Christian Music: A Global History

Very comprehensive

Must read

Beautiful book - photos and drawings are very well done and narrative is comprehensive. If Christian music is your area of interest this is a wonderful book to have!

An excellent overview of Christian music globally. Topics are too brief for a scholar but just right for the interested reader.

As a university professor, I relied on the first edition of this book as my undergraduate course textbook. But this “expanded” second edition is a colossal disappointment. The first edition of the Downey was a large, full-color book printed on glossy paper that was absolutely filled with illustrations and graphics. You could tell that the publishing company put a lot of thought and effort into the presentation of the material. This second edition is a small, text-only book with a handful of small black-and-white etchings (!) scattered throughout. While the second edition does contain a few new chapters written by guest contributors, the sheer loss of the musical iconography from the first edition is a huge net loss.

This is clearly a textbook. Perhaps it is used in college or even high school as part of a “music appreciation” class. I purchased the book because I had a genuine interest in the evolution of “Christian” music over the last 2,000 years with an emphasis upon where this genre is today. It was a very informative book, though I sometimes felt things were not covered chronologically. It seemed we would move forward in time in one section and then backward in another; however, there probably is not a better way to handle the subject matter. Good read if you are interested in such subjects.