If my blog and video posts have seemed fewer and less fun in recent months, it’s not your imagination. I’ve been shuttling between San Francisco and my childhood home in the LA suburbs, spending as much time as possible with my dad in the wake of a back-to-back broken hip and terminal cancer diagnosis. He passed away on January 28th — my late mother’s birthday.
Dad was many things: an engineer, a thinker, a WWII vet, a rocket scientist, a college dean, a loving husband and father, a passionate progressive, a sci-fi/horror geek, and a world traveler who visited all seven continents.
But there’s one thing he definitely was not: a musician.
Tonefiend Book Week is simple: I discuss a few titles I’ve found particularly enlightening, useful, or entertaining, and then you jump in and do the same. I’ve organized the days of this week by subject matter. Today’s topics are musical biographies and autobiographies.
Classic rock fans have been rewarded with many cool autobiographies in recent years: Keith Richards’ Life, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace, and Pete Townshend’s Who Am I: A Memoir, to name a few. I’ve read Richards and Smith, and I plan to read the others. Any thoughts about those and similar titles?
And then there are the great jazz autobiographies, such as Miles Davis’s Miles and Duke Ellington’s Music is My Mistress. Despite their alleged omissions and inaccuracies, both are epic accounts of epic lives dedicated to epic music. (So which is better: a lively, lying-through-the-teeth autobiography, or a dry but truthful biography?)
But my favorite musical autobiography is Hector Berlioz’s Mémoires, first issued in 1865.
Hector Berlioz: total punk!
This, admittedly, isn’t a book for all musicians, or even most musicians. It concerns the explosive classical music scene of 19th-century Europe. If that topic holds no interest, the Mémoires probably won’t either.
But consider: Berlioz (1803-1869) is, along with Debussy, France’s greatest composer. He was a founder of Romanticism, and the first composer to fuse literature and instrumental music on a grand scale. He helped create the modern concept of orchestration and wrote the first orchestration manual. And of all the great composers, Berlioz is hands-down the best writer. He is arrogant, irreverent, sarcastic, and blisteringly funny. If you enjoy, say, the acidic humor of Mark Twain’s essays, you’ll dig Berlioz’s voice.
And like Twain, Berlioz played guitar. (More on that in a bit.)
The Mémoires drip attitude from page 1:
Needless to say, I was brought up in the Catholic faith. This charming religion (so attractive since it gave up burning people) was for seven whole years the joy of my life, and although we have long since fallen out, I have always kept the most tender memories of it.
Berlioz’s music was often less than subtle. Here’s one contemporary caricature.
…and it never lets up. We meet the era’s greatest composers and performers and learn what it was like to be a professional musician in an era before recorded music. Concerts were longer. Audiences were more passionate. Wars were waged in the music journals. If you think going on tour today is demanding, imagine it in an era of unpaved roads and horse-drawn carriages.
