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Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music.

Article Excerpt
By James Garratt. (Musical Performance and Reception.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [xiv, 318 p. ISBN 0-521-80737-9. $70.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

For many years, scholars customarily outlined the history of music using a scheme that would be more appropriate for the history of technology. In this interpretation, history is made chiefly by brilliant innovators who fearlessly defy conventional wisdom and invent something new. The critics and pedagogues scoff at the unfamiliar technique, but eventually they are forced to concede defeat. When they finally enshrine the innovator in their pantheon and the novel procedures in their textbooks, they create a new conventional wisdom that will in turn be overturned by a young rebel from the next generation. Modernist composer-critics such as Arnold Schoenberg were the most influential exponents of this view, but it had much to offer historians as well; they gained a convenient structure that helped them transform the messy abundance of life into a coherent narrative of progress, with each chapter emerging logically from its predecessor. With the decline of modernism, however, scholars are taking a second look at the history of the twentieth century, this time being careful to include music that was never part of the great chain of innovations. Composers ranging from Samuel Barber to Sergey Rachmaninoff...

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