Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison

Printed on demand

Estimated despatch time 7 - 10 days

Acknowledgments Author's Note
Introduction Chapter One Imagining America: Jazz, Blues, Country, and the Mythologies of the West Chapter Two What Makes the Irish Heart Beat? The Irishness of Van Morrison Chapter Three Get the Words on the Page: Van Morrison as Writer Chapter Four Caugh
Appendix One - The 2006 Shows
Appendix Two - Recording Studios
Bibliography Discography

About
Reviews
Explore

About

"Hymns to the Silence" is a thoroughly informed and enlightened study of the art of a pop music maverick that will delight fans the world over.In 1991, Van Morrison said, "Music is spiritual, the music business isn't". Peter Mills' groundbreaking book investigates the oppositions and harmonies within the work of Van Morrison, proceeding from this identified starting point."Hymns to the Silence" is a detailed investigative study of Morrison as singer, performer, lyricist, musician and writer with particular attention paid throughout to the contradictions and tensions that are central to any understanding of his work as a whole.The book takes several intriguing angles. It looks at Morrison as a writer, specifically as an Irish writer who has recorded musical settings of Yeats poems, collaborated with Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan and Gerald Dawe, and who regularly drops quotes from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett into his live performances. It looks at him as a singer, at how he uses his voice as an interpretive instrument. And there are chapters on his use of mythology, on his stage performances, and on his continuing fascination with America and its musical forms.

Reviews

It is one of my favourite Morrison songs, a perfect ball of love and desire, belief and rock'n'roll, and, perhaps more oddly, one of the most frequently performed songs at his shows. Peter Mills, in Hymns to the Silence, refers to it as ''this dark horse of a song'' - a way to describe the surprising appeal of a song that was never a hit, but has proved compelling to many

Book

Contents

Download queue