HGHMW Howard Goodall-How Music Works

Howard Goodall is a prolific presenter of documentaries. 'How Music Works' (HMW) is Goodall's foundation course. We covered the first episode (Words & Music: Lennon & McCartney) of 'Twentieth Century Greats' (TCG) earlier. Later we will cover 'Story of Music' (SOM). There are other Goodall goodies that may appear in future posts. We were ready to offer an opinion on HMW, but realized we were not qualified to do so except to say that it felt like the gates of musical understanding had been flung wide.

Fortunately, on his website, Goodall has assembled a variety of reviews: the 'Times' (3) and that would be London; the 'Observer Review'; the 'Independent on Sunday'; the 'Daily Telegraph'; the 'Guardian', which seems to spell its own name correctly these days; the 'London Evening Standard'; 'Time Out', as Wikipedia tartly notes, "By now its former radicalism has all but vanished"; the 'News of the World', at one time the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world but now a disgraced and disbanded scandal sheet that became such a scandal itself that proprietor-honcho Rupert Murdoch made it his sacrificial lamb. Is there not one among you who has a bad word to say about Goodall? Surely, somebody?

Best sentence in the reviews: "Goodall is an engaging host—clever, posh, unafraid to suddenly start singing Christian plainsong in the middle of a sentence, which is always the mark of a superior man." I am prepared to make a small wager that he passes the Billy Connolly tea-cozy test: "Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea-cozy, doesn't try it on." Explaining music is like wearing tea-cozies: we can all attempt it, but only the few can do it well. Nice one, Benny.