Early on in this vast book the composer Robin Holloway advises his readers that Music’s Odyssey is a work to dip into rather than to read cover to cover. Your reviewer, being diligent, ignored him. The subtitle announces it – and the author emphasises the point – as an ‘invitation’ to Western classical music, which suggests it is designed to draw in people who wish to learn about this superlative aspect of our culture. 

However, it is clear only a few pages in, when the author attempts to explain various technical terms, that unless the reader already knows something about music they will struggle to keep up. I can read music, used to play a couple of instruments and have a lifelong interest in the classical canon, but I soon felt out of my depth. Though Holloway knows an enormous amount about music, he expresses himself poorly. His style is eccentric: the book sometimes reads like a succession of telegrams, or as if it were written under the influence of Finnegans Wake. 

A long roll call of composers appears throughout the work, which is arranged broadly chronologically and subdivided by nationality (‘Teutons’, the French, Russians and Italians). Major figures get whole sections to themselves (Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Wagner, for example). The reader is treated to an exhibition of Holloway’s taste,