Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Music and Lyrics of Van Morrison
by Peter Mills
288 pages
Publication date: June 2008
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
ISBN: 9780826429766
Description from Amazon.com entry:
The first in-depth study of Van Morrison's musical genius.
"Music is spiritual, the music business isn't"--Van Morrison, 1991
Peter Mills' groundbreaking new book Hymns to the Silence is a detailed look at
Morrison as a singer, performer, lyricist, musician, and writer. Particular
attention is paid throughout the work to the contradictions and tensions that
are central to any understanding of his work as a whole. Van Morrison has a
global profile due to his enduring popularity and his dedication to live
performance, which keeps him before audiences all over the world, and this is
the first in-depth study of Van Morrison's musical genius, going back 40 years,
investigating the oppositions and harmonies within his work.
Presenting a prismatic approach to Van Morrison's entire oeuvre, Mills engages
with his subject in a manner which is fresh, challenging to received wisdom, and
accessible in style. He explores the thematic tensions that characterize
Morrison's work, examines his ideas about music and spirituality, and the
relationship between the two. Mills also considers him in the context of the
broader schema of the music industry as a "difficult" but high-yielding earner.
As a writer and lyricist, specifically as an Irish writer, Morrison 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 also looks at him as a singer and at how
he uses his voice as an interpretive instrument. Other chapters in the book
focus on his use of mythology, on his stage performances, and on his continuing
fascination with America and its musical forms.
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.
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