Music Histories (was Re: OT Maths, music and art)
John Howell
>news:3eac5c58...@news.compuserve.com:
>
>> I once encountered a single-volume music history intended to compete
>> as an undergrad text with Grout/Palisca History of Western Music
>> (still the standard text?). It had some interesting features,
>> including some coverage of world musics. It was also filled with
>> rather obscure information. I recall in the baroque section, there
> > was no mention whatsoever of basso continuo!!!
>>
>[snip]
>It wasn't by chance Stolba, was it? It's got a blue cover as I recall,
>and quite a bit of information (historical) world music and women
>composers through history, in addition to some obscure details that I
>think may be a bit too much for the undergraduate student to take in.
>This was my text in music history class some 10 years ago.
That would have been the first edition, quite overgrown at nearly a
thousand pages. Each subsequent edition has been tightened up very
well. When I taught using that 1st edition, I instructed the class
to "start reading each section and read until it doesn't make sense
to you any more, then jump to the next section." There was way too
much analysis for an undergrad survey.
The CDs have improved remarkably, too. A great many examples in the
1st edition were recorded by college ensembles, and more professional
recordings have replaced college recordings in each new edition. I'd
have to disagree about including world musics, however. I've used it
for 10 years and never found any. It also has the usual bias against
popular music, musical theater and jazz, which I make up for in my
lectures.
I was thrown into teaching these courses with almost no preparation,
and inherited the Stolba materials. I've stayed with them because
the writing is better, less stilted and easier to read than the
Palisca (Don Grout stopped having anything to do with it years ago),
and because I like the organization much better. Palisca treats
music by genre rather than by chronology, leaving the student
confused about how the various genres interacted at particular times
in history. Stolba takes each time period and explores what was
happening during that period. It simply makes more sense to me.
Norton does good marketing, so probably Palisca outsells Stolba. The
Norton rep tells me that I'm one of the largest customers for Stolba,
since I teach large classes, and that I really should switch back to
Palisca. So far I'm not convinced. For more detail and broader
coverage the Hoppin book and the companion book on the Renaissance by
Alan Atlas have completely replaced Reese's Old and New Testament.
They're actually readable, and valuable as Reese was as a handbook,
there's at least 50 years of scholarship that aren't there.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:John....@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
Margo Schulter
fascinating if taken, not as the last word in scholarship (to say the
least), but as one fascinating landmark of scholarship and also a
record of some of what was known in an earlier era.
I remember it with nostalgia from the later 1960's, when I first got
interested in early music at the age of 15 and pursued some
independent study with the encouragement of a music teacher. One of
the things Reese could be used for is precisely to see "how things
have changed" in this field.
Most appreciatively,
Margo Schulter
msch...@value.net