Geeta Dayal
There are countless books on the history of British music in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Consider, for example, the eight hundred-odd books that Amazon currently has about the Beatles, or the numerous volumes chronicling the roots of mod, glam, punk, and post-punk. The veritable mountain of literature on David Bowie alone could take a lifetime to sift through. 
“I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name,” writes Alex Ross in the opening chapter of his new book, Listen to This. “It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today . . . [the] phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype.” Visual art and music are often studied separately, even though seeing and hearing are inexorably linked. What if we could hear the silence in a Vermeer painting? Is it possible to simulate the experience of a certain city by playing its soundscape through loudspeakers in a city on the other side of the world? What would a Brian Eno song look like as a painting? The books listed here examine the myriad connections and convergences between sound and painting, architecture, and film. Sinister Resonance by David Toop “Seeing comes before words,” wrote John Berger in 1972, in the opening of Music journalism in the mainstream press has been on a downward slide for years. Word counts for reviews are declining across the board, readership is drifting to blogs and other online venues, and downsizing of editorial staff at former strongholds of arts criticism, such as the Village Voice, are making for exceedingly grim times. Few print music magazines allow for the sort of memorable long-form features and lively, perceptive analysis that characterized Rolling Stone and Creem in the ’70s, Melody Maker and NME in the ’80s, and Spin in the early ’90s.