A Concise History of Western Music

In a modest 350 pages, the author indeed gives us a concise history of music, which he structures as a journey through time, not just in the obvious sense of chronology, but placing musical history alongside scientific discoveries and theories relating to time. Thus we have a chapter 0 called Prehistory, in which we are introduced to the earliest archaeological evidence of primitive flutes – bones drained of their marrow to make a hollow tube, with holes made to enable a range of pitches to be sounded for a scale of six notes.

We then move through to the writing...