Introduction to the History of Western Music
_______________________________________________________________
Dan Grimley
Welcome to the course! This document is intended to give you a survey of the material
we shall be covering in lectures and in class. It includes a schedule, a list of lecture titles
and topics, a list of general readings, and details about resources intended to support
your study. DON’T TRY AND READ EVERYTHING! The important thing is to get a flavour
of the debates, and an idea of the ground covered. You can be selective.
Course Description
Music history has always been much more than a chronology of musical works and
events. Historians offer interpretations of the past in the way they choose their objects
of study and by the relationships they construct between things. For this reason, history
is always a contemporary activity through which our understanding of music changes. In
these lectures we will consider different ideas of music history and how interpretations of
the past are contested. A central question is whether music history is primarily the study
of musical language (embodied in individual works) or the study of musical practices
(embodied in musical lives, genres, and institutions). The course will examine how
approaches to music history are focused on different kinds of materials and how
contemporary arguments about music are based on conflicting readings of the past.
Aims and objectives
 To challenge and add to the idea of musical history as simple chronology or the
reporting of ‘facts’;
 To consider what might be the proper objects of historical study and how
theoretical subdisciplines have developed around these;
 To examine how different stories of the musical past embody different ideas of
music, its value, and its social function.
Schedule
8 x 75 min lectures with Dan Grimley (DAH), HT Weeks 1-8, Fridays@10.00
Group Classes (1 hour) weeks 3, 5 and 7, with Christopher May and Adam Harper: see
local timetables on faculty noticeboard.
Resources
A box of readings will be kept in the Music Library for consultation. Please do not remove
readings from the Library. Powerpoint lecture slides will be loaded onto WEBLEARN after
each class. If you experience any problems with these, let me know.
Sample Essay Titles
1. How might the notion of a canon of musical masterpieces be challenged by changes in
the way history is conceived and taught?
2. Is Classical Music necessary?
3. With reference to specific historical studies, discuss the usefulness of ideas of
‘progress’ and ‘development’ in music history.
4. To what extent is music history defined by radical discontinuities?
5. Demonstrate, using specific examples, how the writing of music history OR actual
musical composition might validate a particular aesthetic or political viewpoint.
Course Outline
Lecture 1. Canons, centres, and peripheries. Repertoires and musical value
Philip Bohlman, ‘Music and Culture: Historiographies of Disjuncture’, in The Cultural
Study of Music, 45-56
Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman (eds.), Disciplining Musicology, ‘Prologue:
Disciplining Music’ (Bergeron); ‘Epilogue: Musics and Canons’ (Bohlman)
Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), esp.
Chapter 1 (‘Musical Values’)
Susan McClary, ‘The World According to Taruskin’, Music & Letters 87/3 (November
2006), 408-15
Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of History Western Music, Introduction, ‘The History of
What?’, xiii-xxii
Lecture 2. Defining the musical ‘work’. Objects of study. Philosophical
definitions and musical practice
Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, 1-7
Philip Bohlman, ‘Ontologies of music’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds, Rethinking
Music (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 17-34
Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Introduction (pp. 1-8), ch. 8
(‘After 1800: The Beethoven Paradigm’), 205-242
Jim Samson, ‘The musical work and nineteenth-century history’, in Samson (ed.) The
Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, 1-28
Albin J Zak III, ‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation, “All
Along the Watchtower”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/3 (Autumn
2004), 599-644
Lecture 3. Identities. Gender, sexuality, and the musical canon. Cults of genius
and desire
Maynard Solomon, ‘Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini’, 19th-Century
Music 12/3 (Spring, 1989), 193-206 (see also Rita Steblin’s response)
Philip Brett, ‘Piano Four-Hands: Franz Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire’,
19th-Century Music 21/2 (Autumn 1997), 149-176
Byron Adams, ‘The “Dark Saying” of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian
Paradox’, 19th-Century Music 23/3 (Spring 2000), 218-235
Gary C Thomas “Was Georg Frideric Handel Gay?” on Closet Questions and Cultural
Politics’, Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C Thomas
(Routledge, 1994), 155-204
Suzanne Cusick, ‘Gender, Musicology and Feminism’, Rethinking Music, 471-498
Lecture 4. Narratives and Stories. Ways of telling. Organicism and historical
development. The idea of ‘absolute music’
Janet M Levy, ‘Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writing on Music’, The Journal of
Musicology 5/1 (Winter, 1987), 3-27
Susan McClary, ‘Narrative Agendas in “Absolute Music”: Identity and Difference in
Brahms’s Third Symphony’, in Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and
Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 326-44
David L Montgomery, ‘The Myth of Organicism: from Bad Science to Great Art’, The
Musical Quarterly 76/1 (Spring, 1992), 17-66
Ruth Solie, ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Music Analysis’, 19th-Century Music 4/2
(Autumn, 1980), 147-156
Leo Treitler, ‘Historiographies of Music: Issues of Past and Present’, Rethinking Music,
356-377
Lecture 5. Music and Place. Institutions and sites of performance
William Weber, Music and the Middle Class, Introduction (ch. 1) and ch. 2
William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from
Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), chs. 3 & 8
Celia Applegate, ‘How German is it? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the
Early Nineteenth-Century’, 19th-Century Music 21/3 (Spring 1998),
Sanna Pederson, ‘A B Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German Musical Identity’, 19thCentury Music 18/2 (Autumn 1994), 87-107
Christopher Small, Musicking (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1998), chs. 1-2
Trevor Herbert, ‘Music History and Social History’, The Cultural Study of Music, 146-156
Lecture 6. Inventing the Folk. The ‘English Musical Renaissance’ and the Folk
Music Revival
Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture. Ideology, and the English Folk Revival
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993), chs. 1 & 2
Dave Harker, Fakesong: the Manufacture of British Folksong 1700 to the Present Day
(Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1985)
Dave Harker and C. J. Bearman, ‘Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work
of David Harker’, Folklore, 113 (April 2002), 11-34
Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance 1840-1940:
Constructing a National Music (2nd ed., Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001), chs. 1 & 5.
Lecture 7. Ghosts in the Machine. Music and the Histories of Sound Recording
Amanda Bayley, Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology (Cambridge UP.
2010)
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in
Illuminations (Pimlico, 1998), 211-244
John Culshaw, Putting the Record Straight (Secker and Warburg, 1981)
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke UP,
2003)
Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (Yale UP, 2004)
Lecture 8. Afterlives: Classical Music Multimedia
Nicholas Cook, Analysing Music Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000)
Peter Franklin, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film
Scores (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), ch. 4
Lewis Lockwood, ‘Film Biography as Travesty: Immortal Beloved and Beethoven’, The
Musical Quarterly, 81/2 (Summer 1997), 190-8
Some General Reading (consult selectively!)
Amanda Bayley (ed.), Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology
(Cambridge UP, 2010)
Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman, (eds), Disciplining Music: Musicology and its
Canons (Chicago UP, 1992)
Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, (eds), Queering the Pitch: the New
Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994)
Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton UP, 1996)
John Butt, Playing with History (Cambridge UP, 2002)
Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, (eds) The Cultural Study of Music:
An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003)
Nicholas Cook, Music—A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 1998)
Nicholas Cook, and Mark Everist, (eds), Rethinking Music (Oxford UP, 1999)
Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge UP, 1983),
esp. chs 1-4.
Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford UP, 1992; rev. ed. 2007)
J. P. E. Harper-Scott, and Jim Samson (eds), An Introduction to Music Studies
(Cambridge UP, 2009)
Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, trans. Adam
Czerniawski (New York, 1986)
Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Values (Oxford
UP, 2002)
Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, Music and Society: the Politics of Composition,
Performance and Reception (Cambridge UP, 1987)
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis, 1991)
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (HarperCollins, 2007)
Jim Samson, (ed.) The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge UP,
2002)
Christopher Small, Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown:
Wesleyan UP, 1998)
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke UP,
2003)
Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford UP, 1996)
Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford UP, 2004, rev. 2009)
Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 1989)
Contact me: daniel.grimley@music.ox.ac.uk