Tim Page on Music: Views and Reviews

Joan Peyser, The Washington Post , August 18, 2002
"I heartily recommend Tim Page on Music . . . . This Pulitzer Prize-winning critic is wise, humanistic, well-rounded and direct in his prose."

Jonathan Rabb, Opera News, February 2003
"What makes this collection so enjoyable . . . is the way Page approaches his wide-ranging material. . . .The opinions are strong yet instructive."

Ann McCutchan, The Bloomsbury Review
"A welcome addition to the classical music library, [a] book one can dip into at random for enlightenment and delight."

Ken Smith, Gramophone
"Tim Page on Music picks up where his 1992 collection left off. . . . Page's youthful enthusiasms—and outrages—are still in place."

Book Description
In 65 perceptive pieces, including some of the work that earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1997, Page offers what he calls "a collection of illumined moments," now gathered in a single volume for the wider audience who will treasure their insights.

About the Author
Tim Page won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for "his lucid and illuminating music criticism" in The Washington Post. His books include Dawn Powell: A Biography and a previous collection of his music criticism, Music from the Road, among others. As a boy, Page was the subject of the documentary A Day With Timmy Page 1967), which chronicled his activities as a 12-year-old filmmaker growing up in Storrs, Connecticut. He has served as a radio producer on WNYC-FM, as the founder and executive producer of BMG Catalyst, and as the artistic advisor for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he has recently rejoined the Post.

Excerpted from Tim Page on Music: Views and Reviews by Tim Page. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Throughout much of the 1980s I was the host of a radio program on New York’s WNYC-FM. My emphasis was on contemporary music; however, one afternoon I devoted an entire show to works by the 12th-century composer Perotin---spare, ethereal, yet startlingly intense vocal compositions based on the sound (still fairly rare in Western music) of stark parallel fourths. The record played for a while, then the studio phone rang and I was confronted with a furious gentleman who claimed I’d ruined his drive home (and, one might have surmised, his life as well). He swore that he would never again contribute to public radio until we stopped playing what he called "all that damned new music"! Obviously, 800 years on, Perotin is still not exactly an "easy listen." In fact, almost any musical language with which we are unfamiliar will seem "new" to us at first. But let’s face it: for many well-disposed music lovers, this has been an especially tough century. Indeed, so far as the absorption and appreciation of 20th-century concert music and opera go, a lot of people out there pretty much missed it. Exactly why and how this happened can and will be debated for many years to come (some possible reasons---the collapse of music education in many countries, including the United States; the split between the "high arts" and popular culture; the decline of the concert and the increased importance of mass media; and the perceived impenetrability and/or ugliness of much 20th-century creation). In any event, rightly or wrongly, many listeners never came to terms with the main classical music trends of this century.


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This volume collects 65 examples of music critic Tim Page's music and cultural criticisms, some of which earned him the Pulitzer Price for Criticism in 1997. It includes both short and long articles about artists such as Glenn Gould, Vladimir Horowitz, and Frank Sinatra as well as more contemporary classical and popular performers. In the words of the author, "From the beginning, it was my intention to infuse some of the passion, allusiveness, and occasional irreverence I found in the best writing about jazz and rock into the realm of classical music criticism." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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