Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226823430)

An engaging blend of memoir and music history, Distant Melodies explores the changing ideas of home, displacement, and return through the lives and chamber music of four composers.

How does music played and heard over many years inform one's sense of home? Writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel is forbidden and distance felt anew, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the world-renowned Tak當s Quartet, searches for answers in the music of composers whose relationships to home shaped the pursuit of their craft--Anton匤 Dvoř疚, Edward Elgar, B駘a Bart, and Benjamin Britten.

Dusinberre has lived abroad for three decades. At the age of 21, he left his native England to pursue music studies at the Juilliard School in New York. Three years later he moved to Boulder, Colorado. Drawn to the stories of Dvoř疚's, Bart's, and Britten's American sojourns as they tried to reconcile their new surroundings with nostalgia for their homelands, Dusinberre reflects on his own evolving relationship to England and the idea of home. As he visits and imagines some of the places crucial to these composers' creative inspiration, Dusinberre also reflects on Elgar's unusual Piano Quintet and the landscapes that inspired it.

Combining travel writing with revealing insights into the working lives of string quartet musicians, Distant Melodies is a moving and humorous meditation on the relationship between music and home.

Author: Edward Dusinberre
ISBN-10: 0226823431
ISBN-13: 9780226823430
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 11/08/2022
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 1.00d