"The idea was always a ludicrous one: to reduce millennia of human musical history not to mention billennia of the Earth's sonic geology into a book of 50 pieces of music. And yet that's the challenge I decided to take on. The most pressing question was: why? To which my answer was: the inevitable failures and gaps of the project are precisely where its interest lies."
"Called A History of the World in 50 Pieces, the book is not a digested history of music, nor a list of my favourite songs, performances or recordings. Instead, it's centred on the definition of a piece of music. This is a democratic principle a belief that works don't belong only to their creators but are shared and reinterpreted by generations of musicians at distances of time, geography and technology, in ways their original composers and performers could not imagine."
A project attempts to condense millennia of musical history into fifty emblematic pieces while embracing inevitable failures and gaps as sources of interest. The focus rests on defining a 'piece of music' as a democratic entity that is shared, reinterpreted, and transformed by performers and listeners across time, geography, and technology. Musical works are not confined to definitive recordings, single performances, or fixed scores but exist as cycles of transformation in which the experience of the piece belongs to anyone who plays or hears it. Unexpected resonances emerge between widely separated composers and traditions.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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