This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

History rebels against digests. It baulks at sweeping generalisations, pouts at dogmas and grudgingly tolerates nuances. That is why the concept of the canon came in handy. Short of time to consider human creation and activity in full, students and teachers find refuge in trusted common references, assiduously curated across generations. 

Not only because these are representative of a specific period, but also because they offer insights that transcend their time and, in literature and the arts especially, something beautiful and admirable.

In the crowded field of bite-sized annals, music rarely gets equal billing with the rest of art history. Compendiums on visual arts, for example, are plentiful; but a concise, illuminating reader on music’s evolution remains hard to find. When I entered the Maîtrise de Radio France aged ten (one of the rare professional choirs for young people in Europe) I felt the gap keenly. 

As members of a tight-knit choir, we were trained like machines at musical theory, tonal and atonal sight-reading, memorisation of complex scores and so on. Yet I still yearned to understand why music developed as it did. Where was the book to quench that thirst for knowledge?

The Shortest History of Music promises to untangle the complex mysteries shrouding music — a daunting task for an art form that requires technical knowledge about tunes, rhythms, tones, tempi, nomenclatures, timbres. I remembered another book from the same series, on Germany, which I had devoured years ago. That volume, written by James Hawes, pulled off the remarkable feat of distilling facts across centuries whilst remaining effortlessly engaging.

None of those feelings returned this time. As I set The Shortest History of Music back on my coffee table, I found myself perplexed. I tried to channel my ten-year-old self; frankly, I’m relieved I didn’t encounter this book back then. It’s too muddled to be useful, revealing both why musicology is in a prolonged identity crisis and why anyone invested in cultural politics — whether as commentators or policy-makers — should take notice.

Andrew Ford sows interesting thoughts here and there. In the very first paragraphs, he lays out thoughtful remarks about the difficulties inherent to the historicist approach of studying music, noting that traditional focuses on “classical music” and Western music can be unsatisfactory both outside and inside the European continent. That’s all well and good. But had Ford grounded this familiar critique with reference to musicologists, he might have given his observations more depth.

Roger Scruton, for example (a figure I doubt Ford would welcome into his pages), plainly recognised that the study of Western music, owing especially to its unique focus on written notation, would — as Ford laments — “offer a limited and partial view of just some of the world’s music”. 

But here lies Ford’s first sleight of hand: most readers in the West, picking up a History of Music, however Short, would assume it primarily covers their own cultural lineage. Instead, Ford wavers, critiquing nineteenth-century nationalistic currents in German and French musicology without offering readers sufficient context or alternative frameworks.

Yet these are hardly new debates: the diverse scholarly approaches to Early Music’s revival since the 1950s or the “New Musicology” movement of the 1980s are vast fields in themselves. And the giants — Richard Taruskin, with his monumental Oxford History of Western Music, or William Weber, whose 1999 chapter “The History of Musical Canon” would have been ideal here — are nowhere to be found. Whether Ford enjoys playing with his readers’ assumptions or not, the hazy treatment of what “music” even entails falls flat.

This epistemological problem continues. Although Ford gleefully embraces a great diversity of examples, his fixation on marginal things at the expense of essential figures, opera and historical contexts is complicated by a haphazard structure. Is it truly appropriate to spend several pages on slave work songs but sidetrack the lineage of monodies, madrigals, operatic arias, Lieder and French mélodies? 

Why does the lute — integral to Renaissance and Baroque music — receive only a fleeting mention, whilst the banjo and a miscellany of African rhythmic influences take centre stage? The promised “eclecticism” quickly devolves into a scattershot approach, leaving glaring historiographical voids.

The most unforgivable omission is the god-shaped hole created by the conspicuous absence of the liturgy, the place and role of the Church as musical patron and the unsettling near-total silence about the Medieval period. The latter is timidly touched upon by one mention of Guillaume de Machaut, whose Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer, isn’t even cited. The word “mass” crops up more in media references than in relation to Christendom, which receives a single passing remark. 

Florence’s Duomo appears merely as a “temple of music” in a comment about Guillaume Dufay that is randomly sandwiched between Beethoven and Wagner. Meanwhile, Steven Pinker is highlighted in relation to his “cheesecake theory” of music (I recoiled from these traumatic pages).

At times, music is presented as “neither universal, nor a language”. At other times, it is definitively endowed with universal characteristics and a capacity to seduce any listener. Dates and historical backgrounds are frequently omitted, complicating further the sense of historical perspective, whether in regard to unfamiliar extra-European traditions or in better-charted territories.

Ford dogmatically repeats that music is steeped in patriarchy and classism, but neglects counterexamples that might disrupt this narrative. Indeed, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when female composers are segregated into a single chapter — arguably, the book’s most compelling one, under “Music for Sale” — but conveniently forgotten elsewhere. It is also incomprehensible that the collaborative nature of musical creation is globally neutered by the absence of various key editors, performers or entrepreneurs. Particularly so in a book that claims to diverge from past traditions.

Adding to the structural chaos is the prose itself, which occasionally veers into vapid quotations, clichés and phrases that would warrant red ink in an undergraduate essay. The progressive historiographical slant grates in some clumsy expressions, such as the assertion that it’s impossible to “track any linear sense” because “music is happening all around us all the time”. 

Or that “with an enlightened boss”, as in Haydn’s case, “the composer’s imagination might run free”. The rhythm and tone of the text sometimes aim for a more commercial flair: Haydn’s success was “something close to idolatry” (ah?), thereby bringing him “from servant to superstar!” (wow!).

If epistemological humility was still à la mode, one could have made better use of the book’s format. The difficulty of producing The Shortest History of Music might have been overcome with the addition of tables and diagrams that help condense preliminary knowledge and allow greater fluidity for the thematically organised chapters. Claude Abromont’s Petit précis du commentaire d’écoute masters the exercise superbly (if chronologically). It is in fact the book that I used when I was a child, and I’m sure glad I did.