Howard Goodall Story of Music

Annotation

A dynamic and expansive tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop songsMusic is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet thehistory of its development from single notes to multilayered orchestration canseem bewilderingly complex.In his dynamic tour through forty thousand years of music,from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us throughthe story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation-harmony,notation, sung theater, the orchestra, dance music, recording-strikes us withits original force. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly cleardescriptions of what music is and how it works: what scales are all about, whysome chords sound discordant, and what all postwar pop songs have in common.The story of music is the story of our urge to invent,connect, rebel-and entertain. Howard Goodall's beautifully clear and compellingaccount is both a hymn to human endeavor and a groundbreaking map of ourmusical journey.