A History of the World in 100 Pieces

byTom Service

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Music transports us and defines us. As a form of expression, it has been passed down through oral tradition, musical notation and recordings in a chain of connection that spans the globe, across the millennia. A History of the World in 100 Pieces follows that chain, collating 100 examples of classical music that reflect our changing politics, social structures and technological development, and how composers, musicians and listeners have shaped those currents of history.

From folk songs to national anthems, Beethoven to Florence Price, fifteenth-century French opera to 1970s experimental piano works, Tom Service offers a fresh take on pieces everyone knows and many more they might not. With each short, sharp analysis, he expands the typical canon and tests the boundaries of what we understand to be ‘classical music’ – or even music at all, such as the sounds of the earth’s rotation as recorded by sound artist Jez riley French.

An official BBC Radio 3 publication, A History of the World in 100 Pieces is a book for anyone curious about the power of music and how it shapes us and connects us.

About Tom Service

Born in Glasgow, Tom Service graduated from York University and studied the music of American composer John Zorn for his PhD at the University of Southampton. He began presenting Radio 3’s Hear and Now in 2001 and now regularly presents Music Matters, the station’s flagship classical music magazine programme, and the New Music Show. He also writes and presents The Listening Service, which has run for more than 120 episodes. As well as fronting many Proms on BBC radio and television, he has presented a number of BBC TV documentaries, including a six-part series of 20th-Century Classics at the Proms, The Joy of Mozart and The Joy of Rachmaninoff – and three programmes, on Handel’s Messiah, Verdi’s La traviata and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad), with co-presenter Amanda Vickery. He has written about music for The Guardian, of which he was Chief Classical Music Critic, and has given lectures at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and York, and at Trinity College of Music in London. In 2018–19 he was Gresham Professor of Music at Gresham College, London. Tom was Guest Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2005 and is the author of Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras and Full of Noises, interviews with the composer Thomas Adès.
Details
  • Imprint: BBC Digital
  • ISBN: 9781473534070
  • Length: 336 pages
  • Price: £11.99
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