How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

Author : Stephen Johnson
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 1910749451
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind written by Stephen Johnson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder. BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder. There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.

Author : Stephen Johnson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781912559060
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind written by Stephen Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Stephen Johnson
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 191074946X
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind written by Stephen Johnson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder. BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder. There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.

Author : Solomon Volkov
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307427722
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shostakovich and Stalin written by Solomon Volkov and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.

Author : Solomon Volkov
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062987852
Total Pages : 575 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Testimony written by Solomon Volkov and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed classical composer chronicles his life and work in twentieth-century Soviet Russia with the help of a distinguished musicologist. Since the time of his death, Dmitri Shostakovich’s place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers has become more commanding and more celebrated, while his musical legacy, with all its wonderfully varied richness, is performed with increasing frequency throughout the world. This seemingly endless surge of interest can be attributed, at least in part, to Testimony, the powerful memoirs the ailing compose dictated to the young Russian musicology Solomon Volkov. When Testimony was first published in the West in 1979, it became an international bestseller, and was called the “book of the year” by The Times in London. The Guardian heralded Testimony as “the most influential music book of the 20th century.” Testimony offers a chance to reckon with the life and work of one of history’s most lauded musical geniuses—as a man and an artist.

Author : Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801439797
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Story of a Friendship written by Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This choice by the composer's close friend Isaak Glikman brought the tormented feelings of the musical genius into public view. Now those feelings resound in the first substantial collection of Shostakovich's letters to appear in English.

Author : M.T. Anderson
Publisher : Candlewick Press
ISBN 13 : 0763691003
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Symphony for the City of the Dead written by M.T. Anderson and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.

Author : Elizabeth Wilson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780571174867
Total Pages : 550 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shostakovich written by Elizabeth Wilson and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer, drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life. 'The one indispensable book about the composer.' New York Times

Author : Wendy Lesser
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300171781
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Music for Silenced Voices written by Wendy Lesser and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-08 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. "Music for Silenced Voices" looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a "diary, the story of his soul." The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich's operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works.Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich's singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer's friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, "Music for Silenced Voices" is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century's music.

Author : Ian MacDonald
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 184595064X
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The New Shostakovich written by Ian MacDonald and published by Random House. This book was released on 2006 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the posthumous publication in 1979 of alleged memoirs by Shostakovich, the controversy about the composer and his music has escalated. This book presents the case for the dissident view, arguing that the meaning of the composer's music cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of the terrible times he lived through under Soviet Communism.