The Story of Music by Howard Goodall: review Nowadays it's not so easy. Authors are squeamish about equating music with one high-born tradition located in one corner of the globe. And yet any discussion of music anywhere assumes Western classical music as its template. The very idea of a "story" of music immediately imports a bias towards the Western classical tradition. That's where music was written down in fixed "pieces," which together traced a coherent narrative. This allowed composers to see what their predecessors had achieved, as well as hearing it, and this gave them the freedom to say, "hmm, what if I did it this way ..." Each move built on the previous one with increasing speed, fuelled by the equally rapid rise of the West. In that sense, non-Western music barely has a story. It's a huge brief, made huger by Goodall's alertness to new thinking in scholarly circles, and his fondness for interesting asides. It was fascinating to discover that the term "macaronic" carol (meaning a carol written in more than one language, like In Dulci Jubilo) has the same root as the word macaroon, because both are concerned with crushing and mingling things (languages or almonds). Goodall's style can be amusingly knockabout, as in his reference to Brünnhilde's Valkyries as "airborne undertakers." As the narrative unfolds he slips in descriptions of music's discoveries, such as the triad, scales, notation and the advent of well-tempered tuning, and deftly gestures towards their essence without getting bogged down in technicalities. However, lying in wait for us is a surprise, which is the ousting of classical music in the final two chapters by pop music. Goodall likes pop, as he keeps reminding us by mentioning Mariah Carey or Alicia Keys when he's discussing Josquin or Monteverdi. And he feels that classical music forfeits its right to be at the centre of the story by turning its back on the audience to pursue its modernist dreams. Goodall is suspicious of classical music's tendency to spiral away from its roots in social concerns and in the simple facts of music like melody. One example which attracts his scorn is the surrealist ballets of Satie and Picabia which he finds frivolous, with the slaughter of the First World War taking place only a few miles away. This is refreshing, but elsewhere Goodall's suspicion of classical music's artfulness seems forced, given that he's an artful composer himself. He describes the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony as "clever-clogs," which has to be the most philistine judgment ever passed on that immortal paean to freedom. The author of a general survey of music has a duty to extend some imaginative sympathy to music he dislikes or disapproves of, and Goodall's book fails in that duty. He describes Schoenberg as a revolutionary out to wreck music, which is wrong-headed. This is a serious blot on what is otherwise a racily written, learned and often shrewdly insightful book. The Story of Music begins on BBC Two on January 25 Follow Ivan Hewett's guide to classical music The Story of Music by Howard Goodall 368pp, Chatto & Windus, T £18 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 RRP £20, ebook £17.91