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.
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
The stupendous and vaulting 'Symphony of a Thousand', first performed in Munich in 1910 to huge acclaim, and its effect on those around the composer: Berg and Schoenberg, Korngold, Bruno Wal... 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