Ear-altering sounds and personal stories

Book review: Sound Within Sound by Kate Molleson

This is the latest in my series of reviews of music books by women, specifically those that were longlisted for the 2022 Penderyn Music Book Prize. I think this going to be the hardest to write, because it’s outside my field of knowledge, but the book wasn’t hard to read because it is so well written.

I suspect that some books get listed (particularly in the case of memoir) because they tell a good story rather than for the quality of the writing. Sound Within Sound, though, qualifies as literature; Kate Molleson used to be a music critic, and her descriptions of how things sound are precise and poetic. But she tells a good story too – in fact, many good stories.

Interviews with the composers themselves, if they are still here, or with people who knew them, give insights into their stories. Alongside these, there are histories and descriptions of the music itself.

My knowledge of classical music extends as far as the Proms, so I don’t know much about the outer reaches of the genre. And some of these are very outer reaches.

There are some familiar names along the way. Gilberto Gil, Miles Davis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Philip Glass, Sun Ra…

But the ones that take centre stage are the ones I haven’t heard of. And possibly that most people haven’t heard of, because that’s the point of the book.

Talking of the Proms, the BBC were repeating some old ones recently and it struck me that I was looking at a lot of middle-aged white men and how little that seems to happen these days. So things are changing.

Nonetheless there still is, as in everything, a canon. Molleson's job here is to challenge that canon. As she says in the introduction to this book, her interest lies in “radical innovation”: “ear-altering sounds” that are beyond “the margins of the mainstream”.

It turns out, obviously, that the composers she chooses to profile are beyond the mainstream not just because of their innovations but because of race and gender. No surprises there.

Ten people feature in this book. Six are women, and each from a different country. The men are from Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines and the US. The American one is black. So, there’s plenty of diversity here.

There is much creative diversity, too. There are some common elements: electronic music, folk music, church music, musique concrète, microtones, modernism, dissonance, improvisation, the use of non-orchestral instruments, the invention of new instruments. The choices vary according to the composer.

There’s quite a bit of politics – I learnt a lot about different countries and cultures in the 20th century – and a lot of eccentricity. There are, too, human stories, of achievement, displacement, exile, love and family.

One of my favourite interviews here is with Peggy Seeger, talking about her mother Ruth Crawford, who gave up composing when she got married and took up folk-education instead. “My father composed too, but he wasn’t nearly as good as she was. I think there was something operating there.”

Molleson adds later that when Ruth met Charles Seeger: “He had a low opinion of female composers, mostly because he didn’t read about them much in history books.” 

That’s the heart of the book, really: what keeps people out of the history books.

“I write this book out of love and anger” Molleson says in the introduction. Even if you don’t know much about classical music, most women will completely understand that.