-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Kate Helsen, Neumes for novices, Early Music, Volume 43, Issue 2, May 2015, Pages 319–320, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cav028
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
The scope and aim of Thomas Forrest Kelly’s Capturing music remind me of Ernst Gombrich’s A little history of the world (New Haven, 2008), a book for young people that describes everything from the Stone Age to the 20th century in under 300 pages. Gombrich wrote ‘I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read’ (p.xix). Kelly echoes this in his preface by stating: ‘This is not a technical manual. It does not propose to teach you how to read medieval music, nor does it assume that you can read music now’, but he assures his readers that, ‘It’s not really difficult, and it’s very interesting indeed to be directly connected with the physical act of recording contemporary sounds from long ago’ (pp.xi–xii). While Kelly’s book encompasses only about 400 years of (mostly notated) musical life, it is nevertheless an impressive feat to have ‘captured’ that much music in only seven short chapters, especially for anyone who has actually tried to write lectures for undergraduate music history survey courses.
