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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. The more you know, the more you may want to shout. Yet Goodall puts forward a convincing case and is a fluent and enthusiastic narrator. He is canny, too, and knows when to qualify his sweeping statements: Monteverdi’s opera Poppea was a masterpiece but the famously sexy final duet was probably written by someone else. Wagner’s celebrated ‘Tristan’ chord was indeed a turning point, but Liszt (here nicknamed ‘Mr Trick and Treat’) had used it already. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) caused a musical revolution but the tale of rioting audiences at that first Paris performance is pure exaggeration.
If the style is breathless and at times hasty, the content demands that you pay attention. Abandoning the usual generic headings, Goodall carves his material with deference to Eric Hobsbawm: ‘The Age of Discovery’, ‘The Age of Elegance and Sentiment’, ‘The Age of Rebellion’. The account proper begins with Hildegard of Bingen as the first ‘named’ composer, leading on to the impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, then Handel and Bach through to Classical and Romantic and the present day. Each major composer is given due mention, some more duly than others. Mussorgsky gets more than Tchaikovsky, Verdi roughly a third of the space allowed to Wagner.
Goodall’s distinguishing gift is his ability to explain the mechanics of music instead of gliding hastily over them. He is fearless in unknotting those medieval mysteries of organum and isorhythms, as well as chords, triads, fugues, keys, equal temperament, atonality, dodecaphony and blues. He assumes little knowledge beyond a few guitar chords or an idea of what a piano keyboard is like, but he does expect his reader to concentrate. Some of this material he has already approached in Big Bangs: The Story of Five Discoveries that Changed Musical History, also a book and a TV series, but it bears retelling.
The final chapter, taking us up to 2012, most openly reflects the author’s own tastes: Pierre Boulez and his circle get short shrift. The emphasis is on songwriters, musicals, jazz, rock, hip-hop and bhangra. This may be the way the history of late-20th- and early-21st-century Western music will be told in years to come. In Goodall’s view, as he dazzlingly and boldly argues, it was the Beatles who ‘reaffirmed the supremacy of the Western system of key families, the interlocking jigsaw of harmony and melody that had worked for the likes of Bach, Schubert and Mendelssohn’.
As in the photo-montage album cover of Sergeant Pepper, everyone is here in these pages including Bob Dylan and Karlheinz Stockhausen — except those who are not. Someone else can tell their story. It is unlikely to have the vitality of Howard Goodall’s colourful collage.
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