The Oxford History of Western Music Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century

About this book

The history of "history"--our changing perspectives on the act of narrating and trying to "recapture" the past--encompasses the most profound seismic shifts in modern consciousness. Once seemingly commonsensical the science-aspiring ambition of historiography to recount the past "as it actually was" (to borrow Leopold von Rankes famously misunderstood phase) now betrays anachronistic naivete if not a dangerous arrogance masquerading as objectivity. And the business of cultural history provides a particularly fascinating--and contentious--index to the larger issues at stake. The very urgency of the debate over "how" to tell the story (and indeed what the story is) continues to intensify in proportion to the uncertainty of our times. Considering its official title (bearing an impressive imprimatur from Oxford University Press the vanguard of scholarly reference works) Richard Taruskins grand opus might appear at first glance to eschew the more-heated arenas of debate involving cultural history. Quite the contrary: Taruskin throws down the gauntlet at once and passionately joins in the fray. In the process he strips the story of musics development in the West (i.e. Europe and America) of its deceptively innocuous trappings and received ideas thrusting it into the spotlight of contemporary critical inquiry. The result virtually a priori is a highly controversial reexamination of a narrative that will cause even the most open-minded music lover to do a number of double-takes. Whats extraordinary about Taruskins achievement is how immensely engrossing insightful provocative fresh and downright brilliant the "history of Western music" becomes in his weaving of it. But why yet another sweeping history when the New Grove Dictionary of Music has been recently overhauled (in an edition to which Taruskin prolifically contributed) and when long-standing classic texts such as Paul Henry Langs Music in Western Civilization continue to be reissued? The heart of the matter lies in the very ambition behind this new history. First some of the fun factoids: at nearly 4 000 pages (along with an additional resource volume containing master index chronologies and bibliography) The Oxford History of Western Music weighs nearly 20 pounds and took a decade to write. In other words this isnt history-by-committee. Its perspective from the point of view of one massively learned individual is at once the works chief strength and its Achilles heel. Taruskins powerful voice echoes the kind of "old-fashioned" synthesis with its attempt at an "overarching trajectory " of such pioneering cultural historians as Jacob Burckhardt or perhaps even the epic sweep of Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -an antidote to the curse of ivory-tower specialization. But more crucially Taruskin arms that voice with the toolkit of contemporary historiography to pursue a critical rethinking of how Western music turned out as it did and where it is today. His singular viewpoint anchors Taruskins attempt to show that "the literate tradition of Western music is coherent at least insofar as it has a completed shape." Its important to realize as Taruskin early acknowledges that his work is meant not as a stock-taking "survey" but as a history. That is it involves an unfolding both of that larger coherence and of many smaller narratives that are its tributaries: not of the artwork (or composer) alone but those of its production its social and political context and its (often-changing) reception as integral components of musical "meaning." Taruskins aim is to filter out the distorting perspectives of "historicism" (the myth of purposeful goal-oriented evolution through history) and aestheticism (which considers the artwork as a "pure " timeless entity). Along the way this means smashing rows upon rows of icons and legends (not surprisingly the bulk of these stemming from the 19th-century Germanic tradition but also comprising a good deal of 20th-century received ideas about Stravinsky Soviet composers such as Shostakovich and various postwar "elitisms"). Inevitably Taruskin doesnt prove immune to resorting to some legends of his own. In an extraordinary overview of Wagner for example he persuasively debunks the routine citation of Tristan und Isolde as pointing toward the coming "collapse of tonality " demonstrating how such thinking is the epitome of "the historicist tendency to write history backward with an eye toward giving the present a justification." Yet hes also capable of reducing the Wagner of the Ring to an obsession with a "cult of strength" in what is an otherwise deeply insightful discussion of "the Wagner problem." In terms of the larger stakes of this history Taruskins strongly argued debating points (and debunkings) at times veer in more eccentric directions especially when it comes to such pivotal figures as Stravinsky who gets a particularly intense thrashing. And regardless