This is Your Brain on Music (Daniel Levitin)

I already know a fair amount about music and about the brain, so some of this book was old hat, but I still learned a lot about the intersection between the two. For instance, I never appreciated the importance of the cerebellum in timing and rhythm. I also never realized that even non-musicians can generally sing a very familiar song from memory and get the key, the tempo, and even the singer's vocal mannerisms right. Music is a very complex and meaningful set of promises, and I enjoyed learning more about it.

Orfeo (Richard Powers)

There is a lot to like in this book, especially if you know something about music. Peter Els is a retired composer who spent his life searching for music that would break through the walls of reality and people's souls, giving up his family and, to a certain extent, polite society in the search. In his final years he goes back to an early, abandoned love of chemistry and starts dabbling in do-it-yourself biochemistry, tinkering with the genetic sequences of common household bacteria. Along the way he comes to the attention of government officials and finds himself to be the target of an increasingly hysterical government manhunt. It's difficult to talk about music in a way that conveys anything like the experience of listening, but Powers has done this rather well. On the other hand, the characters, including Peter himself, are less well drawn. I never grasped anything like the core of Peter's personality that would lead him to make the choices he did, particularly at the end of the book. It felt more like the masks of an ancient mime, illustrating large themes, than the intimate story of real people. Overall, though, I was drawn in and really wanted to find out how Peter's story would end.

Finishing the Hat (Stephen Sondheim)

The lyrics Sondheim writes for musicals are full of unexpected rhymes, intricate interweavings, and other forms of wordplay that I love, so I was happy to read this book for my book club. Actually, I didn't read it all; it's much too dense, including as it does every lyric he wrote for every show between 1954 and 1981, along with what he refers to in the subtitle as "attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes." What I did was read all of the material on shows I was familiar with ("West Side Story," "A Funny Thing Happened...," "Company," "A Little Night Music," and "Sweeny Todd") and skim the others. It was delightful to read about how these songs came together, what he thought about each one, and why this one worked and that one didn't. For example, there's nearly a whole column on the invention of Kearny Lane, covering the difference in intonation between Lanes and Streets and the strength of the consonant K, although this place name exists in one line in one song in Sweeny Todd.This book would be a treasure for anyone who writes words for music, and I much enjoyed the bits I read.