A Concise History of Western Music

RR 2006/434 A Concise History of Western Music Paul Griffiths Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2006 ix + 348 pp. ISBN 0 521 84294 5 £25; $35

Keywords History, Music

Review DOI 10.1108/09504120610709691

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...