Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day by Clemency Burton-Hill

Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day Reviews

• 
  Cindy Rollins

  Loved listening to these selections all year so much, I bought the next volume.
• 
  Colin Baldwin

  Loved the concept of this book and the well-written, sometimes witty, always insightful notes from the author. She covered many of my favourites and many not-so-well-known musical gems. The extra ‘tit bits’ about composers, performances and sometimes controversy were a delight.
  
  Thank you, Laura, for your recommendation. It was spot on. A satisfying daily/weekly companion. If I missed an entry, it was fun going back and catching up.
  
  I’ve got ‘Another Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day’ by the same author. Wunderbar!
  
• 
  Ingrid

  This was a wonderful journey. I listened nearly every day and loved some of the new suggestions and disliked others.
• 
  Jason Furman

  I started this on January 1st and just finished it today. It is a separate movement from a classical piece for each day of the year, generally ranging from 2 to 20 minutes. In some cases motivated by the feeling of the day (like the champagne popping in the Johann Strauss waltz for today’s piece), in some cases the birthday, death day of the composer or the date of the composition, and in some cases even more arbitrary.
  
  Clemency Burton-Hill is ecumenical in her tastes, incredibly enthusiastic, not remotely snobby—talks about pieces she listens to in the Tube, while doing housework, or reverentially in a concert hall. All of the major composers are here but with 366 days (yes, it has the leap day—so perfect for 2020), there are lots of women, non-European/Americans, and composers who are still alive and working—many of them under 50.
  
  A book like this would have been impossible prior to streaming but with streaming I was able to listen to all 366 pieces (mostly on the designated day, but sometimes I did in groups because I got behind or felt like getting ahead). This introduced me to so many new pieces/composers that I downloaded and will help add to my listening next year and beyond.
  
  If you like classical music and want to expand your horizons this is a great way to do it.
• 
  Diana

  Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day [2017]- ★★1/2
  
  First of all, I would like to say that Clemency Burton-Hill, an author, broadcaster and journalist, has one of the most wonderful and “noble” intentions regarding this book. Through it, she desires to show her readers just how varied, beautiful, inspiring and life-changing classical music can be. I love classical music and find this goal splendid. Burton-Hill presents 365 classical pieces for each day of the year in her book, and the chosen pieces range wildly in style and stem from all kinds of composers. Apart from distinctively classical compositions, the author introduces religious music, traditional songs (from Indian to Danish), film scores, modern minimalist music and jazzy pieces. At one end of the spectrum we have such big names as Purcell, Lully, Scarlatti, Tallis, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, etc., at another - such composers as Vivaldi, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Ravel, Smetana, Sibelius, Strauss, Chopin, Satie, Ligeti, etc., and yet at another – Bernstein, Morricone and Glass. I applaud the author for including many women composers in her book, including Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), Isabella Leonarda (1620 –1704), Florence Price (1887 – 1953) and Germaine Tailleferre (1892 – 1983). Overall, the selection of musical pieces is good, though sometimes odd and hardly introductory to classical music. Perhaps, I also personally wanted to see more piano pieces, and there was an abundance of viola, string quartet and choral music.
  
  The main problem with this book is that Burton-Hill provides the most annoying commentary to her chosen pieces that I have ever read in my life. The author is definitely very passionate about classical music and genuinely wants to share this passion with others, but, in my personal opinion, she goes completely overboard with this desire. Her commentary beneath each chosen musical piece is in a strange diary-like format where she mixes weird Wikipedia-like trivia about composers with some dull biographical information about her own life. We read where she first heard this or that musical composition (or about it) - at her friends’ wedding, at a Christmas party, on a tube, etc., etc. and what an amazing impact it had on her, helping her to get over a break-up or through a washing time. We read what a particular piece of music did to her insides at page 260, and every single entry ends on something similar to this line - “I hope you fall as hard for it as I did” [2017: 83].
  
  Clemency Burton-Hill also uses language that more annoys, than informs or inspires her readers, writing constantly phrases like “this is something else” or “stay tuned”. There is a line between admiration and sincere praise, on the one hand, and incessant fanaticism, on the other, and the author leans to the latter, with the result being that her undying and absolute love for each and every piece and composer becomes exasperating to read. Surely, we all know how amazingly great Bach or Mozart were, but phrasing it this manner “Bach’s brain was…supercomputer” or “Bach was the daddy” [of everything in music] [2017: 11] is beyond cringeworthy. Her other entries are hardly helpful, for example, on page 26, for 16 January, we have Etude in C Sharp Minor, Op. 2 No. 1 by Alexander Scriabin (1872 – 1915) and this description beneath it: “Look sometimes what we just really need in the middle of January is music that feels like a large glass of red wine”….then the author adds “with sincere apologies to non-drinkers or those attempting a Dry January”. Similar weird and toe-curling attempts at lightness and humour pervade this book as the author later also “advertises” French and Brazilian cocktails.
  
  Going further, I have to say that I have never in my life read such a brazen and inconsiderate portrayal of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s life and death as I read in Burton-Hill’s book, and her degrading description of Alexander Pushkin’s death is beyond insensitive. I understand and appreciate “reader-friendly” language and material which is “fun to read”, but there is got to be some limit to it at least sometimes. Burton-Hill writes on a Glinka piece: “Pushkin, by the way, had been intending to write the libretto, but unhelpfully got himself killed in a duel with his brother-in-law after the latter attempted to seduce his wife” [Burton-Hill, 2017: 180]. Only a person who has not the slightest respect for this greatest of all Russian poets or who has absolutely no idea about the state of the duel practice in Russia in Pushkin’s time could have written something like this. I do not even know what is worse in Burton-Hill’s sentence, the passive tense hint [“got himself”], that can be read as both “objectifying” the poet and somehow blaming him for the duel position he found himself in, the word “unhelpfully”, which seemingly puts a libretto above Pushkin’s life, or the generalisation “the latter attempted to seduce his wife”.
• 
  Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance

  I knew by January 3 that I was going to love this book. By spring I was starting to dread the turning of pages. In September I hated to think that the book would be coming to an end.
  
  You know the feeling you have when you wish a book was but the first in a series? That's how I felt about Year of Wonder. I could have gone on reading this book every day forever.
  
  I found a copy of the book at the end of November. I also got a copy of the audiobook, thinking that it would include a bit of each piece, but, no, it did not. I found a playlist on Spotify that included almost all of the pieces in the book, and so my adventure began. Year of Wonder is a compilation of a short writing about a piece of music for each day of the year. I read the daily essay and then listened on Spotify to the musical selection. And I marked each selection that I especially liked and made a playlist of my own on Spotify:
  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/52o....
  
  I will look for more from Clemency Burton-Hill.
• 
  Laura

  I loved this book in which the author, a violinist, journalist and BBC presenter, curated some of the world's greatest classical music pieces from throughout the ages, including those of some lesser known composers! I found many gems, both ones old and new to me, and thoroughly enjoyed Ms. Burton-Hill's interesting comments about the composers and often, also, about how these particular pieces came to be. This book is a wonderful jumping-off point for further exploration of the composers she cites as well as for delving into the opus of those who may be new to the reader. I've just learned that she has published a new compilation of more curated music, "Another Year of Wonder", that I look forward to exploring when it crosses over the pond to the U.S. Published in 2021, it appears that, as of now, it's only available in the UK.
• 
  Shelli

  Although I'll rate and review it before then, don't expect me to finish this book for exactly 365 days from now, as I'm definitely using this book as intended – enjoying a single piece of music and its accompanying one-page write up each day! I'm hoping that between YouTube, Amazon Music, Hoopla, and my local library, I won't have too much trouble finding all the music referenced.
• 
  Sher❤ The Fabulous BookLover

  Not sure when I’ll be finished with this book, but man I love the journey! I’ve added some amazing pieces to my spotify playlist and I love hearing the background of the composers and the reasoning behind the written pieces.
  
  This is the perfect coffee table book and I highly recommend it!
• 
  Brendan

  I liked this book ok but it got old after a while, so I’m writing my own. This one celebrated all these random days (“listening to this piece today because it’s the composer’s birthday!!!”); I’d rather have it tied to more interesting stuff. And the author also, for the sake of growing audience, always says you don’t need to understand music to appreciate it. I agree, but understanding helps make it deeper, and you can explain musical concepts without needing the person to have musical training.
  
  On the plus side, this is a great book for exposing you to new music that you never knew, female composers, living composers, old pieces that have their own small but interesting place in history. For that I would recommend this book. But I hope I can do a better job.
• 
  Celeste

  This was an informative and enlightening look into the world of classical music. Through a piece a day, I was introduced to a vast compendium of music I had never experienced before, as well as learning some of the background behind pieces and artists I already knew and respected. There were a couple of drawbacks to this book, but those are very much personal preferences. Firstly, there was far more opera included than I would have expected. When I hear “classical music” I instantly think of instrumentals, which I know is closed-minded. I simply have never developed a taste for opera, and thus there was a wide swath of this collection that I suffered through instead of enjoyed. Secondly, I wish there had been a bit more to the write-ups for each day. I know they’re meant to be brief, and that the author had a lot to do as there were 366 of them, but I was just left wanting more information to go along with quite a few of these pieces. But again, those are minor personal complaints. All in all I found Year of Wonder illuminating, and I’m very glad to have been introduced to so much new-to-me music.
• 
  Rachel

  What an amazing book project. I would read a few of the days, download the songs to google play, and then spend a few days listening to them, then going on to read more. And such fun to come, from listening to all the songs again, to listening to all of the different renditions, and then listening to more from the artists I really liked. Can't say I enjoyed all of the songs, but really I would say I didn't enjoy maybe 7 songs? Please don't tell 15 year old me that I would get older and start to enjoy classical music.
• 
  Shannon

  interesting concept but honestly? for the repetition of the same phrase ('formal elegance') and appalling number of times the slur 'g*psy' was used in a modern context and the switching between adoring and making digs at millennials....gonna have to give this a 2.5 :/
• 
  Rosemarie

  Really enjoying this!
• 
  Melody Schwarting

  Fun daily look at a lot of different classical music. This would be great to go through for exposure to classical music for someone of any age.
• 
  Marie

  January: The first month's worth of music has been interesting! There were some pieces that I didn't expect to like, but I did! I loved Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1, Concerto Grosso in D Major by Corelli, and Unsent Love Letters by Elena Kats-Chernin (this was based on a bunch of love letters written by Erik Satie that were discovered, unsent, after he died. Kats-Chernin wrote a suite of 26 piano miniatures that were inspired by these letters.) I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Mozart's Symphony No. 41 on his birthday, and discovering a unique piece of music by Steve Reich called Electric Counterpoint. I may never have heard some of these pieces if not for this book!
  When I listened to Mendelssohn's Octet in E-Flat Major, I noticed that the scherzo was very familiar to me. But this didn't seem possible because I didn't think I had heard this piece before! I did some investigating and discovered that Mendelssohn wrote the Octet in 1825 when he was 16. When he wrote his first symphony, he orchestrated the scherzo from the Octet and used it in his symphony, and THAT'S why that part was so familiar to me! I'm one month into this book and it's a fun musical adventure so far. :)
• 
  Jim

  Terrible as an audiobook! I thought I'd get to listen to at least a bit of the music, but there was none. Each chapter is short, a quick bio of the composer, a bit about the piece, & it's name. End of chapter & on to the next. So, I have to stop the book, remember the name (often long & confusing), search it out, & find it somewhere to listen to? Not happening. They could have at least included a 30 second clip, legal under fair use.
  
  The text doesn't go into what makes the piece great, either. I don't know much about music, but I do know there are certain combinations of notes, tempos, & beats that hit certain chords in us. There is a math underlying much of it that appeals to our penchant for patterns, but there was nothing on that for the first couple, so I'm abandoning this as a waste of time in audio format.
  
  This might be OK as daily meditation book in text of some sort, but definitely not as an audiobook, so how about another format? Nope. $11 is way too expensive for a Kindle text. It's almost as much used from Abebooks in HB & the PB edition is a few $ more. Not worth it to me. Big disappointment.
• 
  David Dunlap

  Did not read this so much as skim it -- it is not what I was expecting. -- This book would make a GREAT gift to give someone who wants to learn about classical music or for the person who already loves classical but would like to expand his/her horizons. The selections touch most of The Greats, but there is a definite whiff of political correctness about the contents (although the inclusion of so many female composers is a definite plus).
• 
  paulireads

  Every day my husband and and I listened, semi faithfully, to selections from A Year of Wonder by Clemency Briton-Hill! (This Book was donated to our public library by the Friends Group, in honor of Arthur Belfiore & the MCHS Marching Band.)
  We had a sticker system which designated favorite selections! We agreed there were some not to receive a sticker, or to listen to ever again! It was a fun family project, and made for some entertaining dinner conversation!
• 
  Siri

  Loved this book <3 The author's passion for classical music is infectious. I wish I had another one to read and listen to throughout 2020!
• 
  LeeAnna Weaver

  One of my goals for 2022 was to listen to a new piece of classical music everyday and to learn about the history of the piece and the composer. Year of Wonder was a great guide for exploring old favorites and lots of music new to me. As I read the daily entries, I downloaded the featured music and created monthly playlists. It’s turned into a worthwhile project for me, and I discovered I love some of the modern classics, especially music by composer Philip Glass. I especially enjoyed the author’s spotlights on female composers such as Fanny Mendelssohn And Clara Schumann, who have only recently become better appreciated. I listened to compositions by Erik Satie that gave me a better view of art in the early 20th century. Burton-Hill is an accomplished violinist, and her BBC programs have made classical music more accessible to the average listener. My only complaint about the selections - too much chorale music. Still not a fan! I plan to read her next daily guide to classical music, Another Year of Wonder.
• 
  Babs

  ‘Year of Wonder’ is an absolute delight & I have loved every minute of it! It’s a truly wonderful, enlightening, exciting & interactive journey through a year of classical music.
  
  Clemency Burton-Hill has done a fantastic job of making classical music totally accessible to absolutely everyone, dispelling the myth that you have to ‘know things’, or to be ‘learned’, to be able to listen to classical music. Her writing is beautiful; easy to read, down to earth, heartfelt, informative & brimming with enthusiasm & passion. There is nothing difficult, technical or ‘high brow’ about it. Clemency clearly loves her music & she’s, naturally, very excited to share it with us, which is part of what makes this book so marvellous.
  
  Clemency’s daily musings & short stories that accompany the music are fantastically informative & interesting, indeed often eye-opening; those concerning female composers, music composed during the war or in seemingly intolerable or impossible circumstances, early LGBT composers, from long before that acronym came into being, etc. Such incredible, enlightening stories. Or on 12 February for a beautiful Liszt piece entitled ‘Consolations’, simply “It is mid-February. Be consoled by this - just this”!
  
  Having worked my way through the year I now know some composers whose music I really do enjoy, (Chopin, Liszt ...), & others that simply don’t do it for me. I feel I have learned so much & enjoyed so much music that I can now confidently go out & buy (or stream) classical music by the composers I’ve discovered I love. I’m not sure I knew I had a ‘fear’ of classical music but I did have that ‘where do I start?’ feeling about it. Now I know where to start ... with this book! And it’s easy!
  
  Yes, in summary this book is ‘simply wonderful’! Thank you Clemency Burton-Hill!
• 
  Carmen

  So much good music and so many new composers!
• 
  Ellery

  Can't say enough good things about this book. Burton-Hill shares my love of music -and hatred of snobbery about it. Like Yo-Yo Ma, she invites people to forget the labels and just enjoy "music," while recognizing that the word "classical" scares people off. She has chosen to stand at the gates, pushing the doors open and cheerfully inviting us in.
  
  She has compiled a fantastic year-long daily listening sampler. And what a collection! Mozart, Bach and Beethoven are in there, of course---but she gives the impression of romping through the woods of the canon, overturning old rocks and gravestones to bring us lesser known composers with lovely gems to offer; loads and loads of female composers who deserve way more recognition than the dismissal they got for being female, (or, in Fanny Mendelssohn's case, forced to publish under her brothers name!) composers of color, and many interesting modern composers who are working today.
  
  I love opening up to today's date and finding what gift of music, music history and lore I have today. I can see keeping this book handy for a 5 minute music break for years to come.
  
  The book makes a perfect gift as well!
• 
  Nichelle Crocker

  This is great. A classical piece a day with a short paragraph or two about the piece or composer. I have listened on work days all year and enjoyed it so much that I will continue with this next year as well. It’s a nice mix of music from different periods, some familiar and some new to me.
  
  I wanted something to use as a jumping off point for new listening and this was perfect. I figure it usually takes about fifteen minutes or less to read the text and listen.
  
  I’ve been able to find everything easily on Spotify. There is a Year of Wonder playlist there.
• 
  Sammy

  An interesting concept, and a good way to discover some great music (and some not so great too!). The book itself was interesting to begin with, but got a bit tedious as the year progressed. I finished the last couple of weeks in one go, so I can pass it on to someone else before the new year starts.