The 1970s NME critic got bored with pop and discovered that the most radical music of all was classical. This is a personal and entertainingly idiosyncratic history of music.
Published by Yale, this is a fascinating and original exploration of the influence of the newly popular guitar on the Romantics and on culture in the early C19th.
A massive work tracing Wagner's immense influence, not only through his adoption by the Nazis but through a gallery of others, from Baudelaire and Woolf to Philip K Dick and 'Apocalypse Now'... read more
A companion volume to his Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (pbk £25), tracing Bach's evolution as a composer and looking deeply into his creative process.
It's only six years since his magisterial biography of Beethoven, which seemed a lifetime's work. To do the same so quickly for Mozart seems nothing short of miraculous. NB due for publicati... read more
Shinichi Suzuki was a violinist who became more famous as an educator and philosopher; his ideas of language acquisition revolutionised musical training. He also did much to erode occidental... read more
The upheavals of 1930s' Germany created a cultural diaspora as composers and musicians fled abroad: Kurt Weill, Korngold and many lesser-known artists too.
Mozart was taken to Italy three times by his father in his early and mid-teens; already astonishingly accomplished as a thirteen-year-old, he drank in Italian opera like a thirsty man findin... read more
The first biography of one of the great codebreakers: she played a key role in both world wars, and also deciphered the letters of both Beethoven and Mozart.
A short biography of Thomas Linley, the Georgian prodigy who was celebrated - with Mozart - by Burney as "the most promising geniusses of the age". But he died very young.