Cover art for How Music Works
Published
Canongate, October 2013
ISBN
9780857862525
Format
Softcover, 376 pages
Dimensions
21.4cm × 16.4cm × 2.8cm

How Music Works

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How Music Works is David Byrne's buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about.

Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators - along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists - to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance.

A brainy, irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music's liberating, life-affirming power.

Recommended by Thomas

Thomas Crow is a Boffins staff member and science writer. He studies biochemistry when not at the store. He loves reading science books, especially chemistry, evolution and machine intelligence. He is also an avid fantasy and sci-fi reader

A brilliant, insightful scholarly analysis on music. One of my faves! 

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