Mr. R. J. Stove

A Student’s Guide to Music History is one of currently fifteen volumes in the Student Guides to the Major Disciplines series, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. A note on the back of the book informs us that the series is meant to provide “reader-friendly introductions to the most important fields of knowledge in the liberal arts.”

R. J. Stove’s book is a survey, a “package tour,” in the author’s words, of Western classical music from the Middle Ages to the present day. It is not clear to me who would find this book useful. Stove’s writing suffers all the usual vices of music appreciation books (clichés, generalizations, hackneyed vignettes) with out the compensating enthusiasm and reverence for music normally found in books for novice music listeners.

The author’s survey of music history up to the twentieth century is functional, if unexceptional. His treatment of the modern era is not even competent as a music appreciation text. Stove is no lover of modernism, but only an ingrained lack of curiosity could allow a professional musician and composer to write that Igor Stravinsky “never particularly aimed at anything except startling,” or include the tautology that Alban Berg’s Wozzeck “avoids dodecaphony altogether (not surprisingly, since he finished it a year before his teacher proclaimed the method)…” In the pages devoted to music since 1945, Stove has some sly fun with government-funded avant-garde composers such as Hans Werner Henze, who composed an oratorio to the memory of Che Guevara, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who pronounced the 9/11 atrocities as “the greatest artwork ever made.” Elsewhere, he writes more approvingly of relatively accessible contemporary composers such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, but cannot find room in his text for two extraordinary modern masters of composition, Elliott Carter and György Ligeti.

A Student’s Guide to Music History is not meant to be a textbook, so it cannot be criticized for not including a CD with excerpts of the works discussed in the text. Unfortunately, the author does not even include a list of recommended recordings which is what any beginning listener reading the book really needs. I am not without sympathy for the task faced by the author in writing this book. Any brief history of so inexhaustible a subject is likely to be found wanting by many readers. Unfortunately, this book seems generally uninspired, as if written with no great enthusiasm and against an approaching deadline.

(Published in Catholic Library World, September 2008)… (plus d'informations)