Leaping from Paleolithic cave paintings to Egyptian tombs to Gregorian chant in barely half a chapter, as Howard Goodall does in his breezy but effective The Story of Music, requires panache. He compresses several millennia into little over 300 pages with the first 40,000 years — when admittedly little happened beyond some inter-cave sonar-style singing — dispatched in a few paragraphs. Goodall, known as the composer of theme tunes for Blackadder, QI and Red Dwarf and also responsible for the music for the London 2012 opening ceremony, could never be called shy.
For the past three decades he has enjoyed the limelight as one of those rare beings: a musician who can play, compose and evangelise. He countenances no stylistic boundaries, bouncing between Mozart and Michael Jackson, Schubert and Adele, French horns and Cuban drumming with pneumatic ease. Classically trained, his own work in musicals and film soundtracks ensures an absence of musical snobbery. This book accompanies his new six-part BBC2 TV series of the same name, which starts on 25 January, with a supporting The Story of Music in 50 pieces on Radio 3.
There is no subtitle, but were one to exist it might read: a gallop through the history of (mainly) western classical music with excursions across continents and time zones and social movements and political upheavals and scientific inventions as seems useful, always setting the past in the context of modern life with all its gadgets and press-button ease and explaining how to write a fugue while we are at it.
No wonder the editors preferred to keep the title plain. Each line, each sentence, each paragraph consists of generalisations which may annoy the purists but are the only way so vast a story can be told.
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