‘It’s basically a celebration and evocation of richness, abundance’, said Robin Holloway, the composer of Seascape and Harvest, a lush, swirling half-hour orchestral tableaux premiered by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1988. It’s extravagant music, swirling with rich neo-Romantic harmonies and textures and large-scale surging melodies. Holloway’s Music’s Odyssey, a nearly 1,200-page voyage through musical history, is surely driven by similar impulses, with a sweep that belies its coy subtitle An Invitation to Western Classical Music.

Though Holloway’s music is less of a fixture on concert programmes these days, he still looms large over the British musical landscape. Teaching at Cambridge since 1975 and retiring in 2011, he has taught many of today’s leading musical voices (Thomas Adès, Judith Weir, Jonathan Dove, Huw Watkins, and George Benjamin, to name just a few). Holloway’s compositions are sensual, grounded in tonality, and rich with melody – his first book was on Debussy and Wagner – dwelling on the shore where Romanticism meets a tougher-edged modernist expressionism. Alongside his work as composer and teacher, he was a columnist for the Spectator for over two decades.

Music’s Odyssey is the culmination and extension of all this. Its title reflects the vastness of this undertaking – an heroic adventure through classical music’s major archipelagos, monsters, wonders and perils. There is a romantic feeling for music’s capacity for Wagnerian Verklärung – an ‘empire… infinitely renewable, dying again and again to be again and again reborn, transformed utterly yet paradoxically continuous’. We might also glean some identification with the wily, irreverent Homeric hero, playing the trickster and thumbing his nose at the musical gods. Both Hildegard von Bingen and Heinrich Schütz are dismissed as ‘bores’ in the opening 200 pages, which takes us from the earliest notated music up to Bach; Orlando di Lassus is knocked back with donnish tutorial banter (‘Alas, Lassus’). It’s enriched throughout by Holloway’s deliciously baroque idiolect: the word ‘fustian’, which I have never seen in the wild, appears ten times; Janáček is described as ‘chalorous’; there are several references to ‘Teutonia’, as if from the Marx Brothers.

The demolition jobs are often very funny, especially when you don’t agree. Italian modernist Luigi Nono descends into ‘dreamy meditative vacuity’; Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘sulky megalomania’; Boulez is the creator of ‘delicious decorative flim-flam’. The latter, like the most interesting critiques in the book, models the ambivalence that often drives Holloway’s frequently thought-provoking appraisals.

Holloway imagines the book not as a history but as a kind of guidebook or Baedeker, to be consumed piecemeal and capriciously. Before the music starts proper, we are given an autobiographical sketch, as if to signal the partiality of the enterprise, before a wonderfully lucid account of musical mechanics in ‘Some Basic Technicalities’. From then on, the book has a brisk, telegraphic style, with the musical architecture of key works set out in a blow-by-blow manner. To offer a snapshot, 20 of Bach’s cantatas are given this treatment, a particular highlight, as well as Holloway’s cherished Schumann and the late quartets of Beethoven.

It is best read in short bursts. As a reader, you sometimes yearn for the tour to stop for lunch, so you can get a bit more stuck in and hold Holloway’s feet to the fire on his summary judgements. The book is at its absolute finest when we are offered something more discursive. A chapter on Haydn is masterful, circumnavigating his music’s poles of attraction – as craftsman, innovator, joker, the ‘musician’s musician’ – and, in doing so, revealing how enigmatic and multifarious he remains. An assessment of Mozart draws a fine distinction between his work and that of his Classical peers, identifying all of his work as opera manqué, and more concerned with proportion and contrast than the musical arguments developed by his colleagues.

Holloway’s artistic sympathies shape the course of Music’s Odyssey. Much attention is lavished on the nexus of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler as leading exponents of the German symphonic tradition, with an extensive exploration of Richard Strauss as a high watermark of tone-poem and opera. It’s unsurprising that he is so fine in this territory – his Brahms orchestrations from the early 2000s suggest an intense sympathy for this repertoire’s expressive ebb-and-flow and psychological undercurrents. György Ligeti ‘stands out as the best there is and the best that could be done’ in a near-manifesto for the composer whose style is sensual, communicative and imaginative, balancing the demands of formal ingenuity with a language that beguiles its audience, aiming for aural pleasure above mere cleverness (a trait Holloway abhors in the avant-garde).

Even if there’s no claim staked for comprehensiveness, then some omissions might raise an eyebrow. Italian opera – one of the most important commercial and political forms in 19th-century music – gets less than 15 pages, as part of a section of odds-and-ends into which is bundled up as ‘The Non-Teutonic Nineteenth Century’. Spanish music, including the distinctive oeuvres of Manuel de Falla and Enrique Granados, features rather Napoleonically as a sub-category of ‘France’. And how, in its discussion of classical music in the 20th century, can there be no discussion of music’s place in film? John Williams, legatee of Stravinsky, Debussy, Mahler, as well as Copland, Ligeti, and Korngold, has arguably brought orchestral music of the European traditions to more people than any other individual; what about the journey he and others (Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann) took it on into cinema and the home?

For Holloway, the ‘western classical music’ of the title is ultimately in the notes on the page. It is, he insists, a ‘relatively unconnotational art’, made from ‘pitches, rhythms, durations, timbres, in all their infinite potential for organised combination’. It is fine to take such a stringent view, but ultimately the music is kept in a kind of cultural airlock, having no purchase on, nor finding itself informed by, the ferocious political, cultural or economic currents outside. What happens when the stuff between the staves hits the public? How are their meanings reshaped when they are swept into strange new contexts? That is part of music’s Odyssey, too.

Of course, the countless contexts in which musical works are performed makes this an impossible task, but it would be nice to get a sense of how and why these pieces can get shipwrecked or blown off course. A chapter on Shostakovich – who Holloway ‘habitually detests’ – brings the issue to a head. He is unable to reconcile the popularity of the oeuvre with what he sees as its fatal, internal mediocrity. It raises the question in turn of how musical meaning is made and how we understand the porous boundary between work and the world – and its relative absence in the book impoverishes our understanding of some key figures. Wagner, whose work is so overdetermined by metaphysics (let alone historical and political baggage), presents a special problem in this regard, sidestepped by Holloway: ‘I’d like to concentrate simply and briefly on the problems and solutions of Wagner the composer’, he writes, ‘rather than add to the hot and air and confusion of the Wagner the metaphysician.’ But given his own admission that Wagner ‘musicalises the extra-musical’, the endeavour may be doomed.

Much of Music’s Odyssey is wise and entertaining. As guide, Holloway is as variegated as the centuries of music he traverses – vexing, perplexing, entertaining, rueful, avuncular – but the book is best consumed, as his preface suggests, in smaller measures. His views are strong, bracing, highly aromatised, so best enjoyed therefore as a palate-blasting sharpener taken before an evening in a concert hall or diving into Spotify.

Tom Service’s prospectus couldn’t be more different. A History of the World in 50 Pieces comes in at around 300 pages, for a start. For Service, each work is a grain of sand in which we can see the world. It’s a very different kind of seminar to Holloway’s, with Service as a dynamic, caffeinated postdoctoral student searching and probing, more often asking questions than giving chapter-and-verse. Where Holloway turns wearily away from masterpieces like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Bach’s Matthew Passion, Service relishes the challenge of re-opening such musical cold cases, or turning an historical and critical eye on commonplaces like ‘Happy Birthday’ (a sketch of copyright law, publishing shenanigans, and the question of musical ubiquity and democracy – who owns a tune?).

His more sociological and philosophical bent, with its wide-ranging remit and pivots between high and low, belongs to a different sort of university campus to Holloway’s Cambridge. Quite literally: though best-known as a BBC broadcaster, Service studied at the Universities of York and Southampton, writing a PhD at the latter on the zany American experimentalist John Zorn, composer, saxophonist, producer and improviser, whose work straddles myriad fields (a fine avatar for the writer himself).

Service moves with alacrity – we cover just over three centuries between Monteverdi’s Orfeo and the 1913 premiere of Le Sacre du printemps in a mere 100 pages. Each episode, as a consequence, is highly energetic. Sometimes you wish Service had the space to slow down and show us the musical and technical sinews about which he is so expert, and which were showcased on his old Radio 3 series The Listening Service, one of the best set of programmes about classical music the BBC has ever made.

But ultimately it is the juicy social and political questions that come out of these pieces that fascinate Service. What lives do these works have out in the world, born in the maelstrom of their moments and riding the rapids of history thereafter? Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’s status as the apogee of human freedom and dignity is tested to destruction; unlike Holloway, he takes on the politics of Wagner, and piles up its contradictions with impressive concision: ‘a question, for some, and a wound for others, that can never be answered, and which will never be healed… its urgency only increases’. A chapter on Steve Reich’s Different Trains ponders how to witness the Holocaust through music.

The worldliness of Service’s musical storytelling is never hectoring or didactic – as a teacher he has strong views, but is interested in things that are ambivalent or uneasily heterogeneous. There is a continual wonder at the mysteries of sound and the fundamental properties of music, presented with beguiling clarity. A chapter on bells and bell-ringing underlines the poetry of the harmonic series (the complex overtones and partials that arise whenever a pitch is sounded – especially rich and strange in church bells). Chants from Judaism, medieval Christianity, and the nocturnal drones and filigrees of the Indian Malkauns Raga are all musics of foundational simplicity from which expressive marvels are spun.

There are also plenty of names, too, which do not crop up in Holloway’s story – often women. 17th-century French composer Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, for one, whose opera Céphale et Procris brings an unusually raw and desolate slant on the Lully-shaped conventions which generated it. Julius Eastman, whose underplayed role in American minimalism is only now coming into view, alongside the political, social, and sexual provocations his compositions used to blow open that style.

Especially well-represented are contemporary composers who do not appear in Holloway’s pantheon (or rogues’ gallery). Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence – her razor-sharp 2021 opera about a school shooting – is the final work in the book, and makes a powerful case for the dramaturgical and political innovations of her work, as well as spotlighting its connection to the past. Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros – visionary innovators in American music ploughing distinctive furrows to the usual triumvirate of Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich – also get fine excurses, with Oliveros the champion of ‘Deep Listening’. John Luther Adams is celebrated for creating music ‘that is an ecological phenomenon in its own right’, his orchestral soundscape Become Ocean is the soundtrack for the anthropocene.

It’s ambitious and robust in its grasp of musical works and their implications beyond the staves. These works are touchstones, pace Matthew Arnold and Holloway, for sure, but they are electrifying, and contact with them sets into motion powerful currents between listeners and musicians: ‘I believe all of the pieces in this book, and millions like them, have a potentially prophetic power.’, he writes. ‘They are the sounds of our future.’