Musical Chairs
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few memoirs capture the dizzying whirl of early twentieth-century bohemian artistic life with the candour and wit found in Musical Chairs, the autobiography of Cecil Gray — Scottish music critic, composer, and intimate of some of the most formidable creative minds of his era. Gray chronicles his remarkable passage through the interwar cultural world, recounting friendships with D.H. Lawrence, Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), and a constellation of composers, poets, and eccentrics who defined the avant-garde of their time. Written with a sharp, acerbic intelligence and an unapologetic eye for human folly, the memoir presents both a vivid personal history and an invaluable document of a vanished Bohemia. Beyond its anecdotal richness, Musical Chairs stands as a significant work of musical and literary history, offering Gray's penetrating critical perspectives on the figures who shaped modern British music. His prose style is animated by the same irreverence and passion that marked his critical writings, and his portraits of contemporaries are rendered with a precision that is by turns affectionate and devastatingly frank. For anyone drawn to the intersection of music, literature, and the lives lived recklessly in their service, this memoir poses a question that lingers long after the final page: what is the cost of art when it is pursued without compromise?
Author: Cecil Gray
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few memoirs capture the dizzying whirl of early twentieth-century bohemian artistic life with the candour and wit found in Musical Chairs, the autobiography of Cecil Gray — Scottish music critic, composer, and intimate of some of the most formidable creative minds of his era. Gray chronicles his remarkable passage through the interwar cultural world, recounting friendships with D.H. Lawrence, Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), and a constellation of composers, poets, and eccentrics who defined the avant-garde of their time. Written with a sharp, acerbic intelligence and an unapologetic eye for human folly, the memoir presents both a vivid personal history and an invaluable document of a vanished Bohemia. Beyond its anecdotal richness, Musical Chairs stands as a significant work of musical and literary history, offering Gray's penetrating critical perspectives on the figures who shaped modern British music. His prose style is animated by the same irreverence and passion that marked his critical writings, and his portraits of contemporaries are rendered with a precision that is by turns affectionate and devastatingly frank. For anyone drawn to the intersection of music, literature, and the lives lived recklessly in their service, this memoir poses a question that lingers long after the final page: what is the cost of art when it is pursued without compromise?