Two nice things happened yesterday. I popped into Waterstones in Princes Street to ask if they were going to stock my Nocturne book. Lo and behold it was already on the 'New NonFiction' shelf, with its own little recommendation card (see photo). An hour later my...
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My book Nocturnes and the Fascination of Night Music comes out today from Yale University Press. Tomorrow (Wednesday 25 March at 7pm) I'll be talking about it at Toppings Bookshop in Edinburgh. When I did a radio interview recently, the presenter asked me, before we...
This evening I'm doing a live interview about my Nocturne book with Katie Derham, presenter of BBC Radio 3's 'drivetime' programme In Tune. Normally these interviews are done in person in the London studio, but as I live in Edinburgh I've been offered the possibility...
Here are Eva Hoffman, Janice Galloway and me at the Royal Festival Hall discussing what it’s like to write about music and musicians. Janice got us all laughing, and it turned into a fun evening. We three speakers all said something about why we wanted to write about...
I’m looking forward to taking part in a literature event at the South Bank on Monday evening at 7.45pm. The novelist Eva Hoffman has invited fellow novelist Janice Galloway and me to join her in a discussion of what it’s like to write about music. I don’t really know...
My copy of the newly-published Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music arrived today along with about 35 other items of post suddenly released from the backlog of the current postal strike. My contribution to the book is just a short article on 'Learning to Live with...
In the past few days I’ve spent some time studying scores of pieces I’m going to be teaching in a masterclass at the RSAMD this week. The date has been in my diary for a long time, but because the academic year only began a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to...
In Monday’s Guardian, Umberto Eco laments the decline in children’s handwriting ability. He gives various reasons why he thinks it’s a shame that we don’t handwrite letters any more, but surprisingly doesn’t talk about the impact that someone’s handwriting can have on...
In the Review section of today's Guardian, I've written a review of Daniel Levitin's book, 'The World in Six Songs'. If you'd like to read the review, here's the link.
The Author, the newsletter of the Society of Authors, has just dropped on to the doormat. It's full of doom and gloom about the effects of the recession on writers, particularly freelance writers. Fewer reviews are being commissioned by newspapers. Rates of pay have...
I'm reading the American poet Mark Doty's memoir about his two beloved dogs. It's a charity shop find in a Large Print Edition, the oversize print giving me the impression that the author is talking to me slowly and in a loud voice. The sensation fades away as I get...
Last night the Royal Philharmonic Society announced their 2009 awards for music. One result that I found particularly pleasing was the Creative Communication Award to Alex Ross for his book The Rest is Noise, which has already won the Guardian First Book Award. I gave...
The BBC's poetry season included a sweet programme last night about Wordsworth's poem ‘Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge'. Presenter and poet Owen Sheers shared his lovely insight that the poem has become more, not less resonant over the years. The surprise of...