Reviews for Music

The average rating for Music based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-08 00:00:00 Kelly Tang Although this book was written in the early 80s, it still has a great deal of relevance today. The author, who got her doctoral degree reaching mid-life career change, put the stories of those she interviewed into an easy-to-read book. This book was written well before the internet came to be and naturally, the marketplace has changed more dramatically than any of us could have anticipated. But the doubts and insecurities, the prejudices, the difficulties, and the do's and don't's when switching careers are surprising relevant today. This book is long out of print (sold only with secondary sellers), but for those in a position to change careers in mid-life, there is a great deal of interesting advice and many true stories of people successfully and unsuccessfully looking for a new path.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-23 00:00:00 Paolo Brega "My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely." So goes Miranda's soliloquy, directed at the audience (explicitly, as this play is stylized as a self-conscious commentary on Shakespeare's play). The poetry is lovely, yet Auden continually reminds you that his play is metafiction, a cognitive echo of the original story's aesthetics. Nothing is straightfoward - neither beauty nor monstrosity - in this beautiful critical approach. My favorite section by far is Caliban's monologue to the audience. Shakespeare's play arguably encourages the reader to interpret Caliban unequivocally, as an unambiguously monstrous personality embedded in an ambiguous, half-human form. Auden doesn't challenge that notion so much as he makes you, to a sometimes-uncomfortable extent, aware of it: why interpret Caliban as the monster if his are empirical desires, plans, and dreams? Are we nothing more than Doctor Frankensteins, twisting Caliban - being the objectified "other" of the play - to suit our needs, even as we fail to understand the mechanisms of our own twisting? Auden encourages readers of Shakespeare's play to a state of higher literary self-awareness, even as he subverts that effort with the pointedly aesthetic (rather than objective) beauty of his own poetry. And oh, that poetry: each character's monologue is so dreamy, so intricate, and so evocative of imagination itself as to create its own universe. A beautiful, transformative read for any Shakespeare fan.