Morley’s typically digressive attempt to demystify classical
music is exhausting but illuminating
A few years ago, on a plane to
Barcelona, with a trio of string quartets by Beethoven, Brahms and Hindemith for company, Paul Morley found himself musing on the piece of music he would choose to be the soundtrack the final moments of his life. “To arrive at an answer,” he recalls in his introduction to A Sound Mind, “I would have to write a book, to explore once and for all what my thinking about music is.”
Any casual reader or, indeed, classical buff drawn to Morley’s writing for the first time by the extravagant, though probably ironic, promise of the book’s title would be advised to pay heed to that sentence. It provides a much more accurate description of this epic, endlessly digressive undertaking in which Paul Morley thinks about music for around 600 pages. Along the way, his thoughts roam freely through a whole range of tangentially related subjects including self-reinvention, memory, mortality, criticism, taste, embarrassment, modernity, nostalgia, genius, iconoclasm, the lingering presence of the pop cultural past and the floating, opaque nature of the pop cultural present. Pure Paul Morley, in fact.