Whaaaaaaaaat!?

"Whaaaaaaaaat!? I Don't Get Classical Music: A Self-Help Desperation Guide" is a tonic for the perplexed, and a companion guide for those who feel classical music is forbidding, complex and grandiose. It is a concise and helpful book with humor and insight written by a composer and performer with a lifetime of experience. Beginning with patterns, pitches and instruments, author Dennis Bathory-Kitsz covers topics from performers to shrieking singers to the mysterious classical codes, from Beethoven ("the great hulk of a man") through space music, tone poems, nationalism, and even composers insulting each other. Written in response to a student's plea for help ("I'm desperate! I don't get classical music!"), the book is not stuck in the distant past. Instead, "Whaaaaaaaaat!?" includes classical music-which the composer prefers to call "nonpop"-from ancient times right up to the present day, from Gregorian chant through electrons and gongs to nonpop fused with pop. Writes one of his students, "it accomplishes what a textbook does without being a textbook." Another says, "It gets right into the dirty details of Western music and does so in a way that makes even the most novice listener feel like a professional." Explored and critiqued by more than two dozen readers from complete amateurs to working professionals, "Whaaaaaaaaat!?" is insightful, exuberant, funny and, according to one music professor, "terrifically valuable as a corrective to bad thinking and its offspring, bad teaching." In a short, readable 100 pages, Bathory-Kitsz shares the madness and mystery of classical music.