How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

by Stephen Johnson

Overview

A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder.

BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder.

There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910749463
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	265 KB

About the Author

Stephen Johnson has taken part in several hundred radio programs and documentaries, including Radio 3’s weekly series Discovering Music. He is also a presenter on the Classic Arts podcast series Archive Classics. He contributed as a commentator and narrator to Tony Palmer’s controversial film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, O Thou Transcendent, and to Palmer’s Holst: In the Bleak Midwinter. He lives in England.

Editorial Reviews

"... an intensely readable, highly personal analysis of the major works of a composer, who, Mr. Johnson decides, has recorded a collective experience for an all-inclusive listenership ... All great music teeters the edge of madness. This troubled writer makes a convincing case that the music of Dmitri Shostakovich helped to save his mind.  In life's crises, he suggests, each of us comes up against an internal siege of Leningrad, and music comes to your relief."  —Norman Lebrecht, The Wall Street Journal

"... palpably humane, sensitive, and breathably erudite ... How Shostakovich Changed My Mind is ... a deeply felt and well-considered work — and anyone who cares about music, the mind, or personal struggle can learn from its depths.” —Nicholas Cannariato, NPR

"How Shostakovich Changed My Mind is one of the most powerful, honest, and profound revelations that exists on what it is that music means and does: it’s just an essential document.” —Tom Service, Music Matters (BBC)

"The book ranges well beyond Shostakovich’s work, and explores how we perceive music, the distorting effects of depression and how music can reconnect us to emotions and fellow humanity... Johnson argues that Shostakovich...testified on behalf of fellow humanity, his music concerned with ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. Part of Shostakovich’s attraction is that while he suffers he knows—and reminds his fellow sufferers—that we do not suffer alone.” —BBC Music Magazine

"Strangely, anguished music can be the most comforting: using a delicate, self-deprecating style and references encompassing everything from Greek drama to the Moomins, Johnson explores the way Shostakovich provides catharsis, transforming the personal ‘I’ into the collective ‘we.’ Profoundly moving." —The Sunday Times, “The Best Classical Music Books of 2018”

"How Shostakovich Changed my Mind is short enough and eloquent enough to read comfortably at a single two-hour stretch, without skipping over a single word ... Many readers will surely find ideas in it that resonate with their own experience of Shostakovich’s music, and be grateful for having so many of them gathered so tightly together.” —Gramophone

“Stephen Johnson is one of our most sensitive and thoughtful music critics, and this book, written from the heart about a composer whom he loves and admires, will prove to be a landmark in the understanding of its subject.” —Sir Roger Scruton 
 
“I started reading and was hooked. Within a few pages I knew I had fallen into the company of the most wonderful interlocutor. Stephen Johnson take the reader from the most profound meditations on music, to delicious anecdotes about Shostakovich, to penetrating observations about the nature of art and the way it may rescue us from despair. I finished it inspired by a sense of human possibility.” —Raymond Tallis

From the Publisher