From Music to Sound presents itself as a very ambitious book: one that attempts to establish how sound as a material and central concern of contemporary Western art music composition emerged from a number of schools, approaches, and experiments that converged on a consensus regarding the centrality of sound in composition. The book is based on a previous publication in French from 2013, although it is in fact not just a translationFootnote ¹ but also a revision of the original version. In the introduction, Solomos notes differences from the initial publication, including pointing out that he has updated the references in the text for currency, and that he has taken the opportunity to respond to some of the feedback from his French readers regarding omissions (11). However, in addition, he describes some reduction in scope, which is the result of lack of space. One imagines that he must hope that these comments also guard against some of the limitations of the book – which in a sense they do – but they also emphasize the somewhat impossible nature of the task: the histories and ideas addressed by this book are of great importance to the understanding of the evolution of contemporary musical approaches through the twentieth century, but from the outset the question is raised as to whether a book such as this can ever be comprehensive? Solomos does not claim that it can be, and does acknowledge the boundaries and limitations of the approach that he has taken in the introduction.

The book is supported by a set of online examples that provide further illustration of some of the points made beyond the printed score extracts. This perhaps demonstrates the difficulty of trying to combine more interactive formats with traditional academic publishing. The online archive does not prove easy to access, requiring many stages of online verification before the examples are eventually downloaded. The multimedia presentation led me to expect audio examples, or something equally not printable, but in fact these are mostly further score examples. The resultant need to compare these – which are all differently formatted and presented as a list of files – to a list at the end of each chapter proved more frustrating than enlightening. Their inclusion seems almost certainly the result of the reduction in scope mentioned previously, but it is hard to discern what the convoluted process of accessing these files adds to the understanding of the ideas in the book; if anything this directs the reader's attention away from the argument.

The book itself is split into six over-arching sections: timbre, noise, listening (to sounds), immersion (in sound), composing sound, and sound-space. Indeed, each of these could be the topic of a monograph in and of themselves and, as a result, there is certainly a sense of the selective approach to the information, which must have been challenging when compiling the book: lists of composers’ names and their compositions pass by very quickly on multiple occasions. Within each chapter, many subheadings divide the topic into various overviews of – in some cases – time periods, and – in others – the approaches of individual composers or concepts; each of these is therefore necessarily quite short. As a structure, in places this is positive and in others it also creates challenges for the reader in following the many changes of direction. Naturally, a lot of ground is covered by moving through the material in this way, and the reader has a sense of the variety within the histories explored. In presenting a picture of the movement towards the centrality of sound in art music practice, the breadth and reach of this approach serves to support the book's main premise. However, the brevity that this also necessitates means that without existing contextual knowledge of these composers and musical movements it can be difficult to draw all the threads together.

As an example, Russolo's 1913 manifesto, The Art of Noises, is dealt with in the context of a discussion of how this was interpreted as an attempt ‘to get away from music’ (55). From here, the author moves into a discussion of Varèse and the term ‘organized sound’ as an alternative to ‘music’ in the description of work that combines noise, ‘concrete’ sounds and musical sounds (59). From there, the narrative moves to Pierre Schaeffer who is described as owing an unacknowledged debt to Russolo, and who ‘sought to subject noises to musical sounds’ (64). Next, noise as either human or natural is explored, with the author concluding that when considering their role in the music of Iannis Xenakis, one may claim: ‘[n]oises are the world of Nature; owing to this aesthetic project, their musical quality lies precisely in their own quality as noises, which bears the trace of their natural origin’ (65). Each of these lines of enquiry is itself equally interesting. Although only briefly outlined and introduced, potentially different narratives from those found in many overviews of twentieth-century music for the understanding of the work of many of these composers are being proposed. However, the speed at which these pass also risks reducing multiple and competing strands of twentieth-century music practice to a set of options for dealing with noise and sound: noise in opposition to music; noise and music combined; noise subjected to musical form. It seems to be inferred and assumed that these positions must absolutely come from the same origins, something that is made problematic even in the text: Solomos refers to Xenakis's dionysian aesthetics without describing the implications of this claim for other aesthetic narratives that may be applied to the music (65).Footnote ² Indeed, the ‘naturalness’ of recordings of nature is an assumption here, perhaps contrasted with the fact that many of the recorded noises described earlier in this section originate from human activity or machinery, but without an acknowledgement of the similarities between the two categories. Again, this pace and breadth has been acknowledged by Solomos who writes that artistic practices that draw on these histories of sound are, ‘manifold, heterogenous and varied, evolving at high speed’ (3), and one could not argue that this impression does not come across in the book. However, where readers do not bring the context of existing scholarship of this music to the text, they may miss some of the more interesting and insightful comments made by Solomos as they pass by.

This is not to say that the book is not clearly written from a position of a very deep and detailed understanding of the musics discussed. For example, the discussion of spectralism is insightful and contains details that do not just describe the desired effect of the music but how, practically, it was achieved (37–40). Further, the conclusion that ‘spectrum-timbre’ is in fact ‘a renewal of orchestration’ and a matter of ‘increasingly advanced musical exploration’ that is – not yet – of noise and sound makes a helpful distinction upon which not only this but future analyses might be based (43). Such helpful approaches can be found throughout the book. For example, Solomos presents a number of what could be thought to be useful methodological tools in the approach to this and to other musics. These include the concept of a ‘map of timbres’ (18–19), a ‘delineation of musical noises’ (48), and a visualization of Schaeffer's four types of listening (92), all of which would be of benefit to students wishing to apply the same approaches to music not covered here.

Despite the obvious difficulties of discussing the range of music covered in this book, the scope of the music considered is also one of its main limitations. The author acknowledges that many links could be made between the musics and composers described – of which almost all are drawn from art music traditions – and, for example, popular musics or radio. However, this acknowledgement notwithstanding, the importance of these other musics, traditions and approaches to some of the ideas and events that are described is somewhat downplayed. Both popular music and radio are acknowledged but their omission from more detailed discussion is explained by the author for two reasons: the ‘musicological’ rather than purely historical focus of the book, and lack of space. While the second reason, as mentioned previously, is an understandable limitation of such a broad approach, the first is not necessarily one that can be accepted without question. The author is keen to show that, although histories of sound are explored in the book, he does not consider himself a historian but rather a musicologist; however, it is not the case that musicology does not deal with history. Nor is it the case that this book deals only with themes of music analysis or criticism; it does, in fact, present histories, and even describes them as such (238).Footnote ³ Moreover, many histories of this period have already been written and while Solomos offers some interesting and alternative narratives to some of the accepted lineages of the composers and works discussed, such comparisons are never explicitly made.

Beyond these points, the reader might consider the ‘alternative’ histories of electronic music, for example, that are already being offered and explored and that have taken in much of the same repertoire that Solomos covers.Footnote ⁴ Mooney et al. note in their approach that, ‘all history is contingent: no account can be complete in every detail; none can accommodate all viewpoints, or interrogate all sources’.Footnote ⁵ While this is, indeed, my criticism of this book it does not come from an expectation of completism but rather a frustration that these obvious limitations do not seem to be acknowledged in the text but are brushed aside in the introduction. To give a limited number of examples, a brief passage deals with ‘[i]ndustrial music, metal, rap, New York Noise, radical improvisation’ (72–4). It is not only the lack of space given to this long list of varied, different and important genres that the reader may regret, but the lack of consideration given to the well-documented links between these non-classical musics and the art music genres and composers mentioned elsewhere. Free Jazz is similarly relegated to a couple of pages (66–7), while Coltrane is mentioned only in relation to the link between music and spirituality, the discussion of which quickly moves away from his work to that of Stockhausen (133). The composer Halim El-Dabh, now widely recognized as a key pioneer in electronic music, is mentioned only once as part of a list of composers who worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre (184). The great degree of overlap between experimental work in radio studios and music of the same genres presented here does not come into consideration.

Therefore, while an often-interesting account of the musics that are analysed is presented, and while often those musics are contextualized in a much wider history of the development of sound-based approaches to composition, one cannot but help feel that the selective focus of this work might have been better framed. It goes without saying that not every composer or genre can be included, and that some will always be left out, but this book verges on appearing to claim that all the ideas that are explored here both originated in Western Art Music and have found their most profound expression in that music as well. Those ‘alternative’ histories – particularly regarding popular music and the development of sound technologies in radio studios – have already begun to detail how non-classical musics clearly influenced art musics as much, if not more, than the other way around. Thus, one might return to Solomos's own comment that timbral expansion in music – for example, in spectral composition – remained a musical problem and not one of only sound because of its reliance and focus on orchestration. In the foreword to From Music to Sound, Simon Emmerson writes that it is, ‘in crossing, combining and converging that these histories have ended up provoking the change of paradigm that we have steadily witnessed, as we go from a musical culture centred on notes to a culture of sound’ (ix, original emphasis). However, the reader may notice that until the chapter on sound-space is reached, a large number of the examples are in fact drawn from music that does have notes, either present in score-based notation or as precisely tuned electronic pitches, even where unpitched sounds and noises are also present in the same pieces. Rather than a movement from one to the other, an integration of the two is a more likely conclusion.

The conclusions to the book deal with such questions of generalizability and in fact mention even further examples of disciplines and practices that could be studied or included. Here, again, the author touches on heterogeneity within the topic and the musics presented, adding ‘sound is marked by its properties of emergence and by its complexity’ (241). As a result, perhaps satisfactory conclusions might not be reached: a corollary of the previous observation of the persistence of notes and notation through the book is that sound alone is not necessarily central to all the musics presented here, and many of these approaches have more differences between them than they have connections with each other. Therefore, the book ends not with a series of conclusions but with a long series of quotations from artists, composers, and authors. For example, Agostino Di Scipio writes, ‘sound is never truly object’ (2016, quoted at 240), and Xenakis, ‘music is not a language’ (2008, quoted at 241). Finally, a conclusion is reached that music and sound co-exist in music of the present and the past, should one wish to look for this co-existence. Perhaps, then, this claim might have been better made in the introduction: rather than a history of movement from the one to the other, the author has presented a series of approaches for dealing with this co-existence in art musics of many types; itself a valuable contribution.

Despite the shortcomings that I see, this book ought to be of interest in particular to students who want to gain an overview of developments in the musics of the twentieth century that are mentioned, and the practices of the composers who are analysed. It would be a good companion to courses on the topic, especially where students will be engaging with other critical texts and therefore where this book might offer them a scaffolding approach to the history of art music and some electronic musics of this period. In this respect it should be treated as an overview text rather than a series of in-depth analyses or a historiography of the time period. Its limitations, however, may also restrict its interest to the more informed reader who is already knowledgeable about the approaches and composers discussed. Conversely, the book could also be of interest to the general reader who wants to gain an overview of the topic and to briefly understand these compositional styles and composers in relation to one another: the accessibility of the analytical detail that has been presented is indeed one of the work's strengths.

Whether or not the author did indeed intend this work to be read as a ‘history’, that is how it is presented and how it comes across to the reader. Therefore, a necessary criticism of this history is that while it offers many valuable insights in the relation of the many twentieth-century musics to each other and to ideas of noise and sound, it also replicates to a large extent historical narratives about the centrality of these composers and musics that have been critiqued and questioned over the last twenty years. The problem is one of framing: the claims made for the study are too broad and comprehensive and therefore invite this critique. A more modest framing: of the connections between various composers and ideas in the twentieth century around the topic of sound might describe the contents better. This is not to say that I do not appreciate the task that has been undertaken, its breadth and its difficulty. If only through acknowledging this to a greater extent – and its attendant limitations – might these arguments in fact be made more persuasively. But therefore, and despite this, I think that Solomos's project is of value to the scholarship on contemporary music of this type and offers many points of interest, insight, and interconnections that may be drawn out of his narrative.