Taruskin — Oxford History of Western Music

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

The Oxford History of Western Music is a history of Western art music by the Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin, published by Oxford University Press in six volumes dated 2005. It sets out to explain the causes of musical change, against most histories of Western music, which Taruskin dismisses as surveys of a repertory. The subject is the literate tradition, music handed down mainly in notation, which Taruskin calls elite and sees as a story with a known beginning and an end now in view. More than four thousand pages carry that music from the earliest notations to the late twentieth century. Reviewers praised its analyses and its writing and objected to its polemics, to its choice of composers and to its claim to be a new kind of history. It won an R. R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers for 2005.

Taruskin had taught at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1986.¹ Oxford University Press first planned the history as a joint project of Berkeley’s music faculty, and when that fell through it asked Taruskin to write it alone; he began in 1991.² The assignment started as a textbook meant to supplant Donald Grout’s A History of Western Music, and the set grew far past that, he told the New York Times, “because … well, you know me.” Its six volumes hold more than four thousand pages.² The first volume takes music from the earliest notations to the sixteenth century, the second the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the third the nineteenth.³ Two volumes are given to the twentieth century, and a sixth holds the chronology, bibliography and index.³ The set is dated 2005, but Open Library gives October 19, 2004, as its publication date, and Leon Botstein’s “An Appreciation” of it appeared in The Musical Quarterly that October.^{4, 5} Taruskin’s preferred title, Music in the Western Literate Tradition, did not survive at the press, and in the introduction he calls the one the set carries “one not chosen but granted.”^{2, 6}

In the introduction Taruskin sets out his aims. Most histories of Western music, he writes, “are in fact surveys” that “make little effort truly to explain why and how things happened as they did”; his set “is an attempt at a true history.”⁶ The genres it treats are literate ones, “disseminated primarily through the medium of writing,” and “the history narrated within these covers is the history of elite genres.”⁶ He hopes to have “sought neither to advocate nor to denigrate” the music he chose.⁶ His central premise is that the literate tradition hangs together “at least insofar as it has a completed shape,” with beginnings “known and explicable” and an end that “is now foreseeable.”⁶ The introduction also takes on other scholars, and calls the work of Theodor W. Adorno “preposterously overrated.”⁶

Reviewers admired the writing and the analyses and objected to much of the method. Charles Rosen, in a two-part review in The New York Review of Books, found the analyses “generally both cogent and entertaining” and the “rambunctious” style clear on technical matters.⁷ Jeroen van Gessel, in the Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie, wrote that “in many ways Taruskin’s achievement is very impressive indeed,” and he valued its account of how the very ideas of art music and classical music were formed.² Reviews also appeared from Douglass Seaton, in Notes in 2006, and from Mark Everist, in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 2009.⁸

The objections began with the selection. Reviewers listed composers who are barely mentioned or left out, and Tim Page, in the Washington Post, proposed the title “Richard Taruskin’s Greatest Hits.” Taruskin answered that the critics had neglected his introduction. Van Gessel himself judged the complaints “exaggerated” beside Grout’s textbook, and he credited the set with fresh attention to Russian and East European music and to North American music from the late nineteenth century to 1950.² Rosen quoted Taruskin’s hope back at him. “In writing about art, a pretense of objectivity never succeeds,” he wrote, and in his reading the music Taruskin cared for got the better pages. He summed up the set as “a very personal history, often entertaining, self-indulgent, long-winded, occasionally brilliant, and even sensible.”⁷

Van Gessel thought researchers in the field would learn little from it, judged the postwar chapters “too much an exclusively Anglo-American affair,” and called the introduction’s treatment of other scholars an instance of “senseless aggression and immoderate pretensions.” He read the focus on literate genres as “mainly an elegant way to sidestep folk music, entertainment music, jazz etc.” He concluded that Taruskin’s “claim to have written a totally original kind of music history cannot be upheld,” and that the set was, after all, “a splendid survey of the great composers of classical music.”² Gary Tomlinson, in his 2007 review article “Monumental Musicology,” found the set slow to credit other scholars: “the endnotes are thickest precisely where Taruskin’s own researches have most often led him,” in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁹ The Association of American Publishers gave the set an R. R. Hawkins Award in its 2005 PROSE Awards.¹⁰

A five-volume paperback edition followed in 2009 and an online edition in 2010; with Christopher H. Gibbs, Taruskin also produced a one-volume College Edition (2012; second edition 2018).³ Taruskin died on July 1, 2022; the New York Times headed its obituary “Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77.”¹

Key contributions

• A history of Western art music by a single author, from the earliest notations to the late twentieth century, in six volumes.
• A history that sets out to explain musical change, against surveys of a repertory.
• The literate frame: genres handed down mainly in notation, whose story Taruskin calls “the history of elite genres.”
• The premise that the literate tradition has “a completed shape,” with an end now in view.

See also

• The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works — Lydia Goehr’s 1992 study of the work-concept and the musical canon
• The Rest Is Noise — Alex Ross’s 2007 history of twentieth-century classical music