The World According to Taruskin

Like Aesop’s frogs desiring a king, my undergraduates often clamour for a textbook that will present a narrative history of Western music—a guide that will tell them everything they need to know, all bundled up in a single tidy package. I have always resisted their pleas, however; memories of dragging myself through the arid, unexplained dates and names offered by Donald Jay Grout’s too-long-ubiquitous account left me adamantly opposed to making use of such pedagogical aids. Instead, I have relied upon musical scores, supplemented only with a book of source readings: Music in the Western World, edited by Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin (hereafter, Weiss/T).1 The scores allow me to concentrate on actual pieces of music in their entirety instead of the lists of style characteristics that typically fill textbooks. And instead of the simplified fairytale of smooth succession, by which each great composer merely passes the torch to the next in line, Weiss/T offers a chronologically ordered series of polemical documents that demonstrate how nearly every step along the way provoked fierce debate.