The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “music”

Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List: 28 Favorite Books That Shaped His Mind and Music
Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List: 28 Favorite Books That Shaped His Mind and Music

From Montaigne’s philosophy to Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, literary anatomy of the creative icon.

read article

Greil Marcus on What the History of Rock ‘n’ Roll Teaches Us about Innovation and the Art of Self-Reinvention
Greil Marcus on What the History of Rock ‘n’ Roll Teaches Us about Innovation and the Art of Self-Reinvention

How to continually experience “the satisfaction that only art, only the act of putting something new into the world, can bring.”

read article

How Repetition Enchants the Brain and the Psychology of Why We Love It in Music
How Repetition Enchants the Brain and the Psychology of Why We Love It in Music

“Music takes place in time, but repetition beguilingly makes it knowable in the way of something outside of time.”

read article

Legendary Composer Aaron Copland on the Conditions of Creativity, Emotion vs. Intellect, and the Trap of Public Opinion
Legendary Composer Aaron Copland on the Conditions of Creativity, Emotion vs. Intellect, and the Trap of Public Opinion

“The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.”

read article

July 18, 1992: The First Photo Uploaded to the Web, of CERN’s All-Girl Science Rock Band
July 18, 1992: The First Photo Uploaded to the Web, of CERN’s All-Girl Science Rock Band

Love and science set to song, from quarks to colliders.

read article

Jazz Legend Bill Evans on the Creative Process, Self-Teaching, and Balancing Clarity with Spontaneity in Problem-Solving
Jazz Legend Bill Evans on the Creative Process, Self-Teaching, and Balancing Clarity with Spontaneity in Problem-Solving

“The person that succeeds in anything has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning and [knows] that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time.”

read article

Joni Mitchell on Freedom, the Source of Creativity, and the Dark Side of Success
Joni Mitchell on Freedom, the Source of Creativity, and the Dark Side of Success

“How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open… to encounter and to… be in touch with the miraculous.”

read article

Jeff Buckley on Music and Life: A Rare Interview with a Rare Soul
Jeff Buckley on Music and Life: A Rare Interview with a Rare Soul

“Be awake enough to see where you are at any given time and how that is beautiful and has poetry inside.”

read article

Leonard Bernstein’s Moving Letter of Gratitude to His Mentor and a Prescient 1943 Manifesto for Crowdfunding the Arts
Leonard Bernstein’s Moving Letter of Gratitude to His Mentor and a Prescient 1943 Manifesto for Crowdfunding the Arts

Decades before Kickstarter, a vision for how micro-patronage can help creators “ascend to new heights” and “gain in confidence, in self-esteem and in fortitude.”

read article

David Bowie’s Enchanting Isolated Vocal Track for “Ziggy Stardust”
David Bowie’s Enchanting Isolated Vocal Track for “Ziggy Stardust”

Because Ziggy didn’t always play guitar.

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)