Actually a misanthropic diatribe on Western music,

As a 46 year old composer, performer and conductor with a degree in music and 22 years of teaching music in schools behind me, I was looking forward to actually finding out about how music evolved in our societies, in a reasonably objective, historical sense.
What I got instead was a diatribe on the cultural impoverishment of Western music, easy low blows that have been said many times before about the low participation rate in music amongst the population at large- the professionalisation and so called elitism of music. Every page he seemed to invoke Rousseau, suggesting music anywhere else is inherently better, more ‘Eden-like’. In the final chapter he seems to go after human beings more generally, as if to say we long to be like the birds; that they are the true musicians, that evolution itself is a mistake. Then he tries to walk it back with a reference to a Schumann piece which he seems to like. I think the author is simply too consumed with his anger towards his fellow human to actually do the topic justice. The whole book reads like an argument, not an exploration, and that thesis is ‘Man is awful, and Western man particularly awful.’ Don’t waste your time on this drivel.

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