The recorded legacy of any composer reckoned to be canonical presents an interesting and revealing set of historical tensions. It has its own narrative, which unfolds in a complicated counterpoint with the story of the performing tradition(s) revealed in live performance. This double narrative is inflected by the changing view of the composer within academe, particularly in matters of performance practice, but not only that. Complicating the picture still further is the stubborn material persistence of the recorded medium itself. Live performances vanish the moment they are over, but LPs and CDs hang around for decades on music-lovers’ shelves, enforcing a loyalty to older ways of thinking and feeling, in critics as much as in ordinary listeners. This means that journals which offer critical reviews of recordings, particularly those aimed at musically sophisticated enthusiasts, are peculiarly revealing.

We are in one of those large buildings peculiar to the Western classical tradition known as concert halls. Around us are 1,500 or so people, and on stage is an army of musicians, around thirty of whom are playing a miscellany of instruments – woodwind, bowed strings, gleaming brass. With them is a choir of about the same number, four solo singers and – facing all these – the conductor. The music begins in a severely martial tone, the serious rat-a-tat of the kettledrum answered by a similar rhythm in the trumpets. The large body of strings play angry minor chords on strong beats, creating an atmosphere of implacable judgement and terror. Eventually the choir bursts in with the word ‘Kyrie’. This tells us that we are listening to a musical setting of that part of the Roman Catholic Mass which remains unchanged from day to day, the Ordinary. This one is by Joseph Haydn, from 1798, and is called the Nelson Mass.

ON one level this scenario offers something straightforwardly comprehensible. The music rouses emotions in a way that seems familiar for anyone with even a minimal acquaintance with tonal harmony, that unique invention of the West. We feel with ease the stern darkness of the prevailing key of D minor, the martial sound of drums and trumpets, and the joy created by the eventual move to the major key, as if these things were the voice of nature.

On the other hand there are things about the experience that do not seem natural at all. Some of these are institutional and social, such as the way audience feels obliged to sit in stillness and silence, even when moved. The performers’ nineteenth-century formal dress is equally striking. And the music, despite its familiar tonal grammar, is in many ways remote. The neatly balanced articulated phrases and the clean-edged sound-world with no Romantic or impressionistic haze – all this lends the music a period flavour. The music is rooted in a very specific style, the ‘Classical’, which flourished in Europe from around 1770 to around 1810.

This last fact raises a problem. The Classical style reflects a mere halfcentury in a tradition that has so far lasted more than a millennium. Within that millennium are innumerable other styles. Which of them is typical of classical music in the broader sense of the word? None.

THIS book is a team effort, driven by a shared desire to illuminate and celebrate the world's great classical traditions. Its ancestry as a piece of crosscultural musical analysis goes back a thousand years, to the ‘science of music’ of the medieval Arab theorists. Its European precursors include the sixteenthcentury Swiss theologian Jean de Léry, who notated antiphonal singing in Brazil, and the Moldavian polymath Prince Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) who was enslaved by the Ottomans in Istanbul, became a de facto Turkish composer, and created the first notation for Turkish makam; also Captain James Cook, who made detailed descriptions of the music and dance of Pacific islanders in 1784. Meanwhile Chinese music was being admiringly analysed by French Jesuit missionaries – Chinese theorists had beaten their European counterparts in the race to solve the mathematics of equal temperament – and other Frenchmen were investigating the music of the Arab world. While serving on Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, Guillaume-André Villoteau made studies of Arab folk and art music, before going on to contrast those with the music of Greece and Armenia; his theories were then contested by the French composer Francesco Salvador-Daniel, who after a twelve-year musical sojourn in Algeria concluded, among other things, that Arab and Greek modes were one and the same. Long before ‘ethnomusicology’ was born in academe, the game was well established.

In recent years the ethnomusicologists’ findings have been magisterially presented in two great publications: in the ten massive volumes of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, and scattered through the twenty-nine volumes of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. But our book is, we believe, the first panoptic survey of the world's classical musics (I explain in the Introduction why we have settled on that somewhat contentious adjective). Although much of its information may also be found in Grove and Garland – many of its writers were contributors to, or editors on, those projects – its tight focus permits presentation in a single volume, rather than scattered through a six-foot shelf of tomes.

As editor I am deeply indebted to my writers, who have patiently put their chapters through numerous drafts in pursuit of non-academic accessibility, while in no way traducing their (often very complicated) subject-matter. I must particularly thank Terry Miller, whose resourceful problem-solving assistance has extended far beyond his own signed contributions; also his colleague Andrew Shahriari, for additional information on Persian classical music.