Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Beethoven’s Skull
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1968
WEBSITE: http://www.timrayborn.com/
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
http://www.timrayborn.com/Biography.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2013006165
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2013006165
HEADING: Rayborn, Tim, 1968-
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001 9190568
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008 130205n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2013006165 |z no 97032711
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |e rda |d DLC
046 __ |f 1968-12-10 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Rayborn, Tim, |d 1968-
370 __ |e Berkeley, Calif.
372 __ |a Music |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Musicians |a Composers |a Authors
670 __ |a The violent pilgrimage, 2013: |b E-Cip t.p. (Tim Rayborn) data view (b. Dec. 10, 1968 ; resides in Berkeley, CA )
670 __ |a Magnificentia iberica, p1995: |b label (Tim Rayborn, director)
670 __ |a Tim Rayborn web site, accessed Nov. 10, 2016 |b main page (Tim Rayborn: multi-instrumental musician, writer on topics from the amusing to the appalling, and some-time composer)
953 __ |a rc25
PERSONAL
Born December 10, 1968.
EDUCATION:University of Leeds, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Musician.
AVOCATIONS:Cooking, reading, cats.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Tim Rayborn is a world-acclaimed musician who is skilled in numerous little-known musical instruments from around the world. He is also an author with several books to his credit, including The Violent Pilgrimage: Christians, Muslims and Holy Conflicts, 850-1150; Against the Friars: Antifraternalism in Medieval France and England; A New English Music: Composers and Folk Traditions in England’s Musical Renaissance from the Late 19th to the Mid-20th Century; and Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond.
In Beethoven’s Skull, Rayborn takes the reader on a tour of music throughout history, focusing on the strange and the bizarre. He covers subjects such as murder, wife swapping, and many gruesome events from ancient Greece to the present day. Library Journal reviewer Virginia Johnson commented: “It will be of special interest to musicologists and performers but will also appeal to readers of true crime and even those who enjoy a Ripley’s-believe-it-or-not view of the world.” A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote: “The target readership for this volume includes both trivia buffs and classical music fans, for whom this book will be an enjoyable source of well-researched material and quirky anecdotes.” Classical MPR website contributor Jay Gabler felt that some things were missing from the volume and other stories were just rehashes of well-known tales. Gabler wrote: “A fan of classical music is sure to find some good nuggets of knowledge in Beethoven’s Skull, but the book is also apt to be frustrating.” Seattle Times Online reviewer Melinda Bargreen commented: “Witty and occasionally weird, Beethoven’s Skull will provide music lovers with many macabre points to ponder, argue and use to impress their friends.” Meanwhile, Sunbreak website reviewer Philippa Kiraly called Beethoven’s Skull “the quintessential ‘bathroom’ book, a great read for those private moments of communing with nature.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, October 1, 2016, Virginia Johnson, review of Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond, p. 81.
Publishers Weekly September 26, 2016, review of Beethoven’s Skull. p. 77.
ONLINE
Classical MPR, http://www.classicalmpr.org (January 5, 2017), Jay Gabler, review of Beethoven’s Skull.
Seattle Times Online, http://www.seattletimes.com (December 25, 2016), Melinda Bargreen, review of Beethoven’s Skull.
Sunbreak, http://thesunbreak.com (March 28, 2017), Philippa Kiraly, review of Beethoven’s Skull.
Tim Rayborn Website, http://www.timrayborn.com/ (July 3, 2017).
Tim Rayborn is an internationally acclaimed musician who plays dozens of unusual instruments that quite
a few people of have never heard of and frequently can’t pronounce. These include medieval instrument reconstructions and folk instruments from Northern Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East. He has appeared on over forty recordings to date, and his musical wanderings and tours have taken him across the US, all over Europe, to Canada and Australia, and to such romantic locations as Marrakech, Istanbul, Renaissance chateaux, medieval churches, and high school gymnasiums.
Tim has collaborated with numerous artists in various genres, including: Ensemble Alcatraz, Margriet Tindemans, and Sinfonye (early music); Kitka (Balkan women’s choir); Ruben Van Rampaey (Middle Eastern percussion); Grammy nominees Linda Tillery (voice) and Alex De Grassi (acoustic guitar); and film composers for Warner Brothers. He has been heard on BBC (UK and Channel Islands), NPR, Harmonia radio,
and Millenium of Music (US and Oceana).
Tim lived in England for nearly seven years and has a PhD from the University of Leeds, which he likes to pretend means that he knows what he’s talking about. He has written a number of books and magazine articles about music and history (with a recent speciality in early 20th-century English music), and undoubtedly will write more. He currently resides in Northern California amid many books, instruments, and cats, and is at least somewhat obsessed with cooking excellent food.
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Print Marked Items
Rayborn, Tim. Beethoven's Skull: Dark, Strange,
and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical
Music and Beyond
Virginia Johnson
Library Journal.
141.16 (Oct. 1, 2016): p81.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Rayborn, Tim. Beethoven's Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond.
Skyhorse. Nov. 2016.304p. illus. ISBN 9781510712713. $21.99; ebk. ISBN 9781510712720. MUSIC
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll: certainly a modern rallying cry, and not usually what the average person visualizes when
thinking about classical music. Professional musician and music historian Rayborn gleefully proves that kind of
thinking wrong in this rollicking, if grisly, stroll through the history of music. He takes readers way back to ancient
Greece and Rome and forward through the ages into the 20th century, with a deliciously repulsive collection of the
curious, shocking, and gruesome events that have surrounded music and its composers for centuries. Included are
incidents of murder, wife swapping, and the inspiration for "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" (actually a dream by
Paganini and a violin concerto). This impeccably researched yet eminently approachable book is sure to keep readers
engrossed (pun intended) to the very end. VERDICT This title takes what is usually a dry and academic subject and
gives it an almost tabloid feel. It will be of special interest to musicologists and performers but will also appeal to
readers of true crime and even those who enjoy a Ripley'sbelieveitornot view of the world.Virginia Johnson, East
Bridgewater P.L., MA
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Johnson, Virginia. "Rayborn, Tim. Beethoven's Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical
Music and Beyond." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 81. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464982245&it=r&asid=3c13becb2fcfc01d38b475f68f9f3c6e.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464982245
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Beethoven's Skull
Publishers Weekly.
263.39 (Sept. 26, 2016): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Beethoven's Skull
Tim Rayborn. Skyhorse, $21.99 (304) ISBN 9781510712713
The 19thcentury Austrian composer Anton Bruckner was obsessed with his music idols: there are accounts of him
cradling and kissing Beethoven's skull after it was exhumed from a Vienna cemetery. This bizarre anecdote provides
the title for Rayborn's unusual and diverting tour through musical history, from ancient Greece to the modern era. At
his best, Rayborn, himself a musician, combines historical anecdotes and factoids into meaningful vignettes, as when
he observes the consequences of Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev dying on the same day as Josef Stalin. The
Communist leader's state funeral swamped the composer's memorial and commandeered all available fresh flowers in
Moscow, leaving organizers with only paper flowers and potted plants for Prokofiev's farewell. Rayborn has a
lighthearted tone that many readers will enjoy. However, when there are few facts around an historical event he's intent
on developing, Rayborn's own speculation feels thin. For example, he suggests with little evidence that the tale of the
pied piper of Hamelin is based on a nobleman, Count Nicholas von Spiegelberg, who took a band of youngsters to
colonize lands east of Germany. The target readership for this volume includes both trivia buffs and classical music
fans, for whom this book will be an enjoyable source of wellresearched material and quirky anecdotes. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Beethoven's Skull." Publishers Weekly, 26 Sept. 2016, p. 77. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465558240&it=r&asid=4808b320fd8dc99dd12ce4a4301b0084.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465558240
'Beethoven's Skull': Tim Rayborn chronicles classical trivia
Classical Music Features Jay Gabler · Jan 5, 2017
Jay Gabler with 'Beethoven's Skull'
Jay Gabler with 'Beethoven's Skull' Leah Garaas/APM
0
I'd heard about Chopin's heart, but I hadn't heard about Haydn's head. The former was enshrined in a Warsaw cathedral (with the rest of the body resting in Paris), while the latter was removed by an 18th-century stan and wasn't reunited with the remainder of the composer until 1954.
That's the kind of trivia you learn in Beethoven's Skull, a new book by Tim Rayborn — a writer and musician whose author photo shows him contemplating a lyre. It's billed as a compendium of "dark, strange, and fascinating tales from the world of classical music and beyond."
A fan of classical music is sure to find some good nuggets of knowledge in Beethoven's Skull, but the book is also apt to be frustrating. The bulk of the book is a chronological list of figures that Rayborn has dirt on, but as the author himself admits, "you may nave noticed a few big names missing." Rayborn's explanation for that is that the missing composers (including Bach, Wagner, and Stravinsky) were either amply covered in other books or they just "led pretty good lives."
That means we're left with a lot of musical whos — like Alessandro Poglietti (obliterated by Ottoman cannon fire), Charles-Valentin Alkan (killed by a falling coat rack), and Wallingford Riegger (died after getting tangled in two leashes during a dog fight). There are also chapters on "Magic in Music" ("Debussy apparently hobnobbed in occult circles"), "Plague and Penitence" (Rayborn finds some Renaissance music that may be about hashish), "Blood and Guts" (what did Vlad the Impaler have to do with music? not much, but we get seven pages on him anyway), and other subtopics.
Rayborn isn't afraid to gossip, which sounds juicy in theory but in actuality means he rehashes some very old canards: Vivaldi's unproven affairs with his teenage students, Salieri's supposed involvement with Mozart's death, and so forth. There's an image section in the middle, but it's largely the same old headshots we've been looking at for centuries.
So what's the story with Beethoven's skull? You won't find it in the entry on Beethoven: you have to page forward to the "Final Musical Oddities," where fortunately (since there's no index) it appears at the very end. It turns out that some fragments of Beethoven's skull were thought to have traveled all the way to San Jose...except that (spoiler alert) they turned out to be inauthentic. What an anticlimax.
About the author
Jay Gabler • Digital Producer
jgabler@mpr.org • @jaygabler
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT, LITERATURE, MUSIC
Review: ‘Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond’
If you ever had questions about the private lives of composers, you’ll find a plethora of odd anecdotes in Tim Rayborn’s Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond, stretching back to antiquity. Although stories from then are thin on the ground, as the book goes forward to later times, the author has mined a rich vein of tales of skullduggery, criminal activity, mishaps, crazy or at the very least bizarre behavior attributed to composers, well known and otherwise.
The author is a professional musician with a specialty in medieval repertoire, with a PhD from the University of Leeds in England (though in what the author blurb does not indicate).
He has divided the book into periods of composer tales, starting with Ancient Greek and Rome and continuing to modern times, then adds chapters on specific subjects from Magic to Plague to Nursery Rhymes.
Unfortunately, Rayborn has written the book in relentlessly chatty style, which becomes tiresome when the material is scant, but possible to overlook in some of the later fascinating stories. There’s no doubt he did an immense amount of research to come up with many of the anecdotes he includes. Who knew that Bruckner had an obsession with dead bodies, managing to be present when Beethoven’s body was moved, seizing the skull and kissing it, then doing the same with Schubert’s and having finally to be forcibly removed from the scene both times?
This the quintessential “bathroom” book, a great read for those private moments of communing with nature. Each piece is short and unrelated to the next. Nor do you have to remember any of it, so no need to take notes.
RELATED
BooksEntertainment
Books on Beethoven: under the skin (and skull) of a musical genius
Originally published December 25, 2016 at 5:03 am
** FILE ** This is an undated sketch of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven was born in Bonn on Dec. 17, 1770 and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. Viennese forensic expert Christian Reiter claims it was the famed composer’s physician who inadvertently overdosed him with lead, in a case of a cure that went wrong. He says the new analysis shows that in the last few months of Beethoven’s life, lead concentrations in his body spiked every time he was treated by his doctor, Andreas Wawruch for fluid inside the abdomen. Those lethal doses permeated his already sick liver, ultimately killing him, he told The Associated Press. (AP Photo) VIE109
** FILE ** This is an undated sketch of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven was born in Bonn on Dec. 17, 1770 and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. Viennese forensic expert Christian Reiter claims it was the famed composer’s physician who inadvertently overdosed him with lead, in a case of a cure that went wrong. He says the new analysis shows that in the last few months of Beethoven’s life, lead concentrations in his body spiked every time he was treated by his doctor, Andreas Wawruch for fluid inside the abdomen. Those lethal doses permeated his already sick liver, ultimately killing him, he told The Associated Press. (AP Photo) VIE109
Two new Beethoven-related books, “Experiencing Beethoven” and “Beethoven’s Skull,” examine both the famous composer’s musical genius and the sheer weirdness behind some of music’s enduring legends.
Share story
By Melinda Bargreen
Special to The Seattle Times
The lives of the great composers continue to fascinate music lovers — though none, it could be argued, exert quite the fascination of Beethoven, who continues to attract biographers and commentators, as he has by the thousands ever since his death at age 56 in 1827.
Festivals are still organized around his works; his solo and accompanied sonatas are continually performed landmarks of the repertoire. The Ninth Symphony with its famous “Ode to Joy” is a fixture of important occasions, from the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall to the finale of the Olympic Games and the opening of concert halls around the world.
“Who can explain it? Who can tell you why?” author Geoffrey Block muses, echoing the lines from “Some Enchanted Evening” as he considers the eternal lure of his subject in the introduction to “Experiencing Beethoven: A Listener’s Companion” (Rowman & Littlefield, 290 pp., $45).
A professor of music history at the University of Puget Sound, Block explains the unique greatness of the music as he probes Beethoven’s masterworks, including the circumstances of the historic performances. He details the massive scope of what the composer left behind besides his musical scores: several dozen surviving music sketchbooks and 4,000 extant pages of sketches, nearly 2,000 letters, plus diary entries and conversation books (used because of the composer’s deafness).
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Focusing in, Block presents brilliant, in-depth analyses of several Beethoven works in different genres, including symphonies and piano sonatas, his only opera, his songs, the late piano music and the Op. 131 String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor (admired so deeply by Wagner and Schubert). A detailed analysis of the sketches for that enormous quartet, for example, show Beethoven changing his mind five times about the structure of the work.
Block’s book is aimed at both the general reader and the Beethoven fan, and even those in that latter category may well add considerably to their store of knowledge about this titan of music.
Another new book, “Beethoven’s Skull: Dark, Strange, and Fascinating Tales from the World of Classical Music and Beyond” by Tim Rayborn(Skyhorse Publishing, 304 pages, $21.99), uses as its springboard a grim anecdote about the posthumous indignities suffered by Beethoven’s skull. During the composer’s postmortem examination, Beethoven’s skull was clumsily cut into several fragments (some pieces of which have reportedly resurfaced from time to time) in an attempt to discover the cause of his deafness. As if that weren’t enough, poor Beethoven was exhumed twice.
Beyond this anecdote, this chatty and colloquial book isn’t really about Beethoven, as its full title clarifies: It’s a compendium of bizarre and entertaining musical anecdotes, including legends, superstitions, myths and a lot of history — from ancient Greece and Rome through the present day.
Witty and occasionally weird, “Beethoven’s Skull” will provide music lovers with many macabre points to ponder, argue and use to impress their friends. There’s even a (somewhat) local angle: Gonzaga University’s music building, Monaghan Hall, has been the site of much reported supernatural activity, particularly in the 1970s: organ keys played by an unseen hand, and phantom flute music wafting through the halls from no visible source. No one, however, was reported playing “White Christmas,” the biggest hit of Gonzaga alum Bing Crosby.
Melinda Bargreen is the former classical-music critic for The Seattle Times and the author of two books, “Classical Seattle” and “50 Years of Seattle Opera.” She’s a freelance contributor to The Times and also writes for several music publications.