WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Having completed, in his own write, the 3,825 pages (1.25 million
words, 21 pounds) of the Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin
now merits entry to the niche of honor beside such figures as Bill Wambsganss
(first unassisted triple play in a World Series game, 1920) and Charles Lindbergh
(you-know-what, 1927). There have been Oxford music histories before; the last
was completed as recently as 1990 by a consortium that drew copiously from the
panoply of musical scholarship. Their multitude was explained in the introduction:
“To attempt a detailed survey of the whole history of music is no longer
within the power of a single writer.”

Fearless and unstoppable, Taruskin (professor of musicology, UC
Berkeley since 1987, Columbia before that) is hardly your garden-variety single
writer. Words pour forth; a two-volume study on Stravinsky requires 1,757 pages
to get us up to 1921, leaving 50 years still to go. He also wields a critic’s
sword, terrible and swift, and it serves to stir hot cauldrons; a renowned New
York Times article from December 9, 2001, takes the side of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, against general outcry, for having canceled music from John Adams’
Klinghoffer out of fear of post-9/11 sensitivity. Not stopping there,
he goes on to rake old coals, condoning the long-standing, if unstated, anti-Wagner
boycott by Israeli audiences. “Why should we want to hear this music now?”
he asks, a curious question in a critical context.

Anyhow, the first thing to know about Taruskin’s huge new solo
flight is that he has not left his critical hat behind. He affects an ingratiating
tone, downright chummy and certainly rare among authors of multivolume histories.
More than once you get the feeling that he’s walking alongside, his arm firmly
on your shoulder, carefully steering you past some composer he’s decided isn’t
worth your while — England’s sturdy old Sir Ralph Vaughan Williams, say, who
is vouchsafed nary a word in the text, save for a note in the intro ordaining
his banishment — and into the arms of some nonentity whose importance he’s decided
to fabricate: four pages for the absurdly insignificant Nikolai Medtner, say.
He spares us footnotes, relying instead upon endnotes keyed to words within
the text. (In one instance, at least, the keying goes haywire, and his own quoted
comment on the Klinghoffer matter is linked to an exactly opposing view
by San Francisco critic Bob Commanday. What ever happened to careful editing?)

A question needs asking: Is not the bundle of critical predilections
on which Taruskin has climbed to fame in recent years an impediment per se to
an encyclopedic history such as the Oxford banner proclaims? Questions of selection
infect this work; they are more than mere judgmental quirks. Where, for example,
is there mention of the enormous richness that has come into Western — yes,
Western — music from the awareness of Far Eastern music? A decisive date,
1889, goes ignored — when the young Debussy hears raga and gamelan in Paris,
absorbs their sounds into his own music and passes his enthusiasms on to European
generations. Where is Lou Harrison, and the awareness of the vast cultural panorama
of the Pacific Rim that he has spread to young Americans on both coasts? What
about Toru Takemitsu? Or the brilliant young talent that slipped out of China’s
clutches to give the West some of its best new music? (Tan Dun earns a mention
not much longer than his name, and an erroneous reference; it is the Matthew
Passion, not Luke, that he has set to music.) Where, amid page after
page of homage to the Beatles and Laurie Anderson and Dylan and other manifestations
of ’60s culture, is notice taken of Stephen Sondheim? And what of today’s Finns,
who do their nation proud?

PRIORITIES

Of the 10 volumes in the previous Oxford History, seven
were filled before Beethoven (i.e., 1800) was reached. In his five volumes (plus
a slender volume for references and index), Taruskin covers that ground in two.
A third volume encompasses the entire 19th century, while the 20th century,
padded out with its ain’t-I-the-cool-one excursions into cultural hinterlands
that would have frazzled the chin whiskers of musicologists in my day, demands
two volumes on its own. Priorities, in other words, aren’t what they used to
be. Supplementing and illustrating the previous edition were albums of recorded
excerpts, two LPs per text volume (at extra cost, of course). In their place,
the new volumes offer rather a lot of printed excerpts, usually considerably
simplified and in modern notation. The intent, I suppose, is that the books
can be read at the piano, and up to a historic point — the point of finger-friendly
Mozart piano sonatas, say — the device works fairly well. What can be gleaned
from a printout of the last few measures of orchestral blooie-blooie from the
Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, however, is open to discussion.

Music demands a central literature to ally the inscrutabilities
of the art itself to the society it serves. Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western
Civilization, now 60 years old, a single volume but, at 1,107 pages, a fat
one, is part of Taruskin’s ancestry, along with the previous Oxford histories.
They have served their purpose well; the graduate student, the musicologist,
the serious enthusiast leaves them shelf space, or makes sure to live near a
library that stocks a copy. It isn’t likely that anyone, anytime soon, will
challenge or replace this huge effort of Taruskin’s; it stands as the
Oxford Music History for the next few decades. As such, it is a staggering accomplishment.
Its faults are exactly what was foreshadowed in the preface to the previous
series — the inevitable critical bias of any single observer, especially one
as famously bristling with passions as Taruskin is known to be.

Those passions rumble through the project, and the eruptions are
wonderful: a brilliant discussion of the constructive principles within one
of Josquin des Prez’s early Renaissance motets; a fine-tuned side-by-side evaluation
(in a chapter called “Class of 1685”) of the great choral works of
Handel and Bach; a chilling 20-page account of the musical drama in Berg’s Wozzeck;
a deep penetration into the astonishing, newly invented harmonic usage that
Schubert lavished on his “Unfinished” Symphony. At one point in the
Schubert chapter, the author misidentifies 1828 — the composer’s last year —
as the time of the “Great” C-major Symphony; several pages later he
sets it back, correctly, to 1825. (Poor Schubert, how he suffers at the hands
of the encyclopedists: first Robert Winter’s error-studded article in Grove’s
Dictionary, and now this!)

Oh, and did I mention . . . the asking price for The Oxford
History of Western Music at this moment is $500, which works out to $23.80
a pound. After January 31, the price jumps to $699.99. Be warned.

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