The Way We Listen Now and Other Writings on Music

This is a book that can be read with great pleasure and considerable profit by the general reader today. But when, in a century's time, historians want to know what musical life was like in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and what judgment, opinion and taste was current then, this book will certainly be capable of giving them a cultivated and accurate answer. Without exception, these essays are of permanent importance and value. Only the richness and diversity of their subject matter make it impossible to give an adequate idea of their variety and scope, not to mention their stature. Book jacket.

Hugh Wood Bayan Northcott was born in Harrow in 1940, and has lived and worked mainly in London. He has written extensively for Music and Musicians, The New Statesman, The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent and the BBC Music Magazine, as well as for many other publications. In 1980 he edited a collection of essays on The Music of Alexander Goehr (Schott), and his compositions include a Fantasia for guitar (1982), a Sextet (1985), a Horn Concerto (1998) and Four Votive Antiphons (1997-2003). Christopher Wintle (Editor) teaches at King's College London and is author of All the Gods: Benjamin Britten's Night-piece in Context (Plumbago, 2006). He has edited four volumes of Hans Keller's writings, including Essays on Music (CUP, 1994) and Film Music and Beyond (Plumbago, 2006), as well as Julian Littlewood's The Variations of Johannes Brahms (Plumbago, 2004) and Hugh Wood's Staking Out the Territory (Plumbago, 2007).