The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers Musicians and Their Art

A distinguished historian chronicles the rise of music and musicians in the West from lowly balladeers to masters employed by fickle patrons to the great composers of genius to todays rock stars. How he asks did music progress from subordinate status to its present position of supremacy among the creative arts? Mozart was literally booted out of the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg with a kick to my arse as he expressed it. Yet less than a hundred years later Europes most powerful rulerEmperor William I of Germanypaid homage to Wagner by traveling to Bayreuth to attend the debut of The Ring. Today Bono who was touted as the next president of the World Bank in 2006 travels the world advising politiciansand they seem to listen. The path to fame and independence began when new instruments allowed musicians to showcase their creativity and music publishing allowed masterworks to be performed widely in concert halls erected to accommodate growing public interest. No longer merely an instrument to celebrate the greater glory of a reigning sovereign or Supreme Being music was by the nineteenth century to be worshipped in its own right. In the twentieth century new technological social and spatial forces combined to make music ever more popular and ubiquitous. In a concluding chapter Tim Blanning considers music in conjunction with nationalism race and sex. Although not always in step music society and politics he shows march in the same direction.