Reviews for Teach Yourself to Read Music: A Guide for Pop, Rock, Blues and Jazz Singers, with CD

The average rating for Teach Yourself to Read Music: A Guide for Pop, Rock, Blues and Jazz Singers, with CD based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-10 00:00:00 Per-ivar Ruud This was an interesting but ultimately disappointing book. It purports to explain why 'people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen (that is, why crowds worship at the great gallery sanctuaries of modern art but do not listen to modern music). In fact, it is a fairly unsophisticated polemic from a journalist that, in the end, rather fails to do much more than whimper about the current state of affairs. Yet at times, like all good journalism, I found it hard to put the book down and it was only when I asked for and failed to get analysis and some depth that the book lost its fifth star. This is not to say that Stubbs is not insightful on aspects of the state of music - he is good on the forward drive in black music, the role of the BBC and the elaborate economic con trick called conceptual art, the perfect art for the age of derivatives and the art we deserved at the time. However, the book introduces us to the key names and works of alternative traditions in Western music. For that reason alone, it is worth buying and (if you live in London) wandering around the more recherché record shops in and around Berwick Street in Soho to pick up something different. I shall get my own theory out of the way which has nothing to do with capitalism or power but simply is about time. We can take in a picture at a glance and then choose to go back for more when we have sufficient time. The glance allows us to 'fake it' until we do so and can help create a shared cultural illusion that we all 'get it'. Music takes time, even in YouTube gobbets. You either experience it in some extended time or you do not experience it at all. If it is difficult or you are not in the mood, there is less incentive to get enough of it to park it for later and, of course, it is not easy to point at this 'it' to another as if you understood it. Because our culture pours over us so many opportunities to see art in an instant and because we are used to the two or three minute quick fix single or track, it takes proportionally greater effort to experiment with sound - so we don't. Life is too short in a very meaningful sense. There is also a psychological issue that Stubbs only skims, referring at the end to David Reynolds on the problem of 'noise music'. Art and music is seen to be, perhaps required to be, a soother of anxieties or an expression of adolescent feeling. It forms the mind in youth and comforts later. Music is not, for most people, a thing-in-itself. It cannot have a discomfiting purpose, one designed, as Throbbing Gristle clearly intended it to have, to change consciousness through disrupting perception. The population are not elite tantrics but rather are stressed out survivors of a demanding capitalist democracy. They simply cannot cope with Anonymous, let alone Sun Ra. This exhausted population wants meaning on a plate rather than to be faced with anything that simply exists in and for itself, meaning that soothes and endorses identities that are constructed not in accordance with reality but in defiance of it. Nevertheless, as a guide to various corners of 'difficult music', this book can be read with profit. The musicians and composers named by Stubbs and not previously known to me will now be searched out over the coming years. If others do this perhaps advanced music will become more popular. As someone who discovered Stockhausen early and preferred 'Gesang der Junglinge' to the bleatings of the late romantics, perhaps I have a nose for 'noise'. But there are treasures out there for anyone, most of which can be found with only a little effort on YouTube and then put it in a Playlist for when time is available. One major complaint is that the proofreading of this book is, in places, dire. The idea that an 'ethical and distinctive publishing company' [Zero Books] might be permitted more latitude in this respect than evil capitalists is absurd. It rather confirms the prejudice that lefties find it difficult to organise a whelk stall.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-20 00:00:00 Mara Zilkenat Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of 137. Rather, the first 111 pages set out the parallel histories of the two beasts. The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music. Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume). The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange. The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream. Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists. Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes. The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along. I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual. However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.