According to Goodreads, I’ve read 500 books!

I’m only at 450 posts on the blog, so somewhere along the way I must have missed some lol (also not all my posts here are about books so I’ve really missed some lol).

Anyway, The Shortest History of Music… by Andrew Ford has been on my radar since I finished The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs back in June of this year. My library system had a copy which I checked out right away, and then just sort of held onto it for like five months . . . Ooops.

But much like TSHotD felt like a sort of intro course you might take in college, so too was Shortest History of Music a pretty broad spectrum of musical topics crammed into a neat 221 pages. I was lucky enough to be able to take a few music history courses back in college, covering Classical Music, World Music, and Jazz, Blues, Pop and Rock History (interestingly the jazz and blues history courses were in my English dept classes), but I was a music undergrad a little over a decade ago now, so I was very curious to find out how my own knowledge would stack up, and to find out what “the kids” are learning these days.

Turns out, quite a bit.

The subtitle for this book is: “From Bone Flutes to Synthesizers, Hildegard of Bingen to Beyonce — 5,000 Years of Instrument and Song“

That is quite a bit of time to sum up, and Ford approaches the task from a few viewpoints:

• its cultural impact (the tradition of music),
• its form (notation and technique)
• its economic impact (sale of music)
• its elevation (modernism)
• its capture (recording tech)

If you’ve noticed this list looks quite a bit like Ford’s table of contents, you’d be on to something. I basically just tried to put that table of contents into my own words after reading the book. Obviously the description of the section on modernity is a bit weak, but that is more just a failure of my ability to contextualize it, not the writing itself. If anything, Ford writes one of the most insightful definitions of Modernism I’ve read yet:

“. . . excitement for the new tempered with nostalgia for what is lost.” pg 189.

Ford is writing here about a piece called ‘Piano Burning’. The score for this piece instructs the performer to light a piano on fire, and to play whatever they want until they can no longer play the piano. Ford notes that the composer Annea Lockwood, has described stagings of the piece tended to “begin in a carnival atmosphere but would invariably end with the audience falling quiet to listen to gentle crackles of the fire, as though in mourning for the instrument.”

I certainly did not learn about that in music school.

I also quite enjoyed this book’s assertion that:

“Operas tend to change composers. The dramatic imperative, the need to tell a story, to communicate dialogue to an audience: These are useful distractions, and artists are most themselves when they are least self-conscious.” pg 160.

This line is in reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde in which the composer had begun experimenting with a unique approach to chromatic harmony. What I love about the line, is that it seems to hint at the same conclusion I reached towards the end of Part 1 of my review of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. The best music, the music that survives, tells a story.

Focused as he was on telling the story, Wagner’s craft was allowed to flourish in the background, uninhibited by the normal forms or ‘rules’ music is ‘meant’ to follow. The music that was made was the music that best suited the tale.

I spent a long time thinking about how this works in reverse as well. When writing, is there a kind of musical imperative that seeps into story? In poetry, it would seem the answer is obviously yes, but how about in just prose?

This post is getting a bit long so I’ll quickly just list a few other high points of the book and some things I’d like to research further because I’ve finished this book (and of course I do have one criticism).

Mostly, I think this book does a pretty good job of pulling from a broad spectrum of musical experience. Within its pages we learn about musical traditions from all over the world, whether it be sixth century Chinese guquin, or fifteenth century Spanish vihuela. A big swing I think this book attempts to take is in closing the gender gap in Classical music. More traditional music history texts focus on the men (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven etc.) while ignoring the women. This book allows for a wider view, including names like Fanny Mendelssohn, Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Harriet Wainwright and Pauline Viardot. I was particularly interested to learn about — from genres outside of classical music — Piedmont blues musician Elizabeth Cotten, and gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

My only real critique of this text, is that — even though the book purportedly wants to go in the opposite direction — the parts of this book that felt more well researched and nuanced in their arguments were the parts of the book that talked about classical music. Ford spends about a paragraph on almost all of rock’n’roll, and doesn’t really talk about Hip Hop at all aside from mentioning how popular it is. It would seem that if it is one of the most popular forms of music of all time, it would warrant a bigger chunk of the book.

Give ‘The Shortest History of Music’ a Read?

Despite my one criticism, I’d say yes. Ford’s writing is extremely readable, and this author has a great sense for how to weave many smaller compelling stories into one — 5,000 year old — narrative. Ford’s insights into capital M Modernity, and the importance of storytelling in music really resonated with me. Also there were about a thousand things I noted down to google later.

Even with a (IMHO) solid background in music history, I found that The Shortest History of Music still had quite a bit to teach me, and I genuinely hope that THIS is the text colleges will begin using for music courses. It seems up-to-date in its information and research, and posits a wide view of scholarship on the subject.

That’s all I have for this week. Has anyone read this one before? What are your favorite genres of music? Your favorite songs? Do you have any favorite stories that incorporate music? Or any music you feel tells a great story?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. I’m looking forward to talking about this one!

Until next time . . .