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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.
List of 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
About the author
Andrew Ford is a composer, writer, and broadcaster who has won awards in each of those capacities. In 2014 he was a Poynter Fellow and visiting composer at Yale University, in 2015 visiting lecturer at the Shanghai Conservatory, and in 2018 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Ford has written widely on all manner of music, published ten previous books, and has written, presented, and coproduced many radio series, mainly for Australia's national radio.
