Clemency Burton-Hill

Summary: A guide to classical music introducing readers to one selection each day with a short introduction to the composer and work.

Maybe you’ve heard a few classical music pieces like Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons or Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and thought to yourself, “I’d like to explore more classical music but have no idea where to begin.” Year of Wonder is written for you, although it offers wonders for listeners of many years as well. The book is a day by day guide focusing show more on one piece and one composer each day. Most of the music selections run 3-10 minutes. The introductions are a page or so.

Clemency Burton-Hill, the author of the book, is best known for her writing and programs on the BBC. She has been host of Radio 3’s Breakfast program, a host for the BBC Proms and also Creative Director, Music and Arts, at WQXR-FM in New York, perhaps the leading classical music station in the United States. She is also a musician, having performed all over the world, including playing under Daniel Barenboim. In 2020, she survived a near life-ending brain hemorrhage while in New York City.

What makes this such a marvelous book is really several things. Firstly, she writes chatty yet informative and well-researched introductions to each piece. Writing about Johann Sebastian Bach on January 1, she gives us a description of him I’ve never come across before:

“Bach was the daddy: without him there would be no jazz, funk, or hip-hop; no techno, no house, no grime. He basically wrote the blueprint for everything that was to come. His stuff is wise and witty and capacious enough to contain more than just multitudes: it contains all of everything.”

Makes you want to listen to Bach, doesn’t it?

Secondly, her love of the music comes through. She comes back to Bach on February 14 writing that his Concerto for two violins in D Minor, BWV 1043 is her “desert island disc” and that her love for it knows no bounds. Equally, she can express fury when a woman composer like Fanny Mendelsohn fails to get the recognition she deserves for her music. Burton-Hill defies the stereotype of the snobby-stuffy classical music host.

Thirdly, she doesn’t just stick with the familiar heavy hitters. She introduces us to over 240 composers. Over 40 are women. A number are people of color. They span nearly 1000 years from Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century to Alissa Firsova, a millennial born in 1986. She includes gay and transgender composers, and those, including Beethoven, with disabilities.

I also appreciated her candor as she introduced religious music (which is a lot of classical music!) in both acknowledging her own agnosticism yet deeply respecting the efforts of composers to express the transcendent. (I personally hope her experience will be something like that of C.S. Lewis, recounted in Surprised by Joy, who was moved by Wagnerian opera (!), among other things, to seek the transcendent.)

The daily selections are available on playlists on most music streaming platforms. Unfortunately, in my Kindle version, this information was at the end of the book. (I found the playlists both on Apple Music and Spotify by searching “Year of Wonder.” On both platforms each month is its own playlist. I also discovered that there are playlists for Another Year of Wonder, a sequel to this work, published in 2021.

Reading this was a journey of delight. There were pieces I’ve sung, pieces I’ve loved, and those that were new discoveries. Because I was reviewing the book, I took much less than a year to go through it and I didn’t listen to everything on the playlists. Perhaps in January I’ll return to spend a year of wonder with this book. show less

A big hit in my irl book club. A book one needs to own. I've read/ worked through enough to know that I want to savor it and will return this copy to the library. It does need to tell us how long the pieces are, though. So far it seems that they may mostly max out at about 1/2 hour, so, allow that, and, if it's shorter, listen to it twice.

What a year with this book! I wanted to get it a few years ago but I finally got it for my birthday at the beginning of the year this year. I want able to listen to a song a day but I settled into a rhythm of waking up early on Saturday mornings and listening to about a weeks worth of songs and also reading the corresponding blurb about the song. I found the playlist on Spotify and created my own that I added about 45 songs to after the whole year. My favorite I think is “The Lark show more Ascending”. It still brings me to tears. Happy New Year everyone! show less

The idea was good. Daughter to remake dead mother's iconic movie and find out more about the strange circumstances of her mother's death. Unfortunately this book doesn't live up to the hype. The characters are not likeable (all the protagonist, Lara, seems to do to cry, smoke, feel 'lost', smoke a joint, smoke, be annoying and repeat) so it's hard to care for any of them. Oliver is detached, Eve is melodramatic and Lucas and Alex are barely 2-dimensional. Even Eve, whose story we learn show more through different parts isn't represented sympathetically- no, we are just more confused as to her mood swings.

The book isn't brilliantly written, but it gets better in the last 100 pages if you can stick it. I also found the 'jumping' from the present to past to back again annoying as it left big gaps in the storyline. show less