A Student’s Guide to Music History,

by R.J. Stove;

Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007, US$8.

There ought to be a law against it: marketing a book titled Music History, with just 135 pages. Admittedly, that law could deferred, for the cover has the rest of the title in smaller print: A Student’s Guide to. Moreover, it is just one of fifteen tomes in a series issued by the resonantly named Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. And it is written by an Australian (born 1961 in Sydney) in Melbourne, R.J. Stove, who admits in a five-page preface that being invited to write it caused him “pleasure and terror indissolubly combined”.

To be conceited is permissible only for personages with a substantial amount of truth behind their conceits, and Robert Murray Helpmann (born in 1909 with just one final n, to which he added a second one around 1933, presumably to suggest a touch of internationality) is unquestionably one of them. This book about this distinguished multi-artist born in Mount Gambier traces his phenomenal rise on various steps of the cultural ladder. It outlines these steps pragmatically after the comprehensive research which gained Anna Bemrose her PhD in 2003.

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