Book review: The Story of Music, By Howard Goodall

Goodall's thesis begins with a 40,000-year-old flute. "It is from [such] dusty artefacts that Duke Ellington's horn section… would one day grow."

Unfortunately, this stress on the universality of music produces a rather weak conclusion. The sole work by Philip Glass mentioned is "a Low symphony based on… the Bowie album".

This is not the best work by Glass (or Bowie). Similarly, the main examples for the "profound melding" of classic and popular music are Deep Purple's Jon Lord and a Sting CD from 2006.