I'm a bit over halfway through the second volume of Richard Taruskin's
Oxford History of Western Music.
It's a really great read. I always come away feeling greatly enriched by Taruskin. His insights into the music of the Western tradition are refreshing and dazzling.
There is one small niggle, and it's one that comes up whenever musicologists discuss liturgical music. There is a little double solecism in Taruskin's description of what Catholics got up to at Mass in the early-seventeenth century. Taruskin assumes that it was the common practice for all present to receive communion, an act he describes as dispensing the wafer and wine.
In the year 1600 a frequent
communicant would have been one who received at Easter and/or
Christmas, and they would have received under one kind only (and it wasn't the wine). It was only in the twentieth century that moves to have the
whole congregation receive communion on a weekly basis came to full
fruition. It is a token of the success of this movement among [Roman]
Catholics that we now find it difficult to understand how an extended
motet could have accompanied the communion of the priest alone.
Taruskin is no liturgical scholar, and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise. But he does talk a lot about counter-reformation devotional practices to the extent that they involved music, and it's hard to avoid the feeling that he views Masonic ceremonies and Catholic liturgy in much the same light. Counter-reformation Catholic devotion was at least as much an aesthetic programme as an attempt to provide a systematic account of Catholic dogma embodied in popular piety. Without launching into a full-scale literature review on a microscopically minor point, the relationship of most non-clerical Catholics to the Eucharist in this period was not tasting so much as watching and adoring, not to mention carrying around and lifting up. The highest expressions of post-Tridentine devotion to the Eucharist were those actions associated with the sacrament being brought into full public view -- the elevation at the Mass, or through exposition and benediction using a monstrance. If you look at some of the multitudinous devotional societies attached to many churches in Europe, much of their activity centres on processions of relics which inevitably end up involving the exposed sacrament. In the English-speaking Catholic world, such practices dried up at the parish level from the 1970s.
I have a deeper question that Taruskin's history raises through its method. It would be fascinating to know why it is that most histories of Western music, church music drops off a cliff by the middle of the eighteenth century, hurtles past a couple of unavoidable pieces by Haydn and Beethoven on the way down, practically never to be seen as a substantive topic again. Maybe that's a question for another day.
