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Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears Paperback – April 6, 2005

by Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)

4.3 5 ratings

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Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity, with pop music--his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a sound-track as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence--and in the memory of the presence--of music.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Counterpoint
Publication date

April 6, 2005
Dimensions

5.25 x 0.75 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1582433291
ISBN-13

978-1582433295
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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

O'Brien, a poet and critic, narrates his life through the recordings he has listened to—45s, LPs, radio jingles—shaping his memoir as a sequence of musical madeleines. Moving chronologically, he expands on the assertion that "the age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia": the covers of jazz albums recall a childhood home where music was constant, even when it was "turned down so low it sounds like the scratching of a squirrel trapped in the walls" a Burt Bacharach song exhibits "well-bred melancholia, the hidden side of a Kennedy-era effervescence" and the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love?" incongruously takes over the lobby of a movie theatre in Osaka. But, for all the luxurious reminiscence, O'Brien is not merely a nostalgist, and finds the present as rich as the past—a healthy state for a critic, because, as he says, "you need ears cleared of that rattling debris to receive new signals."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

"Luxurious reminiscence." -- The New Yorker

"O'Brien evokes music's expanding infiltration of the world-a planet of lonely surfers floating in their own individually sealed soundtracks." -- Village Voice

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Counterpoint (April 6, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1582433291
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1582433295
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.75 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,430,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,386 in Essays (Books)
- #94,989 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.3 out of 5

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P. Cherches

A book for "music people"

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2013

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Everybody, well almost everybody, listens to music and loves some kind of music, be it what's hot at the moment or the sounds of one's childhood. Then there are "music people." Not necessarily musicians, but people for whom music is more than a soundtrack to life, it's inextricably intertwined with their lives. I'm one of those people, and Geoffrey O'Brien's book is by one of us for the rest of us. In lyrical prose O'Brien captures both the nostalgia for and the urgency of the music of/in his life. The author is a bit older than me, eight years, but we lived through the same musical times, at least starting in 1964, when Beatlemania turned an eight-year-old me into a music person. Rather than an uninterrupted through-narrative, the book contains a number of individual pieces using varying narrative strategies, some more effective than others. A blurb on the back cover makes an apt allusion to Proust, but for me the book's tour de force is the opening section, ostensibly a rumination on Burt Bacharach; its meanderings, along with its erudition, and that "how did he get there from here?" wonderment, suggests that this is, perhaps, how Montaigne might have written had he grown up with Top-40 radio.

5 people found this helpful

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ge

Return to Early Childhood and Beyond

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2013

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This incredible memoir sparks one's earliest memories of listening to music, especially a baby boomer growing up in the NYC area
in the 50s and 60s. Although the author's parents were a lot more cultured and surrounded by the music and art world, he captures all the nuance and varied genres that affected his listening and continues into the later years of his life.

3 people found this helpful

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James Kerr

Unreadable and oh so wordy.....very dull

Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2012

The author had, I think but I'm not really sure, some interesting thoughts about memory and perception of music . Unfortunately, ,it is impossible to glean anything coherent out of this incredibly wordy, repetitive, vague, soup of stream of consciousness self indulgence . There are lots of words but the author never arrives at a clear, coherent point , and never says anything clearly . The book is dull and muddled. It's no mystery that this book is available for 1 cent and only has three reviews. Don't even think about it.

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Andrew C. Noone

Imaginative, but unreadable

Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2010

While as an elementary music teacher and college piano professor I can appreciate O'Brien's love for pop music and his vast knowledge of it, I found the book to be unreadable. Imaginative writing does not include incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness lists of associations and trivia...I tried repeatedly to slog through it, but found it profoundly dull. And it's no small trick to make the Beach Boys and Beatles insipid.

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