The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (review)

I will not be surprised if Nicholas Cook and the late Anthony Pople's Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music turns out to be greeted as a landmark volume. If this happens, however, it will not be because of the quality of its contents, whose variability is typical of a compilation of this sort, ranging from extremely good to average or, in a couple of cases, below; nor will it be because of the depth of coverage, which on the whole is rather sketchy. What sets the volume off and makes it so arresting is the sheer scope of its coverage.

One is impressed first by the size. Twenty-two separate chapters by twenty-two different authors, mostly academic musicologists, along with a sizeable introduction, account for well over 600 pages. There are also two lengthy appendices, adding some 150 additional pages: one contains brief biographical entries on major figures, both composers and performers (a few sentences each, at most), by Peter Elsdon and Björn Heile; the other is a chronological table, now seemingly de rigueur in such volumes, compiled by Peter Elsdon and Peter Jones, with four-column entries for each of the century's hundred years noting significant first performances and recordings plus contemporaneous musical, cultural, and socio-political events.

Although, as we shall see, there is little attempt beyond this second appendix to provide an overall chronology of the century's developments, musical or otherwise, the book's chapters are, with three notable exceptions, grouped in a roughly chronological arrangement: chapters 36 cover mainly the first quarter of the century, 7–12 the second, 13–17 the third, and 19–22 the fourth. Yet the information they contain is not presented in anything approaching a continuum, making it difficult for the reader to grasp the various components as part of a larger historical pattern. Rather, the remarkably diverse contents are approached from a notably pluralistic range of critical and interpretative perspectives.

Readers will thus be hard pressed to identify any conceptual focal point through whose lens this 'history' is projected, or even to locate a group of competing centres (though the Introduction tries hard to convince us that the latter are there for anyone caring to look for them). The tendency instead is for each chapter to stake out an individual position; and only occasionally, as if by chance, do two or more suggest a larger continuity or some measure of historiographic agreement. The effect in proceeding from one chapter to the next (no doubt not the way the book was intended to be read) is one of marked dissociation.

The editors' determination to think of 'Western' music in the broadest possible terms is most immediately evident in the three chapters standing outside this chronological format; and it is assuredly not coincidental that the book begins with two of the three. The very first chapter, by Jonathan Stock, does not in fact deal with Western music at all, but charts the impact of Western culture throughout the century on non-Western music. This is an immense topic, which Stock effectively reins in by limiting himself to six exemplary 'case studies', their topics separated widely in time (from the turn of the century to its end) and space (from China, the Middle East, and Africa to the United States), providing an effective, if whirlwind, tour demonstrating how modernization, commercialization, and Western conceptions of musical training have transformed 'other' musical cultures. Allied with this chapter is the final one, Martin Scherzinger's dense but informative discussion of current African 'art' music, which, though lying within the chronological frame, is similarly concerned with non-Western musical responses to increasing Western contacts.

These two chapters, through which the editors supply their history with extraterritorial bookends, say much about how the overall project was conceived. They not only focus a strong light on Western and non-Western musical reciprocations but, more important, give voice to those global interconnections...