Had Robin Holloway published Music’s Odyssey—described by its author as “an invitation to the glorious long voyage of Western classical music”—30 years ago, he might well have got away with it. By day, Holloway is a composer and emeritus professor of music at Cambridge university, no less, and you wonder how someone preoccupied with the fabric of music and sound, and for so many years, came to write a book this constricted in its purview, opinions paraded as truths, with prose so admiring of its own cleverness. Holloway has spent his working life interacting with young people, but somehow the memo that ideas of classical music are evolving has passed him by. The dust in these pages is suffocating.
Elizabeth Alker, best known as a BBC Radio 3 presenter, is of an age where, in a parallel universe, she could have been a Holloway student. In fact, she’s a Leeds English graduate but, as she reveals in her own new book, Everything We Do Is Music, her parents studied music at Huddersfield university. Clearly, she feels very much at home at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, where, in the course of researching the book, she attended a performance of Primordial/Lift by the American composer Pauline Oliveros, whose work with electronics and non-standard tunings has proved an inspiration to many, including Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and tape-loop electronic composer William Basinski.
You won’t read about Oliveros in Music’s Odyssey. In a book of more than 1,000 pages, in fact, Holloway finds space for only three female composers, one of whom—Hildegard of Bingen—is wearily dismissed as “a psychedelic bore”. Nor over those same pages will you find any mention of black composers of the magnitude of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk or Anthony Braxton among those B-listers—from Frederick Delius to Colin Matthews—whom Holloway does showcase. Writing music history must never, of course, be reduced to box-ticking and quotas, but such omissions are symptomatic of limitations that fatally undermine the book, with Holloway’s neat subheadings and potted composer biographies feeling like reheated lecture notes.
It soon becomes apparent that—truthfully—even Holloway himself isn’t up for the journey upon which he expects everyone else to embark. His own work as a composer expresses itself around an enthusiasm for 19th-century romanticism: Schumann, Schubert and Wagner, in particular. His compositional dialogues with the past favour harmonic prolixity, tonal allusion and references layered like pasta sheets in a lasagna: music history as material to be reshaped. But Holloway, as writer, states that his own story “really starts with JS Bach”; no shame there, except he’s expecting his readers to wade through a hundred or so pages of oddly dutiful writing about Renaissance (and earlier) music that too often he wishes were something else. The music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina—the absolute guv’nor when it came to defining polyphony during the Renaissance—is diminished in Holloway’s estimation for “what it does not do, or does not care to”.
Which is a point of view, I suppose, but not what I hear. Hectoring dismissals of the Dutch Renaissance figure Jacob Obrecht (a “Lego-composer”) and the Franco-Flemish polyphony of Orlando di Lasso (“the sense of a production line”) arrive with a smartarse smirk.
Having come through the 19th century, Holloway’s consideration of how composition fragmented during the 20th century—which takes very nearly half the book—rarely rises above the prosaic, and has a control freak’s requirement for music to conform to the values they believe in, no matter a composer’s own mindset or cultural background. John Cage has been taken down by far more informed people than Holloway, whose critique offers nothing new or wise. His assertion that 4’33” was Cage dealing with “silence” is an alarming schoolboy error—the piece was an invitation to put a frame around already existent sounds—while Holloway is simply wrong to claim it as a “joke” and that Cage was “trying it on”. What could it be about the California-born Cage, whose father was a wacky inventor and who moved to New York, a city where sound pervades every pore, that made him think of music differently to the entrance requirements to read music at Cambridge? That’s what we really need to know, although Holloway doesn’t even seem to realise it’s a question.
John Cage has been taken down by far more informed people than Holloway, whose critique offers nothing new or wise
Holloway’s disdain for minimalism comes as no surprise, but the terms with which he haughtily dismisses a whole movement of composition—throwing “its bargain-basement bridge over the abyss” and “a hostile reaction to the perceived over-complexity, artificiality, elitism, tyranny, ugliness, non-appeal, of the ascendent avant-garde”—reveals another deadening flaw. These were commonly held views three decades ago, when Holloway’s assessment would have raised few hackles. But in 2026? Recent books, typified by Kerry O’Brien and William Robin’s On Minimalism, tell a far more nuanced story. Even Pierre Boulez, the bogeyman of modern composition, programmed Steve Reich’s 1970 Phase Patterns during his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic; the group he founded, the Ensemble intercontemporain, has subsequently recorded Reich and John Adams. And on it goes.
It reads as though Holloway’s reference points ossified around the turn of the last century. His peculiarly mean-spirited takedown of Michael Tippett, particularly his later music, fails to grapple with the music’s visionary magic, or push understanding further than regurgitating a critical consensus that has persisted since the 1980s. Then you look at his bibliography and realise he hasn’t engaged with Oliver Soden’s major new Tippett biography, published in 2019. Even Holloway’s adoption, and acceptance, of the term “classical music” tells us that he isn’t prepared to countenance the possibility that the phrase itself is very much up for discussion these days; even if you disagree that it should be, pretending that it’s not being talked about can be nobody’s idea of good enough.
Classical tradition ought to be a springboard for exploration, whereas Holloway’s assumption seems to be that only classical music people have a right to take a view on classical music as they define it, which is not how music operates. Had Holloway kept his ear to the ground, for instance, he’d have realised that writing about minimalism without mentioning figures such as Julius Eastman, Laurie Spiegel and Arthur Russell—who have all enjoyed a revival of interest over the past decade—is to tell an incomplete history, one dictated solely by the victors. Eastman was black and gay and could be found either singing Baroque oratorios with the New York Philharmonic or playing disco sets. He didn’t fit then into purist definitions of minimalism; now he queries the neat historical categories Holloway tries to draw.
Questions following on from that—about why only white manuscript composers get to have a “classical music”—flow through Alker’s book in various forms. It concerns itself precisely with the rockers, jazzers, noise merchants and electronic wizards who borrowed, sometimes without realising it, from classical tradition. In that sense, it acts as a useful corrective to Holloway, although it is let down by Alker’s tendency to trip over descriptions of compositional technique.
The basic premise of Everything We Do Is Music, though—that a healthy interchange of ideas between classical and pop has enriched both traditions—is an idea well worth exploring. Alker understands, unlike Holloway, that sound enjoys freedom of movement beyond any artificial boundaries placed around it. We read about Paul McCartney, in the early days of the Beatles, buying an LP of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s pioneering 1956 work Gesang der Jünglinge and learning how manipulating tape could make sound move in mysterious ways. We read, also, of how he took lessons in the random dispersal of material from Cage’s music and from the cut-up technique of William S Burroughs’s novel Nova Express—and elsewhere.
A fabulous photo from 1966 shows McCartney sitting front-row, looking like an overenthusiastic schoolboy, attending a lecture led by the leading Italian composer Luciano Berio—but then I stumbled over Alker’s description of McCartney watching, later that same year, the “communist and free improviser Cornelius Cardew play[ing] the prepared piano at the Royal College of Art”. Lying deep in the mythology of British free improvisation is indeed the story that, one night, McCartney came to hear the free improvisation group AMM play one of their regular gigs at the RCA. Cardew was certainly around AMM at the time, but was known more as a composer and was as likely to have been playing cello (and wasn’t yet a communist).
Alker’s book is packed with such factual guesstimates and gaffes. Erik Satie’s Vexations was not “840 variations on a one-minute theme”, it was a single theme repeated 840 times, while the technique Olivier Messiaen evolved—a rarefication of Schoenbergian 12-tone thinking—for his 1949 piano work Mode de valeurs et d’intensités was a very limited experiment and not, as Alker implies, the technique that sustained him in perpetuity.
Mispresenting Satie’s Vexations has the unfortunate effect that her ensuing discussion of John Cale—arriving in New York from Wales and performing in his near-namesake John Cage’s 19-hour performance of Vexations, in 1963—is built on wobbly foundations. Satie’s looping of the same music over and over helped embed into Cale’s consciousness a fresh sense of musical pacing. By the time he founded the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, this presented as an obsession with drones, which he sustained on his trusty amplified viola. In New York, Cale had also encountered the famously irascible, egomaniacal composer La Monte Young, fresh from California, whose drone-based pieces quivered and hovered like the colours in a Rothko, held in place by his intricate rethinking of how music might be tuned. A highlight of Alker’s book is the interview she managed to score with Young over Zoom, informative and hilarious by turns, ending with him proclaiming his own genius: “You can’t have power around me unless I give it to you, because… very few people know as much about music as me.”
Also well described is the lineage between Jean-Michel Jarre’s ambient electronic soundscapes and the earlier musique concrète of Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, music assembled from sounds recorded in the environment. Similarly, Alker makes the fair point that Pauline Oliveros was already dealing with ideas now considered “Cageian” before Cage.
Alker makes the fair point that Pauline Oliveros was already dealing with ideas now considered ‘Cageian’ before Cage
But a final section—tracing the degrees of separation between Steve Reich, The Orb’s house classic “Little Fluffy Clouds” and Brian Eno— navigates the book towards a disappointingly downbeat finale. Reich gives Alker a version of the same interview he’s been giving to every journalist (me included) for the past few decades; his mantra “good music is good music” is platitudinous at best.
At this point, Alker lashes out at Boulez. This is not, one suspects, because she’s spent hours in fevered-brow analysis of his Le Marteau sans maître or Pli selon pli and realised this music is not for her—which would be utterly fair enough—but simply because that’s how the consensus of current music journalism shakes out these days: post-1945 European composition destroyed everything, then Reich, Adams and their ilk rode to the rescue. Which is a disappointingly generic place for this book to end up. Nobody seems to realise that Reich has become exactly the sort of ideologue—going around telling people the music they shouldn’t write—that once he accused Boulez of being. Anyone who thinks that all postwar composition, including Stockhausen, György Ligeti and Luigi Nono, sounds uniformly the same, and displeasingly so, needs their ears testing.
Indeed, as people involved in music we all must test our ears constantly, far and wide outside our comfort zone, rooting our engagement in hard and concentrated listening, never merely following the pack by landing the same critical strokes. Holloway, writing about Charles Ives, lacks the purview to place him within the wider context of Jelly Roll Morton or Charles Mingus, where he becomes less of a historical outlier; Alker lacks the killer independence of thought that underlies all genuinely great music writing. Both are a problem, but where Holloway’s book is clunky dialup writing for the AI age, Alker at least plugs herself into something current.
