Songs heavier than the air

Songs heavier than the air

This is a remarkable book. Where most studies of a single musical work will consider their subjects as things out there in the world, Michael Symmons Roberts writes from inside the composition that seized him as a student and has never let him go. He does not inspect Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time so much as have it always in his mind, embedded for decades, at once lens and compass, directing and conditioning a meditation that ra…