Stephen Fry’s Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music

This is a bit of a whirlwind tour through western art music from earliest days to basically the end of the twentieth century, written in collaboration between Stephen Fry and Tim Lihoreau. Apparently it was initially a radio show and was put down on paper after that. It’s full of the usual British jokes, sans the kind of filth Stephen Fry prefers (see The Ode Less Travelled) because of radio censorship rules I guess. And it does a pretty good job of covering the major trends of western art music, making you want to go listen to some stuff that you hadn’t heard before – which, I suppose, is the point. Some of the jokes are fairly lame, and you can tell Stephen Fry isn’t as keen on Baroque as, say, I am, but then it’s kind of interesting having the whole thing written from the perspective of a devout Wagnerian. He does put up the argument that modern music – e.g film music – is today’s “classical”, while not really recognising that at the same time Beethoven was composing, all sorts of folk music was going on which I think is a better equivalency to the popular music of our day. This is a small part of the whole, however, and basically it’s a fairly good overview which is good to dip into, a little heavy to swallow in one go.