The Indispensable Composers: a Personal Guide, by Anthony Tommasini

The Indispensable Composers: a Personal Guide (2018), examines the composers whom the author Anthony Tommasini, a New York Times music critic, considers to be the most important in Western music. It is also a kind of memoir in which Tommasini recollects his musical education, first encounters with great works of music, his favorite professors, the performers such as Rudolph Serkin who have influenced him. The book is self-indulgent in this regard, but the personal information give the book an additional layer of interest. Tommasini devotes each chapter to a different composer or group of composers. There's a certain free-form skipping about as he moves from personal anecdotes to music by the composers to biographical details. Most of those details come from biographies which he scrupulously acknowledges. The most significant omission among the composers, I thought, was Gustav Mahler, who is mentioned a few times and whose omission, Tommasini does not excuse. There are no great revelations here. The book introduces us to the lives of these composers and their music. You can use it as a guide for listening, or not.

I've often found in music criticism, and this book is no exception, that there is no good way to describe music in words. One can talk about the key in which a work is written, the time signature, the dynamics, the tempo. One can point out where the violins enter or the horn section begins to diminish. But there is no way, I think, to replicate in words the effects of music.

This book would have been more useful had a set of CDs including the works Tommasini discusses accompanied it.