Taruskin — Oxford History of Western Music

Author: Richard Taruskin
Title: The Oxford History of Western Music
Year: 2005
Type: Reference history (Oxford University Press; six volumes)

Six volumes, more than four thousand pages, a millennium of music, one author — and the fight starts in the introduction. Most books calling themselves histories of Western music, Taruskin writes there, “are in fact surveys, which cover—and celebrate—the relevant repertoire, but make little effort truly to explain why and how things happened as they did. This set of books is an attempt at a true history.”¹ The ground rules are stated with the same bluntness. This is the history of the literate tradition, of genres “disseminated primarily through the medium of writing,” and, he concedes flatly, “the history of elite genres.”² Its self-declared number-one postulate: the tradition is coherent “at least insofar as it has a completed shape. Its beginnings are known and explicable, and its end is now foreseeable.”³ A living Berkeley musicologist, writing in the early 2000s, closed the thousand-year story like a parenthesis. He had wanted to call the set Music in the Western Literate Tradition; the grander title, he noted, was “one not chosen but granted” by Oxford’s Delegates.⁴

The reception was a war the book had openly invited, and the terms of surrender were strange: nearly everyone attacked it, and nearly everyone kept it. Mark Everist’s review for the American Musicological Society’s journal called it “monstrous” in the best sense, reaching for “extraordinary, amazing, prodigious, marvelous”; the Association of American Publishers gave it the 2005 R.R. Hawkins Award for the year’s best scholarly work.⁵ Charles Rosen, in a two-part New York Review of Books essay, quoted Taruskin’s own pledge of neutrality back at him before pronouncing: “In writing about art, a pretense of objectivity never succeeds: clearly, Taruskin writes much better about music he likes than about music to which he is indifferent” — his summary verdict ran “a very personal history, often entertaining, self-indulgent, long-winded, occasionally brilliant, and even sensible.”⁶ The deepest methodological pushback came in two review-essays, Susan McClary’s “The World According to Taruskin” (which opens with her undergraduates clamoring, like Aesop’s frogs desiring a king, for a single tidy narrative) and Gary Tomlinson’s “Monumental Musicology,” which caught the seams in the citations: the endnotes are thickest exactly where Taruskin’s own research lived, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷

Taruskin died on July 1, 2022, at seventy-seven, and the New York Times headline made the style the legacy: “Vigorously Polemical Musicologist.”⁸ The set outlived the fights — a five-volume paperback in 2009, the online edition in 2010, and a single-volume College Edition with Christopher H. Gibbs in 2012 that competes with the standard textbooks on their own turf.⁹ On this shelf it does two jobs at once. It is the full-span monument the family’s twentieth-century books defer to, the place where chant, Palestrina, and the concert canon get their actual history told. And it is evidence in its own right: the “elite genres” concession and the completed-shape postulate are the museum thesis stated as working method — the argument the shelf’s theory book makes about the canon, performed here at four thousand pages.

Key contributions

• The survey-versus-history distinction: explanation of why things happened, against celebratory coverage — the program sentence for scholarly music history since.
• The literate-tradition frame: Western art music defined by writing as its medium of transmission, which both bounds the story and names its class position.
• The completed-shape postulate: the literate tradition as a finished arc with a foreseeable end — the strongest published version of the canon-as-closed-museum claim.
• The polemical method: Rosen, McClary, and Tomlinson’s objections are now part of how the field reads it; the monument and its critique ship together.

See also

• The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works — the theory of the museum this history performs; Taruskin fronted its 2007 edition with a foreword
• The Rest Is Noise — the twentieth-century wing told for readers, deferring its first nine centuries to this set
• Classical music — the family whose full span runs on this monument

Footnotes

1. The survey-versus-history passage quoted verbatim from the introduction to Volume 1, “Introduction: The History of What?” (Oxford University Press, 2005), as published in the set’s online edition; six volumes (five of text plus a resources volume), 4,000-plus pages, and the 2009/2010 formats per Oxford History of Western Music, Wikipedia (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

2. “Disseminated primarily through the medium of writing” and “the history of elite genres” quoted verbatim from the same introduction (carrier as in note 1); the literate-genres passage is Taruskin’s direct answer to Robert Walser’s canon-as-invented-tradition critique, which he quotes and engages there. ↩

3. The number-one postulate quoted verbatim from the same introduction (carrier as in note 1). ↩

4. The rejected title Music in the Western Literate Tradition per the Leuven University Press review; “one not chosen but granted” by the Delegates of Oxford University Press quoted verbatim from the introduction (carrier as in note 1; both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

5. Everist’s “monstrous”-in-the-best-sense verdict (Journal of the American Musicological Society) and the 2005 R.R. Hawkins Award per Oxford History of Western Music, Wikipedia (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

6. Both Rosen passages quoted verbatim from Charles Rosen, “From the Troubadours to Frank Sinatra,” The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2006 (part one of two; accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

7. Susan McClary, “The World According to Taruskin,” Music and Letters 87, no. 3 (August 2006): 408–415 — the Aesop’s-frogs opening per the journal’s abstract page; Gary Tomlinson, “Monumental Musicology,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132, no. 2 (2007): 349–374 — the endnote-density observation per the article’s Cambridge Core page (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

8. Death date, age, and career facts per Richard Taruskin, Wikipedia; the obituary is William Robin, “Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77,” The New York Times, July 1, 2022 (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

9. The College Edition (with Christopher H. Gibbs, 2012; second edition 2018) per Oxford History of Western Music, Wikipedia (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩