A Concise History of Western Music Book

Eloquent, if at times confusing, writing. (I'll probably never finish the thing.)

The former, for example:
"Before recording, and before notation, there was only the now. Music could not be fixed. It was like the forest and the sea, always being renewed and always remaining the same. It could last only as long as memory, for memory was the only means of holding onto past time. For people familiar with memory, and uniquely dependent on it, the past is not strange: it is present, in the mind. Time is whole. Its measures are all in natural observation: the cycles of the day and year, the aging of people, animals, plants and things, the flowing of water or the burning down of candles."

For example, the latter:
"The purpose of notation, right into the fifteenth century, may well have been to record rather than to prescribe, though modern performers have had to understand it in the latter sense."