Hello everyone! I'm interested in learning about music history, particularly Western for now, but I'm not sure where to begin. I have had a couple of experiences with some pretty awful, mind-numbing textbooks, and I would like to avoid spending time and money on a book that I don't get much out of, so I would really appreciate any recommendations.
I imagine any book about music history will have to deal with this in some capacity, but I would also love a book that touches on music theory alongside the various historical movements in music.
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
One difficulty with this question is its breadth: there's a lot of music, all over the world, and has been for a long time, and it all has been changing and interacting for a long time, and since it wasn't necessarily playing by our present rules, the learning curve can be kind of steep. If your favorite music is thrash metal, it will be hard to wrap your brain around how and why a monastic composer in the 13th c. was writing a trope for a Kyrie...or comprehend why the number of surviving medieval secular instrumental pieces ( as opposed to sacred vocal) is so small.
It's also true that most music historians writing a general one volume text would likely assign more importance to other things than you'd find interesting ( which may result in the awful, mind-numbing reading you mention). Even though it's bit old, now, I have found The Concise Oxford History of Music to be a pretty good general introduction: with a good bibliographic essay in the back, you can step off of it into other sources on a lot of other things. Used copies of it abound, it's a thick book but not the multi-volume set of Groves dictionary. And the explanations are pretty clear. But as the editor Gerald Abraham says in the introduction,
The relationship between "high art" Western music and anonymous popular music presents another kind of difficulty. The relationship has been mutually beneficial and the gap that began to open between them during the nineteenth century has been harmful to both. But here again I have generally had to bypass the music of the "folk" as I have the "high art" of some peripheral Western countries.
In other words, given the job of overseeing the writing of a short book, he chose what he thought more important, and didn't write about what was less important. As a result, there is tons on opera and German classical composers, and one paragraph, just one tiny, wimpy paragraph, on jazz.
If you want to focus on Western music and Western music theory, the go-to book has been Grout's History of Western Music. I myself find the text a bit mind-numbing, but it does deal more in-depth with theory than Abraham.