A nice surprise today: Bob came back from a meeting with a magazine page brought along by a colleague. It was from the February issue of the leading French record magazine Diapason, one of whose editors had taken the new Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music as the subject of his editorial. The Cambridge Companion, an […]

My publisher, Boydell Press, has put a short extract from my new book Out of Silence on their blog.  You can read it by clicking here. The blog also shows the book’s cover image for the first time. I’m irrationally proud of this cover because I took the photograph! It aims to give the impression of someone coming […]

A most unexpected and heartwarming New Year gift arrived today in the form of a comment made in a Times book review by the distinguished cellist Natalie Clein. Reviewing a new book on Bach’s cello suites, she muses on the difficulty of writing about music, and says, ‘The most successful writers are often musicians themselves […]

I spent most of yesterday correcting the page-proofs of my new book and twitching with frustration. My electronic copy of the page-proofs is ‘read only’. I cannot type on it or make any alterations. Any mistakes have to be listed separately and sent to the publisher. It’s a process akin to listening to the ‘first […]

I’m delighted to announce that my third book, ‘Out of Silence’, will be published by Boydell and Brewer in March 2010. Boydell, who specialise in history books, published my first book,  ‘Beyond the Notes’, in 2004. Since then, they’ve developed a very strong music list and are now a leading independent publisher of books on classical music and […]