A Concise History of Western Music

Centered on the conceptualization of time in music, Griffiths´ precis traces a course of development from ancient Greece and Babylonia to the present. Western music began with single-part chants, to which multiple lines (polyphony), instruments, and rhythms were quickly introduced. Time in music changed from the even-valued pitches of chant to complex rhythmic patterns, from the unmeasured to the finely divided line. By the sixteenth century, ensembles of performers were the norm. Griffiths cites most major composers in each of the commonly accepted musical periods (baroque, classical, romantic, etc.), describing their contribution to the advancement of musical concepts and how the culture influenced their creativity, and also how composers experimented to progress from humanistic motivation to the complex use of technology to create music. Concluding with the ups and downs of the last 40 years, Griffiths suggests that to survive, music of the future will continue to depend on composition, performance, and listening. A well-written must for classical-music listeners and teachers.