Highlights
Focus on Characteristic Music and Genres
Avoiding encyclopedic detail, Concise History of Western Music , Third Edition, presents a core repertory of characteristic works and genres for each period. This uncluttered presentation familiarizes students with the central works in Western music history, while enabling them to recognize clearly each period’s distinctive musical characteristics.
Enhanced Social and Historical Context
Introducing a stronger emphasis on social and historical context, the Third Edition provides a coherent, accessible narrative of the development of Western music within Western history. This approach contextualizes the most prominent movements and figures within broader social and historical changes.
Unrivaled Pedagogy
The structure and pedagogy of the Third Edition is designed to highlight and synthesize essential information that students need to understand Western music history. A wide variety of engaging sidebars and illustrative material help students grasp and retain core concepts and events covered in the text.
- NEW Part introductions—six in all—provide broad historical and cultural context for each major period.
- NEW Composer biographies highlight composers’ lives and works without interrupting the text’s narrative flow.
- NEW In-Context boxes emphasize the importance of music in the lives of people at every level of society.
- NEW Innovations boxes—one in each of the text’s six parts—focus on key innovations that fundamentally altered the course of music history.
- NEW In-Performance boxes examine the problems, questions, and issues at stake in interpreting musical works.
- A Closer Look boxes provide detailed views of important genres, forms, and theoretical ideas.
- Vivid four-color illustrations and extended figure captions provide cultural context and highlight important ideas, people, and events.
- Maps and timelines, many new to this edition, provide succinct geographical and historical orientation.
Strengthened Coverage of Later Repertories
Shifting emphasis from early to later repertories, the Third Edition provides significantly expanded coverage of music from 1900 to the present. The nineteenth-century chapters are now organized chronologically rather than by genre, and coverage of the twentieth century has been expanded from two chapters to four, offering fuller treatment of the music of Europe and the Americas, including popular idioms such as jazz and blues.
Copyright © 2005, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
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