Andrew Ford

Andrew Ford is an Australian composer, musicologist and radio producer who writes about the history, aesthetics and science of music with rare fluency. His pocket classic The Shortest History of Music traces the whole tangled story of music from ancient ritual to streaming in a few hundred pages.

Ford has worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for decades, presenting programs on classical and new music, and composes his own respected works. His writing makes the deep history of harmony, notation and invention vivid for the general reader while remaining serious — a rare achievement in musicology.