The latest and the best
Peter Phillips
THE OXFORD HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC by Richard Taruskin OUP, £280, pp. 4016, ISBN 0195169794 For once the publisher’s blurb has it right. This is a ‘sweepingly ambitious’ project, written by a ‘towering and often provocative figure in musicology’, ‘an accomplished performer as well as scholar’ who, while achieving numberless other things, contributed ‘160 articles on Russian composers’ to the New Grove. I can personally vouch for his toweringness, his provocativeness and his work as a performer, my experience of the latter commencing in Smoky Mary’s on 42nd Street in 1978 when he conducted a concert of Eton choirbook polyphony. It is perhaps comforting to know that the author of an epic like this both wrote up all those (largely 19thand 20th-century) Russians and knows his way around a 15th-century English antiphon.
To underrate what is contained in these volumes could only be done under the influence of sour grapes, since Taruskin’s sweep is not just ambitious, but astonishing. The last time a single-author survey of Western classical music was undertaken with any degree of relevance to the modern student was halfway through the last century, and even then the result was published in one large volume, not six as here. Since then the immutable trend has been to commission a team of writers to contribute to these musical histories, each period bundled up in a separate volume, each volume made up of essays by different experts. Probably the best-known of these is the OUP’s own New Oxford History of Music which, in its first edition, came out in dribs and drabs throughout the 1960s and 70s. It seemed to us students at the time that it would never be finished. It was also quite clear that however hard the Press had tried to impose a consistent approach on its authors, they had failed. Nonetheless we all bought the volumes because we accepted that music history was always made to sound like this, and had no choice.
What it was made to sound like is very well expressed by Taruskin, who clearly suffered with the rest of us. He explains how in the traditional view composers are never ‘described in the act’ of composing, but are always treated
only as an impersonal medium or passive vehicle of ‘emergence’ ... in a kind of shorthand historiography that inevitably devolves into inert survey, since it does nothing more than describe objects.
It is not hard to find an example of this kind of writing. The following is taken from Donald Jay Grout’s inordinately famous History of Western Music, published in 1960:
The two outstanding composers of the late 18th century are Haydn and Mozart. Together they represent the Classical period in much the same sense that Bach and Handel represent the late Baroque, using the accepted musical language of their time and creating in that language works of unsurpassed perfection .... Haydn was born in 1732, Mozart in 1756; Mozart died in 1791 at the age of 35, Haydn in 1809 at the age of 77. Haydn’s growth to artistic maturity was much slower than Mozart’s, who was a child prodigy.
That kind of summary suited a lot of people in the short term: students could pass exams on it; the interested amateur could feel he was in the picture. Taruskin will have none of it. Here is his take on the same story:
Posterity has turned Mozart, like Josquin des Prez before him, into an ‘icon’ — the ‘image of music,’ replete with an aura of holiness for many reasons. One was his phenomenal precociousness; another was his heartbreaking premature demise. These as-if-correlated facts have long since converted his biography into legend ... It is because of his uncanny gifts and his famously complicated relations with his father that Mozart has been the frequent subject of fiction, dramatisation, ‘psychobiography,’ and sheer rumour (including the persistent legend of his death by poisoning at the hand of Gluck’s pupil Salieri, a jealous rival) ... But Mozart’s iconic status was also due to his singular skill at ‘moving an audience by representations of its own humanity’. His success at evoking sympathy through such representations has kindled interest in his own human person to an extent to that point unprecedented, even by Josquin, in the history of European music, partly because the creation of bonds of ‘brotherhood’ through art had never before been so central an artistic aim.
Taruskin describes the new world he intends to inhabit as one in which the question ‘What did it take to produce Beethoven’s Fifth?’ is not answered by the single word ‘Beethoven’.
To study art worlds is to study processes of collective action and mediation: institutions and their gatekeepers, ideologies, patterns of consumption and dissemination involving patrons, audiences, publishers and publicists, critics, chroniclers, commentators ... furnishing a Rashomon choir of contradiction, disagreement and contention.
Unsurprisingly an approach which has this as its starting-point, and which also involves detailed analysis of much music as well, is going to be substantial. But here is the original contribution which Taruskin makes. Not only was he able to deliver all his volumes to the publisher in one go, he could adopt a contemporary stance towards his subject and follow it meticulously through.
That stance is well represented by the quotations given above. Taruskin’s references are wide, both within music (mention of Josquin was not just beyond Grout and his kind but beyond their expected readerships) and outside: to literature (essential when writing about opera — the section on Britten is quite exceptional), the visual arts and film. The syntax is typical as well, as he corkscrews definitions out of his material, unabashed (he does live in California) to deploy the full range of current analytical techniques to the situations all these musical personalities found themselves in. The result can be wordy, but his touch is sure and it is a great strength that it extends to the choice of actual music under review: he has the knack of homing in on just the repertoire which will best illustrate his argument. In fact he does this better than anyone I’ve read, whether of the old anthologising kind or the modern one-section expert kind; and it could only have been managed by someone with quite exceptional breadth of listening.
It is true that Taruskin has entered a crowded field: from Grove to Grout the subject has been covered in every format and for every attention-span. Also, haven’t we (the much-trumpeted 21st century) got beyond going over this same old dead white male territory yet again? Taruskin gives the impression he could have included all manner of other musics if he had wanted to, and the casual observer might suppose this would rather acceptably spice up a predictable scene. So why didn’t he? One answer is that these volumes do not follow the traditional path exactly, though they do keep within a broad definition of ‘Western’ and ‘classical’; another is that the scope is quite large enough as it stands. The emphasis has anyway shifted impor tantly: the century which attracts the most attention is the 20th, while the 17th and 18th are relatively sized down. The problem in a way is that Taruskin’s thesis demands to be read from start to finish, which is daunting. Most music histories are designed to be dipped into. My advice is to dip into Taruskin and see what happens next. I couldn’t put it down.
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