Customer Reviews

The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is easy to read and endlessly quotable. It is not a book about music per se--there is no discussion of individual works, no musical analysis. It is a book about the social history of music, about how music moved out of the private home and out of the royal courts to become the immense professional and public enterprise that it is now. Blanning traces the long, gradual rise of the musician from lowly servant (Haydn composing to order for the Esterhazy family) to Bono (a master of the universe). Today musicians are among the richest people in the world and the author tells us in fascinating detail, step by step, how that transformation came about.

And he tells the story with really wonderful details. Just one example--he tells us that Liszt was the first pianist to play entirely from memory, the first to place the piano sideways onstage (he had two pianos so he could show both profiles!), the first to open the piano lid, and the first to devote a concert to music for one instrument. He invented the idea of (and the term) the piano recital. He was fabulously successful (and the father-in-law of Wagner). For those, like me, who don't follow rap music, he ends with some samples of popular rap lyrics that left me speechless. Every page of this book has something to say that you will want to share with friends.

For anyone interested in the social history of music, this is a great place to start.

Tis book may not revolutionize our understanding of music, but it is a very good choice as a gift for your musician (or music-loving) friends and family. My son is a composer, and rated it very highly.

I have never found it so difficult to rate any item. There are some very interesting themes in this book but there are mistakes so egregious that they call everything into question.

On p. 99, Blanning refers to "the will he [Beethoven] wrote in 1802 at the age of twenty-eight." The document in question, so identified by Blanning, is the famous "Heiligenstadt Testament" discovered among Beethoven's papers after his death and bearing the date October 6, 1802. As Beethoven was born on December 17, 1770 (or perhaps December 16, but the year is not in question), he was two months short of his 32nd birthday when he wrote this document. Twenty-eight??

Later in this book, Blanning gives a date and then contradicts it in the same paragraph. On p. 207, he refers to Irving Berlin's "`White Christmas' of 1942" and then says that Bing Crosby sang it on his radio show in December 1941! In fact, Berlin wrote the song in 1940 (the sheet music bears that date in the copyright notice).

This book has hundreds of dates in it, more dates than perhaps absolutely necessary in a book of this kind but surely they should be accurate. Just one more example, chosen purely at random. On p. 19 he states that the London music publishing firm of Longman and Broderip was founded in 1767. Actually, a predecessor firm was founded in that year by Longman, but the named firm was not founded until 1776 (it went bankrupt in 1798).

Now, the Beethoven dates are actually important, as they relate to the onset and progress of his deafness and the suicidal feelings it elicited. The White Christmas date is less important, but the self-contradiction in a single paragraph is remarkable. The date of the founding of a music publishing firm which went out of business long ago is less important still. But these errors do make one wonder how many more there are in this book, including perhaps some which are important and which a reader might not recognize as such. I think 3 stars is generous.

I don't like to start book reviews by quoting a paragraph from the introduction, but I think it's the best move here:

Status, purpose, places and spaces, technology, and liberation- these are the five categories I will explore to explain music's march to cultural supremacy. What follows is an exercise in social, cultural and political history, not musicology- no technical knowledge of music is required.

Often when I read a good book, I'm unsure whether I find the thesis convincing because I already agreed before I read the specific book (the book just reinforced pre existing belief) or whether the argument was just objectively convincing. In this case, i can firmly declare that both are true- first- I totally agreed with the above stated thesis before I picked up this book AND that Blanning- the Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge University- writes in such an objectively pleasing fashion that is hard not to get swept up in his five stage analysis of "the triumph of music."

When this book begins, musicians are servants and slaves. The examples selected are the German composers of the 18th century. At the beginning of Chapter one, musicians like Handel, Haydn and Mozart are writing their masterpieces at the bequest of various German princes, and for them alone. Over the course of the 18th century and into the 19th century, this model of musicianship is overwhelmed by the now familiar idea of musicians as cultural celebrity. A recent still-relevant example is Liszt- whose "demonic" piano playing inspired the kind of swoons a modern associates with the Beatles. This initial transformation from musician/composer from court servant to celebrity is embodied by Wagner. Wagner's triumph in German culture remains largely unequalled, at it is to Wagner that all subsequent musicians must look for a benchmark of "how far you can go."

The role of the purpose of music in the march towards triumph is the focus of the second chapter. Here, the point is embodied by a sub chapter heading "The Secularization of Society, the Sacralization of Music." Blanning described- in matter of fact fashion how music moved from being an Assertion of Power on behalf of a specific monarch, to an instrument used in worship, to it's more or less present state as a good to be consumed by the public in the form of concert. Along the way, music audiences were convinced to take music very seriously, a process referred to by Blanning as "Sacralization"(i.e. making something sacred) at the same time, the movement of music appreciation out of the court and into the bourgeois and working classed meant that the audience for music exploded.

Then he is on to the role of physical space (an interesting summary of work about how places to hear music became more 'church like' and how the number of places to hear music expanded to included venues for the middle and lower classes (specifically pleasure gardens and music halls in the late 18th century and 19th century.)

Finally, Blanning handles the role of technology- a subject I've written about so often here that I found his writing duplicative of books I've already read and a final, weak, chapter on the liberating power of music for disempowered minorities. On the whole, it's an excellent, recent summary of the ways in which music is a social project composed of composers, performers and audiences. Blanning assumes that music does not actually exist without all three individuals- music is a social experience, no matter what romanticists and their followers may claim. I recommend this book for anyone looking for a cogent thesis about the role of music in modern society.

This book plots a fascinating story, but gets stuck on some eye-glazing historical flypaper, e.g. the history of European national anthems. Tales of the 20th Century music business are told in a plodding Euro-centric way, while the story of the development of the art form in the 18th and 19th Centuries is compelling. I wish the rest of thesis was as good.