Blanning, Tim (author).

Nov. 2008. 378p. illus. Harvard/Belknap, hardcover, $29.95 (9780674031043).

Music endures while other aspects of culture change with the economic and political flux of the times. The status of musicians and composers increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as royal courts supported them to entertain and reflect the spirit of the monarchs and their people, and formal music grew in response to competition between countries. Opera in Italy united Italians. Populist music displaced religious music. Wagner and Verdi were virtually worshipped as their music pervaded popular culture. Songs such as “La Marseillaise” helped drive political change. Musical instruments, made easier to play, were taken up by more people. Recordings and broadcast media in the twentieth century spread music to everyone, regardless of musical ability. Now popular music is growing along with visual arts, while verbal art is declining. Despite chronicling these developments, this isn’t a history of music but a work connecting music to politics and culture to show how it becomes integral to the souls of specific nations and groups. Music, it implies, will remain when other arts fade away.

— Alan Hirsch

(Source: Booklist)

Drawing on examples ranging across the last four centuries, Blanning (modern European history, Cambridge Univ.; The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815) traces the path of music from its place as servant to its current position of supremacy over all other arts in terms of status, influence, and material rewards. The author intermixes popular and classical music and musicians, jumping back and forth from one era to another, from the concert hall to the iPod, to demonstrate how music has reinforced various social and political agendas. Blanning assembles an impressive set of arguments to support his thesis, organized under the broad categories of "Status," "Purpose," "Places and Spaces," "Technology," and "Liberation." This is not intended to be a history of music; it is a brilliantly written history of the steady growth of the power of music and its performers. Highly recommended.

--Timothy J. McGee

(Source: Library Journal)

Book Description

A distinguished historian chronicles the rise of music and musicians in the West from lowly balladeers to masters employed by fickle patrons, to the great composers of genius, to today’s rock stars. How, he asks, did music progress from subordinate status to its present position of supremacy among the creative arts? Mozart was literally booted out of the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg “with a kick to my arse,” as he expressed it. Yet, less than a hundred years later, Europe’s most powerful ruler—Emperor William I of Germany—paid homage to Wagner by traveling to Bayreuth to attend the debut of The Ring. Today Bono, who was touted as the next president of the World Bank in 2006, travels the world, advising politicians—and they seem to listen.

The path to fame and independence began when new instruments allowed musicians to showcase their creativity, and music publishing allowed masterworks to be performed widely in concert halls erected to accommodate growing public interest. No longer merely an instrument to celebrate the greater glory of a reigning sovereign or Supreme Being, music was, by the nineteenth century, to be worshipped in its own right. In the twentieth century, new technological, social, and spatial forces combined to make music ever more popular and ubiquitous.

In a concluding chapter, Tim Blanning considers music in conjunction with nationalism, race, and sex. Although not always in step, music, society, and politics, he shows, march in the same direction.

(Source: Barnes and Noble)

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