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Article Excerpt
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...
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