Origins of the Popular Style

Here for the first time is a book which analyses popular music from a musical as opposed to a sociological biographical or political point of view. Peter van der Merwe has made an extensive survey of Western popular music in all its forms - blues ragtime music hall waltzes marches parlour ballads folk music - uncovering the common musical language which unites these disparate styles. The book examines the split between `classical'' and`popular'' Western music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shedding light in the process on the `serious'' music of the time. With a wealth of musical illustrations ranging from Strauss waltzes to Mississippi blues and from the Middle Ages to the 1920s the author lays bare the tangled roots of the popular music of today in a book which is often provocative always readable and outstandingly comprehensive in its scope.