Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Amadeus meets Little Women in this irresistibly delightful historical novel by award- winning author Stephanie Cowell. The year is 1777 and the four Weber sisters, daughters of a musical family, share a crowded, artistic life in a ramshackle house. While their father scrapes by as a music copyist and their mother secretly draws up a list of prospective suitors in the kitchen, the sisters struggle with... (more)

Tonight At Noon: A Love Story

by Sue Mingus

The elegant and unsparingly honest memoir of the romance between jazz titan Charles Mingus and Sue Graham Mingus. Tonight at Noon is a story of love between American opposites: she, a product of privilege, a Smith College graduate who worked as a journalist in Europe and in New York; he, an authentic jazz master, a brilliant, eccentric, difficult artist, a scion of Watts, Los Angeles, who would become one of... (more)

A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage

A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage

by Joe Jackson

Now in paperback: The candid, inspiring memoir of becoming a musician by the renowned composer and pop star. Since the release of his first best-selling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music-business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose lack of interest in his... (more)

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

by Dmitrii? Dmitrievich Shostakovich

This is the powerful memoirs which an ailing Dmitri Shostakovich dictated to a young Russian musicologist, Solomon Volkov. When it was first published in 1979, it became an international bestseller. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Vladimir Ashkenazy, as well as black-and-white photos. "Testimony changed the perception of Shostakovich's life and work dramatically, and influenced innumerable... (more)

Symphony

by Jude Morgan

An audacious, brilliant and haunting novel about the composer Hector Belioz, by the author of PASSION. In 1827 Harriet Smithson, a beautiful and talented young Irish actress joins an English company taking Shakespeare to Paris. With the ferment of revolution in the air, the new generation is longing for a kind of passionate, spontaneous art. To Harriet's astonishment, it is embodied in her -- La Belle Irlandaise.... (more)

No Woman no Cry: Minha Vida com Bob Marley

No Woman no Cry: Minha Vida com Bob Marley

by Rita Marley

Bob Marley was one of the greatest musicians of our time. While much has been written about him, here is a unique, intimate, and honest portrayal written by his wife Rita, who talks about their strugglesboth before and during his rise to fameas well as their dreams, fears, and ultimately, her husbands losing battle with cancer while at the height of his career. This stirringly honest, no-holds-barred account of... (more)

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

The scandal over modern music has not died down. While paintings by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, shocking musical works from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, the influence of modern music can be felt everywhere. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalist music... (more)

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Tags: tbr: music

Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell