The World According to Taruskin

Like Aesop's frogs desiring a king, my undergraduates often clamour for a textbook that will present a narrative history of Western music—a guide that will tell them everything they need to know, all bundled up in a single tidy package. I have always resisted their pleas, however; memories of dragging myself through the arid, unexplained dates and names offered by Donald Jay Grout's too-long-ubiquitous account left me adamantly opposed to making use of such pedagogical aids. Instead, I have relied upon musical scores, supplemented only with a book of source readings: Music in the Western World, edited by Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin (hereafter, Weiss/T).¹ The scores allow me to concentrate on actual pieces of music in their entirety instead of the lists of style characteristics that typically fill textbooks. And instead of the simplified fairytale of smooth succession, by which each great composer merely passes the torch to the next in line, Weiss/T offers a chronologically ordered series of polemical documents that demonstrate how nearly every step along the way provoked fierce debate.

'But who was right?', my anxious students ask. 'Show us truth.' Always resistant, I insist that they learn to regard the debates themselves as the proper stuff of history. Some students sneak peeks at Grout or some other such book to give them a storyline on which to hang their tunes and controversies; performance majors most frequently resort to such subterfuge, which gives them a comforting tale of increasing and inevitable progress for the music to which they plan to devote their lives. But many students whose allegiances lie elsewhere—jazz and rock musicians, percussionists, and budding composers, all of whom perceive their own repertories as marginalized by the classic canon—eagerly embrace Weiss/T, starting right from the excerpts from Plato's Republic on page 7. For they recognize in those ancient arguments all too well the same attitudes that would keep them and their music out of the academy. Weiss/T has convinced many such individuals to become historians in their own right. Nevertheless, there are those voices that clamour. . .

At last, the gods at Oxford University Press have seen fit to bestow a king. As in Aesop's fable, however, this gift may bring far more than their subjects had bargained for. On the one hand, we finally have a more than satisfactory narrative history—one that includes whole scores and incomparably insightful analyses, as well as the contentious sequence of debates that have punctuated the history of Western music. Not coincidentally, its author is none other than Richard Taruskin, the 'T' of Weiss/T fame, whose account betrays none of the reductionism that almost inevitably riddles such projects. The crowning masterpiece of a meticulous scholar, consummate musician, committed public intellectual, and fearsome polemicist, The Oxford History of Western Music (OHWM) offers not only a compelling storyline but the materials (the scores and documents) from which that story takes its shape. On the other hand, it's far too massive for classroom use. Even the most zealous teacher of the music-history survey will find it difficult to assign this gargantuan epic, which occupies more than 4,000 pages in six hefty tomes.²

Oxford should have anticipated what it got when it settled the contract. This is, after all, the musicologist who famously took about 1,800 pages to recount just Stravinsky's Russian period.³ Nevertheless, Taruskin has produced the only narrative history I can imagine ever recommending. If its author had bowed to pragmatic considerations, if he had agreed to prune back the commentaries on pieces, the documentation of the debates, or the frequent time-outs for historiographical brooding, we would have a deeply compromised volume that would resemble, I fear, Grout (or, to be fair, the beautifully humanist music-history textbook by Taruskin's own mentor, Paul Henry Lang⁴ ). So here it is—the desiring frogs at last have their king. And although this gift is unlikely to devour its subjects, as Aesop's Frog King did his, those who turn to the OHWM to read a nice story...