There is no doubt that this hefty single-volume history of music in the twentieth century is a brave and ambitious undertaking. The editors, Nicholas Cook and the late Anthony Pople, have set out with the admirable aim of rethinking what music history, what history, and what music can be. Describing history as ‘a construction of historians’ rather than a ‘reflection of facts’ (1) provides a good starting point for their contributors' reassessments of how the stories of the century's music might be told. Cook and Pople have ensured that a wide range of musical genres and musical cultures are covered, though, as they admit, these are almost entirely Western. Their introduction provides a useful summary of the book's focus:

The first, inevitably daunting task of such an enterprise is working out how to organize and structure the investigation of these ‘different musics’ and ‘competing histories’. In the end the volume has been organized not by genre, geography, institutions, or issues, but rather by a combination of chronology and very broadly defined types of music (such as radical composition, the moderate mainstream, light music, or jazz). Of the twenty-two chapters, six cover jazz, light, and popular music in Europe and North America, and fourteen concentrate, to a greater or lesser extent, on music in the Western ‘classical’ or ‘art’ tradition, with two framing chapters on non-Western musics and ‘art-composed music’ in West Africa. There are also two appendices – a personalia and a chronology – neither of which, in these days of continuously updated Internet information, feels strictly necessary.

Most – though not all – contributors make a determined effort to move away from traditional narratives of both popular and Western art music. The well-worn story of the latter during the last century Cook and Pople see as a focus on the ‘progressive, modernist mainstream’ (4) or the ‘modernist orthodoxy’ (5), centred on the achievements of and reactions to the Second Viennese School – with Darmstadt, Cage, and the ‘new Complexity’ thrown in for good measure. The present volume, on the other hand, creates a rich interweaving of ‘mainstreams’, often ones that have been overlooked by scholars and musicologists.

In many ways, the volume's introduction acts as a pre-emptive set of justifications. As well as admitting to an almost exclusive concentration on Western musics, Cook and Pople acknowledge that amateur music-making and music in education are under-represented. They wonder whether performance should not have had its own chapter and even point disarmingly to the fact that most of the contributors are Anglo-American white men. Indeed, of twenty-seven contributors (including the editors and compilers of appendices) only two are women. Cook and Pople brush this staggering statistic away with the remark that ‘gender representation in musicology, at least in the UK, remains far from equal’ (1). But were there really no other female musicologists working in the various fields of twentieth-century musics for them to turn to? In any branch of the discipline, women account for considerably more than this fractional percentage, and the inclusion of more women – and of scholars from a wider range of racial and cultural backgrounds – would undoubtedly have made the editors' rethinking project richer and more vibrant. Diverse storytellers tend to have diverse stories to tell.

Cook and Pople are also concerned that they will be accused of not including enough women musicians in their history, arguing – as part of their discussion about the place of performance issues – against the idea of having one ghettoized chapter devoted to ‘women's music’ and the rest to men. They write that ‘[i]ntegrating performance into the history of music should not mean gesture politics, but rather telling the story of performance through all aspects of music, and telling the story of all aspects of music through performance’ (14). But ‘gesture politics’ is surely a charge that could be levelled at the assimilation into a single, opening chapter of ‘Peripheries and Interfaces: Western Music and its Others’, the theme of which its author Jonathan Stock describes as ‘the encounter with Western musics of other peoples during the last one hundred years’ (18). Even in focusing on stories of engagement with Western musics, Stock still has an overwhelmingly wide pool of musics to draw on and sensibly organizes the chapter as a series of pertinent and fascinating case studies. This could, surely, have been a model for other chapters organized by theme or issue. Indeed, several authors do choose – very successfully – to focus on what can be regarded as case studies (Franklin on Tauber, or Whittall on Britten and Shostakovich, for example) even when their contribution is not defined by a theme or issue. Stock's chapter is not the only one to embrace the idea of a specific theme. In their respective contributions, ‘To the Millennium: Music as Commodity’ and ‘Music of a Century: Museum Culture and the Politics of Subsidy’, Andrew Blake and Leon Botstein both move away from discussion of genres of music from specific periods towards broad themes, and the volume is all the richer for their sharply focused but broad-ranging insights.

Given the under-representation of women in the volume, another absence comes as no surprise – that of any dedicated and systematic consideration of gender. Gender has been an important issue for music scholars in recent years, and the outpouring of useful and stimulating work in this field would have made a chapter exploring the impact of gender on both musical creation and musical experience especially valuable. Such a chapter could have looked at the experiences of both women and men, highlighting the ways in which expressions and expectations differed from one musical world to another. It would have sat comfortably alongside chapters investigating other identity issues, such as race, class or sexuality, and those investigating other broad themes such as performance, broadcasting, or listening. Such a section would not have stopped other contributions from embracing these issues or themes, but would have offered the reader a wider range of approaches and ways of understanding.

So, given the rather more traditional organization of this volume, how do either gender issues or the discussion of women's work as musicians fare in individual contributions? Are gender and women's achievements or experiences indeed threaded through the chapters, as Cook and Pople suggest they should be? Like so much in this multi-authored collection, this depends on the contributor. For some writers, gender and women are important issues, while for others they are both simply invisible. Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, the two chapters written by women are among those that provide interesting insights into gender – and also into race. Susan C. Cook's chapter, ‘Flirting with the Vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–1945’, investigates the reception of American popular music, and in particular jazz, in Europe. The story of how modernist European composers such as Milhaud, Stravinsky, or Krenek embraced elements of jazz and popular music has been frequently told, but Cook is a thought-provoking commentator, always searching for the broader picture through the lens of gender and race. As she points out at the opening of her chapter, jazz (and popular music in general) was from the start ‘personified as female’ (152), seen as musically Other. Cook's focus is not just on the reinventions of composers, but also on performers – and in particular on the dances and dancers so central to these musical genres. Hence she covers the tango, the foxtrot, the cakewalk, and ragtime, as well as men and women such as George Grossmith, Irene and Vernon Castle, and Josephine Baker.

Robynn Stilwell offers a fascinating chapter, ‘Music of the Youth Revolution: Rock through the 1960s’, which offers a lucid challenge to prevailing myths. Stilwell's argument is rich, evocative, and persuasive, in her own words aiming ‘to question the easy “truths”, to point out possible alternative readings of received wisdom, to question how the romance relates to both musical style and social history’ (419). She does this with compelling explorations of the complex early history of rock music, always placing issues of race firmly at the centre of her narrative. Also central for Stilwell is the issue of authenticity, which she describes as ‘an unacknowledged synonym for “integrity”, part of the Romantic ideology of rock’ (437). Stillwell wears her erudition lightly, often confining her impressive breadth of pertinent examples to footnotes – as, for example, her tracing of the influence of Ritchie Valens's ‘La Bamba’ through the Isley Brothers and the Beatles to Liz Phair (428). She conveys the sound of the music under discussion deftly in a few well chosen words, as for example in her concise characterizations of the Motown and Stax sounds (433).

It is not until her final section that Stilwell brings women to the forefront of her story, writing that ‘[w]omen were marginalized in the practice of rock, and they have certainly been marginalized in the writing of its history, making it impossible to reintegrate their history smoothly even in this revisionist approach (445)’. Most writers would probably have left it at that, but Stilwell produces a devastating account of some of the suppressed female musicians of the period as well as a clear-sighted exploration of the roles that women did manage to carve for themselves.

Dai Griffiths's ‘History and Class Consciousness: Pop Music towards 2000’ is another authoritative chapter, in which the author explains popular music in the last thirty years or so of the twentieth century as ‘being in the front line of a shift in critical thought from class-based critique to identity politics’ (557). These identity politics, of course, include issues of both gender and race. Initially Griffiths's one example of gender issues seems to be the Spice Girls and their noisy, confused espousal of ‘girl power’. But gender and race return towards the end of the chapter in a powerful exploration of cover versions and the way that they can change markers of identity. Griffiths's choice of Aretha Franklin's cover of the Beatles' ‘Eleanor Rigby’ makes his point persuasively and powerfully.

Griffiths does have some strange ideas, however, for example describing Mary J. Blige as a ‘rap act’ (563 and 573) when the terms hip hop, soul or R&B are surely more appropriate, or claiming that Suzanne Vega's song ‘Luka’ is about an abused woman (569), when it is clearly, as Vega has frequently acknowledged, a song about child abuse, sung by Vega in the first person, in the voice of the abused (male) child. Griffiths describes the words and narrative of this song as being ‘rendered in a non-expressive manner’ (569), surely a misunderstanding of the chilling effect of the child's voice. What is particularly interesting is that these glitches, obvious to anyone familiar with late twentieth-century pop culture, were not picked up by the editors, perhaps showing the extent to which those involved in the enterprise still regard popular music as a somehow marginal topic.

Both Stilwell and Griffiths deftly combine a range of information with compelling critical reappraisal. Two of the other popular music chapters read much more like a breathless recounting of factual information, cramming in as many names and dates as possible. The chapter by James Lincoln Collier, ‘Classic Jazz to 1945’, is particularly disappointing. The careful rethinking and questioning of so many other chapters is nowhere to be found, and instead Collier produces a chapter firmly rooted in the traditional story of the roots of jazz. There is a bare minimum of context in his narrative, and nothing on the reception of this radical genre. Needless to say, women are mostly absent. Even the early female blues singers, such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, receive only a brief summary paragraph. It is not until Stilwell's chapter that the problematic position of these women is adequately accounted for. Stilwell points out that their performances are – like those of so many women – regarded by scholars as somehow inauthentic in comparison with those of their less commercially successful male contemporaries. The only other woman to be mentioned by Collier is Billie Holiday, but why she should be the only woman of her generation deemed worthy of inclusion is never discussed.

Derek B. Scott's information-heavy but easy-going chapter ‘Other Mainstreams: Light Music and Easy Listening, 1920–70’ brings in several women and to an extent discusses issues of gender, but there is never quite enough space for Scott's concerns to be fully explained. For example, in discussing ballads he mentions that ‘women composers were still involved in this genre’ (311), but doesn't explore the significance of this remark. Gender is discussed more fruitfully in terms of the associations, made by Cocteau and others, of Edith Piaf's voice with that of a bird – whether sparrow or nightingale. However, this is a welcome chapter, staking a claim for repertoires that are all too often excluded from consideration.

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music has seven chapters dealing with what can be considered art music traditions in the period before the Second World War. Two of these chapters – Stephen Banfield's ‘Music, Text and Stage: the Tradition of Bourgeois Tonality, 1900–1930’ and Peter Franklin's ‘Between the Wars: Traditions, Modernisms and the “‘Little People’ from the Suburbs”’ – provide particularly thought-provoking perspectives on the music-making of this period. Peter Franklin uses the career and repertoire of the popular German tenor Richard Tauber as a focal point for the exploration of interactions between high-culture modernism and popular music in 1920s Europe, with an emphasis on Germany. The placing of an individual performer, rather than a composer, at centre stage offers a different angle from which to view this mostly familiar ground.

Banfield's fascinating chapter provides a dazzling journey through the many different platforms for what he terms ‘bourgeois tonality’, a pervasive and important musical approach that is all too often overlooked in histories of a period best remembered for innovation. The main focus is on popular music theatre and film, but Banfield also brings in the concert and operatic works of ‘high art’ composers from Richard Strauss to Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, with an enviable authority and range of reference. It is in this chapter that what was presumably an editorial decision not to use music examples becomes problematic, forcing Banfield to spell out musical phrases in a somewhat awkward way.

The other five chapters covering this period are more predictable in approach and subject matter. David Nicholls's chapter on experimental music during the interwar years – mostly in America – is structured imaginatively around a quotation from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Chapters by Joseph Auner, Hermann Danuser, and Michael Walter cover, respectively, the Second Viennese School, neo-classicism (which Danuser would rather call ‘modernist classicism’ or ‘classical modernism’), and political engagement in the 1930s. Danuser's chapter (translated from the German) is one of the most impenetrable in the collection. Walter's chapter would probably have worked better with a specific focus. As it is, it ranges rather too widely round the surface of music-making in Europe and the Americas. British politically engaged music is represented only by Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time, which Walter cites as an example of a genre that he finds ‘aesthetically more or less problematic’ (296). Walter may have been deliberately avoiding the well-known politically committed collaborations of Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden, but surely at least a mention of Rutland Boughton or Alan Bush and their engagements with, respectively, the Glastonbury Festival and the Workers' Music Association would have taken the story into less frequently charted waters.

Christopher Butler is a Professor of English at Oxford University and the only contributor, apart from jazz writer and musician James Lincoln Collier, who is not an academic working in a department of music. His chapter on ‘Innovation and the Avant-Garde, 1900–1920’ turns into an attack on ‘recent scholarship’ (especially that of Susan McClary and Lawrence Kramer) which examines ‘the ways in which works of art are […] involved with the expression or contestation of ideas which still trouble us – most notably those of class, gender, and ethnicity’ (84). Butler accuses Kramer of stirring up ‘liberal guilt’ in his discussion of the exotic in Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé rather than describing ‘innovative ideas and intentions’ (85), while McClary is described as reaching a ‘surely preposterous conclusion’ in her examination of Schoenberg's ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ (81). Rather than engaging with, or even allowing, what are seen by other scholars as important issues of identity and their interaction with the world of music, Butler seems to be calling for a return to a curiously old-fashioned model of intentionality, as well as demanding the study of musicians and musical works in the wider context of the history of ideas.

So, none of the seven chapters on ‘art music’ in the first half of the century really engages with gender – though Franklin does discuss both class and race. Nor are women performers or composers granted much of a place, though Banfield refers to works by Smyth and Boulanger. In discussing the interaction of composers from the United States with folk music, Walter makes no mention of Ruth Crawford, a radical composer whose engagement with both political texts and folk music is discussed instead by David Nicholls in his earlier chapter. It is much the same story in the chapters covering ‘art’ music in the second half of the century. In general, these chapters are less innovative and challenging than those covering the early period, though Robert Fink's contribution, ‘(Post)-Minimalisms, 1975–2000: the Search for a New Mainstream’, is a persuasive and dynamic assessment of the minimalist phenomenon, which concludes that ‘[t]he future belongs to minimalism's step-children: ambient and electronic dance music’ (555). While Fink mentions the work of several women performers and composers – from Janice Giteck to Laurie Anderson – he does not raise gender as an issue.

Arnold Whittall's chapter ‘Moderate Modernisms: Individualism and Accessibility, 1945–75’ is written with authority and clarity. The music itself shines through, and Whittall makes no apology for focusing on composers rather than institutions (or, he might have added, issues). The composers included are, in his own words, those ‘deemed prominent on grounds of quality’ (365), and so music by familiar figures such as Britten, Poulenc, and Shostakovich is discussed alongside considerations of individuality, accessibility, and the topos of the lament. No women feature, despite the success and indeed prominence of figures such as Elizabeth Maconchy and Elizabeth Lutyens, just to take composers working in Britain.

Alastair Williams's chapter ‘Ageing of the New: the Museum of Musical Modernism’ – a passionate plea for the continued relevance of musical modernism – is one of the few chapters in the book to discuss both issues of gender and the musical contributions of a range of women. While deftly exploring music's social and cultural contexts (including institutions such as IRCAM or Darmstadt) and engaging with critical theory, Williams also provides two sections in which he discusses the work of specific composers. The first of these covers seven men, the expected canonical figures of Berio, Boulez, Cage, Carter, Ligeti, Nono, and Stockhausen. The second discusses eight younger composers with an almost equal split between women and men: Birtwistle, Davies, Ferneyhough, Guibaidulina, Rihm, Saariaho, Saunders, and Schnittke. That this near-equal split is remarkable is highlighted by Cook and Pople's extraordinary observation in their introduction that ‘Williams's discussion of Gubaidulina and Saunders at the expense of, say, Lindberg and Adès may reflect little more than personal taste (perhaps coupled with the desire to resist a continuing bias towards males in both composition and composer-oriented histories of music – a bias that is sometimes challenged in this book […] but at other times simply reflected)’ (3). That the inclusion of these two women is seen to need some explanation – as either a peculiarity of personal taste or a compensatory action – further entrenches the sense that the rarity of women as composers in discussions of twentieth-century music is a natural, almost ‘default’ state. The inclusion of, say, Hindemith at the expense of Maconchy in Whittall's chapter is not thought worthy of comment. Do Cook and Pople find it hard to believe that Williams might have included Gubaidulina and Saunders (and Saariaho) simply because their music exemplifies the ‘ways of working through the tensions between tradition and restructuring’ (526–7) that he sees as a shared concern of this group, or indeed that he chose them, like Whittall, ‘on grounds of quality’?

But if the presence of women musicians appears to be somewhat problematic, queer musicians are simply non-existent. Plenty of composers who were involved in gay relationships and communities, from Smyth and Britten to Cowell and Cage, are brought into the narratives in various ways. But they are kept firmly in the closet and are never acknowledged to be gay. Neither do any of the contributors suggest that sexuality might be an issue worth discussing in relation to music. Scott does mention a ‘gay rights’ cabaret song from the Weimar Republic (328), but more characteristic is Nicholls's reference to Cowell's ‘arrest and imprisonment’ (220), which stops short of explaining that the conviction, which had considerable impact on Cowell's career, was for sodomy. Another example of closeted silence is David Osmond-Smith's ambiguous reference to Cage's ‘partnership’ with Merce Cunningham (349). Perhaps Osmond-Smith did not feel it was relevant to the particular point he was making that Cage and Cunningham had a sexual as well as an artistic partnership. But the overall impact of silence about queerness in relation to music-making or music-makers is to present the history of twentieth-century music as one that is entirely heterosexual and to ignore the ways in which the issue of sexuality might relate to experiences of music. Given the well-established work of scholars such as Philip Brett, Nadine Hubbs, Howard Pollack, and Elizabeth Wood in the field of queer musicology, it seems extraordinary that such a vibrant and engaging aspect of today's scholarship should find no reflection in the 818 pages of this book.

A question I asked myself with increasing frequency as I read this volume was, who is it intended for? The editors suggest different ways of reading it: ‘The book may be read as a whole, read as a series of more or less separate chronological sections, read thematically, or browsed’ (15). Since the book is in Cambridge University Press's history of music series, the intended audience is obviously academic – students and scholars. The price of the book would doubtless be prohibitive to most individuals and would probably also discourage libraries from purchasing more than one reference copy.

While Cook and Pople do ask ‘whose musics?’ are under discussion (7), they don't directly ask or explain who they envisage their potential reader to be. But implicitly they do exactly that when they define Western music as ‘our’ music (8). I'm not entirely sure who ‘our’ refers to. The two editors? The reader? Presumably, given the reference to Western music, it does not refer to the English-reading scholar in, say, India or Korea. I have a suspicion that ‘our’ refers to the white, male, European or North American academics who make up the bulk of the contributors. I myself was born and educated, and am currently living, in the West (South London, to be precise), but even so I do not feel that this cosy ‘our’ includes me. Many of the contributions to the book are compellingly thought-provoking and challenging in their reassessment of the concept of the mainstream in twentieth-century music histories, and in their rethinking of how to tell selected aspects of those histories. But in the end, with its sidelining of issues and themes ranging from race to listening and gender to broadcasting, its total exclusion of any discussion of queerness, and the fact that women have still not found much of a place in its revisionist histories, this volume does not reflect what I have come to think of as ‘my’ world of music.