Come funziona la musica

David Byrne is our great charlatan. He stands up there twitching and tweaking and exhorting, like an amateur weatherman who thinks too much about his hands. Like a caricature of an amateur weatherman. Like a snake oil salesman. He speaks in tongues. "You may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful

I approached Byrne's latest with a little trepidation, due to a less than stellar NY Times review, and due to the number of people in the music industry (notably his own former bandmates in Talking Heads) who feel somewhat mistreated by Byrne. I was ready to read something that might be a bit arrog

As this started out, my heart started rolling her eyes. "Great," she said, " another pretentious white guy talking out his ass about music ." Some annoyances from the first couple chapters include a lot of multicultural chatter that basically amounts to "I have a black friend!" + sweeping generalizati Leggi tutto

Una maravilla de libro. De verdad, me gusta mucho más que el anterior, diarios de Bicicleta, me parece que se llamaba. Este es David con todo, y eso que no puedo decir que he seguido su carrera, aunque siempre he admirado su capacidad para hacer tantas cosas distintas, arte, performance, talking hea Leggi tutto

There is a lot of information about musical roots and how musicians worked to perfect their sound according to what worked best with their style. I was fascinated by the facts about the designs of opera houses, concert halls and clubs. There are some entertaining tidbits in this book which covers no Leggi tutto

This book fails to live up to its title, and indeed to the name of its author, who's musical career might lead you to expect that he has some interesting insight into the question of how music works. What you get instead is a cursory and unfocused ramble through recent history of music technology and Leggi tutto

Byrne gives us his take on music in a style that is very pleasant, straightforward, and conversational. He comes across as someone whose wide-ranging, collaborative experience and creative intelligence combine with an everyday kind of modesty in a way that allows you to imagine you could run into hi Leggi tutto

An uneven, often enjoyable, but ultimately disappointing read. My disappointment stems–as, I'm sure, will most readers' interest in the first place (mine included)–from my deep admiration and subsequent expectations of David Byrne. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Byrne writes that he Leggi tutto

I have been a Talking Heads listener for 30 years. For some reason that escapes me now I began to read How Music Works. To my delight I found it compelling. While much of the text is almost a autobiographical narrative of the creating of Byrne's musical corpus, the role of that narrative is quite dif Leggi tutto