Looking for the Harp Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty

This book is a philosophical tour through the experience of beauty: what it is, and how the composer, performer, and listener all contribute. It explores – with insight, patience, and humor – profound issues at the essence of our experience. A student performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 10 in E-Flat Major, known as the Harp, serves as a point of departure and a recurring theme. For the layperson the core of the book is five dialogues betweenIcarus, an inquiring student intensely concerned with fulfilling his highest potential as a musician, and Daedalus, a curmudgeonly, iconoclastic teacher who guides Icarus’s search. Three technical articles, geared to the music professional and academic, treat the issues in greater depth.

Supplementary online audio files and musical examples.

Markand Thakar, music director of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, is an internationally renownedpedagogue of conducting. A protege of the legendary Sergiu Celibidache and former assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Thakar is author of On the Principles and Practice of Conducting (University of RochesterPress, 2016) and Counterpoint: Fundamentals of Music Making (Yale University Press, 1990).