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The Musical Human
- A History of Life on Earth
- Narrated by: Daniel Levitin
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Bloomsbury presents The Musical Human by Michael Spitzer, read by Daniel Levitin.
One hundred and sixty-five million years ago saw the birth of rhythm.
Sixty-six million years ago was the first melody.
Forty thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument.
Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story.
The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages – from Bach to BTS and back – to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, world-leading musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, looking at music in our everyday lives, music in world history and music in evolution, from insects to apes, humans to AI.
Through this journey we begin to understand how music is central to the distinctly human experiences of cognition, feeling and even biology, both widening and closing the evolutionary gaps between ourselves and animals in surprising ways.
The Musical Human boldly puts the case that music is the most important thing we ever did; it is a fundamental part of what makes us human.
Critic Reviews
"An amazing book, tying together research in archaeology, anthropology, music history, and human origins to form a compelling and exciting account of the many ways music has developed across the world and across time." (Daniel Levitin)
"A hugely ambitious work, but never daunting, and there’s something thought-provoking on every page.... With scholarship, wit and passion, this book demonstrates that there truly is a soundtrack to human lives." (Catherine Bott, Classic FM)
"A thrilling exploration of what music has meant and means to humankind." (Ian Bostridge)
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- Luke
- 06-01-2023
Actually a misanthropic diatribe on Western music,
As a 46 year old composer, performer and conductor with a degree in music and 22 years of teaching music in schools behind me, I was looking forward to actually finding out about how music evolved in our societies, in a reasonably objective, historical sense.
What I got instead was a diatribe on the cultural impoverishment of Western music, easy low blows that have been said many times before about the low participation rate in music amongst the population at large- the professionalisation and so called elitism of music. Every page he seemed to invoke Rousseau, suggesting music anywhere else is inherently better, more ‘Eden-like’. In the final chapter he seems to go after human beings more generally, as if to say we long to be like the birds; that they are the true musicians, that evolution itself is a mistake. Then he tries to walk it back with a reference to a Schumann piece which he seems to like. I think the author is simply too consumed with his anger towards his fellow human to actually do the topic justice. The whole book reads like an argument, not an exploration, and that thesis is ‘Man is awful, and Western man particularly awful.’ Don’t waste your time on this drivel.
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