Stuart Isacoff

Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed Stuart Isacoff

From the critically acclaimed author of Temperament, a narrative account of the most defining moments in musical history--classical and jazz--all of which forever altered Western culture

The invention of music notation by a skittish Italian monk in the eleventh century. The introduction of multilayered hymns in the Middle Ages. The birth of opera in a Venice rebelling against the church's pious restraints. Baroque, Romantic, and atonal music; bebop and cool jazz; Bach and Liszt, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In telling the exciting story of Western music's evolution, Stuart Isacoff explains how music became entangled in politics, culture, and economics, giving rise to new cultural eruptions at every turn, from the early church's attempts to bind its followers by teaching them to sing in unison to the spread of American jazz globally through the Black platoons of the First World War.

The author investigates questions like When does noise become music? How did discord become the primary sound of modernity? Musical Revolutions is a book replete with the stories of our most renowned musical artists, including notable achievements of people of color and women, whose path to success was the most difficult.