Greg Stepanich

New classical music 'travel guide' has abundance in brief

A new book out this month in the Eyewitness Companion series from Britain's Dorling Kindersley Ltd. offers a look at classical music in what is more or less guidebook form, and it's a lot of fun to gaze on.

The book, simply titled Classical Music, looks and feels like a high-end travel guide — it's only 8.5 inches tall and 5 inches wide, but it's thick at 512 glossy pages — and is most unusual in that it runs through the entire history of art music with thousands of pictures and charts, including photos of almost every major composer of the past 1,000 years.

After introductory chapters on the elements of music, instruments and performance standards, the book examines seven periods of musical history, beginning with plainchant and Guido d'Arezzo and ending with contemporaries from Thomas Adès to Arvo Part. Every page is stuffed with photos, and each composer biography has birth/death dates, nationality and numbers of published works, all accompanied by little icons.

There are "Milestones" boxes with entries on major events in the composer's life (under "Life and Music"), and if the composer is considered more significant, there are little synopses of several "Key Works," with icons indicating what the piece is, how long it lasts, how many movements it has, and what it's written for.

For instance, the entry on Francois Couperin (1668-1733, French, 126) has a short piece of text on the Vingt-Cinquieme Ordre from his suites for harpsichord. The readout under the name of the piece reads: Solo harpsichord; 17:00 (icon of an hourglass); 5 (icon of open pages); and a tiny icon of a horn, meaning it's a solo work. The biggest figures of classical music get several pages to themselves, but many of them get only half a page, and still others get only a quarter.

I don't think this is a bad way to get acquainted with the world of classical music. The photos range widely, and are taken from every cultural indicator you can think of. There's a tiny still from the film Brief Encounter for the entry on Rachmaninoff (spelled Rachmaninov here), for example, because that movie used his Second Piano Concerto.

The entries for the most important composers begin with a full-page picture, often from nature or some other landmark: Mozart is accompanied by a peacock in full display; Berlioz scowls across from a moody shot of gargoyles atop a cathedral; Schumann gets a closeup of some yellow lilies; Mahler appears to be looking at a massive iceberg; Ives is prefaced by a band at a college football game; Gershwin, inevitably, gets vintage New York City at night.

The book is credited to 14 writers and editors, chief among them series editor John Burrows, though the production team that had to dig up all these art elements must have been quite large, even if a lot of these images are more readily available on computer databases than they used to be.

It's a fine book to browse through, and perfect for short attention spans. The texts seem to largely be accurate, and there's little shying away from some of the sadder aspects of composers' lives, such as syphilis (Schubert, Donizetti, Smetana, Wolf — but not Delius, interestingly enough, where it's just a "debilitating illness.") It's fascinating to see the faces of all these composers, some of whom I've never seen (Henri Duparc, Moritz Moszkowski) in all the years I've spent studying this music.

The publishers are asking for $30, and I think it's worth the money. American composers are well-represented here in this very British book, which is gratifying. There are errors, which is understandable given the enormous amount of information that's been stuffed inside these covers.

In particular, the picture on page 302 with the mini-bio of the Hungarian pianist and composer Erno von Dohnanyi is that of his grandson, Cristoph, who used to lead the Cleveland Orchestra (you can see the real Erno on this Hungarian site, which is very interesting in its own right — check out the entry on Gene Simmons).

Arm yourself with an iPod or a bunch of CDs and start browsing through the guide. The best thing about a book like this, while it can't replace deep immersion in the life and works of these writers, is that it shows in a short space the vastness of the creation at hand.