Harmony

Tuesday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Beauty, terror and banality are uneasily juxtaposed in Harmony

If there is a central message in Harmony, it is that old cliché that evil flourishes when everyday people stand by and do nothing. That idea is returned to repeatedly, with increasing angst, as the central characters in the musical get swept up, and finally tossed aside, in Nazi Germany. Harmony revives the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, six men — three Jewish, three Gentile — who created an ensemble in 1927 during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. The group, who melded physical comedy with singing, sometimes using their vocal cords to mimic entire orchestras, became a surprise hit. They sold millions of records, appeared in movies, and performed worldwide.

Harmony

Tuesday

Simon Ings

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight

From our UK edition

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling books about the natural world, full of eyecatching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion – a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence. Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed leitmotif for the Earth, where, he felt, misery and famine held sway’.) Item: the world’s loudest sound.

Wednesday

Alexandra Coghlan

Musings on harmony, melody and rhythm

From our UK edition

Every Good Boy Does Fine – a banal phrase that also just happens to be the key to limitless wonder. You may have learned it, like Tom Stoppard, as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, or perhaps as the rather more tension-fraught Every Good Boy Deserves Food (whose sinister implication haunted more of my childhood than I ever confessed to my parents). Whichever it is, this mnemonic for the notes that fall on the lines of the stave in the treble clef is where music begins for most of us: the key that turns hieroglyphs into sound and, eventually, meaning. So it was for Jeremy Denk.