R. J. Stove's A Student's Guide to Music History is a concise account, written for the intelligent lay reader, of classical music's development from the early Middle Ages onwards. Beginning with a discussion of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century German nun and composer, and the origins of plainchant, Stove's narrative recounts the rise (and ever-increasing complexity) of harmony during the medieval world, the differences between secular and...