Book Alert / A Concise History of Western Music

A Concise History of Western Music by Paul Griffiths, Cambridge UP '06, 348 pages, ISBN 0521842948. Index, further reading, glossary, unillustrated.

It takes a good deal of discipline to condense the history of Western music into barely more than 300 pages, but Welsh-born veteran music critic Paul Griffiths manages to do it and in an accessible manner. Starting with the Babylonians, he parades his readers past troubadours and organists, studies the effect of the High Renaissance and the Reformation on music, dwells on the emergence of the fugue, concerto and operatic forms, drops in on New Germans and old Vienna, and ends in the modern era with a tribute to such composers as John Cage and Olivier Messiaen.

A sampling from Griffiths's graceful narrative:

"Music, so intimately engaged with perception, lights up the mind. Music, being immaterial, touches on the immaterial -- on the drift of thought and feeling, on divinity and death. Music, as sound, can represent the auditory world: the moan of wind, the repeated whispers of calm waves, the calls of birds. Music as idealized voice, can sing or sigh, laugh or weep. Music, as rhythm, can keep pace with our contemplative rest and our racing activity. Music, in proceeding through time, can resemble our lives."