A perky, enthusiastic foray into the overlap of music, art, and history.
A visual journey through sound.
Chan, a classically trained musician and art historian, offers an “insight into the sheer variety of ways the visual has been integral to music throughout history.” She goes back 12,000 years to Western European caves covered with paintings to discuss how people made sounds of running bulls using shells and other items, creating the first music venues. Impressionist Edgar Degas “was fascinated, throughout his life, by what it meant to depict music.” Serge Diaghliev and his Ballets Russes married art and music in ballet, transforming “what music looked and sounded like.” The painting Four Children Making Music (ca. 1565) changed “how people think about English musical culture and how music travelled.” The author nicely uses the movie Frozen to explain how music can be magically made into something we can see with our eyes, to fix sound into something tangible—which leads to a discussion of Hildegard von Bingen and Fanny Hensel Mendelssohn and their invention of new ways of writing music. Guido, a medieval Benedictine monk, may have used his hand and finger joints to “memorise pitch space—the intervals between notes.” It was music, generated by image, guiding sound. Chan revisits her past and the English choral tradition as she celebrates the importance of the hymnbook and The Whole Booke of Psalmes in particular, which “changed what music looked like and how it was fantasised, forever.” Printed sheet music—“music as a visible, visual phenomenon”—soon followed, and later still, sheet music as art itself. Next up are musical instruments as art objects, especially flutes, which Chan played, briefly. She concludes by discussing some favorite artists who rethought the way we conceptualize music, including Levina Teerlinc’s painting An Elizabethan Maundy from the 1560s to Aubrey Williams’ 1981 painting Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 and Toko Shinoda’s visualized music lithograph Duet (1955).
A perky, enthusiastic foray into the overlap of music, art, and history.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9798897100385
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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