Raised in Nazi Germany, at 18, Wulff Scherchen was Britten's muse and lover. When the composer went to the USA during the war, Wulff was interned as an enemy alien and transported to Canada,... read more
This magnificent book - which takes its title from a remark of the singer Josephine Baker - gives us the cultural landscape of black genius from the mid C20th to the present. We are in extr... read more
Argues that role of the unruly, the socially outcast, the revolutionary, the disreputable etc have consistently been overlooked in the history of music, which has in effect been bowdlerised... read more
A personal exploration of Indian classical music, its improvisations that flower from well-established short sequences of notes, its subtle evocations of feeling. By a fine writer and vocali... read more
A novel based on letters from the 1930s between the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and a student, revealing a gay relationship that remained secret from everyone including VH's wife (Toscanini's ... read more
For old rockers and die-hards who simply refuse to gather moss... and, no doubt, for hipsters: an illustrated history of contemporary culture, through the prism of Rolling Stone magazine's c... read more
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
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
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.
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.
There are seven exceptionally talented siblings in this family of musicians, and they went to a state comprehensive in Nottingham before all moving to the Royal Academy of Music. This is the... read more
"I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb - and I'm not blonde either." Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, actress, author, business... read more
How and why does it work on us? This masterful study explores the mystery through the psychology, philosophy, mathematics, neurology and history that underlie as surrund it, in all its remar... read more