A landmark music history made affordable, at last

Scanning through pre-publication lists ranks high among my guilt-free, no-cost pleasures. The abundance and scope of forthcoming written material, even viewed through the narrow aperture of a single field, never ceases to amaze me. So many folks with a subject to share, a point to make, an axe to grind. So many new books, emerging and flowing onwards in a torrential logorrhea.

And that's just in English. And just in "classical music" -- whatever the heck that term really means.

Item: a new biography of Sibelius from the fine scholar Glenda Dawn Goss arrives December 1.

Item: Mendelssohn expert par excellence R. Larry Todd brings us not one, but two books in his specialty, the first about Felix's sister Fanny Hensel (due November 25), the second already out on Mendelssohn's composition exercises.

We have a monograph on waspish pianist/conductor Hans von Bülow coming on October 28.

For devotées of subject matter focused down to nearly a geometric point, consider a book about the musical scoring of mad scenes in Shakespeare movies.

And that's just a teeny-tiny sample, a drop of water in the flood. Books, books, and more books on the way. How wonderful; how overwhelming.

Amongst the pre-pub announcements appears a five-volume set of inimitable importance to music lovers. This is the long-awaited paperback publication of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, a staggering feat of scholarship that deserves space on every listener's bookshelf, and not just for bragging rights, either. Formerly a $750.00 investment in hardcover, it may now be yours for a truly reasonable $153.88 from Amazon.

Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, finally in paperback
Photo: Oxford University Press

Taruskin's OHWM stands resolutely apart from most committee-managed, curriculum-dominated, PC-governed music history overviews. It is the work of a single scholar, a researcher of integrity and strong opinion who hasn't the slightest hesitation to speak his mind freely as he shepherds us through the rich pastures of the Western musical tradition. Nor does he feel compelled to embrace inclusiveness for its own sake; he leaves people out. (Ralph Vaughan Williams, for example.)

Scholars and reviewers have sometimes taken exception with some of Taruskin's stances, or his editorial decisions. However, the OHWM is neither all-comprehensive nor painstakingly middle-of-the-road. Despite the Oxford History of the title, this is a personal history of music more in the manner of past greats such as Charles Burney, and much less in the manner of college-bound music history texts such as the longterm industry standard by Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca.

More than anything, the OHWM is readable. Taruskin is a prose stylist of uncommon power and the 4000-page sweep of the work bristles with scintillating English. Just his chapter titles alone can bring a smile: The Class of 1685 as a header for the careers of Bach, Handel, Scarlatti; Getting Rid of Glue as an introduction to the early 20th century French composers; Pathos is Banned to describe Stravinsky and Neoclassicism.

From the very beginning of the work Taruskin can be counted upon to chomp down hard on the sound-byte approach to music history so often encountered in music appreciation texts or other history-lite affairs. He prods, pokes, digs and delves and avoids facile bromides. Consider the naming of "Gregorian" chant, so often crisply summed up as stemming from the influence of Pope Gregory I. Taruskin, on the other hand, aims higher, informing us that the Gregory story was

...a venerable legend that became attached to the Roman chant around the time of its advent into written history. It was then widely asserted that the entire musical legacy of the Roman church was the inspired creation of a single man, the sainted Pope Gregory I, who had reigned from 590 until his death in 604...The legend was a propaganda ploy contrived to persuade the northern churches that the Roman chant was better than theirs. As a divine creation, mediated through an inspired, canonized human vessel, the Roman chant would have the prestige it needed to triumph eventually over all local opposition. Gregory I was chosen as the mystical author of the chant, it is now thought, because many of the leading intellectual lights of the Carolingian court...were English monks who venerated St. Gregory as the greatest Christian missionary to England.

Volume 1: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, pgs. 6-7

That's one tiny example from the whole, needless to say -- but the idea of Gregorian as a Carolingian marketing blitz is sure to be unfamiliar to many readers. Fresh and intriguing observations are to be found throughout the OHWN. Consider the subject of Wagner's harmonic practices as witnessed by the Tristan chord:

But before making closer inspection of Wagner's mechanisms of arousal, a general comment will be in order. As the most influential composer of the later nineteenth century, Wagner had an effect on his progeny similar to Beethoven's. Just as a multitude of nineteenth-century composers in the "post-Beethoven period" claimed Beethoven as a father however antagonistic their positions, so did a multitude of turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century composers in the period post-Wagner claim descent from him. And just as Beethoven's contesting heirs made of him what they would, so did Wagner's. On the basis of the chromaticized harmony and the fluid modulatory schemes that we have observed in Götterdämmerung and will observe in Tristan, Wagner has been cast by many of his followers as the subverter or saboteur of tonal harmony.

He was anything but that. On the contrary, Wagner brought many aspects of traditional tonal practice to their technical and expressive zenith, always by working within the system.

Volume 3: The Nineteenth Century, pgs. 542-43

A caveat: readers without at least some musical training will find OHWM to be extremely rough sledding. This is a history of music, and to that end it does not shy away from careful theoretical analyses of selected pieces, complete with copious musical examples. For those with the musical training to follow along, the examples (and Taruskin's discussions) are likely to be the high points of their respective chapters; for those who do not read music comfortably (i.e., cannot play the examples on the keyboard or, better yet, simply hear them in their minds), substantial portions of the text will wind up being skipped.

I suppose if the OHWM were targeted for college curricula the publisher might have assembled a massive (!!!) CD set containing recordings of the examples. But the OHWM is neither a textbook nor a reference book. Written by a musician and intended for musicians, it expects a musically-literate readership.

I'm enough of a music history wonk to have invested in the six-volume hardcover edition and I have been repaid many times over by the wealth of material and food for thought contained within. The new five-volume paperback edition would appear to thread the sixth volume (master index and bibliography) throughout the whole -- at least judging from page counts. I note that Volume 1: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century runs 854 pages in hardcover; in the new paperback edition, the page count is 928.

No matter what the fate of the master index, the new affordable price should open the door for many more folks to explore this thrilling, engaging, sharp-witted, and exceptionally well-written achievement.