Hymns to the Silence

Hymns to the Silence is a thoroughly informed and enlightened study of the art of a pop music maverick that will delight fans the world over. In 1991, Van Morrison said, Music is spiritual, the music business isn't. Peter Mills' groundbreaking book investigates the oppositions and harmonies within the work of Van Morrison, proceeding from this identified starting point. Hymns to the Silence is a detailed investigative study of Morrison as singer, performer, lyricist, musician and writer with particular attention paid throughout to the contradictions and tensions that are central to any understanding of his work as a whole. The book takes several intriguing angles. It looks at Morrison as a writer, specifically as an Irish writer who has recorded musical settings of Yeats poems, collaborated with Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan and Gerald Dawe, and who regularly drops quotes from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett into his live performances. It looks at him as a singer, at how he uses his voice as an interpretive instrument. And there are chapters on his use of mythology, on his stage performances, and on his continuing fascination with America and its musical forms.

Peter Mills is Senior Lecturer in Media & Popular Culture at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He was singer and lyricist for the band Innocents Abroad who made two albums, Quaker City and Eleven. He has taught music, literature and philosophy at universities in the UK, Hungary, Romania and Croatia, and has published work on, amongst others, Samuel Beckett, Olaf Stapledon, Hungarian folk music, Pink Floyd, national anthems and The KLF.

Acknowledgments
Author's Note
Introduction
Chapter One Imagining America: Jazz, Blues, Country, and the Mythologies of the West
Chapter Two What Makes the Irish Heart Beat? The Irishness of Van Morrison
Chapter Three Get the Words on the Page: Van Morrison as Writer
Chapter Four Caught One More Time: Themes and Thematics
Chapter Five Listening to the Lion: Van Morrison as a Singer
Chapter Six On the Burning Ground: Liveness and the Recording Studio
Chapter Seven Down the Road: Van Morrison, Exile, and the Idea of Eternal Movement
Chapter Eight A Three Cornered Quartet: Van Morrison and the Art of Through Composition
Postscript Make It Real One More Time Again: Astral Weeks Live
Appendix One - The 2006 Shows
Appendix Two - Recording Studios
Bibliography
Discography