How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

"... an intensely readable, highly personal analysis of the major works of a composer, who, Mr. Johnson decides, has recorded a collective experience for an all-inclusive listenership ... All great music teeters the edge of madness. This troubled writer makes a convincing case that the music of Dmitri Shostakovich helped to save his mind. In life's crises, he suggests, each of us comes up against an internal siege of Leningrad, and music comes to your relief." -Norman Lebrecht, The Wall Street Journal "... palpably humane, sensitive, and breathably erudite ... How Shostakovich Changed My Mind is ... a deeply felt and well-considered work - and anyone who cares about music, the mind, or personal struggle can learn from its depths." -Nicholas Cannariato, NPR "How Shostakovich Changed My Mind is one of the most powerful, honest, and profound revelations that exists on what it is that music means and does: it's just an essential document." -Tom Service, Music Matters (BBC) "The book ranges well beyond Shostakovich's work, and explores how we perceive music, the distorting effects of depression and how music can reconnect us to emotions and fellow humanity... Johnson argues that Shostakovich...testified on behalf of fellow humanity, his music concerned with 'we' rather than 'I'. Part of Shostakovich's attraction is that while he suffers he knows-and reminds his fellow sufferers-that we do not suffer alone." -BBC Music Magazine "Strangely, anguished music can be the most comforting: using a delicate, self-deprecating style and references encompassing everything from Greek drama to the Moomins, Johnson explores the way Shostakovich provides catharsis, transforming the personal 'I' into the collective 'we.' Profoundly moving." -The Sunday Times, "The Best Classical Music Books of 2018" "How Shostakovich Changed my Mind is short enough and eloquent enough to read comfortably at a single two-hour stretch, without skipping over a single word ... Many readers will surely find ideas in it that resonate with their own experience of Shostakovich's music, and be grateful for having so many of them gathered so tightly together." -Gramophone "Stephen Johnson is one of our most sensitive and thoughtful music critics, and this book, written from the heart about a composer whom he loves and admires, will prove to be a landmark in the understanding of its subject." -Sir Roger Scruton "I started reading and was hooked. Within a few pages I knew I had fallen into the company of the most wonderful interlocutor. Stephen Johnson take the reader from the most profound meditations on music, to delicious anecdotes about Shostakovich, to penetrating observations about the nature of art and the way it may rescue us from despair. I finished it inspired by a sense of human possibility." -Raymond Tallis

Stephen Johnson has taken part in several hundred radio programmes and documentaries, including Radio 3's weekly Discovering Music series. He is also presenter on the Classic Arts podcast series Archive Classics. Stephen has made numerous appearances on TV, contributing as guest interviewee on BBC4 coverage of The Proms, ITV's The South Bank Show, and more recently on BBC1's The One Show. He also made an important contribution, both as commentator and narrator, to Tony Palmer's controversial film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oh Thou Transcendent, and more recently to Palmer's film about Gustav Holst, In the Bleak Midwinter.