Reading notes: 'Everything We Do is Music'

28 Jun, 2026

This is a good book about a subject I love but don't know enough about: the relationship between 20th-century classical music and pop music.

1. I think of the book less as an exploration of connections and more more as Elizabeth Alker, long of BBC, using her knowledge and connections to get great interviews and write about them. The result is a series of essays less about pop/non-pop relationships than about single subjects. I was hoping to learn about, e.g., what exactly The Who thought was important about Terry Riley.¹ I was disappointed in that respect, but the book is good enough that I wasn't disappointed overall.
2. Those essays are quite good, but (again) it doesn't keep all its promises. For example: by my reckoning, the book spends more time promising to talk about Anton Bruckner than actually talking about Bruckner. He appears in the subtitle of a chapter but only has one entry in the index, which consists only in a note that someone says that Glenn Branca's work "has an antecedent in" Bruckner.
3. Conversely, though, Everything We Do... gives more than it promises in describing connections between 20th-century music and other 20th-century art (especially visual arts).²
4. Alker has a great discussion of what exactly "ambient" means, for Brian Eno and others. Among other things, it needs to enhance one's experience even if one isn't paying attention to it, but it should also reward attention. This is fascinating in its own right and also provides a nice lens for thinking about ambient computing: a lot of what gets called "ambient computing" needs to do something useful in the background but also allow useful human intervention. (What good is ambient computation if you don't care about the results, you can't tweak them, you can't intervene at key junctures, you can't integrate the results into other systems, and so on?)
5. Everything We Do... taught me that John Cage and Marcel Duchamp had a significant artistic relationship and that they played chess together. In following this thread, I've since learned that Duchamp and Cage had a cool artistic / musical chess project. And it turns out that Alekhine was only the second-most-famous member of the French team at the 1933 Chess Olympiad.
6. When Alker describes music by explaining the relevant history, technology, theories of art, and so on, it's great. When she describes music with strings of adjectives, I consistently fail to get any significant idea of the music. This is no specific fault of Alker's.
7. I've enjoyed going through my notes and the index of this book more than I do for most books I read. I expect to refer back to it, and I find myself still "living with it" even though I finished it several days ago.

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