Five top books about classical music

Harriet Constable is a writer and filmmaker based in London. Her debut novel is The Instrumentalist. The book is inspired by the true story of Anna Maria della Pietà, who was an orphan, musical prodigy and student of Antonio Vivaldi. It has been named an Observer top 10 debut for 2024.

Constable’s journalism and documentary work is featured in outlets including The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, The Times, Financial Times, NPR, The Economist. She produced for BBC News at Six and Ten during the pandemic, and is a Rough Guide to Kenya co-author. She was part of the team that made the BAFTA-award winning 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room.

Originally from London, Constable worked at the Financial Times before spending several years in Nairobi and then Johannesburg. She grew up playing the flute and piano and singing with her mother, a classically trained musician.

At the Guardian Constable tagged five of the best books about classical music, including:

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

In Amsterdam, Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday are two old friends who meet at the funeral of a mutual ex-lover and find their lives inextricably linked in the weeks that follow. Clive is a top composer and, for me, it’s in the descriptions of his work that this novel sings. A piece composed at the top of a cello’s range sounds like “some furious energy restrained”. A crescendo is compared to “a giant drawing breath”. And melody erupts “into a wave, a racing tsunami of sound”. It won McEwan the Booker prize in 1998.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue