A soundtrack to all of humanity

The Nazis adopted Ode to Joy. Happy Birthday hides a tale of greed. And Putin has turned Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony into a call to arms. Is this the fate of musical utopias?

- Tom Service

The idea was always a ludicrous one: to reduce millennia of human musical history into a book of 50 pieces of music. And yet that's the challenge I decided to take on. The most pressing question was: why? To which my answer was: the inevitable failures and gaps of the project are precisely where its interest lies.

The next concern was how. Called A History of the World in 50 Pieces, the book is not a digested history of music, nor a list of my favourite songs, performances or recordings. Instead, it’s centred on the definition of a “piece of music”. This is a democratic principle - a belief that works don’t belong only to their creators but are shared and reinterpreted by generations of musicians at distances of time, geography and technology, in ways their original composers could not imagine.

The point of a piece of music is not to exist in a definitive version but to be continually remade, so that the experience of the piece belongs to anyone who plays or hears it. This way of thinking throws up unexpected and serendipitous connections. Before writing the book, I wouldn't have thought there were resonances between Beethoven, Mildred and Patty Hill, and Shostakovich. Yet all have written music that reveals what happens when, whether by accident or design, you write tunes for the whole world.

Let’s take Beethoven first, and his Ninth (“Choral”) Symphony. The final movement is the moment when instrumental music alone cannot sustain the full power of Beethoven's message and ushers in the voices of Beethoven's chorus. The Ode to Joy is his theme of themes. It is a dream of universal compassion. The idea of “joy” may seem to be apolitical but, taken on its own, the melody can be attached to any ideology you want.