The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century

Download or read book The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century written by D R M Irving and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories as "European music" and "Western music," showing how they originate from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the European continent rather than the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates how reductive labels for the musics of a continent or a hemisphere often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.