The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (review)

This is an ambitious book. To my knowledge, it is the first attempt to encompass in a single volume all manner of musics practiced in the twentieth century with roots in European and American traditions, including art music, jazz, popular music, entertainment music, film music, and cross-cultural amalgams around the world.

The core of the book consists of twenty-two chapters, each focused on one type (or several related types) of music within a specified time frame, by experts in their fields (all but seven of them British). The chapters are grouped roughly chronologically, with main dividing points around 1920, 1945, and 1970. Strongly contrasting traditions appear in adjacent chapters. The ordering encourages taking different paths through the book. One can follow a single tradition across the century, such as the atonal, serial, and avant-garde composers in chapters 3, 8, 9, 13, 17, and 19. But reading the chapters in order may highlight connections across traditions in the same era, although these are largely left implicit.

The title suggests a one-volume history of music in the twentieth century, yet only a few chapters offer conventional narrative histories of their subjects. Most instead engage their topic in a ruminative essay, highlighting the authors' views on how a history of the subject should be focused or how conventional narratives should be challenged.

The editors announce in their introduction a hands-off approach, letting the "competing histories" (p. 3) of their authors rule in each separate chapter. This has advantages in offering material for discussion, appropriate to a seminar on historiography, but it reduces the book's coherence and makes it less useful as a history. Central terms such as "avant-garde" and "modernism" are used with different meanings in different chapters, typically without definition. Political perspectives abound, sometimes explicitly announced but usually implicit. In most cases, one must already know a good deal about the subject at hand, have read other accounts, and be familiar with the music under discussion to make sense of what is being said.

Perhaps because there are many other histories of twentieth-century classical music told in more traditional ways, some chapters on classical music focus more on how one should write such a history than on actually writing one. For example, Christopher Butler's "Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20" considers the nature of innovation, making the obvious points that it is not solely or even principally the province of the avant-garde (whatever that is; he never defines it) and that there is not one kind of innovation, but many. Peter Franklin critiques notions of progress and sketches an alternative history for modernism in the interwar period. Hermann Danuser contrasts the neoclassicism of German composers with that of Stravinsky and concludes that both should be seen as part of modernism, defined as engaged with the past rather than in opposition to it; this is worth repeating, although it has been argued many times before.

By contrast, David Nicholls offers a clear and useful narrative history of experimental and radical music between the wars, linking together Cowell, Busoni, the futurists, Varèse, Ornstein, Roslavets, Antheil, Grainger, Partch, Cage, Harrison, and others into a remarkably coherent web of influences and mutual interests. In a chapter that is greatly clarifying and informed by deep familiarity, Joseph Auner illuminates Schoenberg's work and image as a teacher, the image of Berg and Webern as his most important students, the impression that their music is comprehensible only through an understanding of their compositional techniques, and their relationship to Vienna. Michael Walter's chapter (unfortunately marred by factual errors) shows that despite widely differing political agendas, many composers in the 1930s sought a broader appeal in a more accessible idiom.

David...