Full Description
No other art is as popular—or pervasive—as music. With just a few clicks, anyone can cue up (and critique) Chopin or Cher, The Bangles or The Beatles—even the brand-new Beyoncé. But things weren't always this way.
In this brisk, breakneck history under 300 pages, award-winning composer, author, and broadcaster Andrew Ford replays the dramatic evolution of music, from early oral songs to the first orchestras (and their wealthy patrons) and from the emergence of recording technology to the multibillion-dollar industry we know today. The Shortest History of Music explores the immense influence of religion, politics, and the economy on world music, what led humans to make music in the first place, and why—in every era—we are irresistibly drawn to listen to it.
The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read.
Contents
Introduction
The Tradition of Music: from Prehistory to the present
Music and Notation: Blueprints for Building in Sound from 1400 BCE to the present
Music for Sale: Paying the Piper from 1000 BCE to the present
Music and Modernism: Reinventing the Art from 1150 to the present
Recording Music: from 1900 to the present
Epilogue: What Is Music?
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Index
About the Author
