Alex Ross
Music critic of The New Yorker and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
I read Doctor Faustus when I was around 18 and something about the book just overwhelmed me. It was one of the most intense reading experiences of my life.
on fivebooks.com · 1 Jan 2013
Music in a New Found Land by Wilfrid Mellers
This is a wonderful book, and somewhat forgotten. It's currently very hard to find, here in America at least. It's fantastically vivid and passionate writing about music of all kinds.
on fivebooks.com · 1 Jan 2013
Silence by John Cage
Silence is one of the great music books. Purely on a literary level, there's something about Cage's style which is tremendously unique, something quite special in the history of literature.
on fivebooks.com · 1 Jan 2013
The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner by Friedrich Nietzsche
The other thing about Nietzsche's writing about Wagner is that it's wonderfully brilliant, unpredictable vivid and perceptive, even when he's deliberately distorting the material for a certain effect or working out his own profound ambivalence about Wagner.
on fivebooks.com · 1 Jan 2013
The Infinite Variety of Music by Leonard Bernstein
When I was very young, I loved the fact that Bernstein's language was so vivid. I was already sold on the music. As far back as I can remember my parents had the records and were playing them, and I took to them immediately. It was really the only music that I cared about, early on. Bernstein allowed me to have a conversation – only with myself at first – about the music.
on fivebooks.com · 1 Jan 2013
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