Twentieth-Century (Light-)Blues

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii + 818 pp. ISBN 0 521 66256 7.

I possess a wondrous map of music charting the history of the art over the whole globe since the dawn of humankind. Music originates in the instinct de la conservation, and thrusts up towards the light via volonté de la puissance; then come rhythmes (vitaux, musculaires and vicéraux); excitabilité protoplasmique follows on fast, thence vocal impulses and gestures culminating in the cri expressif. Here we reach ground level. The upward trajectory incorporates mythologies and religions Asiatic and Chinese as well as those of Egypt, Greece, Judaea. As proper names become historical and datable – from Hermes, Pan, Orpheus to Moses, David, Solomon and their far-oriental peers – the complexity mounts too. The fundamental metaphor metamorphoses from a tree with a tangle of roots and branches into a body with a tangle of nervous and muscular systems; or else, more organic still, veins indicating the circulation of life-giving blood. The principal line, red, reflects the enterprise's French-Swiss provenance, but even at its sensitive publication date (during the First World War), the greater thickness of the Germanic line (blue) cannot be denied. Places and persons where cross-fertilization occurs – J. S. Bach, Liszt, Wagner conspicuously – resemble a spaghetti junction in and out of a great metropolis. Sprouting vigorously into a then-unknown future are shoots labelled types: thus honoured are Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Strauss, Reger, şchoenberg and Moor (who he?). The latest printed date is Scriabine's (sic) death, 1913; perhaps Reger's in 1916 didn't reach Lausanne in time; and Debussy is clearly still alive, which narrows things down a little after the vast cultural span of earlier epochs.

It was an ambition for the new millennium to continue the Tree of Man and his Music for the ensuing nine decades or so. The weedy strands, running almost eventlessly all the way from bottom to top, representing other musical cultures with their still continuing life – byzantine, arabo-turque, javanaise, japonaise, chinoise, etc.; the sturdier growths that flourish near the roots but then go off into the void, representing primitive musics – atlantide, océanique, aztèque, etc.; the once-flourishing but later sadly dwindled branches for musique des oiseaux and musique des insectes would all come purposefully and inextricably into the centre, as, too, renewed continuities with epochs then considered consummated, or brutally cut short (the sinister stumps terminating SS Ambroise et Hilaire), or otherwise peripheral (musique celtique for instance, boasting Merlin and Ossian).

All this, and more, has come to pass in the completed twentieth century, whose tendances are, of course, far from complete: indeed, in full spate still, and sometimes only just begun. As well as the primitives and the ethnics, the birds and the insects (to which whales and other mammals – fishes? – must now be added) and the resurfacing of subterranean streams, absolutely new factors come into play – jazz, local then universal; pop music (ditto, but within months, not years); technology, in itself and, via broadcasting and recording, in its immeasurable sociological impact for good and ill. All these would have to be worked into the already dense mesh of named composers, countries, tendances. It would defeat the most skilful master of flow chart. Only a 3D model on the largest manageable scale could do justice to the mass and intricacy of detailed interactions. Nonetheless it could be done, and needs to be. This weighty new volume in the Cambridge History of Music, given over to covering the last 100 years or so, is where one would expect, legitimately and realistically, to have both possibility and requirement fulfilled.

How does the twentieth century in music appear, seen as a whole? 'A mighty maze, but not without a plan'? Or merely a wasteland of debris with occasional oases and the odd...