The Oxford History of Western Music Richard Taruskin Sweepingly ambitious,The Oxford History of Western Music sets close examination of representative works within a socially and culturally oriented narrative to illuminate the themes, Styles, and currents that gave shape and direction to the literate or "art" tradition of Western music. Taking a critical perspective that challenges the received wisdom of the field, Richard Taruskin treats the conventional narrative of music history as a historical artifact in its own right, within a new approach that gives critical discourse and reception equal billing with composition and performance. Written by a towering and often provocative figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical esthetic position with respect to individual works, and a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. This landmark set considers individual works both with respect to the esthetic and critical paradigms of their own contemporaries and as entities that have ever since been weathering the flux of time and taste… Taruskin provides greater attention to the full range of twentieth-century art music, including American music, than any previous music historian, devoting fully a third of the text to the relatively recent past, and concluding with some informed speculation on the future. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, The Oxford History of Western Music will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse tradition. Richard Taruskin is one of the most acclaimed, controversial, and influential musicologists in the world today. An accomplished performer as well as scholar, he is the author of such works as Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, Text & Act, and Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition. He has also contributed essays and reviews to The New York Times and The New Republic, as well as 160 articles on Russian composers to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Taruskin has been a professor of musicology at the University of California at Berkeley since 1987.