This Sounds Like a Great BBC2 Documentary Series

There’s a real “whoa!” moment in one of the opening paragraphs of this story from The Daily Mail:

Music is now a massive global phenomenon, but in centuries gone by you could go weeks without hearing any music at all, and in the days before music could be recorded you might only hear your favourite symphony a few times in your life.

That’s true!  I’d never thought of it that way before.  How magical and mystical those experiences must have been. The impact of music was some completely different from what we experience today.  Read on.

Yet how many of us actually understand the discoveries, breakthroughs and inventions that led us to where we are today? Unlike other art forms, where we know something of their history – and our enjoyment of, say, a Jane Austen novel is enhanced by understanding its cultural setting – when it comes to music, many of us are hazy, or downright baffled. My mission in my new six-part series for BBC2, Howard Goodall’s Story Of Music, is to get rid of the bafflement factor.

[…]

My Story Of Music will show you what links Adele to Schubert, or Keane to Vivaldi, and what connects the Toccata from Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony No 5, played as Prince William and Kate Middleton walked down the aisle, with Bach.

This sounds fascinating.  Gotta see this.  Read the rest of the Daily Mail article here.