Music from the Road: Views and Reviews 1978-1992

by Tim Page

Since his debut fourteen years ago, Tim Page has established himself as one of our most original and perceptive music critics, and one of the very few to maintain a serious involvement with the music of our own time. Gathering many of Page's liveliest articles and interviews, Music from the
Road introduces a remarkable critical sensibility to a wider audience while offering thought-provoking new perspectives on composers, performers, and trends that dominate the current scene.
Page covers a characteristically wide range of topics, from Irving Berlin's complex sweetness to Milton Babbitt's elegant ferocity, from Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's wild-woman glamour to Mitsuko Uchida's infinitely articulated restraint, from Pavarotti at the Garden to Sweeney Todd in the opera
house. Special highlights are two moving profiles of Leonard Bernstein, a revealing survey of musical prodigies, a trenchant discussion of opera fanatics, and Page's famous Piano Quarterly interview with Glenn Gould. Other interviews offer surprising insights into the thought and works of Babbitt,
John Cage, and, in a remarkable joint interview, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
Balancing an intimate knowledge of the music with an eternal capacity for being surprised, Page is an ideal guide to the new, the old, and the radically unexpected.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Tim Page is the author of Dawn Powell: A Biography and the editor of The Diaries of Dawn Powell and Selected Letters of Dawn Powell

He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his music criticism for the The Washington Post.

Reviews

[Tom van Veenendaal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Contains some interesting interviews, but you really have to wonder at the gall and egotism of journalists who publish things like reviews of a concert held in 1979 in New York and think that readers will want to read it in its entirety more than a decade on. I keep asking why more critics and journalists don't take the approach of H.L. Mencken, who, when publishing his newspaper and magazine pieces in his Prejudices collections and later his Chrestomathy, refined them, fused them, took fragments from one, a sentence from another, and turned the fragments into new, finished, long-form essays. If you think a comment here or there was interesting, Mr. Page, why don't you give us the comment instead of the full review? It feels rather like I'm wasting my time with most pieces here, even if Page's criticism earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

Almost all the notes I made are of his interview subjects, such as Marin Alsop praising American music: "I love American music. It is straightforward, even naïve sometimes. Even our most complicated music retains a certain earnestness that European music doesn’t always have. What we say is what we mean, and we don’t have to hide behind needless complexities to get it across." That seems apt, and there are many more memorable comments like that. Would be better if the entire book consisted of interviews. Or take a cue from the new New York Times reviewer, Anthony Tommasini, who took ideas from his NYT columns on the great composers, but turned them into a readable, interesting book (The Indispensable Composers) with a clear structure, instead of leaving readers with a bunch of scraps, some of which are moderately interesting.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes he gets it right and other times, he's just another annoying music critic. But his interviews from the 70's and 80's are a fascinating prep course for understanding the terrain of the well-known, admired, and worshipped American symphonic and operatic masters of the 90's and 2000's.