Recommended Reading: Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music

Lars Fischer Discussion

Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity.

New York: Zone Books, 2015.

This might well be considered compulsory reading for historians interested in how musicology is responding to calls for deep history and transdisciplinarity. Tomlinson is a renowned scholar of seventeenth-century music who was written on Monteverdi, music and magic, and music in European contact with the "new" world. He has also long been seen as a leader in theorizing and reflecting on the discipline more broadly, and he here brings his powers to bear on music's part in evolutionary history, not only providing a new acount of music "in" human history, but developing his own model of evolution to do so.

Miranda Stanyon