SHORTEST HISTORY OF MUSIC (PB)

Ranging across millennia, Andrew Ford explores music’s great themes: writing it down and recording it; paying for it and making it modern. With brilliant insight, he traces the story of the symphony and the opera, blues and jazz; the oral traditions of folk singers and chain gangs; and the lives of the greats – Bach and Mozart, Clara Schumann and Schoenberg, Charlie Parker and Nina Simone. From lullabies to national anthems, songlines to streaming, this is a sparkling account of what music has meant at different times and in different places.