Sound Tracks

In exploring the historical traces humankind has left of our music-making, Graeme Lawson captures the full scope of the ingenuity and passion that we have brought to this mysterious yet universal and vital impulse. You’ll encounter instruments you never knew existed, find yourself humming the songs of the Bronze Age, and ponder the connections between our own musicality and that we see in other animals. It’s a thrilling journey into the sonic richness of human experience * Philip Ball, author of The Music Instinct * A very rare object – a book where you learn something new about music on every single page. Graeme Lawson piles revelation upon revelation to shed a completely new perspective on the tools we use for making music * Norman Lebrecht, author of Why Beethoven * This is surely one of the most unusual and original histories of music that has been written, recovering a sense of the sounds of the distant past through rare survivals of musical instruments and even a tune recorded on a Bronze Age tablet. Out of the silence of the earth Graeme Lawson has brilliantly conjured up the sounds of 30,000 years of human history * David Abulafia, Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, University of Cambridge * Reveals the sounds that ancient musicians could have created and gives credit to the craftsmen and women who routinely pushed-back the boundaries of past technologies to fashion musical instruments. It's a magical book * Francis Pryor, author of A Fenland Garden * A delightfully quirky tour through the history and prehistory of music in the company of a master * Adam Zamoyski, author of Napoleon * Lawson is an engagingly vivid narrator with a sharp eye and ear, and the breadth of his experience and expertise make for a diverting perspective… His tone is playful and persuasive, pitched to ensure that his meticulously detail is accessible – and crucially, relatable – to all curious readers * New Scientist * The reader is taken in hand by Mr Lawson's expert prose, which shows a winning attachment to the objects and cultures he finds ... [they] will savour rare opportunities to look the over the shoulder of prehistory's answer to Poirot * Country Life * We're used to talking about music's evanescence, tracing its history in documents, scores and biographies, while its sounds remain elusive. Enter Lawson - archaeologist, professor and historian, a sort of musical Indiana Jones - with a compelling alternative: music's very tangible, material remains. … Taking a bird's-eye view, Lawson swoops down to pluck a series of objects out of the ground ... spreading them out in front of us, turning inscrutably, unreadable things into lives and music … Miniature page-turners which play out with the tension of a Sherlock Holmes mystery * Spectator *