The Oxford History of Western Music (6 Volume Set) - Hardcover

Taruskin, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195169794 ISBN 13: 9780195169799

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the context of each stylistic period--key cultural, historical, social, economic, and scientific events--influenced and directed compositional choices.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Taruskin is professor of musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to this work, Taruskin is also the author of such books as Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (1985), Text & Act (OUP, 1995), and Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996). He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New Republic, and many other scholarly journals.

Reviews

Starred Review. The daunting task of connecting the most abstract of art forms to society, economics, politics and philosophy is admirably accomplished in this monumental six-volume narrative history. The work is a single interpretive synthesis by musicologist and critic Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996), covering the Western classical tradition from medieval Gregorian chant to the contemporary avant-garde, with two regrettably scant chapters on 20th-century jazz and pop. He traces evolving performance and compositional conventions from the earliest written records, focusing on the elaboration of the Western system of tonality, its solidification in the Bach-to-Beethoven canon and its subsequent broadening into dissonance and tonal indeterminacy. He also follows the shifting social and ideological functions that elevated composers from lowly court servants to the alienated geniuses of romantic and modernist myth and transformed music from an adjunct of church ritual to a marketplace commodity, a vehicle for nationalist aspirations and a secular religion of art-for-art's-sake. Taruskin analyzes thousands of musical scores by all the major and many minor composers-the musically inclined should peruse the books at the piano-and his close readings of the esthetic and psychological effects of compositions come as close as one can to putting music's ineffable qualities into words. His account of the larger historical framework is erudite but accessible and stylish, conversant with everything from Aristotelian philosophy to psychoanalysis but wary of reading anachronistic interpretations into the past. The result is a judicious but richly stimulating history, valuable both to scholars and to ordinary readers who want to listen with new ears to the music they love. Photos.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195169794
• ISBN 13: 9780195169799
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 4272