Elizabeth Alker: Everything We Do is Music review - Prokofiev goes pop

Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.

In the 20th century that changed radically. New technologies offered almost unlimited increase in the sounds that could be conjured up on stage or in the studio. And conceptually, the range of sounds some considered musical expanded just as much, abolishing the boundary between music and noise, and even – thanks to John Cage – permitting the composer to propose no sounds at all.

Elizabeth Alker dives into this history with great verve. Her chapters generally pair a well-known track from a pop hit-maker with one or more pioneers of composition or technology, often linking to a scene or scenes where new sounds were mixed, and remixed, by experimentally-minded artists.

In this fashion her book begins in the UK with early experiments in tape manipulation after World War 2, their development by Victoria Derbyshire at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, and the way they fed into The Beatles’ studio productions with George Martin, along with ideas from John Cage and Stockhausen.

These are the first in an array of music-makers whose work she reports on and puts in context. That reporting includes attending to the music, described well enough to make you want to hear it immediately, interviewing the living artists, or visiting their working milieux and speaking with any surviving collaborators of those no longer around.

It’s an impressive effort, with the author equally at ease relating the origins of musique concrète in Paris in the 1950s, recounting the origins of the theremin or the Moog synthesiser, or interviewing superstars such as Paul McCartney or Jean-Michel Jarre.

The way some of the connections play out is exemplified in conversations with DJ Alex Paterson, and producer Martin Glover, AKA Youth, both once part of the late 1980s “chill-out ambient house group” the Orb. As a DJ, Paterson worked in the London club Heaven fashioning soundtracks that “completely altered the tempo and texture of British club music”, Alker suggests. She relates how he came across a recording of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s 1987 piece for electric guitar and tape Electric Counterpoint by the jazz guitar star Pat Metheny.

A sample of Metheny’s guitar riff soon underlay Orb’s most heard recording. Later, Paterson developed the use of sampled sounds and loops further, and made more music that interviewer and subject both aver was classically inspired. Alker reports them discussing “the way that loops – sampled extracts of existing records – are, really, just like a leitmotif in a symphony, or a canon… Or a ground bass in a Baroque chaconne or passacaglia”. It may not be the first comparison that comes to mind for pieces that supplemented techno in marathon ecstasy-fuelled club sessions, but it brings the music into the book’s narrative neatly.

All this is fascinating, and generally convincing, as she moves through a list of artists as varied as Edgar Varese, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Brian Eno, Can, Kraftwerk, Bootsy Collins and the Velvet Underground. However, as the chapters unfold, it becomes apparent that the framing narrative is a little too simple. The interactions between musicians, technologists, and other artists, are multifarious and wonderfully complex. Alker’s reporting, in fact, is good enough to belie her subtitle. It’s not that helpful to have to use the awkward term ‘classical’, where lack of a good alternative has led to a fairly nonsensical extension of the original meaning to denote any music that is formally composed, respected in concert halls, and perhaps, nowadays, academe. More importantly, the implied one-way traffic – classical “shaping” pop – doesn’t really fit. What Alker depicts is a wide range of creative artists, trying to respond to the triumphs and tragedies of the last century, and grabbing anything they can lay hands on to help them express their feelings. It's probably true, though, that the simpler framing may encourage fans of Donna Summer or Radiohead to read about Stockhausen, Penderecki, or Cage.

It also, I suppose, helps create order in what could be a difficult history to navigate. Alker’s openness to new sounds and the range of her enthusiasms is admirable, if slightly dazzling. Each chapter deals with a different acoustic world, and, like all good music books, her writing invites pausing to listen to new things, or revisit old ones with a different appreciation. It’s a book to keep on the shelf to cue new exploration when the stuff you have been listening to feels a little too predictable.

The description fits another excellent recent title from the same publisher, one that prompts a final acknowledgment for one of the conditions of this book’s excellence. Alker’s day job is as a presenter for BBC Radio 3, after stints with Radio 6 Music. It’s hard to imagine anywhere better for an ace communicator who is at home with a vast range of contemporary composition as well as the full gamut of pop genres to develop their work. Her book comes just a few years after fellow Radio 3 person Kate Molleson’s Sound Within Sound, which concerns 20th-century composers who deserve a wider hearing. The books go together very well, and it seems fair to take both as added benefits of the licence fee. Lisa Nandy, please note.

• Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop by Elizabeth Alker (Faber & Faber, £20)
• More book reviews on theartsdesk