NYTDBR: Debriefing: A History of Western Music? Well, It's a Long Story
Premise Checker
New York Times Daily Book Review, 4.12.19
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
OXFORD HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC By Richard Taruskin
Illustrated. 4,272 pages. Oxford University Press. $500 until Dec. 31;
then $699.
MOST of the news in classical music takes place on stage or
on disc. But at the moment, one of the biggest stories (in
more ways than one) is taking place on the printed page.
Actually, 4,272 pages.
The new six-volume "Oxford History of Western Music" was 13
years in the making. Despite its bulk, it may seem to pale
in comparison with, say, the 29-volume second edition of
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, of 2001,
but that represented the work of more than 2,500 writers.
This is the work of one, Richard Taruskin, a music
historian at the University of California at Berkeley, who
has been an occasional contributor to Arts & Leisure and
other publications.
As historian, sometime journalist and blockbuster author,
Mr. Taruskin emulates his mentor at Columbia University,
Paul Henry Lang, the author of "Music in Western
Civilization" (1,107 pages in its 1997 edition) and a music
critic of The New York Herald Tribune. On a recent return
to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Taruskin spoke
with James R. Oestreich about the making of the new book.
JAMES R. OESTREICH: What did you set out to write in 1991?
Well, actually, you were planning this book even before
then, suggesting that you might write something to
supersede "Music in Western Civilization."
RICHARD TARUSKIN: I couldn't say I was actually planning
it. Dreaming about it, perhaps, though I never dreamed I
would write six volumes. Maribeth Payne, who was an editor
at Schirmer Books and then Oxford University Press, had the
idea to do a Berkeley history of music, collectively
authored by the whole music faculty, shortly after I moved
out there in the late 80's. And I was to be on the team,
but I don't think any of us are team players at Berkeley.
So the idea went nowhere.
Then, in 1991, Maribeth said: "You know that history we
were talking about? Why don't you do it?" And you know, one
doesn't turn down such an offer, to have the chance to say
your two cents' worth about everything. So I said sure,
I'll do it. And it was to be a one-volume textbook.
The objective was not to write another Paul Henry Lang but
another Donald Grout, the "History of Western Music," which
came out in 1960 and is still the textbook used in most
music history classes. There have been many attempts to
unseat it, all unsuccessful. So I thought, why not try? I
sat down to write in 1994, and I just let myself go. I
began to see that it was coming out long, because . . .
well, you know me.
Q. The whole contour of your book seems different from most
large-scale histories, which kind of rise to a peak with
Beethoven, stay on a sort of plateau through the Romantic
era, then trail off into the 20th century.
A. Yeah, if you look at the earlier books, they are usually
more detailed up to the 18th century and become less
detailed through the 19th and 20th. I don't know why that
is. Maybe because musicology was originally an antiquarian
kind of pursuit. But my book is the opposite. The five
volumes of actual text are distributed so that the first
one goes through the 16th century, the second takes in the
17th and 18th, the third is given over entirely to the
19th, and the fourth and fifth divide the 20th.
Q. But this shift in emphasis is not meant to imply that
other old notion of musical "progress," is it?
A. No, progress is something I argue against. The fact that
art doesn't progress the way technology progresses is clear
just from the fact that we still listen to early music. We
don't feel that the Baroque invalidated the Renaissance or
that Beethoven invalidated Mozart or that Schoenberg
invalidated Wagner. We don't think of Bach as a primitive
version of Mozart. And so we don't really believe in the
progress narrative, but we somehow still mouth it. Why?
Because it's a way of defending the new against
conservative taste.
Q. As usual, you don't shy away from contention. I don't
think anyone will call this an objective history. How, as a
historian, do you stand on the matter of objectivity?
A. There are contentious aspects to the way I tell the
story, but I actually don't believe the term "objective" is
without meaning. I try to write nonpartisanly. But if you
raise social questions, you're accused of partisanship. I
don't actually take a side in many of the debates that I
report, but I do report them.
There's the big debate between classical music as a
universal repository of excellence or of man's highest
aspirations as opposed to the kinds of music that are
written for entertainment. Western classical music
represents the social and cultural elites. Does that make
it elitist? Does that make it undemocratic? Well, there are
those who have argued for classical music from an obviously
snobbish perspective. But there are also those who argue
for it in terms of its ability to express a much wider
range of feeling and ideas than other kinds of music.
And that's why the book is long. I try to show both sides
and take everything in. But obviously, I failed. You can't
take everything in. The book is selective. In that sense,
one can't be objective, if by objective you mean omniscient
or all-encompassing. But if you mean nonpartisan, one can
try.
Q. What kind of surprises did you encounter? Are there any
surprising conclusions or discoveries?
A. Well, I did not discover that Beethoven was actually a
black woman from Mars. No, not that kind of surprising
discovery. What may surprise readers, though I had worked
it through before I even began writing, is the way I define
my field, because this is a history of the literate
tradition of music. I was going to call it "Music in the
Western Literate Tradition," but they didn't think that
would sell too well.
Music history begins when it does because that's when
notation was invented, and that would be in North Central
Europe in the eighth or ninth century. We don't really know
what century, because nobody thought it was so important
that all of a sudden there's a way of writing down music,
so nobody told us exactly when it happened. We just found
the artifacts.
And now we're in a situation where the literate tradition
of music seems to be ending, because of new technological
means and because of the convergence between art and pop.
There's a lot more real-time and improvisatory music-making
going on within the classical domain. I write about the end
of the tradition I'm describing, an end that I won't live
to see, and neither will anybody who reads this. But it's
in the cards.
Q. And in addition to defining the field, literacy serves
as the book's central theme, correct?
A. Yes, I feel very strongly that historians are
storytellers, and so the book has a very strong narrative
thread. My job was always to be in some sense telling the
same story through every chapter. So I kept the question of
literacy and the way literacy and orality interrelate in
the foreground.
The literate tradition has always coexisted with the oral
tradition, even today. And all the way through the book I
was trying to keep in view the question of how the
nonliterate aspects of performance practice and so on, the
oral aspects of music-making, always go with it. So if you
want to isolate the theme of the book, that's it.
Q. You once said after another epic project, your
two-volume book "Stravinsky and the Traditions," that you
came out of it disliking Stravinsky, or at least liking
Stravinsky less. How do you feel now about Western music?
A. Oh, but it wasn't Stravinsky's music that I liked less.
I liked the man less. But who cares what you think about
the man? I was interested in the music, and the man only
insofar as it helped to explain the music. The more I know
about his music, the more interesting it gets. And that
goes double, triple - sextuple, I guess - for Western music
as a whole.
Q. Are you done? Is there going to be some kind of concise
version coming soon?
A. Oh, yes. They have actually hired an abridger to extract
the originally contracted book.
Q. So you don't have to do all of that?
A. I have to
oversee it, but I don't have to actually perform the
surgery. That would be just too painful.
Q. And will there be any other kind of offshoots?
A. None
are being planned right now. They have talked about
different things, various kinds of trade editions or a gift
book sort of thing with much more illustration and far less
text. I don't know how feasible it would be. One reason the
book is as bulky as it is is that it contains many, many,
many music examples, which of course means that its
readership has to be musically trained. So it's not a book
for everybody. Anybody who looks at it can see that unless
you can follow the examples and follow my descriptions of
the examples, you will have to skip a lot.
Q. What's next?
A. What's next!
Q. Have you thought
about it?
A. Yeah, I have. I think I'll be writing a book on the
writing of music history over the next years, looking at
the process itself. I'm taking a sabbatical next year, and
then I think I'm going to do that.
But first, I'm going to take a nice long nap.
Ian Pace
> Q. What's next?
>
> A. What's next!
>
> Q. Have you thought
> about it?
>
> A. Yeah, I have. I think I'll be writing a book on the
> writing of music history over the next years, looking at
> the process itself. I'm taking a sabbatical next year, and
> then I think I'm going to do that.
>
> But first, I'm going to take a nice long nap.
>
on musical historiography that already exists, in whatever language?
Ian
Peter T. Daniels
"Comparable" to what Taruskin might come up with, no, but yesterday in a
usedbook store I noticed something with such a title. Also there must be
some such navel-gazing somewhere in the New Grove and/or the New New
Grove.
One might point out to Mr. Taruskin that Lang's 1000-page tome has not a
single musical example, and is not about music, but about Western
civilization.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Matthew B. Tepper
letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.61.05...@panix2.panix.com:
> Q. But this shift in emphasis is not meant to imply that other old
> notion of musical "progress," is it?
>
> A. No, progress is something I argue against. The fact that art doesn't
> progress the way technology progresses is clear just from the fact that
> we still listen to early music. We don't feel that the Baroque
> invalidated the Renaissance or that Beethoven invalidated Mozart or that
> Schoenberg invalidated Wagner. We don't think of Bach as a primitive
> version of Mozart. And so we don't really believe in the progress
> narrative, but we somehow still mouth it. Why? Because it's a way of
> defending the new against conservative taste.
Two of the theories of music history that we argued about back in the 1970s
(when I was an undergrad) were 1) the "progress" approach, as stated above,
and 2) the "great man" approach, which was based around the conceit that
every now and then a "great man" standing head and shoulders above everyone
else would magically change things forever: Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky.
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Take THAT, Daniel Lin, Mark Sadek, James Lin & Christopher Chung!
Matthew B. Tepper
to be typed in news:35n6a9F...@individual.net:
> This may be very interesting indeed. Does anyone know of any comparable
> work on musical historiography that already exists, in whatever
> language?
_Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart_?
Peter T. Daniels
>
> " Ian Pace" <i...@ianpace.com> appears to have caused the following letters
> to be typed in news:35n6a9F...@individual.net:
>
> > This may be very interesting indeed. Does anyone know of any comparable
> > work on musical historiography that already exists, in whatever
> > language?
>
> _Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart_?
Look up "historiography" in a dictionary. MGG is an encyclopedia of the
history of music.
Matthew Fields
It's actually a full-blown general encyclopedia of music, and it's the
book on which Grove was originally modeled.
--
Matthew H. Fields http://personal.www.umich.edu/~fields
Music: Splendor in Sound
To be great, do things better and better. Don't wait for talent: no such thing.
Brights have a naturalistic world-view. http://www.the-brights.net/
Margaret Mikulska
Matthew Fields wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> >MGG is an encyclopedia of the
> >history of music.
>
the
> book on which Grove was originally modeled.
-MM
Peter T. Daniels
>
> In article <41F6A6...@worldnet.att.net>,
> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
> >>
> >> " Ian Pace" <i...@ianpace.com> appears to have caused the following letters
> >> to be typed in news:35n6a9F...@individual.net:
> >>
> >> > This may be very interesting indeed. Does anyone know of any comparable
> >> > work on musical historiography that already exists, in whatever
> >> > language?
> >>
> >> _Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart_?
> >
> >Look up "historiography" in a dictionary. MGG is an encyclopedia of the
> >history of music.
> >--
> >Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
>
> It's actually a full-blown general encyclopedia of music, and it's the
That's the "Gegenwart" part and is less likely to confuse MBT, since
"Present" doesn't appear inside the word "historiography."
> book on which Grove was originally modeled.
MGG did not exist in 185X or whenever.
Brendan R. Wehrung
"Matthew B. Tepper" (oy兀earthlink.net) writes:
> Premise Checker <che...@panix.com> appears to have caused the following
> letters to be typed in
> news:Pine.NEB.4.61.05...@panix2.panix.com:
>
>> Q. But this shift in emphasis is not meant to imply that other old
>> notion of musical "progress," is it?
>>
>> A. No, progress is something I argue against. The fact that art doesn't
>> progress the way technology progresses is clear just from the fact that
>> we still listen to early music. We don't feel that the Baroque
>> invalidated the Renaissance or that Beethoven invalidated Mozart or that
>> Schoenberg invalidated Wagner. We don't think of Bach as a primitive
>> version of Mozart. And so we don't really believe in the progress
>> narrative, but we somehow still mouth it. Why? Because it's a way of
>> defending the new against conservative taste.
>
> Two of the theories of music history that we argued about back in the 1970s
> (when I was an undergrad) were 1) the "progress" approach, as stated above,
> and 2) the "great man" approach, which was based around the conceit that
> every now and then a "great man" standing head and shoulders above everyone
> else would magically change things forever: Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky.
>
Then we'd have to concede a sliding time scale, because J.S. Bach was
considered somewhat dated by his death. Certainly never forgotten, but
not a Universal Genius for some decades. Unifiying 1 and 2 results in a
theory that the Great Men were most typical of the progress, except that
it's not clear that the 20th century progressed in any one direction,
imitation of Stravinsky aside.
Brendan
--