Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo **** 1/2

Time's Echo is a work of history centered on four composers who wrote major works responding to the cataclysm of World War II and the Holocaust: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. The author's thesis is that music transmits complex emotions across time, and that

musical memorials are therefore more meaningful and enduring than stone monuments or new church railings.

I approached the book with some trepidation. Books relating to the Holocaust tend to be uncomfortably impassioned, and the prose in the introduction tended toward the abstract phraseology of Continental philosophy ("Yet it is not just we who remember music. Music also remembers us."). I needn't have worried, though: Eichler manages to stay grounded in realistic detail despite the enormity of the subject and the non-representational nature of music.

Eichler effectively describes how contemporary events and attitudes shaped the music and the audience response to it. I especially appreciated how he shows the meaning of a piece of music seeping in from the Zeitgeist rather than flowing from the composer's explicit intension. For example, he explains how important music is to the German identity and how intertwined were Jewish contributions to that sense of self.

The book presents a clear case for the importance of art in our responding to the world around us. Time's Echo often reads like particularly comprehensive chapters of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, a book that continues to rise in my esteem due to how often I think about it. Both books are filled with incidents and episodes that enrich their musicological analysis. My favorite episode in Time's Echo is the world premiere of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw performed by the amateur Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra. I am also inspired to visit Coventry Cathedral, whose destruction inspired Britten's War Requiem, and to learn more about the European exile community in Los Angeles during the war.

The only thing standing in the way of a full five-star rating is that I am not moved by the music in focus (Strauss' Metamorphosen, Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Shostakovich's "Babi Yar" Symphony, and Britten's War Requiem). The only affecting piece that I discovered was Shostakovich's Piano Trio #2.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper ***

This enjoyable book is a compendium of musings on the various uses of notebooks. Sketchpads, ships' logs, business ledgers, common-place books, zibaldoni, travel journals, recipe collections, artist/scientist notebooks, diaries. Allen believes that the advent of paper notebooks in the 14th or 15th century enabled new forms of thought; in particular, he believes that notebooks made possible the artistic innovations of the Renaissance.

The subtitle shines a light on the use of notebooks as an extension of our thinking, but many of the included examples show different purposes, such as aides-memoire, contemporaneous record keeping, and social connection. Allen establishes the value of notebooks to the historian more convincingly than he shows their value as tools for self discovery. Expressive writing (like in diaries) is a surprisingly recent development, as is the detailed ship's log. (The log of Magellan's circumnavigation, for example, is notably sparse.)

My favorite sections of the book were those describing the notebooks of specific people, such as the Venetian Michael Rhodes (1434), Adriaen Coenen the King of the Herring (1570), Leonardo da Vinci (1519), and Charles Darwin (1837).

I picked up this book hoping to be inspired to maintain my own notebook(s). There is a chapter that extols the health benefits of writing about your feelings and the psychological benefits of thinking on paper. I didn't find myself inspired. Although after retirement, I may try Julia Cameron's "morning pages" exercise from The Artist's Way (write three pages of stream-of-consciousness each morning).