A musical offering

The oxford history of western music, 5 vols
By Richard Taruskin, Oxford, $185

Music is a difficult subject to write about. This book offers a narrative that covers a huge epoch — beginning with the invention of musical notation more than a thousand years ago to the end of the last century.

The word narrative used in the previous paragraph stands the need of some qualification in the context of this book. As Taruskin explicates most books that claim to be histories of Western music are no more than surveys that make little effort to explain why and how things happened as they did. This is Taruskin’s point of departure. He attempts to explain and thus offer what he calls “a true history’’.

The project is not without a price. The author abandons “coverage’’ as his most important task. There are many names and many pieces of famous music that go unmentioned here. The emphasis is on classical music, a genre that is almost always given the label elitist. But its advocates and its critics agree that the tradition is heterogeneous. One fundamental claim of these volumes — Taruskin declares it to be his “number-one postulate’’ — is that “the literate tradition of Western music is coherent at least insofar as it has a completed shape.’’ This coherence should not be misconstrued to mean that the history of western music is a single, seamless story.

A persistent theme of these volumes is to seek meaning in music. But as a historian, Taruskin asks not “what does it mean?’’ but “what has it meant?’’ The first question, he says, leads to futile speculation and dogmatic polemic; the second to historical illumination. He writes, “What it illuminates are the stakes, both ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’.’’

Musicologists, like musicians, writers and literary critics, are often haunted by what Harold Bloom (himself a literary critic) called the “anxiety of influence’’. The point is important because the realm of Western music is somewhat besotted with the idea of genius. The composer Bartok caught the opposite pulls when he commented that Kodaly’s Psalmus Hungaricus “could not have been written without Hungarian peasant music. (Neither, of course, could it have been written without Kodaly.)’’ Music, like all art, is the ensemble of agents and social relations that it takes to produce works of art. Taruskin’s great achievement is that he unwraps this ensemble to tell readers what it took to produce pieces of music. He combines, breathtakingly, brilliant musical analysis with a penetrating sense of the interaction of music with history, politics, literature, religion, culture and other forms of art. It is a work that will be difficult to excel.

The first volume opens with Gregorian chants and moves on to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, the growth of the music printing business, the emergence of the English madrigals, the impact of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation and the operas of Monteverdi. In volume 2, he looks at the concerto style of Vivaldi and offers his analysis of some of the works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The third volume covers the 19th century: the romantic transformation of opera, Franz Schubert, the revival of the symphony by Brahms, the operas of Wagner and Verdi and the rise of Paganini and Liszt. The last two volumes analyse the music of the early and the late 20th century respectively.