This book serves as a wonderful introduction to the history of European and American art music. The book is structured in an interesting way. Instead of being a simple chronology of music history, ranging from the Renaissance to recent trends in American music, it subdivides each time period into categories, such as "chamber music", "vocal music", or "orchestral music." Scattered throughout each chapter are quotations from the composer or musician in question, making for an illuminating read.

This book isn't really packed with details, mostly because it covers more than 500 years of music history, so it has only enough space to briefly touch on each period, although the major composers and concepts are covered with more depth. Nevertheless, I think it's a good starting point for anyone interested in the history of Western classical music. ( )

This was a textbook for one of my university music history classes. Huge, and packed with details. ( )