Sound Tracks

In Search of Lost Music tells the archaeological history of music and mankind's relationship with music, for the first time. Full of passion, intrigue, and astonishing insights, In Search of Lost Music is an enthralling alternative history of humanity in which the silences of the past are filled with a new and wonderful treasure hoard of sounds and voices.Told through 60 fascinating individual microhistories that read like detective stories - made up of fragments of instruments recovered from digs and under the sea, and the long-lost music itself reconstructed using visual clues and the most up-to-date technology - Graeme Lawson takes us on a grand tour of the world's greatest musical discoveries. Beginning with online streaming and popular music festivals, Lawson works backwards through time to the very origins of music and humankind itself.Music is integral to who and what we are. But what is music, really? Why do we love it and depend on it? Music, he concludes, at the end of this epic journey, is part of human DNA; not just in its conventional role as pastime, entertainment and religious expression but also, more profoundly, as a medium in which people commemorated their pasts and communicated with each other, negotiated and formed their identities, relationships and communities.