THE OXFORD HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC. Volume Two: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. By Richard Taruskin. 758pp. 0 19 522271 7
Volume Three: The Nineteenth Century. 830pp. 0 19 522272 5. Oxford University Press. £425 (US $699) the six-volume set. 0 19 516979 4
The case for the Western classical tradition, argued through symphony and song
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.
There is not a page without insight, and not a chapter that does not fundamentally change the reader's perspective on its subject matter, by making connections and comparisons that call on the author's amazing store of musical and cultural knowledge.
I add the word "cultural" deliberately. For this is not just a work of academic musicology. It is also, and primarily, a work of cultural criticism, which places Western music in its full historical and literary context.
With confident succinctness, Taruskin evokes the time and place of each composer, the currents of thought and feeling that animated the society in which he lived, and the artistic and spiritual expressions that give retrospective form and meaning to his epoch. Envisage Heinrich Wolfflin's art-historical imagination, Donald Tovey's analytical genius and Hugo Riemann's understanding of harmonic function, all deployed by a critical intelligence of the order of T. S. Eliot. And imagine the combination brought entirely up to date, with a sceptical grasp of all the fash- ionable mantras, from "metanarratives" to "the hermeneutics of suspicion". That, roughly speaking, is Taruskin.
Of course, he is provocative, and his sense of what is or is not important in our musical history may look eccentric to many practitioners. Much of the criticism that Taruskin attracts in the profession can be countered, however, if we remember two important facts. The first is that the history of Western civilization looks very different to those who have some knowledge of Slavonic languages, and the deeds that they record, from the way that it looks to those who remain corralled in the Latino-Teutonic enclave. If you doubt this, take a look at Norman Davies's histories of Britain and Europe or Adam Zamoyski's history of nationalism. Taruskin's deep knowledge of the Russian experience means not merely that he sees the European tradition from the perspective of those who have sought with supplicating cries to be a part of it, but also that he is not going to be taken in by any of the Marxisant windbaggery that colonized American musical scholarship in the wake of Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno -who is rightly and contempt-uously dismissed in the introduction to the first volume of The Oxford History of Western Music.
The second important fact is that Taruskin is determined to keep sight of what is most important in music, which is its impact on the listener, rather than its utility for the ambitious researcher in need of territory. As a result his vigorous musical analysis never strays into the parched terrains where so many American musicologists now plant their spindly intellectual saplings. The second and third volumes of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music contain no set-theoretic transformation tables, no Schenkerian graphs of imaginary "middle-ground" structures, no attempts at semiology in the style of Nicolas Ruwet or Jean-Jacques Nattiez, no gestures towards the empty verbiage of Saussurean linguistics or its structuralist and deconstructionist successors.
They go straight to the heart of the matter, which is the musical surface, and give as full an account of its organization as the reader needs, in order to understand what the music itself is saying. The volumes abound in concrete examples, each thoroughly described and analysed, but presupposing only the kind of knowledge that it is the normal business of musical readers to acquire -the knowledge of chords and their functions, keys and their relations, and the elementary rules of tonal syntax. The result is a vindication of academic musicology that ought to inspire the current generation of young musicians to take the subject up.
