Musicians - Interviews, Music - History & Criticism, General & Miscellaneous Music Biography

Music from the Road

Name: Music from the Road
Author: Tim Page
ISBN: 9780195073157

by Tim Page

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Overview

Since his debut fourteen years ago, Tim Page has established himself as one of our most original and perceptive music critics, and one of the very few to maintain a serious involvement with the music of our own time. Gathering many of Page's liveliest articles and interviews, Music from the Road introduces a remarkable critical sensibility to a wider audience while offering thought-provoking new perspectives on composers, performers, and trends that dominate the current scene.
Page covers a characteristically wide range of topics, from Irving Berlin's complex sweetness to Milton Babbitt's elegant ferocity, from Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's wild-woman glamour to Mitsuko Uchida's infinitely articulated restraint, from Pavarotti at the Garden to Sweeney Todd in the opera house. Special highlights are two moving profiles of Leonard Bernstein, a revealing survey of musical prodigies, a trenchant discussion of opera fanatics, and Page's famous Piano Quarterly interview with Glenn Gould. Other interviews offer surprising insights into the thought and works of Babbitt, John Cage, and, in a remarkable joint interview, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
Balancing an intimate knowledge of the music with an eternal capacity for being surprised, Page is an ideal guide to the new, the old, and the radically unexpected.

About the Author, Tim Page

About the Author:
Tim Page is a music critic at Newsday. His work has appeared in High Fidelity, Saturday Review, and The New York Times, and he has taught music criticism at Manhattan School of Music and The Juilliard School.

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Editorials

Library Journal

In the early 1980s, one New York Times critic whose pieces this reviewer especially looked forward to reading was Page. He writes with enthusiasm and an open mind, and he obviously likes music. Now writing for Newsday , Page is a real alternative to the Times 's hegemony in classical music coverage. This collection of criticism, features, and interviews culled from various sources has only one flaw: One wishes it were twice as long. Unlike Andrew Porter's collected New Yorker columns (e.g., A Musical Season , LJ 6/15/74. o.p.), which seem all-inclusive, this collection comprises only a small portion of Page's output. If Porter's ``specialty'' is opera, then Page's metier is new music in all its diversity. Something of an omnivore, he likes minimalism but also Milton Babbitt. He is not above writing an article on Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Compulsively readable, this collection is highly recommended.-- E. Gaub, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, N.Y.

Ray Olson

In the introduction to his collected music journalism, Page says that out of a total of more than 2,500 reviews, interviews, and other articles, "I found very little I wanted to save (or, for that matter, wanted anyone to "see", ever again)." Readers of the 65 pieces he decided to put in this book will surely demur with his rigorous self-editing. For he's an ideal serious music critic for the deeply interested but perhaps not musically schooled reader. He is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, straightforward yet balanced about his own tastes (e.g., "Debussy's `Pelleas et Melisande' is a unique and original work of art but moves me not at all"), and marvelously broad-minded (herein are admiring articles on both Milton Babbitt, often regarded as the ne plus ultra of difficult modern composers, and Brian Wilson, principal songwriter of the Beach Boys). Moreover, he's good-tempered, even in disapproving appraisals of annoying audience manners and members; in such pieces, he strives to lay facts before a candid world, not to indulge in amusing put-downs. In short, there's not a better popular writer on concert music and performance around these days.