How Shostakovich Changed My Mind
$40.93
- Hardcover
172 pages
- Release Date
13 May 2019
Summary
A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson’s struggle with bipolar disorder.A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson’s struggle with bipolar disorder.BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on suffer…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781910749456 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1910749451 |
| Author: | Stephen Johnson |
| Publisher: | Notting Hill Editions |
| Imprint: | Notting Hill Editions |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 172 |
| Release Date: | 13 May 2019 |
| Weight: | 238g |
| Dimensions: | 190mm x 120mm x 17mm |
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Critics Review
‘How Shostakovich Changed My Mind is one of the most powerful, honest, and profound revelations that exists on what it is that music means and does: it’s just an essential document.’
– Tom Service, presenter, Music Matters”… an intensely readable, highly personal analysis of the major works of a composer, who, Mr. Johnson decides, has recorded a collective experience for an all-inclusive listenership….All great music teeters the edge of madness. This troubled writer makes a convincing case that the music of Dmitri Shostakovich helped to save his mind. In life’s crises, he suggests, each of us comes up against an internal siege of Leningrad, and music comes to your relief.”
– Norman Lebrecht * Wall Street Journal *“For Radio 3 presenter and journalist, Stephen Johnson, Shostakovich’s music is nothing less than a matter of life and death. Johnson, a tireless and passionate advocate of the man and his works, explores how the fraught music of Shostakovich shepherded the Soviet Union through the dark times of Stalin and the Great Patriotic War - and also helped to pull Johnson, suffering from clinical depression, out of the suicidal depths of despair.”
* Classical Music *‘Profoundly moving.’ * Sunday Times *‘I started reading and was hooked. Within a few pages I knew I had fallen into the company of the most wonderful interlocutor. Stephen Johnson take the reader from the most profound meditations on music, to delicious anecdotes about Shostakovich, to penetrating observations about the nature of art and the way it may rescue us from despair. I finished it inspired by a sense of human possibility.’ – Professor Raymond Tallis‘Stephen Johnson is one of our most sensitive and thoughtful music critics, and this book, written from the heart about a composer whom he loves and admires, will prove be a landmark.’
– Sir Roger ScrutonAbout The Author
Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnsonhas taken part in several hundred radio programs and documentaries, including Radio 3’s weekly seriesDiscovering Music. He is also a presenter on theClassic Artspodcast seriesArchive Classics. He contributed as a commentator and narrator to Tony Palmer’s controversial film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams,O Thou Transcendent, and toPalmer’sHolst- In the Bleak Midwinter. He lives in England.
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