I’ve actually been reading the OHWM – starting in the 20th century. Yes, Taruskin limits himself to the “literate” art-music tradition, i.e. that which is written down as music. This is his first limiting factor, and confines the OHWM to Gregorian Chant -> Late 20th c. (It should be noted that the second volume dedicated to the 20th century is about a third shorter than the others.) And he does consciously leave out a lot of material in favor of hitting the “high points” of music historiography. Yes, the book is arranged chronologically. This is more of an organizing principle to keep some structural sense to this mammoth undertaking than an attempt to squeeze Western art-music history into a progressive narrative.

From chapter to chapter, though, Taruskin constructs essays designed to explicate significant technical procedures of composition and to historically situate the composers and pieces of a time period. For every topic, Taruskin makes reference to contemporary philosophies of spiritual, social and political thought, relevant musical influences (micro-progresses have their value), biographical factors, and critical reception.

By making the limitations of historiography transparent, Taruskin is saying point blank that his (and implicitly all) history does not see things as they were, but as the are – and have been – perceived. And because it is the work of one man (or one man propped up by grad students and filtered by editors), it cannot (will not) cover everything from every angle. This is classic post-Foucault New Criticism and it doesn’t take away from Taruskin’s achievement one bit.

There’s plenty to argue with in OHWM. Have at it. The analyses are overfocused on pitch and structure concerns. There is little real discussion of means of dissemination of music (performers, cultural institutions, etc.) and the role they play in shaping the music. The end of the millennium, “post-literate” discussion is fairly reductive.

But if you want to start a discussion of the value (or lack there of) of contemporary/ modern art/serious/non-pop music, don’t use Taruskin’s history as a whipping boy without backing up your assertions. And he is the absolute wrong choice for a demonstration of a poverty of music historicism.

As to the perceived 20th century bias, I’m perfectly content with that. Earlier histories were weighted more heavily towards early music (musicology began as a much more archaeologically-inclined, pre-18th century discipline). The most commonly used textbooks still don’t know account well for the music closest to us in time. It doesn’t bother me in the least that Taruskin inverts that formula.

Has Jazz become decadent as well?
maybe. Times moves fast these days.

Durability is important, (there was an early reference to pop ‘ephemera’) but the claim that art music is more durable than popular doesn’t stand up well for the period after the rise of jazz and blues (though it’s true for the early part of C20, I agree). Louis Armstrong (1901-71) seems likely to be at least as durable as any of his art music contemporaries. And for the period from 1950 to the present, there’s no comparison in my view. Popular music from this entire period is still heard on a daily basis, whereas much of the art music hailed at the time has disappeared.

Despite the above, it’s clear as I said before that there is plenty of activity in contemporary art music and plenty of people finding value there, which is all to the good.

A few people here have defended their likes and dislikes as that; as if taste per se equals value. Times change. Liberalism in 2005 is well to the right of liberalism in 1975 and some of the responses above sound as vaguely defensive as a those of a senate democrat. Art is formal- is a debate within/through form. The classical tradition is one of the wonders of the history of mankind, but it’s dead. The future is in new forms and hybrids, whether it’s in Jerry Springer the Opera or some idea off long form compositional jazz, or in real loud guitar. In other words- and I am drunk- you can give the past its due in every way without becoming its slave. There is no excuse for the stupidity of Antonin Scalia.
And Ashlee Simpson is prettier!

In these, Taruskin was responding to the performance of three Prokofiev pieces: The Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of October, Zdravitsa (“Hail to Stalin”), and the score for the Eisenstein film “Ivan the Terrible.” Taruskin’s criticism was that 1.) Prokofiev cynically returned to the USSR because he couldn’t compete as a concert pianist or composer with Stravinsky and Rachmaninov in the West and 2.) while there wrote a lot of absolute dreck in an effort to curry favor with Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov.
From the 1996 NYT article:
“What can it mean in 1996—Year Five of the Sovietless New World
Order—to perform and lustily (or as Nabokov would put it, poshlustily)
acclaim the worst musical dregs of the Stalin’s personality cult [i. e.
Prokofiev’s ‘Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution,’”—and—“Are we celebrating the freedom to perform of our own volition works that were once forced down gullets and banned by turns? ”

Taruskin isn’t savaging Prokofiev, so much as the practice of performing some truly awful works that add nothing to Prokofiev’s reputation and are only of interest as artifacts of Soviet artistic repression. Why waste valuable musical resources on dreck? The argument isn’t “Prokofiev should be dropped down a few notches as a composer…because [he] picked the wrong horse,” it’s that Prokofiev squandered his talent by cynically going where he thought he could win performances and acclaim easily, and that our respect for him as a person is what ought to be dropped a few notches. Taruskin has spoken favorably of some of Prokofiev’s work in other places.

To return to the larger point, John Q, it seems like you might be representing your opinion of concert/art music—to which you are, of course, entitled, as something more than that. The charges that art music “plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole,” don’t denigrate this music in the least. If anything, they are too contradictory too serve as any kind of objective measure of quality/importance. Ashlee Simpson probably has an impact on the lives of more americans today than Beethoven, she is certainly more popular; but is she more durable? Is the depth of her impact on the individual greater than Beethoven’s? Your criteria tell us something about the musician, certainly, but I don’t think it correlates with a any kind of objective “value”, how do you measure that anyway? Too personal. Your criterial allow all kinds of other, more slippery factors into the mix that have nothing to do with the music itself: economic and social issues, questions about marketing and publicity, popular culture, inter- and intra-generational social dynamics—all those things that have put rock, jazz, and art music in their respective pigeon holes but have nothing to do with musical content. Suffice to say art music remains—probably for more people than you think—something that has value. I don’t think it’s necessary to launch an impassioned defense of art music or to try and savage rock/pop (Ashlee Simpson excepted). Art music stands just fine on its own. Either you like it, you don’t, or you just don’t know enough about it to make an objective decision: all reasonable positions that have nothing to do with the “value” or “usefulness” of this music. As long as people are playing and listening to it, it has value and is usefull.

(1) Progress in Music
Its not a history of progress, but it is a history of innovation. A good book would focus on how each major composer took the musical language of the day and then added something new.

(2) The Value of Art Music
There is not, as some people might have it, a clear line between high art and low art, but those categories are useful. What makes high art worthy of study is its richness and complexity, which fascinate attentive, sensitive listeners. Whether the audience for it is large or small is not relevant. You can create a 2×2 matrix with popular vs. unpopular on the horizontal and high vs. low on the vertical, and you will find pieces that fall into each of the four squares of the matrix. Remember that the audience for good literature and film is much smaller than the audience for mass-market literature and film. Stating that the prog rock audience is about the same size as the contemporary music is not very useful.

You also mention durability and impact on our culture. Durability is slightly higher in art music than popular music. Virtually no popular pieces from 1900 to 1950 are played as often as a few classical pieces from 1900 to 1950 that I could name.

Music unlike visual art or drama is something that you can record and play in the background. If, of all the listening activity in the world, you only count focused listening, i.e. not background music, then you would probably find that focused listeners find art music and jazz most rewarding.

Most pop music, even by the best musicians, is predictable and repetitive, so once you’ve heard the first twenty seconds of a song, you know what the rest of the song is going to sound like. And chances are it will be in verse/chorus form and there will be a bridge, and the metre will be 4/4, and the dynamic range will not vary, and that a percussive instrument will be used to keep the beat. So when it comes to form and structure, there’s very little innovation in pop music. That’s what makes it work so well as wallpaper.

Anyway I could write much more but I’ll stop now :)

I asked him a year or so ago if anyone had done anything on the relationship of strict constructionalism in both fields, (Scroll down) He also organized a presentation by Taruskin.

But if I remember correctly T. made the argument not so long ago that Prokofiev should be dropped down a few notches as a composer due to the failure of communism.
The argument seemed to be that the composer picked the wrong horse.
Pretty vulgar stuff

I must say I’ve really enjoyed this discussion – lots of people here are much better informed than me, and I’ve certainly learned a lot, though it hasn’t fundamentally changed my viewpoint.

“The historiography of art—and particularly, it seems, of music—remains the most stubbornly Whiggish of all historiographies, despite longstanding maverick opposition. That historiography is still a Tradition-of-the-New narrative that celebrates technical innovation, viewed as progress within a narrowly circumscribed aesthetic domain. The hermetic and formalist side of this paradigm and the heroically individualistic, asocial side of it remain sources of dissatisfaction to those of us who believe that this manner of accounting for the production and the value of artworks has had a deleterious influence on that very production and that very value.”

I have a great deal of trouble reconciling this sentiment (which, I might add, is entirely born out in Mr. Taruskin’s work) with your assessment of OHWM as having “a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting.” Your reviewer is damning Mr. Taruskin for the same problem Taruskin diagnoses in Musicology as a whole. So my advice is: read Taruskin and see for yourself. He has authored plenty of shorter, more accessible works than the OHWM that well repay a reading. As to your dissatisfaction with the fact that 2/5 of the work is devoted to the twentieth century, I can think of two good reasons for this: 1) the preponderance of writing about and by 20th c. composers. The fact is, we know a lot less about Mozart, much less Bach, or Willaert, than we do about Stravinsky or Schoenberg, who have written extensively about their music. Meanwhile, it’s wildly optimistic to think that we have retained even half of the amount of music written during the 18th c., much less the 15th. There is simply a lot less material to cover from those time periods. You can argue that Taruskin should have been more selective, left more of the twentieth century out, but that’s a different point entirely. 2) The other problem is the fragmentation/atomization in the 20th century of all those aspects—melody, harmony, form, instrumentation, rhythm, etc—that are said to comprise musical style. The decline of serialism, in particular, revealed and encouraged a sort of anything-goes approach for composers of art and concert music, and that left a lot of ground to cover, including attempts to integrate rock, pop, jazz, folk, and nearly any native/ethnic music which has been recorded anywhere in the world into the western classical tradition. It is a vast, vast field and on top of it you seem to want a major survey of rock, pop and jazz in-and-of themselves. I can’t even imagine what the readership for such an unwieldy and ridiculous tome would be like. Meanwhile, to anyone who would actually purchase the OHWM, I think it’s pretty well implied that this is a survey of western art/concert music. If you want someone who has a lot to say about Led Zeppelin, clearly you would not seek out Mr. Taruskin. Nor would I look to Lester Bangs’ work if I were researching integral serialism.

In the mean time, the kind of intellectual poverty you attribute to musicology reveals a lack of familiarity with it on your part, more than anything else. Having received a very traditional, conservative music conservatory education, I realize there is a real gap between what is being taught at the undergraduate level and promulgated in the media, and “what’s actually out there,” so to speak, so I understand your view. As a discipline, musicology (and to a lesser extent, music theory) has been a late bloomer, but it now boasts scholars of a caliber that any academic field would envy. This list is basically off the top of my head, but check out Carolyn Abbate, Adam Krimms, Gary Tomlinson or Patrick McCreless to see where musicology is and where it’s headed. Or if you really want to know all about what’s happened to musicology in the last twenty years, read Kevin Korsyn’s 2003 book “Decentering Music,” an exhaustive account of the internecine squabbles that have left musicology a very changed field.

One final point I should like to mention in musicology’s favor: it’s best and brightest practitioners have long since moved beyond the serialism/non-serialsim debate that rages in the comments above, and which, as one commenter has mentioned, is well and truly a dead horse. There has been enough hot air expended by the partisans of these two factions for a lifetime. One the one hand, you get people who have had one or two bad pieces forced on them in a music history class or who have read some of Boulez’s more incendiary pronouncements and feel perfectly reasonable in claiming that serialism is stupid. To them, I would quote an excellent line of Richard Toop’s: “Serialism, like any other rich approach to composition, is only marginally described by the recitation of its surface mechanics. Its essence lies in the musical, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas and conflicts it helps to articulate. Only an idiot, I hope, would imagine Stockhausen’s ‘Gesang der Junglinge’ is ‘about’ the numbers 1 to 7 or that ‘Le Marteau san maitre’ is about the chord multiplication technique.” …another way of saying there is just as much crappy serial music as there is crappy tonal music. Imagine, any of you, if you were asked to render judgment on jazz having heard nothing but Paul Whiteman. On the other hand, I can think of a few choice words for rabid serialists, but as nearly as I can tell, one can only read about them in books nowadays