Friends and fiddlers

Catherine Drinker Bowen was a Philadelphian with music in her veins.... Into this book she has crammed the joy, comedy, and desperation of a musical life. With the skill of a biographer she sums up the human equation in music with insatiable enthusiasm. She discourses on amateur quartets, fiddlers, wild-eyed cellists, wives who play violas and children who bang the box. This is a book which musicians will chortle over, a book which the layman will read with dawning delight.