For the Love of Music: A Conductor's Guide to the Art of Listening

With a lifetime of experience, profound understanding, and heartwarming appreciation, an internationally celebrated conductor and teacher, answers the questions: Why should I listen to classical music, and how can I get the most from the listening experience?

A protégée of Leonard Bernstein—his assistant for 18 years—and an eminent conductor who has toured and recorded all over the world, John Mauceri helps us to reap the joy and pleasures classical music has to offer. Briefly, we learn the way a musical tradition born in Ancient Greece, nursed by the rise of Christianity, and nurtured by influences from across the globe came to be embraced by cultures from Japan to Bolivia, and helped give shape to genres from jazz to devotional music.

Then Mauceri examines the music itself, helping us understand what it is we hear when we listen to classical music: how, by a kind of sonic metaphor, it expresses the deepest recesses of human feeling and emotion; how each piece bears the traces of its history; how the concert experience—a unique one each and every time—allows us to discover music anew. Unpretentious, graceful, instructive, this is a book for the aficionado, the novice, and anyone looking to have the love of music fired within them.