Audio books

 

Hymn: Alan Bennett And The Medici String Quartet

Author : Alan Bennett and George Fenton

Performed By : Alan Bennett

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 50 minutes

Categories : Biographical
Music Related
Comedy
Biographical
Non Fiction

Our Price : $7.49

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Recorded live for BBC Radio 4, Hymn is a memoir of music in childhood, written by Alan Bennett and George Fenton

 

'I am one of those boys, state-educated in the Forties and Fifties, who came by the words of Hymns Ancient and Modern by singing them day in, day out in school every morning at assembly. It's a dwindling band... you con pick us out at funerals and memorial services because we can sing the hymns without the book'

To mark their 30th anniversary, the Medici Quartet asked composer George Fenton and writer Alan Bennett to collaborate on a piece for performance at the Harrogate International Festival. The result was Hymn, a meditative piece, by turns funny and

melancholy, in which Bennett looks at the part which music played in his childhood, at his father's doomed attempts to teach him the violin, and at what hymns mean to him now. The illustrative suite for strings, played by the Medici Quartet , draws on a range of musical references including Elgar, Delius and several well-known hymns. Recorded in front of an audience at the BBC Radio Theatre, Hymn is prefaced by an introduction from the author.

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All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics

Author : Carson Holloway

Performed By : Nadia May

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc

Runtime : 6 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Arts & Drama

Our Price : $14.95

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"The great virtue of All Shook Up is its unfashionable insistence that music be taken seriously...
"Wall Street Journal

"Refreshing...may well appeal to both critics and defenders of pop music."
Publishers Weekly

The national debate over popular music's effect on character is both furious and confused. Conservatives complain primarily about lyrics, appealing to public decency and safety. Liberals, swift to the defense of any self-expression, simultaneously celebrate rock's liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence. Carson Holloway is out to shatter the assumptions of pop's critics and defenders alike, showing that
music is more beneficial than we think.

Plato and Aristotle, Holloway finds, were aware that music can either inflame the soul with passion or can awaken it to reason and help to cultivate temperance. What Holloway proposesa rediscovery of the musical wisdom of Plato and Aristotlewill completely change the way we think about music.

Carson Holloway is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the 2005-06 William E. Simon Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. His articles have appeared in the Review of Politics and Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of fourteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.