August Kleinzahler, A History of Western Music (Carcanet, 2025)

In the poem ‘CHAPTER 4 (THE MONKEY OF LIGHT)’, the speaker informs us that ‘Music is fugitive, living a moment and leaving nothing behind’. If this were true, August Kleinzahler’s A History of Western Music wouldn’t exist. Music may well be fugitive but what it leaves behind for all of us are rich associations of people, place and time. These poems go beyond the familiar conceit of the ‘soundtracks of our lives’ to explore the complex daily give and take in our inner relationships with music.  

The wryly didactic tone of ‘CHAPTER 4…’ is fitting for a collection with a pseudo-scholarly title and poems each given a ‘chapter’ number. But this is just one of the many games Kleinzahler plays; the ‘chapter’ numbers have significance for the most part only to him, and the poems are not presented in numerical order. The playlist here is eclectic, including Bartók, Whitney Houston, Ravel, Thelonius Monk and Mahler. The poet is a time-traveller among exiles (literal and figurative), and throughout the collection runs a leitmotif of bodies of water, an element almost as insubstantial as sound.

Kleinzahler’s approaches are as varied as the music he writes about. At times, he’s the musicologist, writing about form, tonality, and the ‘story’ behind the notes, or about the performers and composers themselves. In other poems, he invokes a musical synecdoche, when a note or two releases not just an entire piece but the time and place associated with it. There are also ...