The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth

"This is one of the best single-volume books about the history of music and how humans engage with music that I’ve come across. It has a great combination of range and concision. There’s just so much to learn from it about the nature of music from the earliest archaeological evidence and written records right up to the present day. It’s about the extraordinary nature of music, which engages more of our brain than perhaps almost any other human activity: processing, movement, emotion… There’s a magical phrase from Thomas Browne, the seventeenth century physician: he said music is “an Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world.” I think Spitzer’s book does a great job of taking us a little further on that journey of understanding. Yes, although there are some musicologists who will put up a warning sign here. ‘Music’ is a concept that is common to virtually every Western society, we all have a word that means roughly the same thing, but there are cultures where, for example, music and, for example, dance are seldom if ever separate from one another and there isn’t a distinct word for ‘music’ alone. This again reminds us that music is movement. But one can become unhelpfully pedantic with definitions. I don’t think there is any known culture that doesn’t have what we would think of as music, even if we might find it hard to relate to. I mean, I have a friend who just cannot stand classical Chinese opera. He finds it very challenging to listen to."