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Views development of Western classical music in an entirely new light
Reveals how Western popular and classical music were inter-related
Does justice to the Oriental influence on Western classical music

Roots of the Classical identifies and traces to their sources the patterns that make Western classical music unique, setting out the fundamental laws of melody and harmony, and sketching the development of tonality between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The author then focuses on the years 1770-1910, treating the Western music of this period - folk, popular, and classical - as a single, organically developing, interconnected unit in which the popular idiom was constantly feeding into 'serious' music, showing how the same patterns underlay music of all kinds.
Contents
I. The Melodic Foundations
1 The subtle mathematics of music
2 The Ramellian paradigm
3 The children's chant
4 The pentatonic scale
II. The Harmonic Revolution
5 Primitive harmony
6 The discovery of tonality
7 Rivals to tonality
8 Dissonance and discord
9 The evolution of tonality
III. The Melodic Counter-Revolution
10 The invention of folk-music
11 The cantilena style
12 The debt to the East
13 Drones and ostinatos
14 Melodic line
15 Sequences
16 Relatively diatonic modes
17 Chromatic modes and scales
18 The polka family
19 The early waltz
20 The later waltz
21 The waltz suite
22 The continuing Italian ascendancy
23 Melody
24 Harmony
25 Tonal counterpoint
26 Romantic nationalism
27 The symphonic tradition
28 Wagner and the vernacular
29 The roots of Modernism
30 The Modernist conspiracy
31 The late vernacular
32 The blues and early jazz