The latest and the best

For once the publisher’s blurb has it right. This is a ‘sweepingly ambitious’ project, written by a ‘towering and often provocative figure in musicology’, ‘an accomplished performer as well as scholar’ who, while achieving numberless other things, contributed ‘160 articles on Russian composers’ to the New Grove. I can personally vouch for his toweringness, his provocativeness and his work as a performer, my experience of the latter commencing in Smoky Mary’s on 42nd Street in 1978 when he conducted a concert of Eton choirbook polyphony. It is perhaps comforting to know that the author of an epic like this both wrote up all those (largely 19th- and 20th-century) Russians and knows his way around a 15th-century English antiphon.

To underrate what is contained in these volumes could only be done under the influence of sour grapes, since Taruskin’s sweep is not just ambitious, but astonishing. The last time a single-author survey of Western classical music was undertaken with any degree of relevance to the modern student was halfway through the last century, and even then the result was published in one large volume, not six as here. Since then the immutable trend has been to commission a team of writers to contribute to these musical histories, each period bundled up in a separate volume, each volume made up of essays by different experts. Probably the best-known of these is the OUP’s own New Oxford History of Music which, in its first edition, came out in dribs and drabs throughout the 1960s and 70s. It seemed to us students at the time that it would never be finished. It was also quite clear that however hard the Press had tried to impose a consistent approach on its authors, they had failed. Nonetheless we all bought the volumes because we accepted that music history was always made to sound like this, and had no choice.