The definitive history of Western music, now with Total Access. Combining current scholarship with cutting-edge pedagogy, the Ninth Edition of A History of Western Music is the text that students and professors have trusted for generations. Because listening is central to music history, the new Total Access program provides a full suite of media resources—including an ebook and premium streaming recordings of the entire Norton Anthology of Western Music repertoire—with every new text. Combining thoughtful revisions—particularly to chapters on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—with exceptional media resources, A History of Western Music provides all the resources that students need in a text that will last a lifetime.

Concise History of Western Music combines Grout and Palisca's uncompromising reliability, scope, and respect for the narrative, while offering many more pedagogical aids, such as chapter preludes and postludes; "Etudes," excursions that explore the material more deeply than the main text; and "Windows," boxed discussions of special topics.

Publisher Description

The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the c