The mystery of music… from Mozart to Taylor Swift

Music is everywhere and always has been. It’s in the rhythm of our heartbeats and our breathing and our walking. It’s in the rising and falling of our speaking voices. When we exaggerate that rising and falling, it turns into song – and all of us sing, if only in the privacy of our own showers.

But why is music important to us? Why do our playlists somehow define us? That’s harder to say. Music is mysterious. Even in songs – which have words – it’s difficult to say what the music is “about”. Sometimes the words and music don’t match. The words might be despairing, while the music lifts us up. Bruce Springsteen’s songs are often like that. So are some of the hits of Abba. But it’s always the music that draws us to songs. And when we make proper contact with music – even the saddest sounding – what we feel is a kind of joy.

Why is that? My new book, The Shortest History of Music, attempts in part to answer that question.

From an infant’s first experimental sounds to the voice of Elvis – via Hildegard of Bingen, Beethoven and bebop – it sets out to understand what exactly music is, and why humans are irresistibly drawn to making it. Here are my ten pieces of music you should hear to understand the true joy of music and humanity.

• The Shortest History of Music by Andrew Ford (Old Street Publishing, £14.99) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25

Mozart: Symphony No 41 (Jupiter)

Mozart composed his last symphony in 1788. No one is quite sure who gave it the name “Jupiter” – certainly not Mozart – but at 35 to 40 minutes, it was the longest symphony he or anyone had composed. Before Jupiter, the finales of Classical symphonies tended to be lightweight affairs, but this one builds and builds. Mozart introduces theme after theme, passing them back and forth until, just before the end, the music gathers itself and sets out anew, bringing in each theme until all five are playing simultaneously. He’s showing off, of course, and there are few more joyful sounds in all Western music.

Louis Armstrong: Potato Head Blues

If it’s extrovert joy you’re after, there’s no going past Louis Armstrong’s recordings from the late 1920s with his so-called Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. Jazz had barely come of age when these virtuosos of the art entered the recording studio bursting with ideas. Really you could choose any track, but “Potato Head Blues” is a particular gem. Listen to Johnny Dodds’ frisky, astonishingly inventive clarinet as, right from the start, it cavorts like a dolphin round Satchmo’s trumpet.

The Beatles: Love Me Do

To start with, The Beatles were about you and me and him and her and love (Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You, Can’t Buy Me Love). And they worked quickly – their first album took them under ten hours to record. But a mere four years later, everything had changed. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded over 129 days and contained not a single love song. That album may have superior music and lyrics, but for sheer joy you have to go back to those early singles, and why not start with the first? Love Me Do is two-and-a-bit minutes of John Lennon begging. And he’s not alone. What was remarkable about The Beatles when they started was the harmonies. Pop songs were generally sung by just one singer. But while John might be pleading for love in this song, Paul is there as his wingman. And the harmonica (which seldom cropped up again in the Beatles’ songs) is the promise of pure, inexpert sex.

Beethoven: Ode to Joy from Symphony No 9

“All people will be brothers!” Beethoven’s ninth is the obvious place to look for musical joy. It’s there in the title of Schiller’s poem sung in the last movement. But even when words are involved it’s not always possible to say what music means. Whose joy are we celebrating? Who is this band of brothers? Today the “Ode to Joy” is the anthem of the European Union. Once it was the national anthem of Rhodesia. After Mao’s communists came to power in China, the symphony was regularly wheeled out for special occasions. In Nazi Germany, it was performed annually on Hitler’s birthday. When Berlin’s wall came down, Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance in that city reverting to the poet’s initial intention and replacing the word joy with freedom.

Rock-a-bye Baby

Music starts for most of us with a lullaby. It doesn’t have to be Rock-a-bye Baby – in fact the tune and the words don’t matter much. What matters is the command performance at the end of our childhood bed. As we listen to our parent’s voice at its most parental and soothing, sleep is made easier (if not inevitable). Importantly, lullabies are also work songs for parents. As with sea shanties and field hollers, they have two functions. The first is to help get the work done, so the rhythm must suit the work – the hauling of sails or the baling of cotton. In this case the work is getting the baby to sleep, so lullabies have a gently rocking rhythm. The other function is to make the singer feel better by heaping abuse on the taskmaster – the ship’s captain or the slave owner. With lullabies, the taskmaster is the baby. And so: “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Down will come baby, cradle and all.”

Thomas Tallis: Spem in alium

Composed in London sometime before 1570, Tallis’s grand design of a piece is often referred to simply as the “forty-part motet”. That’s because the music is composed for eight choirs of five voices, each of the 40 singers with their own independent part. Why that many? It’s possible the piece was a fortieth-birthday present for the composer’s patron, Queen Elizabeth I.

If so, and assuming she heard a performance, she could hardly have failed to be impressed by its sonic impact. It might be nearly 500 years old, but it still inspires awe, the music moving from one side of the assembled choristers to the other like a Mexican wave, then rolling back again, before all the voices sing together in an overwhelming wall of sound.

Hildegard of Bingen: O viridissima virga

“Hail to the greenest branch!” Going back another 400 years, the Abbess Hildegard was not only a composer, a natural scientist, a healer and a theologian, she also ran a Benedictine abbey. It all comes together in this song of joy she wrote for her nuns to sing. It’s about the Virgin Mary, but it’s also about greenness in the modern sense, about conserving the natural environment made by God. Her writings and teachings would be remarkable even without the music, but the multitalented composer wrote astonishing melodies. This one is never still as it twists and spreads like the tendrils of a vine, beguiling and inspiring singer and listener alike.

Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Music to riot by. That’s what happened on the opening night of this ballet at Paris’s Champs-Elysees theatre in May 1913. The audience’s reaction was prompted at least as much by Nijinsky’s choreography as by Stravinsky’s score, but the music was certainly daring – jagged and brutal – and the riot made its composer famous. Cat-calling started the moment the curtain went up and it’s anyone’s guess how much of the music was heard on the night.

At the end of the ballet, a sacrificial virgin dances herself to death to music of unprecedented savagery. It still sounds savage, more than a century later – even after free jazz, heavy metal, punk and gangsta rap. In Stravinsky’s telling, things also got pretty savage in the stalls, too, with punches starting to fly.

But what’s so distinctive about the final sacrificial dance is the rhythm. It’s not steady like a march or a waltz. The notes are grouped into tiny cells of different lengths, and the effect is jarring, convulsive and thrilling.

Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah

It’s hard to say what Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is about, partly because people don’t all sing the same verses (there are reputedly 80 of them to choose from). At the most obvious level it’s about sexual obsession with biblical references (David spying on Bathsheba, Delilah cutting Samson’s hair). But when it comes down to it, the great pleasure of the song is that it’s about itself: “It goes like this, the fourth the fifth / The minor fall the major lift”: and that’s what the music does, the fourth note of the scale heard on the word “fourth”, the fifth on “fifth”; a minor chord, followed by a major chord. There are not many songs that analyse themselves. Joyful? Maybe not. But it’s very satisfying.

Taylor Swift: Shake it off

I see those raised eyebrows. Bear with me. This selection can be considered a placeholder while you decide which song from your own childhood should go here. We all have them – probably dozens of them. Songs that stir in us the same feeling of joy we experienced the first time we heard them. Songs that are so familiar we recognise every nuance of the singer’s voice. Songs we carry around deep in the recesses of our memories, so that a chance encounter with one of them is like a validation of our existence. Mine include Ticket to Ride, Waterloo Sunset and The Mighty Quinn. My teenage daughter doesn’t know it yet but in years to come Shake it Off will be one of hers. What are yours?