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Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation.

Article Excerpt
Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation. By Arnold Whittall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [xi, 238 p. ISBN 0521816424. $70.] Index, bibliography, music examples.

In this new book, Arnold Whittall offers critical inquiry into compositional trends in mainstream European and American art music composed, primarily, over the course of the 1900s. The book derives from a series of lectures Whittall delivered in London in late 2000-early 2001 (p. vii), and is addressed to a scholarly audience. Although Whittall's approach reflects a musicological bent, he carefully avoids exclusionary forays into either overly specialized philosophical principles or highly rigorous analytical techniques, and in this regard, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music is readily approachable.

In the course of 11 chapters Whittall references numerous compositions, and by composers as distinct from one another in chronology and in temperament as Jean Sibelius and John Adams. While many of the compositional references prove to be brief, and are employed cursorily in support of larger philosophical points, Whittall demonstrates an impressive grasp of twentieth-century repertoire. In a similar vein, Whittall freely draws into play the writings of various contemporary scholars: a strategy attesting to the meticulous degree of research that underscores the book.

One of Whittall's central motives comes across in the form of a variegated critique of musical modernism: the topic is engaged throughout the book, and is examined largely in a compositionally based manner, with representative selections of numerous styles of twentieth-century music serving equally as subject and as object. Furthermore, musical modernism is presented through the lens of composers--speaking either about their own works, or about works of others--and critics alike. At times Whittall's critique is tacitly effected, while at other times explicitly so, but regardless of the directness of the strategy the crux of the matter...