Ted Gioia gives a history of music from ancient times up to rock and rap, highlighting the ways in which the most innovative music is most commonly at first disruptive and even a threat to the establishment ways, and then gets absorbed into the mainstream. It is a long book at over 500 pages, with the audiobook lasting nearly 18 hours. The last 4 of the 28 chapters, from Elvis Presley to the present, are the most obvious and since for many people that history will be already quite familiar, the least insightful. But much of the rest of the book is both informative and thoughtful. Maybe best of all, it is interesting, partly because while an academic, Gioia keeps his tone mostly conversational and he does not go into excessive detail. With thousands of years to cover, each century does not get a lot of pages. Party, the interest is due to the fact that Gioia highlights the roles of sex and violence in music. 

It is not surprising that music of ancient times was part of courting rituals and that people wrote songs about love. Nor that music was important for hunting parties and for war. He is also able to connect the historical account with debates within music scholarship about how to understand that history. Gioia emphasizes that his approach is itself untraditional and controversial, and he explains the advantages of his account over the more traditional ones. 

The main villain of his story is Pythagoras, who proposed a universal ideal of music as mathematical, so that the appreciation of music is a purely cognitive enterprise. Gioia laments the loss of the roots of music in religion, trance and ecstasy. He contrasts the mathematical approach with the earlier poetry of Sapho which he argues were songs, and also with the much more explicit Mesoptomanian songs that were about sex. Gioia’s account jumps around quite a bit from the ancient Greeks to the Mesopotamians to the Ancient Egyptians, but he makes his points well. 

Gioia is particularly good at drawing links between philosophical ideas and approaches to music, which makes sense since he has a background in both. His approach also firmly links musical developments to social history. It makes his work a rich source of ideas for anyone looking to find ways to teach the history of music, especially ancient music. As history moves on and there is more to cover, and the connections he makes between different ideas are a bit looser. By chapter 15, a little over half way through, he gets to the Renaissance and 1600. The ideas come thick and fast, maybe too fast for them to really hold water. Within 3 chapters he is on to Wagner. Then folksong and soon the blues. There are many provocative ideas thrown out here but they are not set out or defended with a huge amount of care. If they were, the book would be twice as long.

Music: A Subversive History is an enjoyable read that presents a valuable take on the place of music in society. It is not a book to just browse through since it develops its argument, building from the start, but you don’t need to get to the end. 

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews. He teaches philosophy in the NYC area and is an APPA certified philosophical counselor.

Categories: General

Keywords: music, history, rebellion