Youn Ling:

>Can anyone recommend books on Music History? I would like to have a
>comprehensive, authoritative and detailed one.  It's the best to have
>critique in it.

A standard book is A History of Western Music, by Donald Jay Grout, which
has gone through five editions, the latest with Claude V.  Palisca as
second author.  It is best for earlier rather than more recent music and,
as the title suggests, it deals only with Western music, but it is an
excellent one volume work.

>I've found two books from Amazon.com.  One is "Evening with the Orchestra"
>by Berlioz.  The other is "Vintage Guide to Classical Music" by Jan
>Swafford.  Any ideas about these books?

The Berlioz is a classic and quite interesting.  Swafford is an excellent
writer on music, though I don't know this particular book.

Jim Tobin