The Concise Oxford History of Music

by Gerald Abraham

This book provides a comprehensive history of music from its origins in the ancient world up to the death of Stravinksky.

In addition to a full account of the development of Western music, which includes information on composers, their works, and their influences, Gerald Abraham also interweaves chapters on the musical traditions of other parts of the world.

The book is illustrated throughout and includes numerous musical examples.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, Reference

990 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This long and tedious work may be worth five stars, but I cannot be sure because I know very little about music. Arguably, I should not even be reviewing this book given my modest knowledge in the area.

I have always felt that books about music are like radio shows about art in that neither can truly address the subject matter. Nonetheless Abraham finds a way a cope with the challenge of analyzing music without sound. Abraham's basic approach is to present a great deal of staff paper. Thus, the reader who is familiar with Palestrina, Messian or CPE Bach can combine his or her memories of concerts or recordings with the written notes in order to follow Abraham's arguments. Ultimately Abraham finds the right combination of musical notation and text. The result is a plausible if not dramatic narrative.

For Abraham, the history of music is the history of ideas as can be seen on the staff paper. He is not interested in the development of a musical public, the marketing of music or the phenomenon of recordings. He is not even interested in changes of performance or conducting styles. For Abraham, musical evolution is simply a dialectical process. Every innovation by a composer begets a response by another composer to which yet another composer will react.

Abraham also demonstrates very little interest in the evolution of musical instruments although he does observe in passing that the invention of the pianoforte had a profound impact on developments in the nineteenth century and mentions that the remarkable violins produced by Stradivarius, Guaraneri and Amati probably influenced composers to give this instrument more prominence. Abraham however does not comment on the tendency in the late nineteenth century for composers to write works that exploited the very pure tones produced by the very high quality of the new instruments being produced. Thus he is silent on the entire issue of modern versus "period" instruments which has dominated the debate on musical performance for the last forty years.

Readers should be aware that Abraham does not begin to discuss the 19th century until three-quarters of the way through. For those many music fans who prefer the 19th century to all others, the first 600 pages will inevitably seem a bit long. However, Abraham constructs a superb narrative that shows how the music of classical Greece, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment prepared the way for the great modern period that we all love. In the end, every section and every page is worthwhile.

I find myself in total agreement with Abraham's general thrust which is to present the musical tradition of Western Europe going from strength to strength from the 5th Century BC to the end of the 19th Century before a catastrophic 20 th century in which more than two millenia of achievement was annihilated in less than 50 years. In Abraham's view classical music emerged fatally wounded from WWI. During WWII it died and was entombed.

Despite its great flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed Abraham's history of our civilization's wonderful music.

[Carlos · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel like this book should have been titled “A Chronology of Musical Technique”. Although Abraham introduces the book stating that he meant it to be understandable to a lay reader, I can honestly say that he failed miserably in that regard; I’ve had one year of music theory courses and I could only loosely follow his painfully detailed analysis. Another thing that I found needlessly confusing was his refusal to deal with any particularity on the figures that most lay readers would identify as the greatest composers. Obviously he dealt with them when their period came around, but he lost a huge opportunity to use them as an anchor for the people who do not live and breathe musical analysis. The only good thing that I got out of this book is the over 300 excerpts of music from across the centuries. In my humble opinion, this book was not worth the effort.

[Gille Liath · Rating 3 out of 5]

The problem with this huge book is that you could only really understand much of it if you already knew what it was trying to say. It is loaded with jargon; perhaps this is necessary to keep the treatment short, but too often the author writes as if the thing he is supposed to be explaining had already been explained. Not only that, it is full of foreign language titles and quotations that are left untranslated, and even when he uses English the author often manages to be obscure. The material is present by topic, rather than by composer, and in very short snippets so that the treatment feels bitty. The comments about any particular composer could be split between a dozen different sections; it feels as though the overall importance of Bach, say, or Mozart, slips through the cracks between these bits. After all it is primarily as a composer, not as individual pieces of music, that a composer has an impact - both in his own time and to us today.

When it says 'music' it means, predictably, Western classical music, although there are brief but respectful nods to the music of other regions. There's nothing about any kid of pop/rock, and folk music is mentioned briefly only where it affects the development of classical. I saw a review which said it gives short shrift to modern music; I don't think it does, it just doesn't treat the modern era at greater length than others as is often the case. It does come to an end around the middle of the C20th; the author, writing in 1979, says he didn't feel able to identify the most significant music of his own day. And actually, there isn't that much of interest to show from the last 40-50 years.

For a book like this to be produced by a single author is a mammoth achievement of learning - understanding classical music is the work of a lifetime, I don't know how anyone ever gets round to actually creating it - but there aren't enough concessions to the supposed target audience, the legendary 'intelligent layman' (or woman). Probably it would be useful as a reference work for undergraduate music students, who will presumably be familiar with the terminology; and if you wanted a book to point you towards the key works of the repertoire, you could do a lot worse.

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful

[Mody Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

it is a good dicion