ABC Books 2002
Reviews
Erudite, unpretentious, provocative, passionate, succinct, kind, combative and sometimes wildly funny, Ford is the least pompous musical essayist I’ve encountered. Ranging from Arnold Schoenberg’s last years to the vicissitudes of historically informed performance . . . Ford’s essays are pitched somewhere between the dinner party anecdote and the post-doctoral lecture.
Anna Picard, The Independent on Sunday
There’s nothing stuffy or pious here, just a refreshingly inclusive, embracing and playful tone, underpinned with sound scholarship.
Caroline Baum, Good Reading
Undue Noise provides the collective evidence of what most of us already knew: that Andrew Ford is one of those rare masters of both the musical and the verbal genres. And more: his writings are not just some verbal accompaniment to the music in question, but mysteriously resonate with the music.
Malcolm Gillies, Sounds Australian
Beware John Howard! Don’t read this book, don’t even think about it. Don’t be sucked in by the catchy graphics on the front cover depicting those ubiquitous icons of populist music, the electric guitar and drums, This book is NOT for you. It’s by a bone fide member of the chattering class, an elitist and, God forbid, an intellectual. However, it is for anyone who is genuinely interested in the musical life of Australia in particular, with timely reality checks to the rest of spaceship Earth.
Claudio Pompili, Music Forum
Ford’s intellectual energy, his preparedness to expound on anything tangentially connected with music, his confident, sustained and entertaining pronouncements on the sheer indispensability of music to world civilisation are cornerstones that give some stability and sense of cohesion to so multifarious a group of often very brief articles.
Ian Holtham, Australian Book Review
This book is currently out of print (try AbeBooks.com)