The Oxford History of Western Music

Rating:
Summary: Not Worth The Price
Review: This volume contains a number of factual and conceptual innacuracies and a soporific writing style that made it extremely frustrating to read or even to use as a reference work.
The Grout/Palisca volume is still the benchmark history of the music of Western Europe, not to mention more accessible and $437 cheaper!
If you are the type of person who revels in the minutiae of things, and have hundreds of extra dollars lying around to spend on this doorstop, then you should buy this book.




Rating:
Summary: Let's set the record straight, folks
Review: "Anonymous IV" has a right, of course, to dislike Richard Taruskin's magnificent Oxford History of Western Music, and to express that opinion - however unfathomable it may seem -- on amazon.com.
But inaccuracies, especially at the core of so damning a response to a new book, must not remain unchallenged.
Let's start with Anonymous IV's insinuation that Taruskin lacks expertise in music before 1800. (According to Anonymous IV, Taruskin's "superficial" and "sketchy" first two volumes summarize "the extent of what the author knows about music before 1800"; he is "obviously... on home turf" only in the 19th and 20th centuries.)
Perhaps Anonymous IV cannot imagine a musicologist being on home turf in more than one period. But Taruskin is just such a rare being: a formidable scholar of 19th- and 20th-century Russian music, he is equally celebrated in the realm of early music. His influential book, Text and Act (1995), contains numerous essays on pre-19th-century music. And even the brief author's biography on the back cover of that book informs us that Taruskin has published "numerous editions of Renaissance music, including a complete edition with commentary of the sacred music of [the 15th-century composer] Antoine Busnoys," and that while teaching at Columbia University, Taruskin had a distinguished performing career in early music. (Among other activities, he conducted the Cappella Nova, a New York-based choir specializing in medieval and Renaissance music; as a viola da gambist he recorded and toured with the Aulos ensemble.)
Anonymous IV's whining that Taruskin "rushes through more than 1000 years of music history" is no less mystifying. Hello! Taruskin devotes 1,612 pages to the first 1000 years of notated music in the Western world - rather more than the 843 pages in which Grout/Palisca, to which Anonymous IV repeatedly compares Taruskin, covers the entire history of Western music.
But most importantly: if Anonymous IV has indeed read Taruskin's History of Western Music, he/she will have found, in its opening paragraphs, (pp. xxi and xxii), a clear statement of the book's aim. It is not, Taruskin explains, a survey à la Grout. Rather, it is "an attempt at a true history" - that is, an attempt "to explain why and how things happened as they did" - in short, not the usual laundry list that has too often passed for music history. To compare Taruskin to Grout on this count is rather like faulting a cognac for not being a beer.
Taruskin fulfills his stated aim exhilaratingly. His book is a towering achievement of scholarship and intellect; a challenge to complacency; a joy to read.
As to the accusation that Oxford's production of Taruskin's book is shoddy: well, I do not know what Anonymous IV has been doing with his/her copy. I have been reading mine, for some weeks now, and have had no problem whatsoever with its binding.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant work
Review: Taruskin challenges many of the deep-seeded assumptions about music history. His work is compelling, smart, and deeply-layered. This five-volume set will prove to a be landmark in the study of western classical music, one which come to be valued as *the* reference.

His distracters are often noisy, for it is their work which is called into question by Taruskin. He is considered a "new musicologist," one who seeks connections between music and culture, and looks to explain music as part of a larger whole of life and history rather than in the insular autonomous space preferred by traditional musicologists. Many of us were trained by these old-school musicologists; coming to grips with scholarship which lies outside that scope requires thoughtful work and reevaluation. It is well worth it, and Taruskin is the man to alleviate those border tensions.