Illegal Harmonies: Music In The Modern Age

A delightful and informative history of modern music.

Harmony is created by bringing sounds together. In music lessons, we learn how to do this in a formal way: we learn about chords and keys, and we are given rules for using them. This is the textbook way; this is legal harmony. Everything else – including the sounds that constantly surround us, those of ticking clocks, dogs, traffic, birdsong and aeroplanes – is illegal harmony.

Illegal Harmonies charts the course of music over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, linking it to developments in literature, theatre, cinema and the visual arts, and to popular music from Irving Berlin to The Beatles to rap. The result is a stimulating, provocative and always informative cultural history.