From the My Favourite series - favourite stories on different themes by
different authors, each volume edited by a celebrity in the field.
"Music, be it Beethoven, Bartok or the Beatles," writes Yehudi Menuhin,
"brings us together in a sharing of sound and feeling" which transcends
boundaries. Thus, through the stories, poems and accounts in this
anthology, we may join African slaves in 19th-century New Orleans as
they create their spontaneous, vital, rhythmic music; and may walk with
the exiled Bartok as he remembers the joyful honesty, and the vigorous
tenderness, of the songs of Hungary. Exemplified in these stories is the
deep attachment of composer and musicians to the land of their roots -
"the lands that gave them their ears, their voices, the particular
musical language they use." Here are stories illustrating the music of
men and women living 'in tune' with the earth: Aborigine and Inuit,
Bushman and American Indian; a woman singing to the Hebridean seals,
whose voices answer hers; a Celtic prince entranced by 'the music of the
world'. Here are composers and conductors, makers and lovers of music
from other times and other countries, other cultures and other
landscapes. The lilt of Gypsy music and the haunting chants of the
Balkans; girls dancing in Rhodes, and children dancing in a Japanese
grove; the songs of a Somerset soldier and of the peasants in Russia;
the discipline and complex beauty of Indian music and the deep sense of
melody in Hasidic tales: all these illuminate the infinite range of
music, within which we may, each retaining perfect individuality, share
a universe "in which music and life are one and the same thing."
