In any historical period or place, the musical style bears some relation to the lifestyle in general; this seems self-evident, even if the correlations are hard to pinpoint. Perhaps the point is clearest with popular music, where distinct (and distinctly different) worlds are evoked by rock, rap, and country music, to say nothing of earlier styles such as 1950s rhythm and blues or 1930s swing.

Older styles of music, too, relate to total cultural situations, and we will suggest some of these cultural connections to music of the various historical periods. In the Prelude chapters for each time period in this book, we sketch certain aspects of the culture, history, and lifestyle of the time. We then briefly outline the musical style and, wherever possible, suggest correlations. Then, in the chapters that follow, the musical style is examined in more detail through individual composers and individual pieces of music.

These individual pieces are our principal concern — not history, or culture, or concepts of musical style in the abstract. Learning the basic concepts of music (as we have tried to do in this unit) is useful only insofar as it focuses and sharpens the process of listening to actual music. This book is called Listen, and it rests on the belief that the love of music depends first and foremost on careful listening to particular pieces. But such listening never happens in a vacuum; for all of us it takes place in a vivid, experienced context of some kind. The general information presented here on history, culture, styles, and genres is intended to remake, in some small way, our own listening contexts. In this way it can play a role in our listening experiences.

As we come to the end of Unit I, after a lot of prose and a number of hasty musical excerpts, let’s listen to a whole composition at some length: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra — the young of all ages — by Benjamin Britten, who was the leading English composer of the twentieth century.