Product Description

This title is written by a distinguished team of music journalists, musicologists, and musicians. It seeks to convey the spirit and the passion of almost every type of music.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #577293 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-22
• Format: Illustrated
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

Customer Reviews

Wide ranging look at all types of music
This book attempts to cover the whole musical spectrum, which sections devoted to pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, folk, classical, world, dance, hip hop, reggae, soul / R+B, gospel, electronic and soundtracks / theatre, each of which is divided into sub-styles. There's a final section headed popular and novelty, which covers contemporary Christian music, novelty songs, music hall, children's songs, Christmas songs, easy listening, lounge music and nostalgia. I guess that covers everything, however briefly, remembering that each main chapter covers a wide range. At the end of each section is an index of artists for that section, but there's also an overall index at the end of the book. The overall index is the essential one, because artists may not always be classified the way you expect them to be.

The perennial problem of classification is never far way. How do you define the boundaries of each musical style? Where does one musical style begin and other end? It is, of course, an impossible task, but in a book such as this, the editor had to make some kind of decision. You may not agree with his classification, but since the book is divided up according to styles, you'll have to get used to it if you buy the book. Each section contains an introduction giving a general history of the music, before exploring each sub-style in turn. As far as the editor is concerned, pop music began in the fifties, which is a fair enough decision, though not everybody will agree with it. Older music can be found scattered among other sections including jazz (Glenn Miller), easy listening (Bing Crosby) and nostalgia (Vera Lynn), although I consider those artists to be among the pop stars of their time. It's even more telling to see that Bing and Vera are classified differently. Both of them continued recording well into the seventies and each of them could be classed as nostalgia or easy listening, as could Glenn Miller.

The first section is about pop music. Accepting (however grudgingly) the editor's assumption that it started in the fifties, this 64-page section does a good job in tracing the changing face of pop music from then until the start of the new millennium. Next is the 44-page section on rock music. The editor suggests that rock music began as pop music with attitude, and that while pop music often tells us that everything is OK, rock music tells us that it's not OK, but we can change it. That's an interesting definition, but hardly a clear one and not always accurate, although it's never been easy to define the dividing line between pop and rock. A look at the sub-styles in the two categories make the division look easier than it really is.

Subsequent sections provide great overviews of jazz (36 pages), blues (28 pages), country (30 pages) and folk (28 pages). The 26-page classical section mainly sticks to the traditional music, but acknowledges that the music is being challenged as never before to retain a distinctive identity. (Jazz, folk and country all face this problem, as pop and rock influences encroach into all of them, but I suspect that classical music faces the biggest challenge of them all.) The remaining chapters are all excellent, though I wish there could have been more than one page about Christmas songs. Actually, I wouldn't have expected there to be more, but I'm wondering (since this book was published in 2003) whether Bing Crosby's White Christmas was still the biggest-selling single of all time even then. I thought Elton John's tribute to Princess Diana had surpassed it, but I must check that. I'd also dispute the list of leading exponents of Christmas music, some of whom only recorded one Christmas song.

Because this book covers so much ground, it can't cover anything in depth, but I knew that a book such as this one could barely scratch the surface (many big names don`t even get mentioned, or only do so briefly), especially as the same publisher released a similarly-sized volume devoted exclusively to country music, which is restricted to thirty pages here. You'll want to buy specialist books about your favorite styles, but this book is particularly useful at providing the basic information about those musical styles that you aren`t sufficiently interested in to buy a specialist book (well, not yet anyway) but which you`d like to read a little about.