What makes Rob Kapilow's new book great?

15th September 2011

In his newest book, What Makes It Great?: Short Masterpieces, Great Composers, conductor, composer, commentator Rob Kapilow uses, fresh, accessible language and new, innovative, user-friendly technology to enrich the musical experience. It is one of those rare books about music that is as valuable for a listener coming to classical music for the first time as it is to an experienced concertgoer or a performing musician, offering a unique entrée into the world of eighteen great composers and a collection of individual masterpieces spanning almost two hundred years.

Each chapter in What Makes It Great?: Short Masterpieces, Great Composers (Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-470-55092-2; Cloth / 320 Pages / $26.95) focuses on the achievement of one major composer by looking closely at a single short masterpiece from his body of work to help the reader understand the essence of his genius and how the piece — which can be heard on the book's web site for readers of the print and regular ebooks and embedded in the text in the enhanced ebook — transformed the musical language of its time. The book uses each short piece (e.g. a Bach Two-Part Invention, a Mozart aria, or a Schubert song) as a powerful and illuminating point of entry into each composer's creative world, and because all of the book's music and musical examples can be heard (and downloaded) and seen with a scrollbar moving in real time, no knowledge of musical notation is required. Additionally, the enhanced ebook version of What Makes It Great incorporates everything in one package. Touching the musical example on the screen, the reader will hear the example play while the scrollbar moves over the notation in real time. The combination of this new technology and Kapilow's down-to-earth approach opens up a kind of in-depth discussion of music to all listeners, no matter what their musical background.

Rob Kapilow has been helping audiences to really hear great music for two decades with his What Makes It Great® program on NPR's "Performance Today," live series at Lincoln Center, and in concert halls throughout the US and Canada, and with his award-winning first book, All You Have To Do is Listen. Kapilow has often been compared to Leonard Bernstein because of his ability to help both new and experienced listeners enjoy classical music more deeply.

Read a chapter and learn more at Wiley.com

Purchase the book at your local bookseller or from Amazon.com