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A Cultural History of Western Music

Music has been significant in social, religious, and political ritual, and in education, art, and entertainment in all human cultures from antiquity to today. The Cultural History of Western Music presents the first study of music in all its forms – ritual, classical, popular and commercial – from antiquity to today. The work is divided into 6 volumes, with each volume covering the same topics, so readers can either study a period/volume or follow a topic across history.

Delve into the cultural history of western music with this carefully curated collection of key eBook chapters, or explore the full content set here.

This image shows a marble statue of two figures, one playing the pipes

Performance Ghosts, Identity, Ontologies in Antiquity

Imagining ancient music in performance is a bit like dancing with ghosts: we might have a good sense of what the phenomenon of mousikē (that is, music, song, and dance) was like in antiquity, but pinning down its precise contours all at once is impossible. Several types of ancient material provide information on where, when, how, by whom, and for what purpose various types of music, song, and dance were performed, but each type of evidence comes with its interpretive challenges. And indeed, before the age of audio and video recording, how could something as occasion-specific and transient as musical performance be documented?

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Politics: Courts, Conquests, and Crusades; Music in the Middle Ages

Music played a number of significant roles within the political structures and interactions of the Middle Ages, frequently in combination with literary texts, visual art forms, drama, and other kinds of performance and ceremonial. It served as a means by which ruling powers could assert their wealth, sophistication, and prestige publicly and to the widest possible audience, both educated and illiterate. This chapter will consider music’s place within royal, local-noble, and ecclesiastical layers of political governance, examine what musical practices can tell us about the tensions and clashes that arose between political entities, and explore the roles of music and musicians in reflecting and contributing to the politics of the medieval world.

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This image shows a drawing of people in a drawing room discoursing

Crisis of Musical Knowledge in the Renaissance

What is the purpose or value of music in human life? Although present-day musicians and adult listeners tend to recognize the emotional aspects of music far more readily than its interconnected cognitive benefits, people in the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century were deeply concerned with music’s relationship to the mind. As Rob Wegman has shown, a “crisis of music” developed early in this period, provoked by anxieties about music’s role as a transmitter of knowledge, as a way of thinking, and even as a mirror of human understanding. Music reflected and exacerbated a concern with establishing the best way to know religious, moral, and political truths.

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This is a still life of a musical instrument

Musical Transaction and Exchange in the Age of Enlightenment

During the Age of Enlightenment, musics of many kinds flowed across diverse cultures, through the circulation, collision, and intermingling of musical ideas, objects, and practitioners. In music history, this process is often referred to as “exchange.” The idea of exchange is not just about physical transmission, of course. It can imply a metamorphosis of one thing into another: the transformation of raw natural materials into musical instruments, for instance, or the recycling or rearrangement of musical elements (melodies, harmonies, rhythms) into new forms. Overall, the exchange of ideas and inspiration from around the world contributed to the aesthetic complexities and artistic inspirations of many musics at the time.

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This image shows Franz Liszt playing the piano

Sound and Technology in the Industrial Age

The history of technology is often told as a succession of inventions. The Age of Industry, the long nineteenth century from 1789 to 1920, is choc-a-bloc full of technological breakthroughs. The favorite breakthrough of nineteenth-century music technology is the invention of the phonograph, bang in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution. Sound recording undeniably had a big impact on subsequent music history. It provided a new kind of musical ontology that did not notate a composed work but recorded a musical performance. As such, the phonograph gave rise to unprecedented dissemination of music, which had a major impact on musical culture that made itself felt especially in the twentieth century.

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Music, Popular Culture and Activism in the Modern Age

Regardless of sheer popularity, music can reflect a community’s experiences, beliefs, and hopes. This chapter considers Western popular culture through the prisms of cultural activism and musical performance. Sound, a medium of protest and an agent of change, has provided critical responses to events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These inequities may include racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, anti-immigrant bias, economic disparities, and more. In exploring cultural activism embodied in sound and performance, this chapter contributes to discussions about actions taken by musicians who confront white/male/heterosexual/cisgender supremacy, responding vigorously to social injustice through their performances and compositions.

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