A Mind @ Play

We live in an age where being a slave to our impatience and short attention spans is almost a virtue, where watching television has made room for channel hopping, where listening to music involves skipping to choruses and jumping between tracks, where our attentions are constantly being pulled in a thousand different directions by our internetworked world.

It comes then as little surprise that one road to success is to cash in on our restlessness. Take a year’s worth of successful tunes, juice them, dissect them, distil their catchiness, then splice, blend and sew together a Frankenstein of audial goodies. That’s what you get with Daniel Kim’s Pop Danthologies: a highly concentrated concoction of successful pop anthems, a luxurious blend of first flush leaves, condensed and refined, the scion of sonic addiction grafted onto the stock of all that is pop.

Which is precisely why I picked up this book when it was on offer. Purporting to be “an accessible guide” and advertising itself as “the place to start” when wishing to learn a bit more about the symphonic form, this book seemed perfect for someone like me, who would be likely to listen in to the BBC Proms but very unlikely to turn up and get his hands on the programme. In the introduction, Nicholas Kenyon explains that this book was designed to provide the information prepared for the programme notes produced for the Proms to a much wider audience of music lovers.