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  • Howard Goodall's Big Bangs
  • Travis D. Stimeling
Howard Goodall's Big Bangs. DVD. Directed by David Jeffcock and Rupert Edwards. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2008, 2004. D4334. $29.99.

Award-winning British composer Howard Goodall has, over the course of more than a decade, become a public advocate for music education in Great Britain through his work as a television presenter and, since 2007, as the National Ambassador for Singing. Since 1996, he has written and presented six outstanding documentary series on Channel 4, three of which have been rebroadcast in the United States on the Ovation Network—Howard Goodall's Organ Works (1996), Howard Goodall's Choir Works (1998), and Howard Goodall's Big Bangs (2000). The five episodes of Howard [End Page 571] Goodall's Big Bangs examine "the great breakthroughs that European music has experienced in its extraordinary history" and their implications for subsequent music-making. "Notation" focuses on Guido of Arezzo, exploring how his use of a one-line staff, a clef, and solemnization syllables freed composers to write more complicated music, facilitated more accurate performances, and accelerated the transmission of music. The second episode, "Equal Temperament," offers a cursory survey of western tuning from Pythagoras to the Second Industrial Revolution. "Opera," the third episode, investigates the intersection of political power and sung drama from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo to John Adams's Nixon in China. The final two episodes consider the effects of the piano and recorded sound, respectively, exploring the dissonance between music as art and music as commodity by highlighting the impact of these technologies on composition and consumption.

The greatest strength of this series lies in Goodall's ability to present complicated and often controversial developments in western music to a lay audience. Rather than simply relying on narrative history, Goodall draws viewers into music history through evocative metaphors and demonstrations, such as a game of "Gregorian whispers" to explain the challenges of accurately transmitting plainchant in oral tradition and a stunning visual representation of the Pythagorean comma. Furthermore, Howard Goodall's Big Bangs spares no expense to make these developments tangible and to provoke discussion of important cross-cultural issues, transporting viewers to China in order to compare Peking opera to western opera and to Romania to examine the effects of equal temperament on Gypsy wedding music. The series does occasionally rely on hyperbole to maintain the viewer's attention or to elicit a reaction (as, in "Equal Temperament," when Goodall proclaims that "a single tuning system that could play all the keys did for music what the supermarket did for shopping, for better or worse"), betraying its origins as a television series. Moreover, the sheer breadth of these topics sometimes requires that important developments, such as the emergence of the virtuoso pianist, be glossed over or ignored altogether. Yet, despite these admittedly rare weaknesses, Howard Goodall's Big Bangs is a concise, accessible, and entertaining introduction to some of the most important musical developments of the past millennium and provides a wealth of material that can be easily assimilated, either as entire episodes or brief segments, into music appreciation and history courses. [End Page 572]

Travis D. Stimeling
Millikin University
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