The Musical Human
A History of Life on Earth
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The Musical Human
Buy Now for $27.99
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Narrated by:
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Daniel Levitin
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By:
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Michael Spitzer
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents The Musical Human by Michael Spitzer, read by Daniel Levitin.
A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
'Full of delightful nuggets' Guardian online
'Entertaining, informative and philosphical ... An essential read' All About History
'Extraordinary range ... All the world and more is here' Evening Standard
165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm.
66 million years ago came the first melody.
40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument.
Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet it 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, from global history to our everyday lives, from insects to apes, humans to artificial intelligence.
'Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible: a Guns, Germs and Steel for music' Daniel Levitin
'A thrilling exploration of what music has meant and means to humankind' Ian Bostridge
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.
Actually a misanthropic diatribe on Western music,
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