Music across millennia

In 2005, when I was midway through my undergraduate music degree, the six volumes of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music appeared on the shelves of the university music library. We were urged by one of our younger and wilier teachers to raid it for material, ideas, angles, before any of our examiners could possibly digest it all. At almost a foot long, its scale was as forbidding as its remarkable, single-authored claim to totality. I left it on the shelf.

By the time I finally took the plunge (now a postgraduate with my own students to teach), those volumes had come to seem rather less undergrad-friendly. Taruskin’s aim was not only to tell the entire history of the phenomenon known outside musicological circles as “classical music”, but also to “account for the rise of our reigning narratives, and show that they too have histories with beginnings and (implicitly) with ends”. This, in other words, was a history of music combined with a history of histories of music. No wonder one of the longest and most penetrating reviews diagnosed the project as “monumental musicology”. Starting in the eighth century with what he calls “the first literate repertory” in the West, Taruskin ends, thousands of pages later, with a characteristically blistering assessment of a handful of late-twentieth-century works and, above all, a refusal to provide easy answers to any of the questions he has raised. “The future”, he points out in closing, “is anybody’s guess. Our story ends, as it must, in the middle of things.”

Taruskin died aged seventy-seven in 2022, the most eminent musicologist in the anglophone discipline. He jokingly referred to his magnum opus as “the Ox”. Almost two decades after its publication it is hard to imagine anyone trying to tackle such an immense historical overview again – and just as hard to imagine why anyone would want to. As Gary Tomlinson, another of the discipline’s figureheads, observed in that lengthy review I mentioned above, “There is probably not another scholar active today who could have marshalled the findings of twentieth-century, Eurocentric musicology as comprehensively”. The Ox was of its time and place; things, inevitably, have changed.

The title of Andrew Ford’s The Shortest History of Music was presumably (like Taruskin’s) granted rather than chosen: it is the latest volume to appear in an Australian series of Shortest Histories. How short, you ask? My advance copy measures just over half an inch (1.5cm, to be precise). In more conventional terms, each of Ford’s five chapters spans a significant historical gamut, with all but the final one (“Recording Music”) reaching back many centuries and promising to return us to “the present” in no more than fifty pages. Taruskin’s Oxford History and Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music (published in 2018, monumental musicology in a different vein) both feature on Ford’s further-reading list. At its best, however, his narrative travels light, across continents as well as millennia.

Take this extract from a rapid sketch of the genealogies of a modern symphony orchestra’s percussion section:

Kettle drums […] seem to have originated in Persia and Mesopotamia, then spread to Africa and beyond; cymbals, which are older, also have Middle Eastern origins, though they were in China and eastern Europe by the twelfth century; tambourines are frame drums (again Middle Eastern and older still) with jingles attached. Gongs are Asian: the word “gong” is Javanese, and gongs of various sorts dominate the percussion orchestras of Java and Bali, Thailand, Myanmar and the southern Philippines, Borneo, eastern Indonesia and East Timor.

A few pages later there’s a typically high-energy climax of a paragraph about the global rise of rap, following hot on the heels of a brief discussion of the possible performance habits of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi and the “English poet” William Blake:

It seemed rap could adjust to any language, subtly transforming itself as it met the guttural consonants of Arabic, the strongly rolled rs and front-loaded word stresses of Finnish or the tonal inflections of Mandarin, the last of which created a palette of vocal timbre and pitch somewhat at odds with the comparatively monotonous delivery typical of Western rap.

There is something undeniably impressive about both Ford’s compressed marshalling of such varied material and his desire to make connections sing across different musical cultures. His history is short, but in certain respects it is as ambitious as Taruskin’s Ox. There’s no mission statement and you won’t find a definition of “music” until his short epilogue (spoiler alert: it’s “organised sound”, courtesy of John Cage). But Ford’s introduction and first chapter – “The Tradition of Music”, where you’ll find those long quotations above – set us up to expect a survey of the whole global-historical shebang. He sets out the difficulties that raises early on: “about Western art music we know a lot, and we have ready access to a vast amount of the music itself; with nearly all the other music in the world (prior to the advent of recording), we know a lot less, and have access to virtually none of it”.

But that surely depends on what you mean by “access”. What kind of stuff is “music”, and what materials do we need to begin to feel we “know” about any given musical tradition? Even more important, who are “we”?

Ford, a Liverpool-born Australian composer, writer and broadcaster, does not engage with such questions. There are occasional gestures of solidarity towards marginalized historical subjects – “The racism faced by musicians of colour was (and still is) as real as the obstacles placed in women’s paths by a patriarchal society” – but numerous assumptions are made about his reader. “Everyone can hum the bridal march (‘Here Comes the Bride’)”, he tells us, “but how many people know that it comes from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin?” Or “It might seem to us that a church or court composer, while keeping warm and dry and eating well, is unlikely to have been at music’s cutting edge.”

Whether or not you have strong feelings about the likelihood of the seventeenth-century French court favourite Jean-Baptiste Lully belonging to a musical avant-garde will depend, I imagine, on your existing knowledge of music history. That level of knowledge may also inflect whether Ford’s high-speed mapping of the origins of symphonic percussion instruments, quoted above, has you reaching for an atlas or a cold compress. The assessment of “Western rap” delivery as “comparatively monotonous”, meanwhile, is presumably his own. Perhaps Finnish rappers hear something different?

As the book continues Ford’s attention settles, quietly and unmarked, where English-language histories of “music” always used to – on Europe and North America. But the level of existing knowledge that he assumes in his reader continues to fluctuate. He imagines the relationship between the nineteenth-century commercialization of music in Europe and the contemporaneous emergence of a musical canon with down-the-pub bravado: once concert tickets were sold, classical music was “available to anyone with the necessary shilling to gain admission […] and like many a paying punter, audiences wanted value for money, the tried-and-true music of the past offering a guarantee of quality”. Elsewhere he explains the conventions of so-called “sonata form” in generously untechnical language, only to switch abruptly into references to a particular work’s “development section” and “recapitulation”. And if you reach his rhetorical query “What does chromaticism mean?” with relief, you may not find the help you need in his answer: “You could say it’s the opposite of diatonicism”.

Ultimately more problematic than his vacillating assumptions about his reader, however, are those he makes about music history itself, those “reigning narratives” that so preoccupied Taruskin, and that have been accumulating across cultures for centuries. In his chapter on “Music and Modernism”, Ford names “Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Elgar”, insisting that “No one today would think of the composers on that […] list as modernists”. Well, no one except experts such as J. P. E. Harper-Scott, author of the monograph Edward Elgar, Modernist and John Butt, conductor and Bach scholar, who referred in a 2006 article on the future of Bach scholarship to the composer being “central to the principal poles of musical modernism”. Straw men do, unfortunately, tend to fall apart.

It takes a particular kind of confidence to write any book grandly titled a “History of Music”. Even Taruskin’s six-volume tome claimed mastery only over “Western Music”. That this “Shortest History” is far from comprehensive is neither surprising nor necessarily a problem. But the fact that “music” gradually turns out to mean a limited view of “Western music” really is.

Flora Willson is a writer, broadcaster and Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. She is finishing a book about operatic culture and infrastructure in the 1890s

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