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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Abnormal psychology
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How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R450
Discovery Miles 4 500
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How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (Hardcover)
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Loot Price R450
Discovery Miles 4 500
Expected to ship within 9 - 17 working days
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BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of
Shostakovich's music during Stalin's reign of terror, and writes of
the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental
illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and
philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where
he believes Shostakovich's music helped him survive the trials and
assaults of bipolar disorder.'There's something about hearing your
most painful emotions transformed into something beautiful...' The
old Russian who uttered those words spoke for countless fellow
survivors of Stalin's reign of terror. And the 'something
beautiful' he had in mind was the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.Yet
there is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich's
greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times
bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to
Shostakovich for having created it - not just Russians, but
westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different,
far safer kind of society? How is it that music that reflects pain,
fear and desolation can help sufferers find - if not a way out,
then a way to bear these feelings and ultimately rediscover
pleasure in existence? Johnson draws on interviews with the members
of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony
during the siege of Leningrad, during which almost a third of the
population starved to death. In the end, this book is a
reaffirmation of a kind of humanist miracle: that hope could be
reborn in a time when, to quote the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam,
there was only 'Hope against Hope'.
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