Sound Within Sound

Review Wonderful . . . This is a book of discovery that speaks of music as a life force, that urges us to live our lives through music. It highlights the challenges of breaking free from the rigours of classical training to explore the potential and power of sound, and reveals new ways of thinking about and making 'music'. -- Cosey Fanni Tutti The fierce music of Kate Molleson's prose demands that we think differently about the accepted classical music canon. Here is a marvellous book that opens our ears to sonic worlds that will enrich and delight us, whoever and wherever we are. -- Ian McMillan A clear-eyed, utterly fascinating exploration of outsiders in classical music. Molleson's excellent book challenges and enlightens. -- Sinéad Gleeson An urgent, dazzling, ear-opening demand to explode and remake the musical canon. I loved reading these tales of visionary, sometimes eccentric, always brilliant composers who wrestled with turbulent politics, spiritual crises and complicated, messy lives to forge their soaring creativity. In a broader way it struck me as an appeal to rethink of music as rooted in its social and political and personal context, not some "pure" and abstract art that somehow floats above the grubby business of human life. Sound Within Sound is absolutely inspiring. Everyone who loves music should own this book. -- Charlotte Higgins Sound Within Sound is a necessary and deeply humane reshaping of music histories. It undoes the narrowing constraints of the classical canon, leaving the culture - and the reader - beautifully enriched. -- Emma Warren The biographies of these musicians reveal the varied ways in which politics, religion, economics and social mores shaped their careers and personal lives . . . Molleson writes evocatively about music, its sensuality, challenges and, not infrequently with these composers, its weirdness . . . Throughout, music and musicians are treated with care and attention: Sound within Sound reads like a series of love letters . . . Molleson's appreciate of her chosen few, her encouragement to "open our ears", introduces swaths of music that enrich global understanding of the twentieth century and supports musical quests through jungles of our own, making it the most stimulating kind of history. -- Laura Tunbridge ― Times Literary Supplement A challenge to classical music's gatekeepers . . . [Sound Within Sound] introduces us to thrilling dreamers from the last century who believed that music could fundamentally - and disruptively - recalibrate our lives . . . Molleson's enthusiastic style and eye for character and place give them life. -- Jude Rogers ― Observer The vividness and passion of Molleson's portraits of these ten extraordinarily gifted, exasperating, headstrong individuals is wonderfully engaging. -- Ivan Hewett ― Daily Telegraph Marvellous . . . Molleson has quietly become a John Peel-like figure. Interweaving historical facts and gnarly music detail with personal experiences, Sound Within Sound offers a fair, intersectional take on 20th century music history. Her writing is eloquent while her arguments are firm, and her frustration with conservative gatekeepers is palpable . . . Required reading. -- Mariam Rezai ― The Wire An attempt to set the tanker of contemporary classical music on a slightly different course. It's a course aligned much more closely with the best new work of today . . . It's noticeable how how little overlap there is between this book and earlier guides to 20th-century music . . . Molleson's is a more intimate, personal, exploratory animal, digging up alternative futures . . . Generous, expansive, alarming, fantastic, perverse, humane, beautiful and ugly, provisional and incomplete: here finally is a portrait that reflects the messy contours of 20th century classical music. -- Igor Toronyi-Lalic ― Literary Review Molleson is tremendous at describing music . . . And among these vivid musical details is an important political point: Molles