Ted Gioia

This is grand fun. Gioia covers the history of song from ancient Greece and Egypt up through Spotify. It's almost all European music... for sure, how non-European influences have constantly revitalized European music, but nothing about e.g. how southern Indian music has revitalized northern Indian music etc. He certainly proposes this kind of outsider-insider dynamic as fundamental to the evolution of music, but his examples are all Euro-centric. Well, it's a big fat book already! Maybe we show more need a series of books to follow this one, to cover different musical traditions around the world.

I am a big fan of mathematical music. Gioia see mathematics as opposed to magic. I would say that mathematics is more a battleground itself, encompassing magic and chaos along with stable order. Actually it could be a grand fun project, to write a book parallel to this one, like Science and Mathematics: A Subversive History. To show how the same cycle of revolution and legitimization happens in science and math. Maybe Thomas Kuhn already did that.

Well this book of Gioia taps into deep waters in a very effective way. He doesn't exhaust or encompass the terrain, but he opens a gate. That's a lot! show less

I reviewed music for quite a few years. In my time, I covered many genres but as much as I loved jazz, I always felt inadequate reviewing it. The deep history intimidated me and my ability to understand (let alone explain) the theory, techniques, and stylistic approaches was completely inadequate. And I think that limited personal history with writing about jazz is what helps me appreciate Ted Gioia's ability to write about jazz in such an engaging and thorough way. I loved "How to Listen to show more Jazz" and how it explained to the layman what to listen for and why it mattered. In "The History of Jazz," Gioia does the same thing for the historical side of things. For a music that is so rich and varied, he does an admirable job of covering every era and style with respect. It's so nice to see free jazz get such a serious treatment right alongside hard bop, cool jazz, and Dixieland. About the only critique I can make is that I hope in the fourth edition, he fleshes out the "jazz around the world" section. Japanese and Polish jazz alone each deserve a deep dive but sadly only get a paragraph or two here.

I took over a year-and-a-half to finish this book, but certainly not because it was boring or dry. Indeed, Gioia brings life to the history of jazz and draws connections that only the truest of students can. No matter how much you think you know about jazz, you'll still learn quite a bit here. show less

Gioia provides an un-academic, enthusiastic introduction to how to appreciate jazz for the novice. Using some of the best known performers and performances, he provides intuitive, common sense approaches to listening that don't require a music degree. After having read a few "encyclopedias" of jazz that cover much more territory, this short book sometimes seems to lack the density required for an important tome--but then, I realized that's the point. If you have always wanted to understand show more and find a way into the huge mass of jazz that is out there, this may be the best way. And with the wonders of YouTube or music streaming services, you can easily find the examples Gioia uses and follow along with them as he describes what is going on. (And believe me, if you call yourself a music fan but haven't felt the joy of listening to Louis Armstrong, or the great swing bands, or John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, or Miles Davis, you are shortchanging yourself. (Not to mention Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker....) show less

Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia started out by surprising me and ended up by blowing me away. Not what I had expected, as in: much more than I expected.

I love to read music histories. Most tend to be about a specific genre, maybe about an era, sometimes about an instrument. The few I have read that are a history of music as a whole still tend to be selective with what is considered music (or at least what they deem worthy of inclusion) and/or limited by a broad style (western vs show more eastern; tonal vs atonal). This book not only covers all of these but goes so far as to start with the Big Bang. Yes, that Big Bang.

The breadth of topics covered through the portal of music and musicality is breathtaking. From prehistoric ideas of how music might have been used through various institutional attempts to control and limit music to the idea of music as primarily entertainment divorced from any practical purpose, Gioia cuts a wide path through not just music history but human history.

He manages to not only cover all of this information but make some arguments for how music has been pivotal in history itself and even some insight into specific musicians (Beethoven, Parker, etc). I think because of the wide sweep through history this book will appeal to a wide range of readers, though admittedly certain sections may be more appealing than others. For scholars in various disciplines this may well indicate how music (broadly defined) might be incorporated into future research. For casual readers I think Gioia has managed to not get bogged down in any one area or time so that even if your primary interest might be a specific time the rest of the book will still interest you. And the early points he makes serve quite often as part of the foundation for later discussions in the book, so reading every section, even if not your main interest area, is highly recommended.

While acknowledging that there will no doubt be some people who don't want this exhaustive or comprehensive history of music, I can't really think of any particular group of readers to whom I wouldn't recommend the book.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less