Winner of the 2005 R. R. Hawkins Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing
Named One of the Best Books of 2005 by The Sunday San Francisco Chronicle
Winner of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems Taylor Award
Named One of the Washington Post's "Best of the Decade: Classical Music" Top Ten

Description

Sweepingly ambitious, The Oxford History of Western Music will illuminate, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective that challenges the received wisdom of the field, Richard Taruskin sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history.
Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the context of each stylistic period-key cultural, historical, social, economic, and scientific events-influenced and directed compositional choices. Unlike earlier surveys, Taruskin provides greater attention to the full range of 20th century music, including American music as part of the mainstream tradition of western music, women in music, and popular musics.
The main five volumes are filled with helpful illustrations that enhance the historical context of musical composition, as well as musical examples and black-and-white pictures throughout. The sixth volume provides a comprehensive chronology, further reading and other source material, and an index to the entire set.
Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, The Oxford History of Western Music will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse tradition. Pre-publication price until 12/31/04. $699.00 thereafter.

Reviews

"It is a visionary addition to our understanding of our culture."--Roger Scruton, Times Literary Supplement

"Expresses the magnificence and melancholy of its age.... Singular in every possible way."--The Nation

"Entertaining. Provocative."--The New York Times Book Review

"[Taruskin's] analyses are generally both cogent and entertaining, written in a rambunctious style that conveys technical information with great lucidity."--The New York Review of Books

"The magnificent new Oxford History of Western Music , by Richard Taruskin, isn't yet another boring music history book - why, apart from the sheer, mind-boggling erudition it contains, its a must-read for people who love or are curious about what we call western classical music ... Well, reading Taruskins 3,800-page, 1.25-million-word opus is like hearing one of those great interpretations. An accomplished performer himself (on viola da gamba), Taruskin doesnt just give us the facts of music history; he performs them the way a great musician does a score. Suddenly there is a coherent, irresistible narrative, full of delightful, sometimes disturbing surprises that leave you thinking for days. Suddenly, music history lives and breathes."--CBC Online

"If you want to know how brilliant Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music is, just open the first of its five long volumes and start reading right from page one. I found myself on the edge of my seat, as Mr. Taruskin begins his journey of a thousand years...And his brilliance---both in his narrative and his thinking---sweeps more or less nonstop through most of his 3,825 pages, which took him 13 years to write."--Wall Street Journal

"The six volumes of The Oxford History of Western Music hit the scale at about 20 pounds. They comprise more than 4,000 pages, including a final volume of chronology, bibliography and index, and 1.25 million words, as well as 500 black-and-white photos and thousands of musical examples. Whew! Let's just say Richard Taruskin's mega-achievement is well worth the weight. In his expansive, 1,200-year journey through what he terms "literate" music - or music written down - the famously provocative American musicologist debunks myths and goes into obsessive detail about the composers and works he believes have helped shape Western musical traditions."--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Carefully worded and well-researched, the set examines the last 2,000 years of music history in loving detail. The structure is clear and the chapters connect well with each other. The Oxford history isn't an encyclopedia or a dictionary, but a narrative history."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Erudite, biased and persuasive; an irresistible survey of a millennium of music."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Taruskin's chef-d'oeuvre, however, is a feast of contrarian ideas, with enough spice to sting the palate of anyone with a stake in telling the old stories in the old way. It aims for nothing less than the revaluation of practically everything you thought you knew about classical music....Taruskin's magnum opus is a must-read, and in its way, a real page-turner of detective non-fiction. It's a cinch to become the most discussed music title of the year, if not of the decade."--The Globe & Mail

"...likely to be remembered as the magnum opus of the most stimulating and insightful English-language writer on music at work today."--Richmond Times-Dispatch

"...a highly personal (and often delightfully prickly) take on musical history from an original and eccentric mind -- a mind to which anybody interested in the art of music should be exposed...it should both inform and inspire arguments for years to come."--Washington Post

"Just in time for Christmas, Oxford University Press will release in November its new six-volume, 3,500-page Oxford History of Western Music . What makes the publication more than an academic door-stopper is the author, Richard Taruskin. This Berkeley musicologist is probably the most readable music academic in English.... In short, Taruskin is a formidable communicator and well-attuned to contemporary issues. But he is no postmodern ideologue. He believes that he "always treats music as a meaningful utterance, a person-to-person communication."--Montreal Gazette

"Taruskin has created a corpus of scholarship of breathtaking scope and crushing weight."--Lingua Franca

Product Details

4272 pages; 500 halftones, 1800 musical examples; 7 x 10; ISBN13: 978-0-19-516979-9ISBN10: 0-19-516979-4

About the Author(s)