I did not know that Claude Debussy had called my favorite English painter, J.M.W. I was particularly delighted by a number of quotations he has unearthed which I’d not encountered elsewhere. I have aimed to include enough background and biographical information to illuminate what makes the composer tick.” At this, Philip admirably succeeds. He states that he tried “to describe each piece of music so that listeners can find their way through it, hear the most important features and events, and gather a sense of what the whole piece consists of. He seems to be talking to us, rather than at us. Radio demands clarity, simplicity, and vividness, and these are valuable qualities to carry over into the writing of books.” Philip’s broadcast experience shows. He explains, “An author can have no better training than writing for speech. It was not for concert audiences, but for the BBC Radio 3 that he began writing about classical music. When I went back to read the book’s introduction, I discovered one reason he does this so well. He lets us know how the music ticks, but in laymen’s terms-and, most importantly, he relates these musical techniques to the composer’s expressive ends. Philip’s accessible and lucid writing is the exact opposite. Program notes, however, are often done by musicologists who provide ponderous accounts of what is technically taking place in a piece of music while neglecting what the music is trying to express. My first assumption was that this must be a collection of a lifetime’s worth of program notes written for concert booklets. Philip covers 400 works by 68 composers from Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 –1750) to Anton Webern (1883 –1945). Despite my familiarity with this music and these composers, I found much to learn and enjoy. And as I happily discovered, this is not a book for beginners only. Yet even with my jaded tastes, I could not resist something as well done as this. Therefore, I was not disposed to welcome a book about the basic orchestral repertory. Now that the National Symphony Orchestra has fallen victim to the same plague, I seldom attend its concerts. For example, WETA, the local Washington, D.C.-area classical music station, leans so heavily on the repetition of the basic repertory that I suspect its mind-numbing, soul-killing programming is done by a bot, behind which lurks an evil genius intent on destroying everyone’s love of Beethoven, Brahms, etc., by replaying their compositions ad nauseam. I was, however, prepared to dislike this book because of what I call the “basic repertory-itis” from which the classical music world suffers today. I hope Philip’s Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music proves me wrong, because it deserves to succeed as a guide to the basic orchestral repertory. Or if they were, they simply read online and didn’t bother with books. No one, it seemed, was very much interested in classical music anymore. The behemoth, biannual Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music ceased publication in 2010. Before that, one has to reach back to Ted Libbey’s NPR Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music from 2006, or to his NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection from 1994, to find works similar to Philip’s. That was the hard lesson I took away when my own 500-page book on 20th- and 21st-century music, Surprised by Beauty, went nearly extinct the same year it was published in 2016. I had thought books like this had gone the way of the dinosaur. This is good news for a number of reasons. Yale University Press has published a nearly thousand-page book on classical orchestral music by Robert Philip, a British scholar, broadcaster, and musician.
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