Over a year has now passed since the publication of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music. Not surprisingly, given its heft (6 volumes, over 4,000 pages), there hasn’t yet been a serious review of it — who would willingly take on such a job? Some, I’m sure, have simply thrown up their hands.
True, the Washington Post’s Tim Page devoted a few hundred words to the task. But the absurdity of such a review was revealed by its headline: "In Brief: The History of Music." And so we get conclusions such as these:
But I would no more treat the results as mainstream authority than I would a chronicle written by a team of mavericks such as, say, Glenn Gould, John Cage and Spike Jones.
The results are just too strange, in a way that history should not be strange.
Probably the most ambitious reviewing effort was Roger Scruton’s in the Times Literary Supplement last July. He confined himself to two volumes, but his review was a publicist’s dream:
Every now and then a quiet discipline in the humanities receives a shattering and world-changing shock, when one of its stars leaves its allotted orbit and crashes brain-first into the centre of the subject. The effect is like an asteroid hitting the earth: old life is extinguished, new life promoted, and the landscape for ever transformed. Such was the impact in our time of Leavis on academic English, of Wittgenstein on academic Philosophy, and of Aries on academic History. Such, too, will be the impact — so I predict — of Richard Taruskin on academic Musicology. Having made his name with scholarly publications on all aspects of musical history and performance, including a profound two-volume book on Stravinsky and some 160 articles on Russian composers in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Taruskin has now completed the greatest musicological task of all: a comprehensive summary of the Western classical tradition. The result is one of the great cultural monuments of our day, the product of a mind as humane and morally focused as it is technically assured.
But the monumental task of reviewing Taruskin’s entire work has finally been accomplished by Charles Rosen, in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Part I is online now, and it’s a prickly piece of work. I’m looking forward to what is (I hope) the inevitable clash of minds and egos in the Review’s letter pages.
My 2001 Lingua Franca profile of Taruskin and his book can be found here.
Dear Mr Mitchinson, just a short reaction to the subject, from the point of view of a composer. I did NOT read Taruskin’s immense History, which I will do with the greatest pleasure after I am retired or gone deaf, but Rosen’s review about the first 2 volumes. I also read your immensily interesting interview with Taruskin, whose views I found strikingly correct. My sympathy is more with Taruskin than with Rosen, who seems to be too abstract and rationalistic in his approach. (That goes also for his very interesting study ‘The Classical Style’.) What I think is interesting in the different views upon music (music history) of Taruskin and Rosen, is that music, if it is really good, is BOTH reflecting the surrounding world and circumstances and the nature of its culture, and a totally independent creation of the mind (or, maybe better, soul). There is a universal layer to music that transcends time, space, location, individual personality. So, I guess, both Taruskin’s and Rosen’s views may just complement each other rather than contradict. Also, what a composer THINKS he’s doing, may be quite different from what he actually DOES do. A composer may think he is, in a totally unworldly and independent way, creating something utterly unique and timeless and divorced from his surrounding culture, only to find-out later-on that exactly THIS was the most time-bound idea he could have had and totally determined by the surrounding world. I think the concept of Jung’s ‘collective subconscious’ may be quite helpful to explain this. In one sense, we are all a ‘prisoner’ of our historic situation, but when music creates an inner space that is independent from just sound, i.e. becomes an inner, psychic/emotional experience and not just a perception of sound patterns, it enters another wave length and becomes universal and timeless. Hence the strange fact that we can be touched by a Bach cantata. With kind regards, Yours sincerely, John Borstlap, Amsterdam
John Borstlap
March 26th, 2006