Books Seeds of Story Egalitarian Operas, Stolen Melodies, and Whalesong: Tom Service’s A History of the World in 50 Pieces Exploring the ways in which music both reflects and changes history and culture. By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on January 13, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Tom Service’s A History of the World in 50 Pieces: The Classical Music That Shapes Us, which dives into the intersections between music and the rest of history, from Australian songlines to opera to that ‘70s whalesong album. What It’s About 50 Pieces is sponsored by the BBC, and for both better and worse you can tell. Each piece gets a short explanation of its creation, its initial performance and reception, what makes it unique, and how its influence and play have developed since. The book is very specifically about pieces—that is, guidance (e.g., notation) for performing music that has both continuity and variation across performances. Pieces can be passed down through generations, across communities, and occasionally across species. What is held constant and what changes varies. Songlines are collaboration with and documentation of travel through a changing landscape; Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” is a set of directions; Julius Eastman’s “Stay on It” defines causal relationships between what each musician hears from the rest of the ensemble, and what they personally play next. Pieces are shaped by conformity with norms, as in the debates over whether polyphony is okay in Catholic sacred vocals, and by their violation, as in the post-World War II search for alternatives to fascism-tainted tradition. Service is particularly interested in the history of opera, but also makes a serious effort to expand both the definition of “classical” and membership in the canon. We start with Enheduanna, history’s first named author, and her hymns address both political goals (merging cults from recently-connected polities) and personal ones (legacy and recognition). Later we get Jewish cantillation, Hildegard von Bingen, a rare preserved song from a female troubadour, the patterns of change-ringing in church bells, a Haitian-French revolutionary and egalitarian opera, “Happy Birthday,” West Side Story, and of course Yoko Ono and those whales. Buy the Book A History of the World in 50 Pieces: The Classical Music That Shapes Us Tom Service Buy Book A History of the World in 50 Pieces: The Classical Music That Shapes Us Tom Service Buy this book from: AmazoniBooks A few of the pieces are notably connected to science and science fiction. Prince Mangkunegara’s “Kinds of Flowers” is recorded on Voyager’s Golden Record. It’s a cyclical piece typical of gamelan orchestras, and Service uses it to illustrate how different approaches to music represent different approaches to time. Breq in Ancillary Justice sings “L’homme armé,” an anonymous tune of military warning later incorporated into a mass by Josquin Desprez. Did Leckie’s protagonist know that it’s a song about war that later became used in an argument for spiritual peace? (I assume Leckie knew full well.) The recording and publicization of whalesong led to major whaling bans and helped push the growth of the environmental movement—nor was the timing of Star Trek IV a coincidence. 50 Pieces came up on one of my online communities, and I was excited enough about the contents to want to read it immediately. It benefits tremendously from reading it with your favorite music streaming service at hand, so you can sample the pieces and avoid the whole “dancing about architecture” problem. I’m very glad I read it, and feel inspired to include more influential musical pieces in my stories—and frustrated with its flaws. Service is a white Christian British guy, and admits from the start that his choices will be biased toward the Western and European, a bias that he actively and sometimes awkwardly works against. It’s also very opera-heavy, in a way that genre superfans will get a lot out of, but which I found frustrating relative to the larger range of classical forms that might have been included. More Jewish and Islamic music, paralleling and interacting with the development of Christian music! More musicals! Inevitably, if someone asks you to pick 50 pieces, many things will be left out, and you’re going to focus on what you know and love most. For some of Service’s deliberately atypical choices, I felt like he left off just when I was getting really interested, and I would’ve liked a few more pages unpacked from places where he devotes a scant paragraph to a piece’s social and political impacts. If this song fed into a social movement or the shape of a war, or was part of a big push to be as different from Wagner as possible, I want to learn more! I also could have used a bit less self-consciousness about his inclusion of female composers in particular (lots of “first woman to X”—sometimes where I’m pretty sure she was in fact the first X, period). At the same time, I enjoyed learning more about corners new to me: the role of troubadairitz, how Handel’s Messiah got people out of debtor’s prisons, the complicated political history of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad.” I also appreciated the use of Solomon Linda’s “Mbube” and Patty and Mildred Hill’s “Happy Birthday” to illustrate the deeply fraught relationship between composition, performance, and modern intellectual property regimes. Questioning list choices is the easy, beginner-level response to any “X best/most influential/whatever” list, but I do think that he should have included (1) Porgy and Bess, which marks a seminal connection between opera and musicals, and (2) Tallis’ Spem in Alium (the 40-Part Motet), which is an acme of both polyphonic music and the potential of live performance. If nothing else, the book introduced me to several excellent creators and pieces. John Luther Adams’ “Become Ocean” may become a highlight of my writing mixes whenever I’m working on something water-related. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories The Whales. If there’s one illustration of how dramatically art can change the world, it’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, listed in the table of contents as “Released by Roger Payne, 1970; cetacean creators from c. one million years ago—present day.” I had it on cassette, purchased from the racks at Earth House and listened to incessantly. What I didn’t know in the ’80s, because I was just coming into real political awareness, was that prior to Frank Wadlington’s initial recordings off Bermuda, most of the world thought of whales as silent, and anti-whaling movements as a weird fringe. (It doesn’t come up here, but I know from elsewhere that several Arctic marine mammal-hunting cultures knew full well, and were generally ignored.) The ’80s and ’90s were full of stories mourning the likely extinction of whales—see above, re: Star Trek IV. Yet today there are around 135,000 humpbacks in the ocean, and other species have experienced similarly dramatic recoveries. Much of that change in attitude is due to the shock of unexpected whalesong. Sometimes we don’t listen, even to humans—but catch us at the right angle, and sometimes we do. What kinds of songs, and what kinds of listening, will cause this kind of dramatic transformation in the future? What assumptions about unavoidable loss may we yet prove wrong? What Can Music Be? Every culture has assumptions about what music is for, what sounds belong in it, what patterns make sense, what instruments you can expect players to have available. One of the fascinating things about modern avant-garde classical is the questioning of these assumptions. Some composers change what’s specified in a score, focusing more on cross-musician relationships or environmental constraints than specific timed notes. Others play with “extended musical techniques” and the full range of what the human voice can do. Some pieces are unexpectedly long or short, or continue from the foundation of previous performances like a Pandemic Legacy game. Knowing what humans are doing now, and have done over the last several thousand years, can help writers give aliens, non-human animals, and far-future cultures music that would stand out at your local symphony orchestra. New Growth: What Else to Read Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day celebrates the value and meaning of live music, and the things you can’t get through a recording. You should also listen to Pinsker’s actual music, and read “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.” Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars is about competitive violin playing, selling your soul for musical legacy, and donuts. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem will not be everyone’s jam, but it includes math-based music from a scientific monastery and you can get the album. Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones column has been working though a song-by-song history of Billboard Number Ones, getting into the rock/pop industry and changes in how people encounter songs and changes in fashion, and really it is not entirely unlike 50 Pieces. Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History is on my TBR list, and focuses on the marginalized origins of popular music. I’ve also heard good things about Charles King’s Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. What music has shaped you? What would be on your list of influential pieces? Share in the comments![end-mark] The post Egalitarian Operas, Stolen Melodies, and Whalesong: Tom Service’s <i>A History of the World in 50 Pieces</i> appeared first on Reactor.