Around the middle of the third episode of For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, I caught myself doing something I don’t normally do while watching a YouTube video.
Event Context
Nine episodes, over 10 hours, four years in the making — and it opens not with a guitar or an ancient instrument but with the Big Bang. Was that a huge act of confidence on the part of its creators (the Cosmic Shambles Network, with British actor Charlotte Ritchie presenting) or pure madness? Having worked my way through six episodes, I think it’s a bit of both. Which is exactly why I highly recommend it.
Most music histories, however serious, start somewhere recognisable: a genre, decade, scene. This one starts with astrophysicists discussing the sound waves generated at the birth of the universe, before working down to the harder, more interesting question: Is music something we invented, or something we merely noticed, already lying around in nature?
British science writer Philip Ball is brought in, to try to pin down the exact threshold where sound becomes music. His answer is that this happens when sound becomes deliberate, organised, intended. That means a bird’s song, a whale’s call, even a dog’s response to a doorbell, all get pulled into the argument.
Episode Two moves from cosmology to Pythagoras, and this is where the real thesis starts to emerge: that music has never really been separable from mathematics; we’ve just chosen, at different points in history, to either notice or ignore that fact.
Then comes Episode Three, which is where the series stops being merely clever and starts moving you. It sends its crew into caves in Germany to look at the oldest known musical instruments on Earth (prehistoric flutes from about 40,000 years ago); then widens out into Egypt and Greece, where music wasn’t a leisure activity accessorising daily life but was woven into ritual, medicine, governance.
Episode Six is arguably the emotional spine of the series. It takes on the global reach of African rhythms without flinching from the brutality of how that reach was transmitted through slavery, and traced how blues, jazz, country and rock-and-roll all lead back through New Orleans. Talking to jazz saxophonist from New Orleans Donald Harrison Jr, and that city’s Hot 8 Brass Band, the series finally closes the loop it opened with the Big Bang: sound as physics, sound as mathematics, sound as ritual and, finally, sound as survival.
What is striking, watching all this as someone who has spent years writing about music, is how rarely anyone attempts to tell the whole story, and how much nerve it takes to do so.
Andrew Hickey’s podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs (2018), was a valiant effort, but doesn’t come close. Hickey built his history song by song, brick by brick, while For the Record works cosmologically, starting from first causes and building forward.
Player Focus
This episode made me think about the Kolkata I grew up in: a middle-class residential pocket in the south of the city, where Rabindra sangeet drifting from someone’s record player was simply the sound of the afternoon, no occasion required. That was every bit as load-bearing as ritual.
Episode Four is the most conventional entry so far: a study of instruments, specifically pianos and guitars, traced from ancient prototypes to their electronic descendants. But even here the framing holds — an instrument isn’t just a tool, it’s a fossil record of what a culture wanted sound to actually do.
Episode Five, on religion and the rise of opera and classical music, is where the geography really opens up. Not content to tell the familiar Vienna-and-Versailles story, it sets European classical music against Chinese and African traditions, and the differences are less about technique than what each culture decided music was for: devotion, state power, ancestral memory, all doing different jobs under the same broad label of “classical”. The episode’s best turn explores how deaf people experience music, which reframes everything the series has argued so far: if music can be felt through vibration and rhythm rather than heard, when does sound become music?
Team Analysis
Ted Gioia’s 2019 book Music: A Subversive History makes a kindred case to this series’ undercurrent — that official music history tends to get written by whoever won, and misses the outsiders who actually moved things forward — though Gioia tells the whole story seated in a chair, never venturing near the caves in Germany.
Alex Ross’s book on classical music, The Rest Is Noise (2007), looks almost timid in scope by comparison, limiting itself, as it does, to the 20th century.
There’s a whole science-of-music strand too — Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music (2006), Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia (2007) — that For the Record draws on directly.
Match Outlook
The title still calls itself “incomplete”, and I don’t think that’s false modesty. It’s the only honest thing a project of this scale could do.
Hours into it, they’ve barely reached the 1900s. Episode Seven, on hip hop’s origins and music’s darker political uses, is due to drop, and I’ll admit I’m looking forward to it a lot more than I thought I would four episodes ago, when I thought this was going to be a tidy, well-meaning primer.
It isn’t tidy. It’s delightfully messy. And it’s the first thing I’ve watched in a long time that made the history of music feel less like a subject and more like a live argument still raging.
(To reach out, email sanjoy.narayan@ gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
