What I Am Reading

In case anyone is interested. If you are reading something interesting, tell us about it in the Comments. I've been reading the first one for a while and I'm nearly at the end:

Early on I was afraid that this was going to be an exercise in political correctness, but it was not so. Excellent book on Javanese music, i.e. the gamelan and wayang, from the inside. No attempts to squeeze anything into Western notation, which means that you have to learn the way Javanese musicians write down music. There is an accompanying CD with many musical examples.

This is a very unusual, but very interesting and worthwhile book. The sweep is wide, the whole of Western European culture considered and discussed with a critical eye. Some very sacred cows are given a bit of a bashing. It is really about the 20th century and the horrible things that happened and the ways people, especially cultural figures, reacted to them. From the Introduction:

If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

 

Just starting this one, but it promises to be a very useful book.

Let's see, we need some music, don't we? First some music from Java. This is music from Mangkunêgaran, Solo, Java.

This is Alina Ibragimova, violin and Kristian Bezuidenhout, piano - Live from Wigmore Hall last week in music by Schubert and Beethoven: