A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History)

British rock critic and journalist Morley (Words and Music) embraces contemporary classical music at its most outré in this labyrinthine meditation. Morley locates the soul of classical music in a passion for innovation that eclipses now-formulaic pop styles. While he salutes old masters including Mozart as still-relevant revolutionaries, he focuses more on modern compositions that are an arduously acquired tastes, including Luciano Berio’s Sequenza V, written in 1966, an atonal trombone solo performed in a clown getup. The book is a grab-bag, jumbling together playlists, loose-limbed thematic essays, reminiscences of studying composition and writing a string quartet at London’s Royal Academy of Music, and rambling interviews with such composers as John Adams and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. Morley delivers many perceptive, tunefully written passages, but many more that display the music-criticism sins of overintellectualizing, obscure erudition, and restless hungering for an unheralded avant-garde to champion (Harrison Birtwistle, for instance, “imagined an entirely different history of the string quartet” and “his entire music orbits classical history, but never lands”). Cognoscenti may relish Morley’s appreciation of painfully highbrow music, but ordinary classical-music lovers will find most of it a baffling slog. [em](Nov.) [/em]