This book makes me sad.
Naughtie is trying to reach a wide audience. Of necessity, and wisely, he establishes connections between the kind of music that all his readers are familiar with from their daily listening, and some kinds of music with which they may not be familiar. For example, he points out that Stockhausen was an idol to the Beatles, and that Philip Glass collaborated with David Bowie. Good points.
I also admire the breadth of Naughtie's world, which includes not only Stockhausen and Glass, but also Boulez and Reich, Nono and Gorecki. He damns no one because of their style.
But, perhaps because it aims at a mass market, the book gives the impression that popularity is a virtue, and lack of mass popularity is an indicator that a type of music will not last.
This is a slippery slope. Once we start to equate popularity with value, it's hard to defend an idea of the quality of an art.
(I know a man who insists that McDonald's is a high-quality restaurant just because it is so popular. By the same token he feels that Puccini was the greatest composer ever.)
Naughtie feels sure, for example, that John Adams' operas will last forever, because they resonate with some of today's audiences. Why not say the same about the film scores of Michael Nyman and John Williams? More people have heard, and therefore enjoyed, their music than Adams', and it is very clever. And if we open the door that far, why not include Andrew Lloyd Webber, who is more popular still?
Current popularity has been shown, in every generation, to be a rather useless indicator of long-term value.
Leonard Bernstein was very much in tune with the popular music of his time, but most people don't care to listen to his symphonies any more. With their bongos and big-band sounds, they resemble forties and fifties fashions.
I've heard many works by young European composers, and very few of them are minimalists. The fashion for mind-numbing repetition has already passed, in Europe at least (where audiences are more aware of the alternatives on offer). Adams and his type were not the culmination of history, after all.
Perhaps because of his desire to examine composers whose names are familar to British audiences, Naughtie omits a great many whom I think deserve to be mentioned on grounds of the quality of their contributions. Thinking for the moment only of America, the following composers are not to be found in the index:
This is a roll-call of huge imaginations, with great influence over subsequent generations of composers. Yet the readers of this book won't know they existed.
And that makes me sad.