Published by Yale, this is a fascinating and original exploration of the influence of the newly popular guitar on the Romantics and on culture in the early C19th.
The 1970s NME critic got bored with pop and discovered that the most radical music of all was classical. This is a personal and entertainingly idiosyncratic history of music.
The latest in Yale's Musical Instrument series winds from ancient animal horns to the lurs of Bronze Age Denmark - and thence eventually to its modern brassy descendants.