A NEW BOOK BY CARLOS ANGELO
What Music Is
Sound, Memory, Time, and What Remains
What if a single piano note could change the way you understand music—and perhaps much more than music?
Press a key. A hammer strikes a string. The air moves. You hear a note. Simple.
Except the note is already changing. The room becomes part of its sound. Your memory changes what the next note can mean. Musicians begin responding to one another, and relationships emerge that belong to no instrument alone.
What Music Is begins with a single middle C and follows it outward through acoustics, rhythm, harmony, perception, memory, culture, technology, identity, love, and loss.
“It begins with one note. By the time we hear it again, neither the note nor the listener is quite the same.”
INSIDE THE BOOK
A book about music that gradually becomes a book about time.
Where does a note actually exist: the instrument, the air, the ear, or the listener?
Why can perfect timing sound worse, and how can a beat be heard when nobody plays it?
How can a song return someone to a moment that no longer exists?
How can something remain itself when almost everything about it changes?
What survives when musical practices move between people, places, and generations?
How can something disappear completely and still remain consequential?
PRESS & REVIEWS
Review copies and interviews
Advance review copies, interview requests, and media inquiries are welcome.
press@heldnotepress.com
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