How Music Works
by David Byrne
- Percentage of approved critics who have given this book a positive review.
Critic Rating
67%
Critic Reviews: 19
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- User rating from iDreamBooks & iTunes
Reader Rating
62%
Reader Ratings: 82
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Synopsis
The Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inductee and co-founder of Talking Heads presents a celebration of music that offers insight into the roles of time, place and recording technology, discussing how evolutionary patterns of adaptations and responses to cultural and physical contexts have influenced music expression throughout history and culminated in the 20th century's transformative practices.
About David Byrne
Published: September 12, 2012 by McSweeney's
Genre: Business & Economics, Education & Reference, Arts & Photography. Non-fiction. 352 pages
- All Critics: 19
- Positive: 13
- Negative: 6
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The Guardian | 9 Nov 2012
How Music Works is wonderfully wide-ranging, covering the prehistoric origins of music, Madonna's contracts... and music's physiological and neurological effects
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The New York Times | 21 Sep 2012
It is full of sharp, glancing insights, but Byrne never brings his approach to music into focus.
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Paste | 16 Oct 2012
...when not focused on experiences in the studio, his writing loses its firsthand intensity, its narrative coherence, and a good deal of its power to interest.
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Cnet | 14 Oct 2012
"How Music Works" is a journey of sorts, with a knowledgeable guide chock-full of personal insights and charm.
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Kirkus Reviews | 15 Aug 2012
Byrne touches on all kinds of music from all ages and every part of the world...anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.
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The Telegraph | 1 Oct 2012
Every form of music, from birdsong onwards, is considered and elegantly related to form, debunking romantic conceits about music and presenting a far more beautiful rationality.
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Washington Post | 22 Sep 2012
...welcoming, informal, digressive...one has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years.
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AV Club | 17 Sep 2012
To How Music Works’ credit, that same joy—of singing and playing, of thinking and dancing, of listening and wondering—renders almost every page a song.
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The Boston Globe | 15 Sep 2012
...a buoyant hybrid of social history, anthropological survey, autobiography, personal philosophy, and business manual, sometimes on the same page.
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The Guardian | 7 Sep 2012
It was wildly ambitious to try and turn this galaxy of theory into a readable work of scholarship but Byrne has done it, and done it with style.
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Publishers Weekly | 23 Jul 2012
Byrne’s erudite and entertaining prose reveals him to be a true musical intellectual, with serious and revealing things to say about his art.
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The New York Times | 12 Sep 2012
Give Mr. Byrne credit for consistently going his own way. But “How Music Works” is a road to nowhere.
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The Wall Street Journal | 5 Oct 2012
Mr. Byrne is exploring all the reasons music is beautiful and how other people, especially musicians, can appreciate and sustain that beauty for themselves.
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Star Tribune | 8 Sep 2012
...he's a bright and curious observer just thinking out loud, offering a mixture of thoughtful insight and the obvious.
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The Globe and Mail | 21 Sep 2012
If you’re a surviving rock star, you may find yourself asked to write a book...they’ve all been interesting and worth reading. But none of them is as good as David Byrne’s book
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London Evening Standard | 6 Sep 2012
Altogether it’s as quirky and odd as you’d expect from Byrne but less consistently entertaining than you’d hope.
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San Francisco Chronicle | 24 Sep 2012
Byrne delivers an essential guide to performance and recording, honest and up-to-date, and filled with both practical advice and insightful commentary.
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The New York Times | 21 Sep 2012
...doesn’t quite cohere. It is full of sharp, glancing insights, but Byrne never brings his approach to music into focus.
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http://query.nytimes.com | 13 Sep 2012
The book contains no details about the famously rancorous dissolution of Talking Heads...
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