Musical Human News Today

It is odd that collective music-making has now become such a parcelled-off activity

A renowned musicologist is coming to Pembrokeshire as part of the Fishguard and West Wales International Music Festival.

Tickets will go on sale next week on Monday, May 16 for one of west Wales’ foremost festivals of classical music.

In Samuel Johnson's last great work, "The Lives of the Poets," there is a fascinating passage about the intellect and reading habits of one of Johnson's most important literary models, 17th-century poet John Dryden.

Arts and culture

Sounds and rhythms are such an intrinsic part of our lives, it’s hard to imagine a world without music. Music has been used to communicate and to coordinate with others for thousands of years, but humans weren’t the first source of song.

Tue 11 May 2021 02.00 EDT Questions thunder down on anyone who writes about music. How to describe abstract sounds in words is the first hurdle. Once every synonym for loud, soft, fast, slow has been exhausted, where next? While the story of a composer’s life is a helpful way in for most of us, others bang their spoons for hermeneutics. Until well into this century, volumes described as “a history of music” habitually began with the births of Bach and Handel in 1685 and petered o...

Granta, 208pp, £12.99 Gwendoline Riley, the author of five previous novels, notably First Love (2017), a portrait of a volatile relationship, now presents the record – unflinching and excruciating, but at times grimly hilarious – of a decades-long stalemate between mother and daughter. Bridget, a middle-aged academic, starts by recalling where her mother, Helen or “Hen”, was born – in Venezuela, in 1949 – and ends by recounting her miserable death, 60-odd years later, in a care h...

The Musical Human by Michael Spitzer review – a wide-ranging global history of music Richard Lea © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian Music has been a lifeline during this year of Covid, but we haven’t all dabbled in drumming or taken up the trombone. Instead we’ve sparked up Spotify, soundtracking our constricted lives with a mood-changing playlist of uplifting beats or chill-out classical. This surge in listening has been little comfort to...