Music Lessons:
Seven Composers and What They Taught Me

by Stephen Johnson

From the bestselling author of the award-winning How Shostakovich Changed My Mind comes a new book about the cathartic power of music.

For critic and composer Stephen Johnson, there have been moments when music has confronted him with life-changing insights. Some of these have been hard to accept, but once accepted they have opened up new possibilities of thinking, feeling and living.

Through an exploration of seven pieces – by Anton Bruckner, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johann Sebastian Bach, Lili Boulanger, Richard Wagner, Jean Sibelius and Ludwig van Beethoven – Johnson considers the lives and the intentions of the composers who created them, and how they have affected him personally.

Zig-zagging through time, Johnson stitches his own autobiography into Bach, Lili Boulanger, Beethoven and others . . .This is not a “listening to the piece of music made me better book” – and it is stronger for it. Instead, Johnson balances musicology with something bigger – how to live.’

BBC Music

This compassionate, wise and affecting little book will remind you to keep listening and to dismiss no music outright, however well you think you know it.’

Gramophone

This book, in seven essays on individual pieces or parts of them by the composers Bruckner, Rachmaninoff, Bach, Lili Boulanger, Wagner, Sibelius, and Beethoven, tells the story of Johnson’s redemption through music and love. He makes no apology for the amount of personal detail he reveals. In fact, this is the point of the book and what gives it its extraordinary power.

Nick Holmes