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Everything We Do is Music
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September 23, 2026
Everything We Do Is Music - a title borrowed from John Cage - is subtitled How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop, which doesn’t really do justice to the imaginative scope of this book and the complexity of the story it tells. It might be more accurate to say that it chronicles how, in the 20th century and beyond, music was transformed by new technology, the boundaries between ‘serious’ and popular music began to be eroded, and the definition of what music is was extended. Alker surveys an extraordinarily wide range of music and musicians - Edgar Varèse, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Erik Satie, Brian Eno, the Beatles, musique concrète, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, disco, Krzysztof Penderecki, Radiohead, La Monte Young, the Velvet Underground, funk, Pauline Oliveros, techno, No wave, Japanese ambient electronica, house, minimalism - and ‘joins the dots’ between them to reveal a complex web of interrelationships. It’s a dizzying celebration of musical innovation and experiment across genres and cultures.
Everything We Do… is strong on the historical context of all this experimentation. After 1945 musicians and other creative artists were keen to create a new future and challenge orthodoxy in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Composers like Stockhausen, and later on groups such as Kraftwerk and Can, were remaking German musical culture after the catastrophe of Nazism. The music of post-war Polish composers like Penderecki and Górecki was informed by the horrors of the wartime occupation, and, in Penderecki’s words, ‘forty-five years of living under a puppet government, when no politics was possible without asking Moscow’. The abrasive and dissonant sounds of the New York No Wave scene of the late 1970s seem like the natural product of a bankrupt, rundown and violent city. Japanese ambient music, or Kankyõ Ongaku, provided a much-needed counterbalance to the frenetic nature of daily life produced by the 1980s economic boom.
I have reservations about Alker’s use of the terms ‘classical’ and ‘pop’. Perhaps it’s convenient as an organising device, but it tends to reinforce a dualism which the musicians surveyed in this history were busy subverting. It even seems contrary to the spirit of her own book. I’m not sure how valid the term ‘classical music’ is in this context. Pierre Henry, Cage, Oliveros, Reich and Glass, for instance, were all formally trained composers, but ‘classical’? It might have been better to call everything experimental, from Tomorrow Never Knows to 4’33’’, and leave it at that. It is also clear from Alker’s text, despite the subtitle, that there was a reciprocal influence between the classical avant-garde and pop. The narrative she unfolds is slightly at odds with, and more fascinatingly knotty than, her structural framework. The Beatles utilised techniques from musique concrète, and Eno’s ambient music can be traced back to Cage, Oliveros and Satie, but Miles Davis and John Coltrane were among Steve Reich’s key influences, and the Philip Glass Ensemble had the volume and visceral impact of any rock group. Alker suggests that in America popular and classical music have always been ‘more closely entwined’ than in the European tradition as they ‘grew up together’. Although this is true, there is another and larger truth: classical composers always borrowed from folk music, and, in the first half of the 20th century, Ravel and Stravinsky, among others, had already been influenced by jazz.
These minor points aside, this is a terrific book which combines scholarship, a passion for music regardless of genre, and a wonderful open-mindedness about what music is. I learnt a lot and it has returned me to some old favourites with freshly educated ears, as well as introducing me to a lot of music I hadn’t heard. You can’t ask more than that from a book about music.
Everything We Do… is strong on the historical context of all this experimentation. After 1945 musicians and other creative artists were keen to create a new future and challenge orthodoxy in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Composers like Stockhausen, and later on groups such as Kraftwerk and Can, were remaking German musical culture after the catastrophe of Nazism. The music of post-war Polish composers like Penderecki and Górecki was informed by the horrors of the wartime occupation, and, in Penderecki’s words, ‘forty-five years of living under a puppet government, when no politics was possible without asking Moscow’. The abrasive and dissonant sounds of the New York No Wave scene of the late 1970s seem like the natural product of a bankrupt, rundown and violent city. Japanese ambient music, or Kankyõ Ongaku, provided a much-needed counterbalance to the frenetic nature of daily life produced by the 1980s economic boom.
I have reservations about Alker’s use of the terms ‘classical’ and ‘pop’. Perhaps it’s convenient as an organising device, but it tends to reinforce a dualism which the musicians surveyed in this history were busy subverting. It even seems contrary to the spirit of her own book. I’m not sure how valid the term ‘classical music’ is in this context. Pierre Henry, Cage, Oliveros, Reich and Glass, for instance, were all formally trained composers, but ‘classical’? It might have been better to call everything experimental, from Tomorrow Never Knows to 4’33’’, and leave it at that. It is also clear from Alker’s text, despite the subtitle, that there was a reciprocal influence between the classical avant-garde and pop. The narrative she unfolds is slightly at odds with, and more fascinatingly knotty than, her structural framework. The Beatles utilised techniques from musique concrète, and Eno’s ambient music can be traced back to Cage, Oliveros and Satie, but Miles Davis and John Coltrane were among Steve Reich’s key influences, and the Philip Glass Ensemble had the volume and visceral impact of any rock group. Alker suggests that in America popular and classical music have always been ‘more closely entwined’ than in the European tradition as they ‘grew up together’. Although this is true, there is another and larger truth: classical composers always borrowed from folk music, and, in the first half of the 20th century, Ravel and Stravinsky, among others, had already been influenced by jazz.
These minor points aside, this is a terrific book which combines scholarship, a passion for music regardless of genre, and a wonderful open-mindedness about what music is. I learnt a lot and it has returned me to some old favourites with freshly educated ears, as well as introducing me to a lot of music I hadn’t heard. You can’t ask more than that from a book about music.
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