Geoffrey Himes comes at this from a popular-music perspective which doesn't really contemplate the reasons why music history is taught the way it is, but this i

Geoffrey Himes comes at this from a popular-music perspective which doesn't really contemplate the reasons why music history is taught the way it is, but this is still an interesting idea. I say this as a classically-trained singer who studied music history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For Himes, the history of music doesn't seem to go back more than about 80 years or so. But the real history of course goes back many centuries further, even for notated "western" art music. So it would have been more interesting if he extended his idea further and tried to justify it based on an 800-year perspective, rather than 80 years or so.