In a course where detail can seem overwhelming, Burkholder’s clear pedagogical structure separates the forest from the trees, calling attention to:
Responding to the needs of instructors and their students, Burkholder provides an up-to date, balanced introduction to music in Western culture, written with the needs of today’s undergraduate students firmly in mind.
Changes to the Eighth Edition
The Ancient and Medieval section examines the role of memory in the oral composition, transmission, and performance of chant, secular song, and polyphony; links the development of notation to issues of memory, performance, and authorship; considers medieval polyphony as a manner of performance, a practice of improvisation and oral composition, and a written tradition, including a reexamination of the Notre Dame school; asks the reader to think about what it meant to be a “composer” during the Middle Ages; and traces the continuities and changes in form and style of medieval secular songs.
The section on The Renaissance reexamines the concept of the Renaissance and its applicability to music, looks at some of the problems of organizing the period as a coherent unit, and discusses how the new contrapuntal practices of the time tie the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries together into a single historical period. The Eighth Edition also incorporates new research on the cantus firmus mass, including imagery, rituals, and textures associated with the Caput masses; on issues of text setting and expression; and on the relation of music to religious politics in Elizabethan England.
The Seventeenth Century expands coverage of the affections and links musicians’ attempts to isolate and categorize emotions to similar efforts by writers, artists, and scientists. Increased emphasis on French music brings the air de cour, lute music, and grand motet into the spotlight, along with French views on nature and expression.
The Eighteenth Century chapters highlight ideas of the Enlightenment as a social and philosophical foundation for the period that resulted in major changes to musical concepts, style, form, and composition that are still with us today. These chapters also clarify prominent forms, especially the varieties of binary form and their relation to sonata and other forms.
The Nineteenth Century section features more treatment of ideas behind the music, including Romanticism, organicism, notions of musical autonomy, and nationalism in politics, art, and music. There is increased coverage of opera, expanding the discussions of Bellini, Meyerbeer, Weber, Glinka, Verdi, and Puccini. The material on Wagner is completely reconceived, with new and fuller treatment of the Ring cycle, leitmotives, Wagner’s approach to poetry, tonality in Tristan und Isolde, and his ideas and writings, from the interrelationship of the arts to nationalism and anti-Semitism. There is more as well on Beethoven’s late style, the development of harmonic relationships based on thirds, chamber music from Schubert to Brahms, Schumann’s instrumental music, and the music of Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, and Grieg.
The final part, The Twentieth Century and After, devotes greater attention to neoclassicism, the American experimentalist tradition, John Cage, postwar serialism, European modernists from Stockhausen and Boulez to Berio and Ligeti, minimalist and postminimalist composers from La Monte Young to John Adams, polystylism, and composers writing today. This section also pays balanced attention to the relationship between art music and popular idioms, including jazz, and their influence on each other. These are only some of the changes in the new Eighth Edition.
