Beethoven's Skull

Beethoven's Skull

by Tim Rayborn
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 15/11/2016

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Beethoven’s Skull is an unusual and often humorous survey of the many strange happenings in the history of Western classical music. Proving that good music and shocking tabloid-style stories make excellent bedfellows, it presents tales of revenge, murder, curious accidents, and strange fates that span more than two thousand years. Highlights include:


A cursed song that kills those who hear it

A composer who lovingly cradles the head of Beethoven’s corpse when his remains are exhumed half a century after his death

A fifteenth-century German poet who sings of the real-life Dracula

A dream of the devil that inspires a virtuoso violin piece


Unlike many music books that begin their histories with the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, Beethoven’s Skull takes the reader back to the world of ancient Greece and Rome, progressing through the Middle Ages and all the way into the twentieth century. It also looks at myths and legends, superstitions, and musical mysteries, detailing the ways that musicians and their peers have been rather horrible to one another over the centuries.

ISBN:
9781510712720
9781510712720
Category:
Western "classical" music
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
15-11-2016
Language:
English
Publisher:
Skyhorse
Tim Rayborn

Tim Rayborn is a writer, educator, historian, musician, and researcher, with more than twenty years of professional experience. He is a prolific author, with a number of books and articles to his name, and more on the way. He has written on topics from the academic to the amusing to the appalling, including medieval and modern history, the arts (music, theater, and dance), food and wine, business, social studies, and works for business and government publications.

He's also been a ghost writer for various clients. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tim lived in England for seven years, studying for an M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Leeds. He has a strong academic background but enjoys writing for general audiences.

He is also an acclaimed classical and world musician, having appeared on more than forty recordings, and he has toured and performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, North Africa, and Australia over the last twenty-five years. During that time, he has learned much about the business of arts and entertainment, and how to survive and thrive when traveling and working in intense environments.

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