imaginary magnitude

I recently came across an article from The Nation that I’d bookmarked not too long ago. On the surface it seems like fanfare for the release of The Oxford History of Western Music (ISBN: 0195169794).However, as journalist Paul Griffiths talks to the man who put the canon together – Richard Taruskin – it quickly turns into a fascinating overview of how we encapsulate our historic understanding of Western musical culture. For example, the death of notation (ie original sheet music), the neglect of female composers, and racism. Fascinating stuff, particularly for those interested in music, history, and cultural anthropology.

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Link: The Man Who Heard It All

Excerpt:

This is an astounding achievement. The Oxford History of Western Music fills five stout volumes (discounting a sixth given over to the index, bibliography and other such matters), and yet Richard Taruskin can justifiably speak of it as a single book. To be sure, it travels far and wide in pursuing a millennium’s ramshackle production of songs and dances, keyboard suites and operas, sacred chants and church cantatas, symphonies and chamber works, electronic compositions and virtuoso showpieces, a good number of them quoted in music type so that competent keyboard players can eavesdrop on this multicolored parade as it goes along. Meanwhile, however, the surrounding text keeps its steady voice of thoughtful inquiry, painstaking analysis, consistent generosity and courteous address to the reader. Nothing like this book has been attempted since the nineteenth century, and as the author ruefully remarks, nothing like it may be written again.

Taruskin makes clear his reason for this proud pessimism. The coherence of Western “classical” music–the jumble of types only partly enumerated above–lies in notation (though due acknowledgment is given here to what never was notated and so has been lost). Just as we can observe the emergence of clearly legible notation in the eleventh century, so we seem in Taruskin’s view to be witnessing its demise, as some of the composers he treats in his last chapter, from Charles Dodge to Laurie Anderson, go off into territories where notation is no longer of any use, and as the possibility arises with the spread of digital equipment that we may all compose, perform and even disseminate our own music without thought of staves, clefs and quarter notes.

In a sense, this book expresses the magnificence and melancholy of its age. Scholarship–some of it Taruskin’s own, on composers as widely separated in time as Stravinsky and the fifteenth-century master Antoine Busnoys–has brought into view, and often into performance, a vast amount of music that was only dimly known half a century ago. But that expansion of knowledge and experience has been accompanied, unavoidably, by doubts about the universal validity of the central repertory, or canon, that built up around the works of perhaps just a dozen composers from Bach to Mahler, nearly all of them not only dead white males but dead white German-speaking males.

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There are many things I love about classical music. I love how, just like the best of our modern music, it can encapsulate history, life, and emotion. It is as if the composition itself is a biometric record of its day, its author.

However, music alone cannot tell us everything. When Solomon Volkov published Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (ISBN: 087910998X) in 1979 which for the first time exposed a completely different picture of Shostakovich than what was assumed at the time (ie not a compliant citizen under Stalin’s reign), it drastically changed our view of both the composer and his music (the debate over this book is still raging today).

Music (classical or modern) paints a picture of lives and cultures past that deserve the painstaking (if admittedly imperfect) work that people such as Mr. Taruskin have committed to it, if only so that we can understand the context behind it.