The Oxford History of Western Music.

The Oxford History of Western Music.
Publication: Notes
Publication Date: 01-MAR-06 Format: Online

The Oxford History of Western Music. By Richard Taruskin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [6 vols. ISBN 0-19-516979-4 (set). $699,00.] Music examples, illustrations, timeline, bibliography, index.

In my university mailbox recently, I received an advertisement for a quiz book titled Classical Music Trivia. After reading Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, one might wonder whether there is such a thing--not. however, because the scope of the book appears to take in everything. Rather, Taruskin is capable of finding significance everywhere his attention turns.

Experience compels me to observe at the outset that readers will not wish to carry the Oxford History on airline flights. Students will not likely carry it to college classes in their backpacks. At six bulky volumes, it looks like a reference book--yet it does not organize itself like a reference book or read anything like one. Taruskin offers a grand survey of Western music, replete with information, generously laced with opinion (and even sermons), in a style both magisterial and witty.

As much as Taruskin has given us a book of music history, he has also given us a book about music history--that is, about music historiography and the assumptions that underlie the writing of music history. In his discussion of the history of seventeenth-century opera he writes explicitly that "it will teach us about the politics of art and (for our present purposes even more pressing) about the politics of art history" (2:12). Inevitably, this means that we find ourselves reading Taruskin's critiques of the ways in which music historians--and musicians, too--have understood music history. This is what distinguishes the book from a series of textbooks or a mere six-volume reference tool.

In his introduction, subtitled "The History of What?," Taruskin adopts the idea of "social contention ... as the paramount force driving [his] narrative" (1:xxiv). As any reader who knows his work at all will expect, he approaches issues contentiously himself. He proclaims his resistance to established metanarratives, identifying the two most invidious ones: the history of the emergence of the autonomous art work, and the history of music as a manifestation of artistic progress. He wants to lead the reader through a history in which "agents can only be people" (1:xxvi), never the works themselves and never what is sometimes referred to as zeitgeist.

Regrettably, this did not prevent the jacket blurb from stating, "Sweepingly ambitious [no one will argue with that], The Oxford History of Western Music sets close examinations of representative works within a socially and culturally oriented narrative to illuminate the themes, styles, and currents [no mention of human agents here] that gave shape and direction [coming very close to the image of history conceived as a story of progress] to the literate or 'art' tradition of Western music." Further, "This landmark set considers individual works both with respect to the esthetic and critical paradigms of their own contemporaries [which sounds very like another way of saying zeitgeist]...."

Indeed, if, as Taruskin claims, any music historians still propose to view the history of music as the narrative of the forward march of musical style toward some teleologically determinate end point (or alternatively toward some already achieved climax, with a subsequent decline), then we ought to contend mightily against such a project. Hands down, Taruskin would qualify as the ideally contentious champion for the battle.

The Oxford History resists assigning pieces to the familiar categories that we have all learned to use, often automatically and insufficiently critically, as the names of the major historical periods. Such pigeonholing raises the danger of implicit (if not explicit) valuations of works that misrepresent them as pawns for what Taruskin refers to as "dueling Zeitgeists." In fact, he refers to his own "strenuous and self-advertising efforts to avoid concepts like 'The Middle Ages' and 'The Renaissance'" (1:583), efforts that he pursues with heroic vigor.

Occasionally this manifests itself in some ways that will seem peculiar. Artificially dangling a chapter on the seventeenth century in the end of the first volume, titled "The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century," comes across as a blatant attempt to force the issue; likewise, the introduction of romanticism at the end of volume 2. One consequence of this will be that the volume divisions will not align with university courses to allow convenient use of a volume as a textbook. (The segregation of the entire index, a timeline, bibliography, and other ancillaries into volume 6, away from the body of the text, also makes the use of the separate volumes impossible.)

Along with the rejection of a myth of "dueling Zeitgeists" comes concern about oversimplification: "But the insistence upon nominating the [he means the in italics, as in "a single, monolithic"] determining factor instead of evaluating a range of influential ones is a product of the false dichotomy between history and society ... [This] insistence is itself the product of a particular historical juncture, one that is now past" (5:306). The cause, as Taruskin sees it, was the romantic notion that artists should operate independent of social or audience pressures and that this is the means by which art can progress. We might at least hope that it has indeed passed, but in any case, Taruskin still finds reason to be concerned about it. So far, so good. Yet we might constructively interrogate some of the consequences of this in practice.

For one thing, a result of avoiding concepts might be history writing (or history teaching) that devolves into an excess of detail, a massive chronicle of data rather than a coherent history. Even if for every observation we offer an immediate explanatory circumstance, our readers might feel left at the end with a lot of information but no overall perspectives. We need not concede that history can aspire to no more.

The Oxford History steers clear of that trap. But how unambitious it seems to say that, if we abandon metanarratives, we can hope to be "freed to engage more directly with the perceptual materials of our trade (like manuscripts), and derive concepts from them (like the dates of their contents) with more confidence" (1:580)! Such a statement leaves the impression that music history should eschew more complex issues, an impression that, fortunately, the rest of the book in no way bears out. Taruskin's real idea of what constitutes a "concept" includes much more intellectual range than dating the contents of manuscripts.

The deliberate resistance to conventional periodization can lead to warping of historical sequence. We find Du Fay's motet Nuper rosarum flores / Terribilis est locus iste discussed in chapter 8 along with the French motets of the ars nova and separated from the consideration of his hymn settings and chansons in chapter 11 by two substantial chapters, on "Machaut and His Progeny" and the music of the trecento. Ostensibly, this results from the resistance to period-pigeonholing, but it might equally suggest the very implication that the work does not "belong" to its own time that Taruskin is at such pains to resist. It appears as if, in dividing the spoils from a battle of "dueling Zeitgeists," Taruskin had to assign Du Fay's motet to one period and his secular songs to another. In any case, the student reader, who does not necessarily bring to the book a clear overview of the chronology of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, will find the history all the more difficult to follow.

The book creates numerous other instances of such arbitrary treatments of chronology. The Reformation seems to arrive after the sixteenth century has been brought to a sort of close. The Magic Flute gets in ahead of Giovanni Battista Sammartini's symphonies, another potential source of confusion for the novice reader. Jean-Antoine de Baif turns up only in conjunction with--mirabile dictu--Igor Stravinsky's neoclassic turn. Some of the music of the twentieth century also gets out of sequence. For example, the discussion of the indeterminate and process music of the 1960s and 1970s precedes the treatment of Babbitt's serialist work in the 1940s and 1950s. After that, the book turns back the clock again to take up the futurists and the development of new sounds, electronic technology, and Edgard Varese's career. But Gyorgy Ligeti's electronic Artikulation was already discussed several chapters earlier.

Knowledgeable readers enthralled by Taruskin's interesting and fast-moving flow of ideas might not wish to carp at these chronological contortions, to be sure. On the other hand, those who do not have the sequence of events and works well in hand will find it a challenge to keep a clear sense of the order of things. In many such cases, too, it could appear that Taruskin has shoe-horned music into juxtapositions that reflect his decisions that some pieces simply don't properly "belong to" their own times.

To some extent, the historiographic manifesto of the introduction may be read as strategic positioning, which the reader later discovers does not produce such a radical departure from existing historiographic frameworks as it implied. Taruskin does know, after all, that we can distinguish changing forces and ideas that shape different times and their musics, without depicting these as "dueling Zeitgeists."

Nor will we come away from the book convinced that agents really can only be people. A few representative passages will illustrate: By the second half of the sixteenth century the forces of "distortion" were rife, and some of them had arisen within the church itself. Others were the result of literary movements. Still others were the outcome of a radical turn within musical humanism, which had always been an uneasy ally of religious transcendentalism. There were also pressures brought by the burgeoning music trade, pressures that reflected the overall rise of mercantilism and that militated further against the prestige of religious art. (1:630) Thus nationalism, public relations, and entrepreneurship conjoined to turn the century's most quintessentially Italian musical genre, or at least a lightened variant of it, into a genre the English accepted as their own. (1:746)

Perhaps the best way of viewing Beethoven's post-1815 fugal frenzy,

then, would be to regard it as having been induced or inspired by

political romanticism, to which Beethoven is known to have responded

with pessimistic gusto.... The resigned, disappointed public temper of post-Napoleonic Europe, with its hankering after the security of a timeless social order, found a private echo in the context of

Beethoven's instrumental music. (2:724) And in the discussion of conceptual experiments and "happenings" in the 1960s and 1970s, "the period's widespread existential despair" (5:94) becomes the cause of the artistic symptom. To argue that such passages do not make agents out of currents, forces, movements, pressures, isms, and public temper, rather than "people," would simply amount to insisting on a distinction without a difference.

Eventually, the slogan about agents being people can no longer hold. Taruskin has to admit that "In the ... chapters ... devoted to the supplanting of the ars perfecta, as much or possibly more attention has been paid to larger social, economic, and religious forces as to the personal intentions of composers and theorists" (2:13). Another revealing manifestation of flexibility applied to the principle that only people are agents comes in the treatment of Elliott Carter's reception. Taruskin takes Charles Rosen to task over the position that "The history of music, in short, is created, in Rosen's view, by musicians, and only by musicians" (5:305). He then argues that "To maintain this even in the case of Carter is to ignore the social factors, above all the prestige machine and its political stimuli, that could counter, and even overbalance the audience (the one social factor that everybody recognizes as such) in influencing the course of history" (5:305). "Social factors" and "the prestige machine" here exercise greater influence than "people" in any usual sense of the word.

The real music-historiographical malfeasance that leads to such energetic insistence on the non-existence of zeitgeists and the avoidance of conventional period labels is the practice, by now outdated and thoroughly discredited, one would hope, of viewing the past as a struggle to progress from primitive musical styles to the fully developed music of the historian's present--that is to say, in practice, usually the nineteenth century in Germany.

Taruskin writes, "again we may observe that there is no uniform march of styles, and that styles arise and decline in particular historical and social contexts" (1:701). This statement allows a crucial distinction. The "march of styles" amounts to a teleological (often Hegelian) construction of history, sometimes miscalled--as Taruskin emphasizes--"evolutionary." It is not necessary, of course, to "see all sequent narratives ... as metaphors for the master narrative of progress and liberation" (1:580). The governing theory of history that Taruskin adopts--"that styles arise and decline in particular historical and social contexts" or, in other words, as a manifestation of natural selection--is actually Darwinian. A good representation of this "natural selection" model of historiography comes in the observation that Haydn's accomplishments with the symphony reflect "miraculous symbiosis with his times ... adapting with phenomenal success to the changing social conditions of his time, and the concomitantly changing social role of musicians" (2:516). To apply a Darwinian model does not require suppressing the effect of historical forces on music; it differs from a teleological ("evolutionary") model in eschewing the presupposition of progress in history.

Taruskin uses an excellent analogy to expose the wrongheadedness of suggesting that any period produced music superior to another, the more obvious ethical error of assigning comparative values to geographically distinct musical cultures: "When periods are essentialized, moreover, we may then begin seeing objects classed within them in invidious comparative terms.... [W]e may then value some objects over others as being better, or even as being 'the best' expressions of 'the spirit of the Middle Ages' or 'the spirit of the Renaissance.' If this sort of essentialism seems innocuous enough, we might transpose the frame of reference from the chronological to the geographical, and reflect on what happens when people become concerned over the purity or genuineness of one's essential Americanism or Africanness or Croathood" (1:381).

Not that we should not recognize different national styles--as Taruskin himself has in noting the influence of French music on Italian in the trecento ("a truly gallicized style" [1:366]). And the passage in question precedes the chapter on "contenance angloise," which reminds us that distinctions of period and place were very much part of the consciousness of the fifteenth century. The problem is not that there aren't recognizable differences among cultural situations, preferences, and styles--whether between times or between geographical regions--but really only that we shouldn't rank some as "better" than others.

Of course, no reading of music history can suppress the fact that the musicians and thinkers of any time have extolled their own governing ideas, from the age of humanism through the Enlightenment, romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism. The valuing of new music over old is not an invention of recent music historians. Taruskin quotes Ronsard's critique of Lasso, in which he describes "the divine Orlando" as "surpassing the ancients and making himself the unique wonder of our time." And Taruskin adds, "From a humanist there could scarcely be any higher praise" (1:713).

Although in the first part of the book those responsible for the historiographical assumptions against which Taruskin contends so mightily are not named, they eventually emerge, as do vigorous critiques of the results of the application of progress theories of history. The roots of this false doctrine are the dialectical, teleological, futurist conception of history in the middle of the nineteenth century, most notably in the writings of Franz Brendel. One deplorable effect of this view of history was its justification of a nationalist program that did not merely express itself as a distorted music-historical narrative that made German music and musical ideas superior to those of other nations but actually made itself complicit in the German drive for hegemony and ultimately in the horrors wrought by Nazism.

Abetting this, too, was the romantic-teleological presumption that nineteenth-century music and culture constituted the highest and best in the history of music, resulting in the glorification of romantic individualism and elitism, as well as the estheticism that justifies the separation of art from common life and excuses it from responsibility for its place and effects in the world. Taruskin notes ironically that "since the Second World War it has been much more difficult to claim that exposure to the greatest masterpieces of art is inherently ennobling. The Germans continued to be sincere and discriminating lovers of their finest music ... all through the Nazi period. It did not inhibit the prevailing barbarism of the period in any way" (4:765).

He does not criticize only Germany in the context of World War II, though. The teaching of "music appreciation" in American colleges fares poorly on the same intellectual and ethical grounds, either in its original form as a putative means to cultural (i.e., spiritual or moral) improvement or as an exercise in formalist elitism (3:782-83), which created the divide between art music and the music of real life.

The book repeatedly recurs to a position of anti-Germanism, set up as a corrective to previous histories. The reader might find that a bit less emphasis on this theme--substituting more positive emphasis on contrasting viewpoints, French for example--would make for a more convincing alternative music history. One could argue, of course, that German musicological hegemony beginning in the nineteenth century overwhelmed any alternatives, so that sufficient balancing viewpoints simply do not exist.

The anti-German rhetoric eventually gets almost snide, as in the discussion of Brahms's Triumphlied and the German military victory in the Franco-Prussian War that it embodies. In the music Taruskin finds the victory "asserted aggressively, with Schadenfreude--roughly 'gloating,' more exactly 'malicious pleasure in another's misfortune,' something for which, perhaps significantly, only the German language possesses a word [italics added]" (3:711-12). The implication that there is a kind of bad behavior that is uniquely German sounds uncomfortably like the instances of national essentializations earlier used as a model of how history writing can go wrong.

The rejection of the teleological construction of history comes into play especially in critiques of its misuse to promote modernist styles in the twentieth century. Taruskin really goes after historians such as Robert Morgan, Donald Jay Grout, and Joseph Straus who suggest that music was directed toward the "collapse of traditional tonality." (Robert Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music [New York: W. W. Norton, 1991], 1) Not only scholars have been guilty of this reading of music history, but composers, too. It first arises in a mention of Stravinsky's orchestrating of Gesualdo madrigals and regarding them as prophetic of Wagner (1:738). Taruskin also identifies this kind of argument in Webern's The Path to the New Music (Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser, 1963), and in other attempts to use teleological history to establish the hegemony of serial music, citing Rene Leibowitz and Adorno, as well as Hans Werner Henze (5:15-18).

Cited in another place as the villains of progress-oriented history are Edward Lowinsky and, again Stravinsky, who espoused an evolutionary view of music history in the forward to Lowinsky's Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). The set-up here is Fernando Valenti's statement that Domenico Scarlatti was more "advanced" than J. S. Bach or Handel, which Taruskin describes as reflecting "a general historical view that places the highest premium on teleological evolution, and on innovation, evolution's handmaiden," a view misrepresented as "Darwinian" (2:396-97).

As Taruskin himself points out, in raising the history of how twelve-tone music was taken as either degenerate or a manifestation of totalitarian behavior, "Musical techniques do not have political sympathies or ethnic background; the people who use them are the ones that do" (4:774). This understanding might help to clarify a lot of the ethical issues that he raises surrounding elitism and nationalism; the critique is directed not at music but at ideas about history.

Taruskin provides one powerful alternative to the premise of dueling zeitgeists, when he observes that style history is a story of cumulation, not a matter of winning and losing. This comes up in the discussion of Vivaldi's Le quattro stagioni and La tempesta del mar as concerti madrigaleschi (2:230), with the observation that word painting did not go away after the heyday of the sixteenth-century Italian madrigal but became absorbed into the toolbox of later composers. The principle also applies to the combination of fugue and sonata in late Beethoven (2:727).

Despite Taruskin's debunking of the mythical zeitgeist, and despite his compelling rejection of the theory of teleology in history, along with its appropriation to promote German hegemony or to proclaim the inevitability of the death of tonality, there is such a thing as culture, after all. Obviously, if we are to have any useful concept of culture, we must recognize that in a particular time and place people share common ways of thinking and common values, which will manifest themselves in their art and music.

Sometimes it merely comes down to a matter of substituting less loaded terminology. One might escape the term zeitgeist by substituting "paradigm shift," as in the identification of the "great conceptual innovation--the 'paradigm shift,' as historians of science would call it--lurking behind all the shocking stylistic novelties that doomed the ars perfecta and gave rise to the aggressively exteriorized sensibility we now call 'baroque'" (1:786) or the term "ideology," as in "The ideologies that drove the practice of the arts to its unprecedented twentieth-century crisis had historical precedents...." (5:222).

Inevitably, historiographical difficulties arise when we don't accept such conceptions as "Renaissance music"--by whatever name we might choose to identify it. One result is that music's relation to its epistemological context is suppressed, so that every piece or any stylistic trait seems the product only of a composer's arbitrary compositional whims or, at most, of miscellaneous small-scale influences. The consequence of this would be to discourage any substantial interpretation of the music's engagement with a broader understanding of its time. In addition, music simply appears as "out of step" with intellectual history, or at least divorced from it. Composers' idiosyncratic choices, matters of individual patron tastes or local market pressures, and so on do operate powerfully on the style of each piece: they do so, however, within larger intellectual frameworks.

We might ask of any time in history, as Taruskin actually does in casting aside (commendably) the use of the word "baroque" to identify the music of the period beginning at about the arrival of the seventeenth century, "But were there no connections between the technical and the esthetic and the ideological?" (1:798), and with him we would have to answer "There certainly were." What he says about the Enlightenment is applicable to any time: "the reality of the connection between the music and the philosophy ... can hardly be denied" (2:444).

Because of this, we might have wished for a bit of generalization--even at the risk of adding qualification--to put into larger perspective the multitudinous movements, forces, and so on whose influence on music Taruskin rightly identifies. From time to time the governing epistemological principles of the temporally different cultures emerge, but frustratingly, the book never brings them to the fore.

The excellent discussion of Taverner and the Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas, for example, does make a fundamental distinction that, despite the book's resistance to such categorizations, depends on identifying value systems that we have been accustomed to call "medieval" and "Renaissance": "The impression is of a music--and a religious attitude--supremely untouched by 'Renaissance' humanism. Such music is still a loftily decorative art rather than one expressive of its occasion. And it is still one that insists upon the difference--or rather the distance--between the human and the divine" (1:613). To make this point, the historian simply must invoke the difference between "medieval" and "Renaissance" governing values, whether we call the contrasting times and cultures by their hackneyed and potentially misleading names or not. The difficulty for the reader arises from Taruskin's principled refusal to present the differences between these views of the divine and the human as a decisive epistemological determinant of distinct cultures.

As we move on, generalized characterizations of governing value systems, and the terms to go along with them, cannot be avoided. Taruskin describes the music that expresses the paradigm shift around the arrival of the seventeenth century as "radical humanist" (not "Baroque"). He writes, for example, of "[Monteverdi's] famous slogan--'Make the words the mistress of the music and not the servant' (far che l'oratione sia padrona del armonia e non serva), which manages to sum up in a single sound bite the whole rhetorical program of the radical humanists" (2:4). Unlike that of the preceding periods the entire treatment of the early seventeenth century is cast in this framework, and it makes the culture of this music and the music's place in that culture more intelligible.

Generally, though, the epistemological frameworks that should serve to place musical style in larger perspective are touched on but not prominently set out. Taruskin distinguishes between the expressive models for late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century music, and the music of the Enlightenment, when he says that "The art of tragedy was the high rhetorical style. The art of comedy was born of nature.... The later eighteenth-century style was in effect the comic style" (2:437) and "Consisting as it does of a single subject viewed as it were from all sides, a fugue is contemplative and, when sufficiently big, monumental. Consisting as it does of a tonal and (usually) thematic polarity worked through to a reconciliation, a sonata is dialectical and, when sufficiently big, dramatic" (2:726). The trouble is, this important observation that dramatic plot replaced affective rhetoric as the governing model for the music of the Enlightenment should have been proclaimed boldly, rather than buried as it is. It merely bobs to the surface a few times and submerges again.

As a consequence, in critiquing the teleological presuppositions of music historiography beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the Oxford History neglects to stress that the history draws on the same assumptions as the music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The epistemological basis for thinking in this period generally--musical or historical--depends on progress and goal-orientation.

We might further wish that the Oxford History would make more pervasive application of the addition of narrative "voice" to plotted development in order to clarify the core values of romanticism. The discussion of the Chopin G-minor Ballade, op. 23, provides an excellent, but again isolated, example. It begins by establishing that "To represent narrative content by means of techniques borrowed from sonata form was an inevitable solution. By its very nature the process of thematic development--in which musical events seem to be not merely juxtaposed but causally connected, so that the past conditions the present and the present (both thematically and tonally) forecasts the future--has a compelling narrative aspect" (3:369). He then works in the idea of the narrative persona in relation to the introduction ("the bard's exordium" [3:371]) and conclusion. What is underem-phasized throughout volume 3, though, is that, as plot had governed form since the late eighteenth century, musical narratives (plot plus voice) were going on all around Chopin. Indeed, this constitutes the expressive paradigm for romanticism.

More than with any other such concept (including even the extensive treatment of the effects of radical humanism), Taruskin grounds his discussion of much of the music of the twentieth century on the idea of "maximalism" (4:5). He characterizes the concept as the extension of existing (i.e., romantic, in this case) purposes by means of stylistic extremes. This really amounts to a definition of what has long been called "mannerism," and it would have been helpful to trace a recurring thread of mannerist handlings of styles through the history of music, including the late fourteenth century, the late sixteenth century, and perhaps even the music of J. S. Bach. In the examination of twentieth-century styles "maximalism" is taken to refer to the far-reaching extensions of the harmonic vocabulary, orchestra size, and so on beyond romanticism, throughout the first part of volume 4.

The concept is a useful one. The choice of the term "maximalism," however, is not really appropriate, for it is generally used to refer to a kind of postmodernist reaction to minimalism in the late twentieth century. The peculiar usage of "maximalism" here even has to cover its intuitive opposite, as when Janacek's "demonstratively stripped-down, barren sonority" and "laconocism" represents a type of "maximalism" (4:440), an oxymoron that signals the inherent problem.

As with the fact that plotted form in music and teleological constructions of history manifest the same view of the world, the discussion of postmodernism neglects the opportunity to tie together conceptions of history and approaches to musical content and structure at the end of the twentieth century. In the same way that a non-progressive and culturally pluralistic model of history came to the fore, postmodern music itself became "diversitarian" in its materials and turned away from dialectical principles of form. Presumably reflecting the resistance to anything that might be mistaken for a theory of zeitgeist, such connections by way of epistemological paradigms aren't integrated in a way that would strengthen both instances of postmodern thinking.

Rather than trace these changing paradigms, then (which need not be thought of as "dueling Zeitgeists"), the Oxford History interweaves several different historical threads, letting them pop in and out of the narrative a bit like plot lines in a television soap opera. These are significant and fascinating threads, and Taruskin has made a worthy contribution to our view of historiography by highlighting them.

One such thread is that of oral musics, including all sorts of improvisation and unwritten performance practices. Taruskin offers continuous reminders that notation took up styles from oral practices--e.g., in medieval polyphony, Italian poetic performances of the quattrocento, organ accompanying traditions that gave way to basso seguente and continuo notation--so that the textualized tradition is constantly set against oral practice. This thread also includes laments for our loss of improvisation practices and skills, as in the discussion of the composed cadenzas of nineteenth-century concertos.

Brought up to the twentieth century, this line of thinking leads to a very helpful approach to understanding contrasting avant-gardes. Serialism, in this opposition, represents a completion of the literate line within history, while indeterminacy is placed in the tradition of orality (5:passim but especially 169-73). Regarded from the viewpoint of this duality, the electronic technologies of the late twentieth century lead Taruskin to the conclusion that the end of the literate tradition is at hand (5:210).

The contrast pair "literate/oral" links to the pair "elite/non-elite" (or elite/"democratic," but that's not quite the right word). In this connection frequent attention is paid to why certain composers became the important ones--i.e., important to the writers of history beginning in the nineteenth century. There is a good discussion, inspired by the case of Puccini, of the difference between music composed "for the canon" and music composed "for the repertoire" (3:664-67). Taruskin is opposed to the telling of history as the music-internal development of style, following the program laid out in Guido Adler's ground plan for musicology (4:4), and he levels some well-aimed and effective shots at the kind of historiography that concentrates on the music that seems, in the historicist view, to advance the progress of the art and ignores the repertoire that audiences have claimed. The book makes real efforts to give "repertoire" music its due, and commendably so. Taruskin admits, however, that a history can only devote limited space to music that does not "add enormously to what we already know about ... style and technique" and is forced to refer the reader to "repertoire surveys, collective biographies, and critical studies" for fuller assessments of the value of that music.

The stance that Taruskin takes shows, as he makes clear, the influence of ethnomusicological thinking, to which all historical...