From the bestselling author of the award-winning How Shostakovich Changed My Mind comes a new book about the cathartic power of music.
For critic and composer Stephen Johnson, there have been moments when music has confronted him with life-changing insights. Some of these have been hard to accept, but once accepted they have opened up new possibilities of thinking, feeling and living. Through an exploration of seven pieces by Anton Bruckner, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johann Sebastian Bach, Lili Boulanger, Richard Wagner, Jean Sibelius and Ludwig van Beethoven Johnson considers the lives and the intentions of the composers who created them, and how they have affected him personally.
Stephen Johnson is the author of How Shostakovich Changed My Mind and The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910. He has taken part in several hundred radio programmes and documentaries, including BBC Radio 3s weekly Discovering Music series, and has made numerous appearances on TV, contributing as a guest interviewee on BBC Radio 4s coverage of The Proms, ITVs The South Bank Show, and on BBC1s The One Show. Additionally, he made an important contribution, both as commentator and narrator, to Tony Palmers controversial film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oh Thou Transcendent, and more recently to Palmers film about Gustav Holst, In the Bleak Midwinter. He lives in Herefordshire.
