The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles
How Music Has Shaped Civilization
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
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By:
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Howard Goodall
About this listen
Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multilayered orchestration can seem bewilderingly complex.
In his dynamic tour through forty thousand years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation—harmony, notation, sung theater, the orchestra, dance music, recording—strikes us with its original force. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly clear descriptions of what music is and how it works: What scales are all about, why some chords sound discordant, and what all postwar pop songs have in common.
The story of music is the story of our urge to invent, connect, rebel—and entertain. Howard Goodall's beautifully clear and compelling account is both a hymn to human endeavor and a groundbreaking map of our musical journey.
Download the accompanying playlist text.©2014 Howard Goodall (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Orlando Figes
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange - they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures.
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DO LISTEN TO THIS BOOK!!!
- By JK on 10-28-21
By: Orlando Figes
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On the Shoulders of Giants
- My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In On the Shoulders of Giants, indomitable basketball star and best-selling author and historian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar invites listeners on an extraordinarily personal journey back to his birthplace. He leads us through one of the greatest political, cultural, literary, and artistic movements in our history, revealing the tremendous impact the Harlem Renaissance had on both American culture and his own life.
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The best of both worlds
- By Marianne on 10-06-08
By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others
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Write Songs Right Now
- By: Alex Forbes
- Narrated by: Alex Forbes
- Length: 4 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Write Songs Right Now is a hands-on, step-by-step guide to creating original pop songs - an approach that been road-tested by thousands of Alex's students and coaching clients in New York City, some of whom have gone on to achieve great success. With insight, enthusiasm, and humor, Alex guides listeners through the process of brainstorming for ideas, crafting effective lyrics, and putting those lyrics to music.
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Kind of old wine in new skins, still good for that
- By Marc on 01-12-14
By: Alex Forbes
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Naked at the Albert Hall
- The Inside Story of Singing
- By: Tracey Thorn
- Narrated by: Tracey Thorn
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In her bestselling autobiography, Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorn recalled the highs and lows of a 30-year career in pop music. But with the touring, recording and extraordinary anecdotes, there wasn't time for an in-depth look at what she actually did for all those years: sing. She sang with warmth and emotional honesty, sometimes while battling acute stage fright.
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Fascinating
- By Jane Sheedy on 01-11-17
By: Tracey Thorn
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Light & Shade
- Conversations with Jimmy Page
- By: Brad Tolinski
- Narrated by: Robert Fass, John Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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More than 30 years after disbanding in 1980, Led Zeppelin continues to be celebrated for its artistic achievements, broad musical influence, and commercial success. The band's notorious exploits have been chronicled in bestselling books; yet none of the individual members of the band has penned a memoir nor cooperated to any degree with the press or a biographer.
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Production History, FY!
- By Amy Peacock on 02-21-17
By: Brad Tolinski
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Dancing in the Streets
- A History of Collective Joy
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From best-selling social commentator and cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich comes this fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture, showing that such mass festivities have been indigenous to the West since the ancient Greeks.
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Oddly leaves out the largest phenomenon of celebration in N. America
- By Emma Goldman on 04-20-19
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Elton John
- The Biography
- By: David Buckley
- Narrated by: Simon Shepherd
- Length: 16 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Elton John is as much loved for his outrageous personality and witty outspokenness as for his music. Such shamelessness and sheer silliness rivals anything uttered by punk rockers, yet it is so typically Elton: honest and intemperate. Tragedy and heartbreak have played a large part in his life. Behind the parties, the hedonism, the lavish stage costumes, and silly glasses lies a more somber story. Between disputes with managers, legal wranglings, public breakups, and divorce, John has been faced with serious health problems and drug addictions.
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Trite!
- By michael mckone on 08-04-22
By: David Buckley
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Botticelli's Secret
- The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
- By: Joseph Luzzi
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri. A powerful encounter between poet and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never finished.
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Great story
- By Chris M on 12-09-22
By: Joseph Luzzi
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You Say Potato: A Book About Accents
- By: Ben Crystal, David Crystal
- Narrated by: David Crystal, Ben Crystal, Jane Savage, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Some people say 'sconn' while others say 'schown'. He says 'bath' while she says 'bahth'. You say 'potayto'. I say 'potahto'. And - wait a second, no one says 'potahto'. No one's ever said 'potahto'. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of received pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father, David, travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English.
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Wish there were more native recordings.
- By Matt Dobler on 07-01-16
By: Ben Crystal, and others
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What listeners say about The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michael S
- 12-12-22
Excellent
This was an excellent overview of the history of music. The performance was five star. Any music lover from classical connoisseurs to modern pop enthusiasts will enjoy this selection.
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- Miah Smith
- 09-17-20
Great book and performance, not full PDF
I really enjoyed the book and learned a lot. I wish that little clips from the songs he discusses were sampled with the narration, but there are Spotify playlists you can look up separately. That info *is* on the accompanying PDF, but there are other things they mention is on the PDF that wasn’t.
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1 person found this helpful
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- BfloBen
- 03-08-22
Bad book for Audible
Three main issues-- (1) the text discusses scales and other technical aspects of music.. These topics clearly need some form of graphic. For example, to show the difference between types of Medieval church modes and various features of musical notation mentioned in the text. (2) Also, there are many references to musical pieces but there are no musical examples included with the text. (3) The narrator has the distracting and ultimately unlistenable habit of dropping his voice at the end of sentences. What professional reader does that? Who talks that way? Although it is well written, I deleted it.
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- Glenys Groome
- 01-28-18
pdf Missing
Any additional comments?
The book comments on music and information provided in the pdf that is available with the audiobook. This was not provided bu audible as a reference.
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5 people found this helpful
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- John West
- 07-28-15
Great book, look for the BBC documentary
Howard Goodall is great in all of his BBC work and now he has written this book. Really enjoyable to learn the components of music composition and find out when in (western) history each musical component/idea/approach was invented.
I wish I could purchase a version of this audiobook with imbedded audio samples of the musical pieces that he references in each chapter. The BBC documentary does a great job of playing examples as he describes the parts of the music to listen for.
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3 people found this helpful
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- JohnnyBass2420
- 12-12-20
Very Entertaining! & Very Educational!
I really loved this audio book. I learned so much interesting things I never knew. It might just be because I am a musician and I love & am obsessed with music because sometimes my Mom will listen to audiobooks with me like when I'm listening in the car or when I have it on the house speakers but with this one she'd beg me to change it to something else she'd say it's uninteresting & she didn't understand what it was talking about. So if your a musician or interested in music I bet you'll love it, if not you might think it's boring I don't know. One thing I do know for a fact! Is That Simon Vance is my absolute favorite audiobook narrator ever hands down. I sometimes will try an audiobook out just because he's the narrator & if I'm unsure about getting an audiobook & see Simon Vance's name I'll get it no matter what. He's The Best!
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- Anthony Moresi
- 06-20-21
I'm a classical musician and even I loved this!
Fantastic book, very thorough researched history and very well compiled. It's obvious the author was taught from well-known musicologists who could weave a coherent narrative about western classical music from a vantage of hegemony of European countries in a way you'd expect, but often refers to worldwide musical comparisons.
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- Acteon
- 12-22-15
Educational, enjoyable, and stimulating
Would you listen to The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles again? Why?
Yes, it is full of information and my memory leaves much to be desired.
Have you listened to any of Simon Vance’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Yes. He is very good here, as he usually is.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I immediately and spontaneously gave copies to friends.
Any additional comments?
An apparently informed negative review on amazon.com very nearly kept me from buying this book. Good thing I took a chance!
It is not that I disagree with all the criticism that reviewer and other commentators have put forth. However, these are minor when weighed against the remarkable quality of the book as a whole. (Incidentally, I do not think Goodall presents as negative a view of Wagner as some commentators pretend). Another reviewer cites Robert Greenberg's lectures (Great Courses series) as being all that Goodall's book is not: I have listened to 90% of Greenberg's numerous courses and recommend them highly. However, this in no way impinges on my enthusiasm for Goodall's book, which does something quite different.
I have learned a great deal from listening to this stimulating audiobook and recommend it to anyone with an interest in music or in cultural history. It is quite dense with information and references, so the better informed you are, the more you can make associations and are likely to enjoy it.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Cory
- 01-07-23
Great read aloud
Extremely informative and is a stellar book for a nice read or for educational purposes.
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- LS
- 01-24-20
For the novice
This book is clearly meant for the person who knows very little about musical history. This is not a fault. The history is clearly laid out and the author constantly draws connections between the historical goings-on and modern events and people that shows both his respect for the material and his respect for the audience.
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2 people found this helpful