ABBA: Let The Music Speak – new book available now
ABBA: Let The Music Speak
"The way I describe it to people is that you know you like the music, so I’m helping you understand why you like it,” Patrick said.
More than 30 years after the stunning 1974 Eurovision Song Contest debut of the Swedish musical supergroup, ABBA’s music remains a benchmark which continues to enthral millions of fans around the world – both on stage and screen as well as on vinyl and disc.
In this equally stunning tour de force, Australian cellist and arranger Chris Patrick has combined his life-long passion for ABBA with his professional musical career skills to create this guide to ABBA’s soundscape – the vocal and keyboard genius of Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Frida, and the precision audio engineering of Michael B Tretow and his team of arrangers – which continues to defy truly successful emulation to this day.
With his lively and engaging writing style, Chris takes the reader on a personally-guided tour – to quote Foreword writer and ABBA biographer Carl Magnus Palm – “over the hills of joyful exuberance, through the valleys of melancholy and along the stretched-out roads of craftsmanship where their music was created.”
The 420 pages of the book are liberally sprinkled with hundreds of specially-created musical notation figures to illustrate the points Chris is making in his text, where sparkling descriptions of ABBA’s different musical techniques join hands with some insightful – sometimes surprising – musical analysis and thought-provoking discussion.
For previews of some of the book’s pages and details on how you can get hold of a copy, visit the book’s site or Christopher’s own website.