Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan By Alex Pappademas & Joan LeMay. University of Texas Press, 2023. Hardcover, 280 pages, $35. Reviewed by Asher Gelzer-Govatos. Steely Dan, those infamously reclusive...
Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile By Fiona Maddocks. Pegasus Books, 2024. Hardcover, 384 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Robert Bellafiore. In the last years of Romanov Russia, Sergei Rachmaninoff was enjoying life as a musical giant, composing such titanic hits as the...
By Robert James Stove What makes organists tick? Denis Arnold (1926–1986), British biographer of Bach and Monteverdi, thought that he knew. In 1983 he remarked: “Organists have to be neat men: their mistakes do not, like a doctor’s, quietly die, but are all too...
Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption by Roger Scruton. Allen Lane, 2020. Hardcover, 208 pages, £20.00 Reviewed by Paul Krause “We have been called not to explore the world, but to rescue it. In doing so we emerge from our trials and conflicts in full possession...
A New English Music: Composers and Folk Traditions in England’s Musical Renaissance from the Late 19th to the Mid-20th Century by Tim Rayborn. McFarland & Co., 2016. Paperback, 312 pages, $40. Reviewed by R. J. Stove When I come to England, I don’t claim...
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