Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Ford is an award-winning composer and broadcaster based in Australia. His Shortest History is essentially an account of our relationship with organised noise from the dawn of conscious primates to the 1970s.
It’s deeply researched and very thorough with the feel of a thesis squeezed into a reasonably accessible consumer book. Ford draws out themes across the ages, attempting to explain how an ephemeral art can spread and grow like a language – with early oral songs passed down the ages, evolving and adapting into a language then a technology and finally a multi-billion pound industry.
His ambition, in 300 odd pages, is to nail what leads us to make music in the first place. He doesn’t quite succeed, but along the way he unpicks strange early forms of notation, colonial influence on indigenous music and plenty of entertaining cultural quirks, from why we sing Do Re Mi to how Vivaldi’s Four Seasons fell out of fashion for a century.