A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)

By Paul Morley

'Exhilarating' - Sunday Times
'Funny and moving' - Jarvis Cocker

Music critic and writer Paul Morley weaves together memoir and history in a spiralling tale that establishes classical music as the most rebellious genre of all.

Paul Morley had stopped being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous – and found it in classical music.

A soaring polemic, a grumpy reflection on modern rock, and a fan's love note, A Sound Mind rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting and varied in music. A Sound Mind is a multi-layered memoir of Morley's shifting musical tastes, but it is also a compelling history of classical music that reveals the genre's rich and often deviant past – and, hopefully, future.

Like a conductor, Morley weaves together timelines and timeframes in an orchestral narrative that declares the transformative and resilient power of classical music from Bach to Shostakovich, Brahms to Birtwistle, Mozart to Cage, travelling from eighteenth century salons to the modern age of Spotify.

'His passion for centuries of music – both celebrated and obscure – is infectious' - Irish Independent

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781408868775

Paul Morley

Paul Morley is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic who has covered music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. A founding member of the electronic collective Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he is the author of a number of books about music including the bestselling The Age of Bowie and A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History. He collaborated with music icon Grace Jones on her memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, and his two most recent books are biographies of Bob Dylan, You Lose Yourself, You Reappear, and Tony Wilson of Factory Records, From Manchester With Love.

Reviews for A Sound Mind

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've been flirting with tackling this brick for awhile, and almost tossed it aside again when I realized who the author actually was. This is as I have distant memories of Morley acting out when he was a leading gadfly in the British music press, before attaching himself to the semi-fiasco that was ZTT Music; after which I lost track of him.Flash forward a generation or so, and Morley is well past his mid-life crisis, and has reinvented himself as a commentator on classical music for the aging hipsters of the world. In as much as I resemble that remark, I actually got a good bit out of this book. Morley's adventures in trying to get a clue, his overview of a lot of music I might not otherwise have heard of, and some astute comments on the rise and fall of a certain type of music environment and economy, were all well appreciated. However, there is no denying that this work probably could have been about 150 pages shorter, and is more of a memoir of Morley's career, than a left-field history of classical music.