A Sound Mind

A Sound Mind by Paul Morley (2020 Bloomsbury softcover 600pp)

 

Paul Morley is a respected UK music journalist who has been covering the world of Rock and Pop since his teenage years in the 1970s. As he entered his fifth decade and the world of music became dominated by the internet, he found modern pop music starting to stagnate for him. Looking for a new frontier he found the world of classical music – now readily available like never before.

So far so good, I thought after reading the introduction and early section of this book. Going by the cover text and blurb we were going to follow Morley’s growing love of the music and discover its history along with him. But not so fast! My attention bounced hard off this book – something about Morley’s style made it difficult for me to keep my attention on the page. I found myself constantly checking how many pages were left in each section…never a good sign. He starts describing his search for a piece of music that he wants to hear last before he dies. This line of thought pretty much goes nowhere. Then we’re introduced to Morley taking part in a BBC reality show where he attends the Royal Academy of Music and attempts to compose his own classical music. This also peters out but to be fair it does tenuously lead on to some other sections. In the end this book seems basically to be a collection of articles, essays, lecture notes, playlists and interviews the author has written over the last decade or so. The linking narrative frequently frustrated me as he went back and forth and simply blathered away for pages. There are substantial sections on String Quartets, Mozart, Record labels, avant-garde use of the Piano and the lasting influence of several composers etc. Don’t get me wrong, there ARE gems of information buried within and the play-lists will prove useful for anyone (like myself) who is just getting to grips with classical music.

Morley returns again and again to a select few experimental musicians (John Cage, Cornelius Cardew etc) their influences and their latter-day proteges such as Brian Eno who went on to alter popular music in the late 20^th century. Its interesting to learn of the links as Morley rages against the pigeon-holing which he blames for making such music seen as ultra-niche.

It took until around page 300 before the book started to become easily readable to me, but perhaps that’s my problem.

Maybe not quite the book I was looking for but not a total loss either.