Review of new history of music

[Chaszz]

A review of a new history of a thousand years of Western music. The reviewer takes the author to task for some shortcomings, but the review also provides a handy overview of this history for an uninformed person like me. This is part one of a two part review, and reaches the threshold of the modern era with Monteverdi.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18725

[sjwenger]

Thank you for posting this informative review. I would NOT be likely to read the 4,000+ page set of books, but I'm glad to read this review. Your trask, should you choose to accept it, is to post part II of the review when it comes out : }

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[Chaszz]

Originally posted by sjwenger:
Thank you for posting this informative review. I would NOT be likely to read the 4,000+ page set of books, but I'm glad to read this review. Your trask, should you choose to accept it, is to post part II of the review when it comes out : }

I found the review quite interesting. Charles Rosen is always enertaining to read.

I accept my mission, should I happen to notice the sequel when it arrives online in the New York Review of Books. Do I assume you deny any connection with me, as usual, if I am captured?

[Peter]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
A review of a new history of a thousand years of Western music. The reviewer takes the author to task for some shortcomings, but the review also provides a handy overview of this history for an uninformed person like me. This is part one of a two part review, and reaches the threshold of the modern era with Monteverdi.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18725

Six volumes seems quite a marathon read! Thank goodness Donald Grout 'History of Western Music' achieves it concisely in one - this was the standard book when I was a student and it was invaluable.

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'Man know thyself'

[robert newman]

That sounds like an interesting new work on western musical history.

The shortest and most profound book on western musical history (to me anyway)was recommended many years ago (and I'm still reading it). The name is ...... Johann Sebastian Bach !

Seriously, in terms of reader friendly and useful books (rather than reference books in their own right) that with most relevance for virtually all the history of western music is perhaps 'The Study of Fugue' by Alfred Mann. This book is only around 340 pages long but was the first readable history of fugue theory. It was first published in 1958 (Faber and Faber) and quotes from many of the classical treatises.

I would like to quote from it's opening page (since its content is a real model of conciseness) -

Chapter 1

'Texture Versus Form'

'The rise of polyphony has been recognised as the most decisive phase in the history of Occidental music. The beginnings of polyphonic art, long buried in oblivion, are today a subject of intense study. Early traces are suspected in classical antiquity and in the less familiar past of Northern countries. Yet, those beginnings were actually contained in all monophonic practice which involved the simultaneous use of different voice registers. The octave, fifth, and fourth, which mark the differences between vocal registers, have gradually emerged in musical knowledge as fundamental phenomena and this as the basis of part writing'.

('The Study of Fugue' - Alfred Mann)

RN

[This message has been edited by robert newman (edited 02-08-2006).]

[This message has been edited by robert newman (edited 02-08-2006).]