Recording and Reality: The Musical Subject

The publication of a magisterial and innovative one-volume textbook on the history of music, Christopher H. Gibbs's inspired adaptation, revision, and condensation of Richard Taruskin's imposing, brilliant, and provocative six-volume Oxford History of Western Music invites a reconsideration of what their subject, and for that matter--music--itself actually is. Additional volumes of annotated anthologies of scores and recordings back up the new textbook. Although musical examples appear in the printed text, music is represented largely, and properly so, by recordings to which students are advised to listen. Here, Botstein discusses the centrality of recordings as the medium of music.