A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music
(and decided to rewrite its entire history)
by Paul Morley
Bloomsbury Publishing (2020), 599 pages
Paul Morley was one of the best writers covering the U.K. punk and post punk scenes for the NME back in the day. Now a geezer, it seems he started exploring classical music right around the same time I did. He writes (and writes, and writes) about taking on classical late in life in this 600-page behemoth. You can read my review of the book below. The playlist is below that.
The mix here is culled from a playlist Morley annotates, all 20th and 21st C. stuff, of course. Almost everything on here is stuff I hadn’t heard before or given enough time to. Composers include Debussy, Stravinsky, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Shostakovich, Varèse, Unsuk Chin, Earle Brown, Nancarrow, Penderecki and Cage.
A Sound Mind is a book by an aged-out and fiercely intelligent rock journalist which discusses his post-menopausal embrace of classical music. It was published in 2020. As a fan of said journalist’s punk-era (’76-’81) jottings and as a person who also turned to classical music after a life devoted to fringe music, I felt compelled to read A Sound Mind and stuck with it far longer than most people, I suspect, as a result of the aforementioned affinities. The book’s strengths do not necessarily balance out its weaknesses, but the fact is this is the only book I’m aware of that describes transitioning to classical music late in life, once pop has ceased to hold much, if any, interest.
For those unfamiliar, Paul Morley was one of the very best journalists covering the punk and postpunk scenes in the U.K. in the ’70s and early ’80s. His articles and reviews for the weekly newsprint New Musical Express were something people (in my circle/niche, at any rate) looked forward to almost as much as the records that were being written about. He was younger than the other writers covering the punk scene for NME, people like Nick Kent and Charles Schaar Murray, and more brash. More punk. He cut his teeth at a time (the mid/late-’70s) when rock writers on both sides of the Atlantic regularly alluded to – and sometimes delved into – subjects remote from rock and roll – philosophy, lit, history, sports, you name it – with the assumption that there were people reading who could follow or at least were amenable to going along for the ride. It was a time when popular music criticism aspired to literature, even if it seldom reached it.
Morely’s NME writing was consistently excellent; there are reviews he wrote 40 years ago that I still remember lines from, and my memory is shit. I would go so far as to say Morley, along with Byron Coley in the U.S (who still writes a column for WIRE), was among the last great rock writers. Like Coley, he mastered the art of saying a lot in the tight spaces editors allotted, and saying it with panache.
As punk and post-punk waned, Morley pushed through the fourth wall and got into managing bands; Malcolm McLaren (naturally) was a role model – even if the bands Morley worked with were more Bow Wow Wow than Sex Pistols. Morely was the fifth (or however many) Frankie Goes to Hollywood-er and he worked with Art of Noise, one of the first British art bands to adopt sampling and other hip hop techniques in the mid-’80s, when American hip hop was fomenting what was arguably the last “shock of the new” that pop music would ever offer. (If Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Art of Noise ring no bells, or ring them faintly, don’t worry – Morley is happy to tell you about them.)
Time – which is to say the ’80s – was not on the side of intellectual rock writers, however. As the ’80s morphed into the ’90s (I would argue the ’80s have been going on for forty years now…) and post punk devolved into affectation masking the emptiness of soft dance music, Morley found less and less to get excited about. It is no surprise that he turned to writing books, penning post-facto tomes on Bowie, Joy Division, Dylan and Grace Jones as well as a bunch of books whose titles belie nothing of their subject matter. (For the record, I have read none of them, though I might read the Joy Division one some day, where Morley’s Northerner perspective likely provides worthwhile insight.)
These days, Morley is a public intellectual who gets to opine on any aspect of culture that stirs him. His essays appear in high-profile places like The Guardian. The celebrity culture critic is a British thing, going back to Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. (While people like Susan Sontag, Greil Marcus and Greg Tate fit that bill back in the day, there is no equivalent in 2021 America. Aside from Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges, who both write about world affairs and human rights, there are no public intellectuals in the U.S. that I’m aware of, and they are nigh on invisible anyway.) Adrift in this miserable century, Morley got an itch to explore the world of classical music, a subject he knew little about. Besides ennui, his principal motivation for this enterprise seems to have been a gimmick: Morley is enough of a celebrity in the UK that the BBC offered to send him to the Royal Academy of Music to study composition if it could monitor and broadcast the shenanigans. This book is the inevitable by-product. Inevitable, I say, because it seems Morley is deeply motivated to document every moment of his life. This book is less about classical music than it is about Morley’s efforts to understand it.
It needs to be said: the writing that endeared Morley to me back in the punk rock days was, as I suggested, terse. Newspapers impose tight length constraints. If an editor says a review needs to be 600 words, that’s that. If a writer goes 25 words over, then he or she knows the editor will parse 25. Books do not have tight length limits, however, and it seems some – like this one – do not even have editors. Without mincing words, then, it is impossible to dispute the opinion of several on-line reviewers that A Sound Mind is word vomit. I doubt Morley would disagree. He admits somewhere or other in these pages to having written “millions of words” about himself. Word vomit is his shtick. He is still insightful, funny and challenging, but A Sound Mind is absurdly excessive, and you have to sift through some surprisingly pedestrian writing to get the good stuff. We all love and need water, but this is a 1600psi firehose.
A reader/reviewer on Goodreads, rather than offering her own critique of Morley’s Bowie book, simply reproduces, in its entirety, a 700-word sentence from it that is, in three tries, impossible for me to get through. I felt like Shelly Winters in the underwater swim sequence of The Poseiden Adventure trying to make it to the end of that sentence. Which is to say, I didn’t make it.
The excess verbiage, the self love, and the book’s spastically incoherent structure conceals the fact that there are ample swaths of excellent essay scattered throughout A Sound Mind‘s 600 pages. There is an excellent 350 page book – of short pieces, ideally – lost in this phonebook.
A 4-part essay on the string quartet in the book’s midsection is definitely worth reading. This is clearly one place where Morely has focused his passion – he tried to write a string quartet at the Royal Academy – and is on firm footing. He very convincingly describes the power that a string quartet possesses in live performance, for example, likening the command a great string quartet has over a concert hall to the sway a cool rock act had (and perhaps somewhere still has) in an electrified rock club. I am biased here, because I have felt exactly what he is describing and have attempted to describe it myself on previous blog posts here after attending performances by the fine string quartets (Kronos, Brooklyn Rider, Tesla) who passed through Asheville in those pre-COVID years of yore. (In fact, watching the Tesla Quartet from 2 feet away, in the front row in a packed Black Mountain College Museum gallery was exactly like rock music.
Then there are profiles, including transcriptions of interviews he conducted with them, of musicans like Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Harrison Birtwistle, John (of no middle name) Adams and others. These are valuable, and not just for the fact that each profile presents information and insight on important artists who do not get a lot of ink. These sections are filled with self-deprecating humor — an “I’m-not-worthy”-ness, or at least an “I-better-do-my-homework”-ness — that might have made the rest of the book less grating.
An essay about four days he spent at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2013, 35 years after its inception, raises points about confrontational music having lost its teeth in the 21st century that I have not seen so well articulated anywhere else. The “shock of the new” simply isn’t possible any longer, in pop OR classical music. (And so what, exactly, do we do now? We are all addicted to “new”…) And along these lines, Morley confronts – glancingly, for the most part – perceptions of classical music and the state of classical music in this disjointed world that, perhaps, only an outsider can address properly (at least when writing for other outsiders…)
Morley’s got playlists all through the book, which makes sense for an NME writer from the ’70s – the British music weeklies of the day all devoted a page or two each issue to an eclectic selection of record charts. Morley has fun with these, some of which are quite useful (for me, at any rate), some of which border on insane, and some of which should have been left out. In the first category are two playlists of Morley-recommended works by Debussy and Ravel (the latter of which spins off from the former, in true ADD fashion), which – because Morley has correctly sussed the significance of Debussy and, as with the string quartet, he has spent some time there – I intend to pursue. In the second category is a playlist of experimental classical music and outre rock music from the year 1973 (which Morley used in a lecture to composition students at the Royal Academy that I’d like to see a vid of…), where Iggy and the Stooges bump up against Glenn Gould. An oblique conceit, but fascinating reading. The Bolero versions (?!!) playlist (which spins off the Ravel playlist before that playlist even starts) falls into the third category, but then while I loves me some Ravel, I hates me some Bolero.
The book’s principal playlist (which is expanded upon in a 3-page appendix), is titled “A Few of My Favourite Things” and, like any well-annotated playlist, is fun to read. I have to say, this playlist, and the book in general, introduced me to a lot of compositions I was unaware of and got me to listen to some composers I’d not made time for before (Varese) to or hadn’t heard of at all (Earle Brown).
Now to the question, “How can someone learn enough about classical music in five years to write a 600-page book?”
In a punk rock move to echo the dust jacket’s Never Mind the Bollocks graphics, Morely opted for a flippant and absurd subtitle (“and decided to rewrite its entire history”), but unfortunately that only shines light on the fact Morely bit off WAY more than he can chew. The holes here are canyons. For example, he barely mentions a composer who many regard as the most significant composer of the last 50 years, Alfred Schnittke. Schnittke is mentioned in passing on exactly four occasions in the course of Morley’s 600 pages. And Morely can not hide the fact that he doesn’t know the century’s greatest composer – Shostakovich, duh – from Adam. It is not a primer, not by any stretch. (For those interested in a really good primer, I would HIGHLY recommend The Classical Music Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, an adult-oriented guidebook published by DK in England. I need to update my post on classical music books for the just-starting…)
Nor does A Sound Mind offer much in the way of guidance to novices confronting the almost impossibly vast world of classical music cold. Morley, as he makes plain right off, is writing about Paul Morley’s relationship with classical music. Drawn to American avant-garde counterculture figures like John Cage, Terry Riley and Lamonte Young early on, Morley’s approach to classical music was not along a well-trod path: His pitch that it is not such a great leap from listening to Eno (or Can, or Autechre) to listening to John Cage won’t be much of an assist for readers who don’t like their hi-jinks quite so abstract or ephemeral as Eno, or Can, or John Cage. Which is to say, 99% of music listeners.
Morely’s most compelling argument, intentional or not, for putting some effort into classical music is, simply enough, his enthusiasm. It takes some serious drive to generate 600 pages of text, I’m sorry, even for a word-vomiter. Morley unabashedly loves this stuff, just as much as I do and I think for most of the same reasons. Morley is an outsider writing about what amounts to a parallel universe, a universe in which no one particularly cares what he might think of things. Perhaps for Morley it’s liberating to be a novice again – I know I certainly feel that way. A sort of giddiness and a haywire energy pervade A Sound Mind, and god knows classical music can use some giddy, haywire energy. Again, I am perhaps projecting my own sense of things, but Morley seems like a kid in a candy store, agog at the shelves and shelves of brilliant music/candy, a lifetime’s supply – a dozen lifetimes’ supply – and all of it just right there… Just reach out and take it.
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This mixtape is comprised (for the most part) of a few of my favorite things from Morley’s “A Few of My Favourite Things” playlist, as well as some other stuff he referenced. The mix here, like Morley’s playlist, is an ADD hodgepodge, leaping about the timeline like a flea on a hot skillet. It is stitched together with György Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes,” a tactic I’ve employed before, but it’s on Morley’s list and there’s all kinds of weird stuff that needs to be isolated on this mixtape, so what the hell. That’ll be the clacking, though: the metronomes.
0:00:03
Gustav Holst – Planets (excerpt)
Simon Rattle: Philharmonia Orchestra
0:00: 23
György Ligeti: Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes (1962) (excerpt)
0:00:58
Claude Debussy – Préludes, Book 1, L. 117 (1910);
No. 10. La cathédrale engloutie
Marcelle Meyer
0:06:32
Igor Stravinsky: Pulcinella (1922); II. Serenata (excerpt)
Gerard Schwartz: Seattle Symphony Orchestra
0:10:05
Harrison Birtwistle: Fantasia Upon All Notes for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet (2011)
uncredited performers
0:19:21
Dmitri Shostakovich: The Gadfly Suite, Op. 97a (arr. L. Atovmyan) (1955);
X. Nocturne
Leonid Grin: Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
0:23:30
Unsuk Chin: Xi for ensemble and electronics (1998), second movement
David Roberts: Ensemble Intercontemporain
0:33:53
Galina Ustvolskaya: 12 Preludes for Piano; III. (1953)
Natalia Andreeva
0:35:36
Krzysztof Penderecki: Largo from Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (2005)
Arto Noras w/ Antoni Wit: Warsaw National PO
0:42:08
Elizabeth Maconchey: Ophelia’s Song (1926)
Caroline MacPhie w/ Joseph Middleton
0:45:14
Iannis Xenakis: Tetora (1990)
Arditti Quartet
1:00:00
Conlon Nancarrow: Study for Player Piano 3a (1948-9)
1:03:06
Edgar Varese: Hyperprism (1923)
Hans van Ronk: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
1:08:38
John Cage: In a Landscape
Jeroen van Veen
1:18:00
Earle Brown: Times Five (1963)
Govert Jurriaanse (flute), Arthur Moore (trombone), Teresia Tieu (harp),
Jaring Walta (violin), Harro Ruijsenaars (cello),
and four channels of tape sound.
1:35:16
Morton Feldman: The Viola in My Life 4, for viola & orchestra (1970)
Marek Konstantynowicz w/ Christian Eggen: Norwegian Radio Orchestra
Concentration Camp 