Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$21.78$21.78
FREE delivery: Saturday, April 20 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $9.57
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
89% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
OK
Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time Paperback – August 17, 2000
There is a newer edition of this item:
$21.48
(14)
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Purchase options and add-ons
"A supermarket tabloid of classical music criticism." ―from the foreword by Peter Schickele
A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third movement begins with a dog howling at midnight, then imitates the regurgitations of the less-refined or lower-middle-class type of water-closet cistern, and ends with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow? For the answers to these and other questions, readers need only consult the "Invecticon" at the back of this inspired book and then turn to the full passage, in all its vituperation.
Among the eminent reviewers are George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Hans von Bülow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor, Paul Rosenfeld, and Oscar Wilde. Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves―or hates―classical music. With a new foreword by Peter Schickele ("P.D.Q. Bach").
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateAugust 17, 2000
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-10039332009X
- ISBN-13978-0393320091
Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (August 17, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 039332009X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393320091
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #315,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #328 in Celebrity & Popular Culture Humor (Books)
- #565 in Music History & Criticism (Books)
- #1,633 in Music Instruction & Study (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Viciously funny. The classical (1850+) equivalent of Ambrose Bierce's DEVIL'S DICTIONARY. The reviews' prose (beginning p. 39) runs to 19th Century flowery, but the venom comes through loud and funny clear. If you're a music/recording buff looking for leads on classical composer plugs after the "sweet stuff" everyone of the they-think-they're-educated Great Unwashed thinks is the ONLY acceptable Classy-cal Music, pick up this book. As a music recommendation book, this tome works as an anti-book: bad is good, but WORST is BEST.
Most interesting aspect of the book, for my kitsch weirdo rock-music-is-the-devil's-music bookshelf self-lobotomizing reading interest, is featured in "Non Acceptance of the Unfamiliar," which runs pp. 3-33, especially pp. 24-25, where you pick up concerns about Depression era VOODOOISM IN MUSIC by Sir Richard R. Terry and Cyril Scott Music and Its Secret Influence: Throughout the Ages (See also David Tame The Secret Power of Music: The Transformation of Self and Society through Musical Energy which extensively quotes Scott's anti-jazz "dark forces" mental-telepathy-with-dead-and-fictional-people work, and Tame got an expert boost in Frank Garlock's 1992 teaching textbook, Music in the Balance ). The information presented about corrupt Gallic morals, eeevil syncopated voodoo drums The Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol. 14: The Church Universal and Triumphant, Inc. feat. Elizabeth Clare Prophet , slavic commie brainwashing symphonies The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music , and uncomfortable picture art (paintings that aren't just like color photographs) is still being blustered about in U.S. and some U.K. halloween non-fiction "research" tracts scaring people today.
Like backward-masking demonic conspiracy literature, this book is a roadway to (serious) music styles well worth checking out.




