Western Music Isn't What You Think - by Ted Gioia
I was crazy to do this. I was trying to understand the role of music in human life going back to prehistoric times, and hoped to follow its evolution until the present day. This demanded intense multidisciplinary research at a scope beyond anything I’d attempted before.
Every publisher and editor I met during that period asked me to write about jazz—because my book The History of Jazz was a big seller and they wanted another book just like it.
When I tried to enlist their support for my bigger project, speaking in rapturous terms about music as a source of enchantment and change agent in human life, their eyes glazed over.
But I was persistent. This project was my obsession, and my motivation kept getting recharged—because I was learning things about music that other experts had missed.
Most of my breakthroughs came through sheer perseverance, and relentless digging into primary sources (usually outside of the music field) that my peers had never even considered consulting.
