Freedom, Books, Flowers & The Moon

"The sociable side of nineteenth-century musical life is not acknowledged as often as it should be..." – Laura Tunbridge discusses the interconnected, complicated and often contradictory myths and realities that link Chopin, Schumann and Brahms; the TLS's music editor Lucy Dallas takes us through a selection of other pieces on music in this week's issue, including new histories of the blues and the poetic pop of Kate Bush and the Pet Shop Boys; when Irving Sandler wrote his seminal history of abstract expressionism, he neglected to mention Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning – Jenni Quilter joins us to put these artists back in the frameNinth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five painters and the movement that changed modern art, by Mary Gabriel Fryderyk Chopin: A life and times by Alan Walker Schumann: The faces and masks by Judith ChernaikBrahms in Context, edited by Nata