Earth Dances: Music in search of the primitive

All music is a synthesis of intellectual design and bodily urge. The human soul cannot make do with dancing alone - it will inevitably seek more fantastic musical designs, more complex patterns, more rarefied sounds. Equally, when the intellect dominates for too long, we listen out for music we can tap our feet to, something we can go home humming . . .

Minimalism, savagery, the raw and the cooked, the primal and the pre-verbal, Elvis's hips, The Rite of Spring . . . Earth Dances is an original investigation of how music and primitivism intersect - a dazzling journey through music and culture.

With alternating chapters of criticism and interviews, including with Liza Lim and Brian Eno, author and broadcaster Andrew Ford explores the relationship between primal forms of music and the most refined examples of the art - between passion and control. He looks at the voice, the drum, the drone and the dance, at 'music that is in touch with something fundamental in our existence'.