A triumphant journey through the history of Western classical music and its great composers


'My aim in this book is to offer an invitation to the glorious long voyage of Western classical music for all those who enjoy and love it, and seek to deepen their enjoyment and love without getting caught up in musicology and technicalities: an entry to Aladdin's cave, an injunction to 'taste and see' re-angled for the sense of hearing in all its complex and various modes. Not historical, but broadly chronological and thematic, from the earliest adventures in notation up to the present day - some fourteen centuries of continuity and interruptions, revolutions and renewals, complements and contrasts, via many detailed descriptions of individual composers and individual pieces.

'In part, it is an account of how music is made - its core of practice, skills, conventions, traditions - but also an attempt to chart the evolution of expression, what is being said, what felt, what communicated 'from the heart to the heart' - how music works upon its listeners, how it moves and stirs, how it reaches and appeals to the highest flights and deepest places (and everything between) of the organising pattern-making mind, the ebb and flow of the sensual body, the centres of emotion.

'Everything is within the art itself, at whatever epoch, in whatever idiom, whatever genre or intention. Nor is evaluation eschewed - why, as well as how, it is so good and why sometimes so deplorable. The style throughout is inherently allusive and I have tried everywhere to preserve the intonations and rhythms of speech - spontaneous, improvised, natural as breathing'
- Robin Holloway