Name: Ricky Burgess's review of How Music Works by David Byrne
Item: How Music Works
Rating: 5
Author: Ricky Burgess

David Byrne

How Music Works is David Byrne's remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. In it he explores how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place, and he explains how the advent of recording technology in the twentieth century forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music. Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns-and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between). Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music's liberating, life-affirming power.

How Music Works

Ricky Burgess

Sean Wilson

There was such a diversity of topics between the chapters, so I confess my interest was not steadfast from chapter to chapter.

The most valuable chapters were the ones to my mind were the ones about recording technology and the music business. Byrne goes into the particulars of how things like physical performance space, and the length of a cassette or LP has an effect on what is composed. I also enjoyed his foray into the metaphysics and philosophy of music right at the end, and I'm delighted to know that the idea of the music of the spheres might actually have something to it.

Byrne writes quite well, and this would be an easy enough read for someone interested in various aspects of music, even if not particularly familiar with technical musical vocabulary. I can see myself dipping into parts of this again from time to time.

Angus Bretherick

Fantastic observations about music and the world relating to it.

Dani

Very interesting analysis of the evolution of music (mostly modern and contemporary), and how the art and the industry have been changing due to technology and even politics.

*Updated with a new chapter on digital curation* How Music Works is David Byrne’s incisive and enthusiastic look at the musical art form, from its very inceptions to the influences that shape it, whether acoustical, economic, social or technological. Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of knowledge to explore the panoptic elements of music, how it shapes the human experience, and reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life. Byrne’s magnum opus uncovers ever-new and thrilling realizations about the redemptive liberation that music brings us all.

Matt Eaves

Robin Howie

daniela

Harriette

sky na

Nick Nikolov

Tuago

Brandon Walowitz

Oz Lubling

jami welch

szdat

Jacob Mishook

Lauren Eliza

Aleksander Pruz

A celebration of music offers insight into the roles of time, place, and recording technology, discussing how evolutionary patterns and responses to cultural and physical contexts have influenced music expression throughout history.

Ricky Burgess &
How Music Works by David Byrne

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Ricky Burgess &How Music Works by David Byrne

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Ricky Burgess &
How Music Works by David Byrne