(Oxford University Press, £280)
Writing a history of music, even a history of western music, begs some big questions. Is there such a unified entity as "music" of which a history can be written, or is it not the case that in the west there have been several musics: folk, dance, "high art" (or classical), jazz, pop, to name just a few?
Richard Taruskin states plainly in his introduction that his book is about the classical music composed in Europe and America. For the most part it excludes discussion of orally transmitted folk music, except as it impinges on high art, and jazz and pop music except as it influences some 20th-century classical styles.
These, however, are easy to exclude, as they are tangential to a history of classical music. Harder to explain, and more contentious, is the exclusion of composers such as Villa Lobos (western does not include South American), Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius (or that much English), Franz Berwald, Vilhelm Stenhammer (Scandinavian), and Alfons Diepenbrock (Dutch), and even Marin Marais, Antoine Forqueray, Johann Schenk and John Jenkins, among others. Each of these is undeniably a western classical composer, and, as such, has a right to inclusion. But it seems that composers, and works, are included not so much because of intrinsic merit or popularity as for being part of an implied canonic history. A History of Western Music is not complete or accurately titled without them, but a book that included them would be impossibly large.
Taruskin's agenda is conservative, even Hegelian, and implies an evolution of music from the 6th century AD to the present. Key works and composers are included that have in some way contributed to music's progression.
Much of the first 100 pages is devoted to the evolution of Gregorian chant. Rightly, Taruskin cites the major authorities on the subject, Richard Crocker and David Hiley, both of whom have demonstrated that it has little, or more likely, nothing to do with Pope Gregory. First, liturgical chant existed in many places and repertoires before Gregory's pontificate (c600 AD), and his eponymous association with chant did not start until the 9th century. It was a careful piece of historical revisionism by the Roman church to give its particular chant repertoire a historic status and supremacy. Given these scholarly developments, it seems perverse to continue to refer to the liturgical chant of the Roman Catholic church as "Gregorian." The label distorts history as much as calling Wagner "Victorian" or even Palestrina "Renaissance." Naming things is part of defining them, and although Taruskin provides a good summary of the complex, and often obscure, history of western plainchant, it is a pity he did not go the whole way and drop the name "Gregorian" as part of its definition.
Notwithstanding such caveats, it must be stated that this is a wonderful book, or six books. I avidly turned the pages to find what he had to say about subjects as varied as minimalism, romanticism or 14th-century polyphony. For musicians—those who can read music in their heads—the book includes fascinating musical analysis. Even for those unable to read the examples, there is more than enough in the books. Taruskin has a remarkable ability to summarise complex issues in telling phrases and paragraphs and to draw apt and illuminating comparisons.
Although many of Taruskin's most illustrious predecessors delved back into the distant, sometimes mythological, past of music, in most cases their real perspective was determined by the present. Some cited the hand of God in the progress of music (Calvisius, Of the Origin and Progress of Music, 1600), some concentrated on the practicalities of music-making (Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, 1615). Closer to the heart of Taruskin is Charles Burney's History of Music, which began appearing in 1766. Despite Burney's conscientious collection of original manuscripts and sources on his travels in Europe, his point of view was determinedly 18th century, and his judgements of past music, such as the eccentricities he found in Purcell's harmonies, resulted from an unquestioned, English Enlightenment assumption that his contemporary musical values were the right ones for all periods. Thus while his judgements on pre-17th century music display anachronistic prejudices (fascinating in themselves), his real merit as a historian is the detail he lavishes on his own day. Of the 1,869 pages of his four-volume history, 253 are devoted to opera in England in the early 18th century (13.5 per cent of the whole history), music which Burney had either performed, heard or learned about from first-hand reports. His history is therefore most useful as a chronicle of his times. Conversely, in the work that Taruskin cites as his spiritual forebear, Paul Henry Lang's Music in Western Civilization (1941), 40 out of 1,030 pages are devoted to the 20th century, just under a meagre 4 per cent. The difference reveals the relative importance that each felt about the music of his own century. Burney thought that everything had inexorably been moving to the best of ages, his own. Lang clearly felt that the best was over and that music was in Spenglerian decline.
Taruskin is much more in the spirit of Burney. His five volumes of text are divided unusually for a modern history: volume one, c600 (the earliest notation) to 1600; volume two, 17th and 18th centuries; volume three, the 19th century; volume four, the early 20th century; volume five, the late 20th century. He all but ignores music that is not written down, unlike Burney and Lang who devoted as much space to ancient Greece and Byzantium as he does to the present age .
Taruskin's volumes blossom as they progress. He is the doyen of Russian music scholars, particularly of the 19th and 20th centuries. This non-German perspective alerts him to the danger of making the 19th century overdominated either by the music or attitudes of the Germans, who with some justification felt they were top musical dogs between Beethoven and the first world war. Schoenberg is once supposed to have said that after the evolution of the 12-tone technique he had found a way of continuing the dominance of German music for another century. He was wrong, as Taruskin shows. His music and its followers were an important, but by no means the only, faction in the pluralistic 20th century.
It is remarkable that one man could encompass in such detail so vast a subject, and this alone would mark this history as a major achievement. Over and above that, however, is Taruskin's determination to set the music he discovers in a context. Music is not just a sequence of organised sounds, it is a phenomenon that affects and is affected by the situations in which it is created and heard. Taruskin writes on such diverse subjects as the contrapuntal density of Guillaume de Machaut and the lyrical sensuousness of Rossini. Neither is attacked for not being what it is not, but is considered as a worthy manifestation of time, place and musical achievement. Given his breadth of vision, perhaps the most remarkable part of his book is his perceptiveness about the 20th century—on such topics as late Stravinsky, minimalism and "maximalism."
Taruskin's is a great personal achievement reflecting very wide reading and reference. It is not a catalogue but a personal and detailed journey through what he considers the core of western art music. Now someone else should write just such a history of the western music he left out, which would itself be an affectionate tribute to Taruskin's magnificent work.
