100 Books Like Absent Friend

This book encourages readers to travel through the ages with our most famous classical composers, big bands, jazz, and popular music innovators. It introduces the reader to time periods beginning with primitive man and ending with the Beatles arriving at Buckingham Palace to receive honors from the Queen of England. Tidbits of information are gleaned as one progresses from page to page through the periods.

Piero Ventura’s fascinating art helps us visualize everyday life and gain insight into our most famous composers. One can almost see the composers walking the streets, attending opening night concerts, operas, and ballets while showing us they were real people, just like us. One never knows what influence these great composers or any one of us might have on society from generation to generation.

This book helped me understand the lives of young male jazz musicians in the early 20th century. A wacky, ecstatic, fragmented, kaleidoscopic, memoir—nostalgic always for Bloomington, Indiana, and his college days in the early 1920s. There Carmichael met his pals Monk and Bix, both of whom died too young. He dedicates the book to them and remembers them fondly. Monk, a surrealistic poet, and Bix, a great musical genius, they understood each other immediately. Bix responded to one of Monk’s poems saying, “I am not a swan.” There is a Dadaist flavor to Monk’s writing, as well as some of Hoagy’s: “The years had pants.” Intertwined with these memories is the slow, jerky progress of Carmichael’s journey from a would-be composer to a famous songwriter.

This is without doubt the greatest Mozart biography of the twentieth century, building directly on the foundation of the nineteenth century’s most important biography (by Otto Jahn). 

Abert’s momentous work, exhaustive, incisive, well informed and opinionated in turn, is expertly translated and edited in this eminently readable volume.      

Paganini is not one of the composers the author discusses. However, I consider Secret Lives an important book, simply because it “spills the beans” about a number of these giants.

Gioachino Rossini is portrayed with some of his numerous shortcomings (though Paganini’s dalliances achieved far more notoriety). I shall mention a few significant historical facts: (1) he and Paganini were very close friends, (2) Paganini wrote a set of brilliant variations, I Palpiti, based on an aria from Rossini’s opera, Tancredi, and (3) Paganini did indeed conduct the debut of another Rossini opera, Matilde di Shobran.

Secret Lives was also a source I tapped for some of the information I presented about composers (including, most notably, Richard Wagner)  in one of my own novels.

Bernard Herrmann is revered as one of the movies' greatest composers.

Imagine starting your Hollywood career with music for Citizen Kane!

He enjoyed a very productive 10-year relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock, which produced such masterpieces as Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest; he also worked with Francois Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, composed the original Twilight Zone theme, and capped his career with music for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Yet he could be cantankerous and difficult, antagonizing both friends and colleagues with his temperamental behavior and insistence upon the highest standards of music and drama.

I love the fact that Smith writes as well about the music as he does about the composer, and the reader walks away knowing lots about both.

This is one of the books that had me inserting an unsolicited “did you know that...” into just about every conversation I had while reading it. Terry Allen is a singular visual and musical artist whose story exemplifies what a rich and contrarian place Texas is. 

I knew something of what I might find in a Terry Allen biography, and yet there’s so much more: 1950s Lubbock wrestling promoters and Thai psychedelic bands, David Byrne and Marcel Duchamp, and, most compellingly, the lifelong love of partners Terry and Jo Harvey Allen. I cannot imagine many authors up for the task.

Brendan Greaves expertly delivers as one of those rare characters who understands that Allen’s roles in fine art and country music are not only on equal footing but of a piece. Greaves also oversaw the masterful reissue of Allen’s iconic albums Juarez and Lubbock on Everything, which makes it all… show more.

The Manchester evoked by Joy Division and Barry Adamson's first band, Magazine, also entered the Eighties a ravaged post-industrial city, strafed first by the Luftwaffe and then its own planners, who erected Brutalist estates over its Victorian past.

The son of a white Mancunian mother and black Jamaican father, Adamson grew up in some of the worst of the city's social housing in the Hulme of the Sixties. Another Selby aficionado, Barry recounts the story his challenging childhood with a picaresque, magical realist flair.

Music offers both salvation and damnation – as he progresses through Magazine and into Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, so too do all his most self-sabotaging addictions, until death brings a reckoning and a salvation in the first fruit of his solo career, the LP Moss Side Story. 

I love this energetic book about experimental composer Charles Ives for its liveliness, beautiful language, and glorious sounds! It’s also an important example of staying true to yourself and following your own path.

Before he became a composer, young Charles Ives’s life was full of noise–glorious noise! Influenced by his father, a music educator and bandleader, Ives experimented with sound. Like John Cage, he faced ridicule and criticism, and faced roadblocks to having his music performed.

Penrod reminded the composer of the many adventures he had as a young boy along with his friends in the early decades of the 20th century. 

McKay remembered when he helped the son of a doctor who was a boyhood friend as they made placebos for the doctor's practice out of bread and water in the basement of the doctor's home. He also recalled street fights with other boys that did not always turn out well for undersized kids but were considered sporting in those times in frontier towns.

This thoroughly researched and engaging biography starts before the beginning of Mozart’s life and ends long after it.  In short–and as indicated in the book’s subtitle–it is not simply about Mozart, but about how his life intersects with the lives of those closest to him, namely father Leopold, sister Nannerl, and wife Constanze. 

Leopold emerges as central to Mozart’s story until his death in 1787, and Constanze too from their courtship in 1781, through Mozart’s death a decade later and beyond it as well, when she tirelessly developed his legacy and reputation.