The Editor's Preface begins with a strong claim: ‘The eighteenth century perhaps boasts a more remarkable coterie of totemic musical figures, and a more engaging combination of genres, styles and aesthetic orientations, than any century before or since’ (xv). Totemic figures for sure. When the publisher asked me which of the six volumes of the original hardcover edition of The Oxford History of Western Music I wanted sent to bookstores to tease potential buyers, I unhesitatingly recommended the second, which encompasses the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, precisely because the composers best known to (and best loved by) the shrinking radio-listening, concert-attending and CD-buying audience for ‘classical music’ were all denizens of the eighteenth century. Their popularity is not an unmixed compliment. One of the virtues that broadcast music must exhibit is that of not being overly ‘engaging’, to cite the other encomiastic adjective from the Preface. But at whatever price, the eighteenth century provides the unshakeable bedrock of our scholarly and performing canons – canons that started forming precisely during the eighteenth century and for eighteenth-century reasons, and continue, for better and worse, to sustain our musical occupations and institutions.

That is surely enough to justify a new comprehensive treatment. And yet, as every reader of this journal will be aware, since the late 1960s the status of the eighteenth century as a music-historical period has been very much in question. These four decades plus exactly coincide with my own professional activity as a music historian. The question, therefore, has been with me for the duration of my career, and I vividly recall its early formulations.

My earliest encounter with the eighteenth-century problem was private, but authoritative and indelibly impressive. My most eminent professor, Paul Henry Lang, was an eighteenth-century specialist – though that is not something I assume that every reader of this journal will remember, since his name occurs nowhere within the covers of the volume under review, and his most important contribution within his specialty, a weighty biography of Handel (New York: Norton, 1966), has long been superseded. In addition to editing The Musical Quarterly (where he succeeded Carl Engel), serving as chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune (where he succeeded Virgil Thomson), and putting in time as officer in every professional organization (including a term as president of the IMS), this indefatigable man was W. W. Norton's acquisitions editor for music from the 1940s to the 1960s, which meant that he was responsible for the legendary series of historical surveys from which early generations of American musicologists learned their basics: Reese for the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Bukofzer for the Baroque, Einstein for the Romantic era, and Adolfo Salazar, a composer by trade and a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, wanly bringing up the rear with Music in Our Time, a translation of a book first published in Argentina in 1944 on a subject that at the time was not kosher für Musikwissenschaft. (Later it was replaced by William Austin's very comprehensive survey.) And looming over all was Music in Western Civilization, Lang's own Universalgeschichte, from which one omitted to quote, in those days, at one's peril.

You will notice that there was no Norton history of the ‘classical period’. Lang often told us why that lacuna persisted. He had first assigned the volume to Alfred Einstein on the strength of the latter's Mozartean credentials, but Einstein had begged off, for a reason that still resonates: we don't yet know enough, Lang said he said, about the origins of the Haydn-Mozart style to write its history. That is why Einstein ended up writing (not too well) for Lang about the nineteenth century instead. Thereupon, with typical self-assurance, Lang decided to take on the job himself, but, as he told us, he shortly came up against an insurmountable barrier: the mountains, as he put it, of southern Italian church music that had never been prospected, and which contained, he was certain, the key to the origins and essence of eighteenth-century classicism. The unwritten book, Lang averred, would remain unwritten for a long time. And it did.

The man who brought the eighteenth-century problem to the attention of the musicological world at large was Daniel Heartz, in an article published, as it happens, in a Lang retirement festschrift that formed a special section within an early issue of Current Musicology (No. 9, 1969), the Columbia graduate student publication then edited by Neal Zaslaw, one of Lang's most redoubtable protégés. In terms of impact per unit length, I nominate this four-page, two-thousand-word article (‘Approaching a History of Eighteenth-Century Music’) as the most influential in the history of musicology. (It had been preceded by a somewhat more detailed challenge, ‘Opera and the Periodization of 18th-century Music’, delivered earlier at the 1967 IMS meeting at Ljubljana, but not published until the appearance of that conference's proceedings in 1970.) No musicologist today, certainly no reader of Eighteenth-Century Music, can be unaware of its thesis, or unresponsive to it. Heartz argued that all attempts at writing the history of eighteenth-century music up to then had been misguided because all had been looking for ways of connecting the style of Bach and Handel to the style of Haydn and Mozart. The wizened among us will remember all the proposed missing links: the Mannheim school, the Tyrolean School, the Italian keyboard school, and so on. Heartz, New Hampshire Yankee that he was (and is), was playing the part of the down-east farmer who, asked for directions by tourists in an old joke, hems and haws a while before finally blurting, ‘Ya can't get theah from heah’. And the missing links were especially otiose, Heartz insisted, because they were all drawn from the realm of instrumental music under the misapprehension (still adamantly maintained by Charles Rosen) that High Classicism was an essentially instrumental style.

There have been three responses to Heartz's gauntlet over the years. One, Rosen's in The Classical Style, was simply to dodge the question, writing about Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as though their styles had no history at all except in terms of their mutual relations and a few proximate influences, mainly C. P. E. Bach. (Rosen's introduction very elaborately disavowed any interest in music history, which is why it has always amused – or bemused – me to find Rosen so often listed among the music historians.) Heartz's own response is found in his Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003) – a thousand-page bodying-forth of his four-page blueprint, in which he effectively posits a ‘short eighteenth century’ to cover what in the gauntlet piece he dubbed the ‘main evolution’ that the century witnessed, namely the one that led to Haydn and Mozart, with Bach and Handel simply excluded as the end of a previous line of no real eighteenth-century import. This book, by the way, plus the two almost equally hefty companions Heartz published on either side of it, constitutes the missing volume in the Norton series that Lang so long bemoaned, and which he formally passed on to Heartz after giving up on the project himself; I wish he had lived to see Heartz's formidable trilogy, if only to hear the inevitable wisecracks with which he would have greeted it.

Heartz's solution to the eighteenth-century problem is certain to become even more influential than it already has been. It is trickling down. Just last week I received a review copy of The Concise History of Western Music, fourth edition, by Barbara Russano Hanning (New York: Norton, 2010), the latest condensation of the Burkholder/Palisca/Grout textbook that has over the last half century established itself as the most widely used music-history text in the history of music. While the current edition of ‘Grout’ (the eighth, published in 2009) continues to apportion its contents according to calendrical centuries, each divided into several roughly chronological chapters, the new concise edition divides its matter up into six parts, of which the third is now called ‘The Long Seventeenth Century’. The last of its five chapters is titled ‘Baroque Music in the Early Eighteenth Century’, and is further broken down into ‘national’ sections covering Vivaldi (Italy), Couperin and Rameau (France), Bach (Germany) and Handel (England). Part Four, entitled ‘The Eighteenth Century’, is in fact Heartz's short eighteenth. It opens with a chapter called ‘The Early Classic Period: Opera and Vocal Music’, which, after a brief introduction, begins, just as Heartz had preached and later practised, with ‘Opera buffa’ (followed by sections on opera seria and ‘Opera Reform’). (In response to my query, Peter Burkholder writes that, although he recognizes the virtues of the approach Heartz has proposed, he does not plan to adopt it in future ‘Grouts’: ‘I like my caesurae at 1700 and 1800, instead of the old divides I learned as an undergrad between ‘Baroque’ and ‘Classical’ and between ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ … because seeing the centuries as units allows me as a teacher to emphasize the conflicts and changes of taste. In a sense, it seems better to take an obviously artificial division at a century mark rather than a somewhat constructed one elsewhere’.)

The third response was the one this journal had the honour of presenting in what amounted to the keynote address in its maiden issue: James Webster's ‘The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?’, in whose title the question mark did all the work. Webster's solution was the opposite of Heartz's. He accepted Heartz's posited main evolution as the central component of a tripartite scheme that encompassed a late baroque half century (1670–1720) leading up to it and an unnamed half century (1780–1830) that realized its implications, encompassing (to quote from his abstract) ‘the rise of the “regulative work-concept” (Goehr) and “pre-Romanticism” (Dahlhaus) [but why ‘pre-’?], and the Europe-wide triumph of “Viennese modernism”, including the first autonomous instrumental music and a central role in the rise of the modern (post-Revolutionary) world symbolized by Haydn's sublime in The Creation’ (47).

While one can agree with Webster that his ‘long’ eighteenth century ‘seems more nearly adequate than either baroque/classical or 1700–1800 as a single, undifferentiated period’, it strains plausibility to call it, at 160 years' duration, a century, or even a separable music-historical period – though as I write this I am aware that I have claimed, in the Oxford History and in my classroom teaching, that the whole two-hundred-year span 1680–1880 is defensibly a unitary period insofar as those dates circumscribe the time during which musical form was determined primarily by harmonic relations. So let me modify my objection to Webster: I don't see in his ‘long’ century a criterion that lends coherence to the whole. As for Heartz's ‘short’ century, one could complain with equal justice that it leaves out all the best parts. So the problem remains a problem, and The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music (henceforth CH18) has a perfect right to attempt a new solution.

The decision to cast all the Cambridge histories by calendrical centuries was obviously taken before individual editors were engaged, and so it was presumably not something that was open to negotiation. But the editor of a volume like this one is nonetheless answerable for its overall approach and performance. (I feel I have to state the obvious here because other Cambridge editors have tried to fob editorial accountability onto the individual chapter authors: see my review of the Cambridge histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, published under the title ‘Speed Bumps’ in 19th-Century Music 29/2 (2005), 185–207.) Responsibility, I am happy to say, has duly been shouldered. As stipulated in the Editor's Preface, the solution adopted here shares with the two others (Rosen's arch non-solution aside) the elimination of the artificial divider at mid-century between Baroque and Classical, while still allowing the calendar to define the span:

This is billed as a new line of attack: ‘instead of relying on temporal, periodic and composer-related phenomena, then, we organize our volume by genre’. But we've been there and done that. That is how the late and unlamented New Oxford History of Music was organized, much to virtually everyone's dissatisfaction. That project was conceived in some antediluvian, pre-Heartzian era (actually I know from conversations with Gerald Abraham that it was the late 1940s), though the individual volumes took for ever and a day to see the light. Eighteenth-century material was covered (along with earlier and later material) over a span of four volumes (5–8) published (not in that order) between 1973 and 1986, and their various chapter breakdowns were almost the same as the ones now served up by CH18:

I will not undertake any direct comparisons of the coverage in CH18 and NOHM; one may take it for granted that the newer chapters have the benefit of more recent research and exhibit more recent attitudes, at times quite self-consciously and by no means always to the good. (Is there anything more hackneyed by now than scare quotes around the word ‘great’? Anything staler than the use of ‘radical’ and ‘radically’ as general intensifiers or encomia? Anything more pretentious than the misappropriation of technical terms from other disciplines, like ‘performative’, which does not mean, simply, ‘pertaining to performance’?) All the same, the organization of the contents by genre was a deplorable decision, because it prevents (or absolves) this purported history of eighteenth-century music from ever engaging with the historiographical problems I have been discussing. A couple of exceptional chapters aside, the book hardly qualifies as history at all. Instead, it is a repertory survey, a genre that differs from historiography precisely as synchronic differs from diachronic.

There has been a certain vogue within musicology for synchronic studies in recent decades, given a notable stimulus by Gary Tomlinson in his still widely discussed article ‘The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology’ (19th-Century Music 7/3 (1984), 350–362), which argued for the anthropological turn that Tomlinson has been advocating by precept and example for a long time. The model of contextualization Tomlinson promoted there was that of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whose name for it – ‘thick description’ – was itself an appropriation from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle and his celebrated parable of blinking boys, which made Tomlinson's ‘prescription for the modern musicologist’, as he was not ashamed to call it, doubly derivative.

My problems with the enterprise are two. The objective of thick description is to explain more or interpret better by broadening the amplitude of the field under observation (often compared with widening the angle of a photographer's lens). The thickest description of an artefact or gesture or any product of culture is a maximally informative description. The way you can distinguish a thick description from a thin one, on Ryle's model, is that it enables one to see and elucidate ‘what constitutes the difference between externally similar factors’ (in Ryle's example, thence Geertz's and finally Tomlinson's, knowing whether an apparent wink is an involuntary twitch or an actual conspiratorial gesture or a parody of the latter or a preparatory exercise to do the last). But – to pose my first problem – how does the objective of thick description, hence of the new culturally anthropological musicology, differ from the Verstehen of Geistesgeschichte (which is to say, from the model of scholarship that American musicologists of my now-senior generation were taught by their Central European émigré teachers – which is to say, the foundational model of the discipline and the most old-fashioned of all humanistic ideals)? And – to adumbrate the second problem – the quotation in the sentence before last is not from Geertz or Ryle, let alone Tomlinson, but from the Preface to Music in the Baroque Era (New York: Norton, 1947) by Manfred Bukofzer, one of those same Central European émigrés, who was as ardently devoted to ‘internalist’ methods as Tomlinson is (or was) to external contextualization, and as insistent that informative comparisons were in essence diachronic (or in Tomlinson's paradoxical vocabulary, ‘presentist’) as Tomlinson is (or was) that comparisons be drawn laterally, so as to reconstruct the ‘webs of significance he himself has spun’, in which ‘man is an animal suspended’ (as Tomlinson quotes Geertz, who was paraphrasing Max Weber). Apart from the avowedly antihistorical Rosen, for whom history is just a series of begats, no one to my knowledge has ever actually propounded the sort of narrowly causal historical narrative that Tomlinson condemns as thin description. What is so new about the method?

Nothing is new about it, and as the comparison between CH18 and NOHM has already suggested, the synchronic approach has already been given a fair trial and convicted. Especially in multi-topical, multi-authored surveys, the generic approach is untenable, because its underlying assumption – that a multiplicity of synchronic accounts will combine to imply a coherent diachronic narrative – is utopian. Can a multiply authored text ever produce such a narrative? Probably not, unless the editor is prepared to control things to the point where he or she might as well have been the author; and today's editors, like today's conductors, are rarely equipped by temperament or circumstances to be the tyrants they once were. As I will show later with examples, the editing of this volume is unusually lenient, even by current standards, and that has virtually precluded the achievement of a coherent diachronic narrative. But if such a narrative is not the goal, why assemble books like CH18?

Well, I would say that, wouldn't I? (But can you show me a counterexample?) In the Introduction to the Oxford History, now reprinted in each of the five volumes of the paperback edition, I insisted upon the fundamental and invidious distinction I am again developing here, writing (in a passage that elicited a great deal of indignant commentary) that ‘most books that call themselves histories of Western music, or of any of its traditional “style periods”, are in fact surveys, which cover – and celebrate – the relevant repertoire, but make little effort truly to explain why and how things happened as they did. This set of books is an attempt at a true history’. Much of the annoyance stemmed from what appeared to be an intolerable hubris: that what I wrote was true (and that what others wrote was false). That was not my claim. I claimed only that I tried to explain the whys and hows, and that only those books that made that attempt truly deserved to be called histories. Histories track and account for change over time, something the Editor's Preface quite wrongly equates with ‘overtly teleological developments’, while surveys are content to describe things as they are or were – which is to say, statically (however richly, diversely or complicatedly).

That the absence in CH18 of a historical narrative is not inadvertent but very much the intention is evident from the very outset, the survey of ‘The Musical Map of Europe, c. 1700’ with which the volume begins. I welcomed it at first encounter, but that was because I was labouring under what proved to be the false expectation that it would be balanced at the end by a similarly static, synchronic survey of the musical map c1800. That would be one way, I thought, of trying to supply a sense of the century's dynamic (albeit one that the reader would have to infer). Well, why not? Letting the reader do the work might even have been an effective heuristic. But the final chapter, by Simon P. Keefe, is not a counterpart to the first. Instead, it amounts to a somewhat cranky and in any case futile complaint that the canonization of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven had already locked into place by the time Ernst Ludwig Gerber reissued his Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler of 1790–1792 (as the Neues historisch-biographisches Lexicon) in 1810. It is indeed striking that Gerber's canon of dead white eighteenth-century males – J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, Handel, Gluck, Joseph and Michael Haydn, and Mozart (as Keefe lists them on page 668) – nearly matches (Michael Haydn apart) not only the academic canon but also the performing repertory of today; but calling it an ‘ossification’ (672), or implying that the exclusion of such formerly popular figures as Pleyel may have been unjust (681–684), is an unhelpful counterfactual exercise, and prissily rebuking Beethoven's cadenza to the first movement of Mozart's D minor concerto, k466, for its ‘brazen virtuosity’ (immediately upped, four lines further down on page 676, to ‘gushing virtuosity’) merely reinforces stereotypes of ‘classical’ effeteness. In Expositions and Developments (London: Faber, 1962) Stravinsky told Robert Craft that after hearing a run-through of Pulcinella, Diaghilev ‘went about for a long time with a look that suggested The Offended Eighteenth Century’. It was a silly look for him, and is an even sillier one for a scholar; but it is typical of surveys, which all too often fall into advocacy at the expense of critical understanding – of canonization, for example. Keefe might have thought them a throwaway, but the last two sentences in CH18 strike me, unhappily, as an apt summation of the book in their combination of salesmanship and non sequitur: ‘Perhaps many precariously placed musicians at the turn of the century … longed for a better life in the nineteenth century than the life they had experienced at the very end of the eighteenth, but they could scarcely have yearned for richer or more vibrant musical cultures. The brightest of musical pasts and presents guaranteed the brightest of musical futures’.

Substantiating a negative claim is always difficult. Only by reading the whole book will readers of this review be able to satisfy themselves that what I say is missing from The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music – namely, history – is truly missing. The best I can do is cite a few places where various chapter authors managed to sneak a reference, implicitly or obliquely, to the dynamic or dialectical processes the book fails to address. The only chapter that presents a truly historical account at its core rather than in the margins is Richard Will's on the eighteenth-century symphony, which puts production in fruitful dialogue with social reception – the ‘unfinished dialogue’ of his title, which continues to the present – and educes out of the dialectic ‘between musical sources and the interests, experiences and imaginations of those who encounter them’ a narrative of significant change.

The general failure, I hasten to reiterate, is editorial, and no fault of the authors. When one is asked to contribute one tile to a mosaic, one bears no responsibility for the whole picture. The only one who could have supplied the dynamic framework is the one in possession of all the tiles. Only that one could have told the others what they needed to add or remove so that gaps and redundancies could be minimized and superfluities mitigated. The chapter authors were justified in assuming that, in the instances I will describe, they were alluding to matters more fully addressed elsewhere in the book. Nor is it their fault that they were asked to produce perhaps the most lifeless and least attractive of all literary genres: the minimally fleshed-out list, which mimics narrative but only accumulates detail.

And what a clutter of detail! Have you always yearned to know the names of the viola players in the Madrid court theatre's pit band in 1758? You can look them up on page 411, along with the bassoonists, the copyist, the keyboard tuner and the other twenty-three members of the crew. On pages 408–410 there is a table listing, right out of the author's database, every opera performed in Madrid between 1731 and 1746. While extreme, the chapter on Spanish theatre music is not unrepresentative. The chapter on Italian opera, at sixty-nine pages predictably (and rightly) the longest in the book, has a laudable premise: that the proper method for studying the genre is not by composers and not by works but by theatres, for that is the only way in which Italian opera can be fully understood as a social practice. Having stated the premise, however, the author proceeds theatre by theatre throughout the length and breadth of Europe (or as much of Europe as musicologists acknowledge), detailing the repertory of every last one. Given the way in which famous operas and librettos circulated, you can imagine how much unbearable overlap these many lists incorporate.

Telling details are the gems in any history, but indiscriminately ladled details like these are a morass. And byways are delightful, but if Sweden was worth a chapter, why then – forgive me – not the Slavic lands? (Gerald Abraham covered them economically and effectively in NOHM, so their omission this time seems gratuitously invidious. Are we still sore over the Battle of Poltava?) From the unexpected chapter on the serenata I carried away a useful nugget that I should already have possessed, and for which I am grateful. I learned that the word derives not from sera but from sereno (Italian for clear sky), referring not to the genre's usual time of day but to its al fresco location. But once the author had made it clear that a serenata was defined by its performance location and celebratory purpose rather than by its formal or dramatic content, and that a work called serenata could be called lots of other things as well, I had to wonder why it rated a chapter.

Thus the problems that made for the almost uniformly poor reception of the ill-fated NOHM continue to bedevil its Cantabrigian successor. They are much more severe this time around because the NOHM was generous with music examples. The authors of its chapters could actually exhibit the artefacts they were describing and classifying, while CH18 contains a mere ten examples in staff notation totalling twenty-two systems, of which five are found in chapter 5 (how did that one rate?), and the rest are scattered without apparent rhyme or reason amongst chapters 16, 17, 18 and 24. Many of the chapters, especially those dealing with lesser-known repertories, were evidently written in the expectation that there would be examples. The lengthy prose descriptions that had to be concocted to take their place are a vain, near-unreadable substitute. Try this one, on a villancico by Antonio Soler:

In other words, nothing about the piece is in any way unusual, and the original purpose of illustrating it must have been precisely to show its typicality – something that can be accomplished without a descriptive commentary. Its chapter, like several others, is studded with similar paragraphs, often peppered with complimentary adjectives (‘charming’, ‘delightful’, ‘profoundly beautiful’, and, of course, ‘forward-looking’) that one is given no chance to corroborate. Again, one commiserates rather than remonstrates with the authors; the publisher made them do it. But one is also aggrieved on their behalf that they got so little help from the astonishingly lax editing. Any editor who would print this sentence – ‘It is undoubtedly true that the concerto as a genre encouraged both an approachable idiom and direct melodic appeal’ (62) – without, at the very least, lopping off the first five words is no friend of the author, or the reader. Further down on the same page we read, ‘It is striking that J. C. Bach completely abandoned the strenuous style of his teacher and half-brother’. A nominal weeding of drone clauses and gratuitous modifiers would have shortened the book, I would guess, by the length of one of its briefer chapters, and removing the pointless descriptive commentaries would have reduced it by another. And who should take the blame for the fact that in one of the chapters in which he appears, Piccinni is shorn of an ‘n’? (It happens repeatedly, and only in that chapter, so it cannot be a typo.) One has to wonder if anyone actually read the copy before it was handed to the printer. In an age of digital texts and e-mail, not even the printer would have had to read it. I won't say that the chapters I am describing were unreadable, since I did in fact succeed in reading them. But as a reviewer I was constrained by an honour bond, without which I surely would have scamped or skimmed.

But I have been putting off the matters of organization and intellectual substance where I felt, as a reader, the greatest disappointment. As many will have noticed from the listing above, the chapters in CH18 are ordered according to a time-honoured device, the ‘three styles’ (within ‘two practices’) – ecclesiasticus, cubicularis, theatralis – first proposed by Marco Scacchi in his Breve discorso sopra la musica moderna of 1649 (if not earlier) and endlessly parrotted thereafter, a list in which the church style was placed first out of mandated decorum. Still, when I saw that the chapters on the stylus ecclesiasticus came first I felt a rush of anticipation, recalling Lang's old contention that it was in church music that the secrets of the eighteenth century lay concealed. But the choice turns out to have been a miscalculation, since all of the authors agree, having actually surveyed it, that (pace Lang) the church music of the eighteenth century was uniformly parasitic on theatrical genres. As a result, the early chapters constantly foreshadow material that is not fully expounded until the middle of the book, and by the time that essential matter finally receives its full exposition, it is full of redundancies.

One of these prefigurings epitomizes CH18's most characteristic failing. Discussing the ‘progressive’ Viennese composers (the adjective is Bruce MacIntyre's) whose masses incorporated theatrical forms, Jen-Yen Chen comments that ‘despite the heated criticism that it sometimes engendered in the late eighteenth century, the assimilation of operatic styles within Viennese sacred music certainly did not begin in this period, as the earlier examination of the work of Fux and Caldara clearly demonstrates’ (79). To this he appends a footnote:

This is what in American newsrooms they call ‘burying the lede’: Chen's little footnote presages the whole ‘main evolution’ toward the classical or symphonic style as signalled by Heartz in 1969, and even more emphatically, via an admixture of topical analysis, by the late Wye J. Allanbrook (in The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music, left unfinished at her death but to be edited from her notes and published by the University of California Press). Nor is it something for which we have only the word of modern scholars and contemporaneous complainers. There is also this pregnant passage from Johann Adam Hiller (1728–1804), who figures very prominently in CH18 both as a composer and as a reporter or theorist:

This passage is not quoted in CH18; nor, amazing to relate, is the development Hiller describes ever pursued, in keeping, it seems, with the aversion declared in the Editor's Preface to a ‘chronological approach’ for fear of ‘overtly teleological developments’. It is a misplaced fear, born of confusion between outcomes and goals. And so throughout the volume we hear about this momentous stylistic transformation only as if inadvertently, as in Chen's footnote, or when Margaret R. Butler snatches a moment from her survey of Italian opera centres and theatres to comment, with reference to the comic intermezzo, that ‘its musical features have been acknowledged as a primary source for the Classical style’ (231). An alert editor should have taken this as a hint that something important needed addressing, albeit not under the rubric ‘Classical’ if (as I agree) that is now considered an outmoded signifier. But jettisoning the signified along with the signifier puts one in mind of babies and bathwater.

Another hint, somewhat more oblique, should have come from Claudia Maurer Zenck's chapter, whose title, ‘German opera from Reinhard Keiser to Peter Winter’, propounds one of those aporias that have so plagued the study of eighteenth-century music. To Zenck's credit, she forthrightly acknowledges that you can't get from Keiser to Winter, that she is telling not one but two quite unrelated stories, and that the second of them, the rise of the singspiel, must remain sketchy owing to the obscurity of its origins. ‘It has to be remembered’, she writes, ‘that dating depends on the material that survives [in written form] and that the practice of equipping spoken texts with [musical] insertions … was standard practice both before and after 1752 [the date of the earliest surviving score]’ (351). The shape of her chapter replicates in miniature that of the century itself when forced into the mould demanded by that ‘sense of musical continuity across the century as a whole’ on which the Editor's Preface insists. Zenck's chapter should have served as a prompt that this vaunted sense of continuity was imaginary, and that, consequently, there was an elephant in the editorial office.

That elephant virtually trumpets and charges when the author of the chapter on the solo concerto commits a revealing gaffe. Writing about the dual impact of symphony and sonata on the later eighteenth-century concerto as exemplified by those of J. C. Bach, he observes that the balance between the two parent genres was later upset, ‘the two sides … thrown into still sharper relief by the arrival of the modern symphonic idiom, not to mention the sheer size of the forces involved’ (599). Idioms whose development has gone untraced for six hundred pages will inevitably seem suddenly to ‘arrive’ of their own volition. That is probably the most insidious consequence of the misplaced emphasis on genres. When genres take centre stage, the stage is effectively depopulated. The result is a history without effective agency – no history at all.

For me the most piquant trace of stories left untold comes at the beginning of the keyboard chapter, one of the most provocative in the book, in one of the rare music examples. Rohan Stewart-Macdonald, the chapter's author, tries extra hard, and quite resourcefully, to construct that unbroken century-spanning continuity posited in the Preface as the book's ideal. One of his keenest points, reminiscent of arguments advanced by Charles Rosen on behalf of Beethoven or Chopin, is that the composers of ‘serious’ keyboard music at the end of the century often went back to Bach for their inspiration, bringing the century's musical developments full circle. The example, on page 458, juxtaposes the beginning of the sarabande in Bach's second English suite (in A minor) with the beginning of the second movement (Adagio sostenuto e patetico) of Clementi's Sonata in A major, Op. 50 No. 1. The top voice is identical in the first bar of the two pieces, and both pieces proceed by two-bar phrases, so that one is quite willing to accept the author's suggestion that the Clementi was modelled directly on the Bach. ‘Clementi’, he writes, ‘appears to have borrowed a good deal from the earlier suite movement, including its key, time signature, thematic substance and sarabande style; but he has strenuously reinterpreted the material within the expanded possibilities of a later keyboard idiom, adorning it with chromaticism and intensifying the texture’ (457). What he does not report, and does not seem to notice, is that Bach's two phrases are both constructed over the same cadential progression, reiterating an approach to A minor (bridged the first time by a deceptive cadence). Clementi, meanwhile, separates the two phrases with a beat's caesura and transposes the second so that it cadences not on A but in D minor. The two phrases are therefore not only complementary and reiterative, but also progressive, in the original meaning (rather than the currently fashionable politicized meaning) of the word. The first phrase is harmonically directed at the second in accordance with the circle of fifths.

Viewed from this angle, the juxtaposition of Bach and Clementi becomes an instantiation of the thesis embodied in Karol Berger's recent monograph Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Berger's is perhaps the most radical enunciation of the bifurcated eighteenth century that CH18 works so hard to elide. I am among those who find Berger's thesis overdrawn, but I find it so mainly with respect to the cycle, not the arrow. The greater discreteness in the phrasing as well as the harmonic trajectory associates Clementi's work as much with the tradition described by Hiller as with those described by Tia DeNora or Anselm Gerhard, the authorities on which Stewart-Macdonald relies. Unlike Bach, Clementi had comic opera in his heritage; the author's silence about this aspect of the comparison he has engineered greatly weakens his argument and calls attention once again to the great gaping conceptual hole at the centre of CH18.

As you see, reading CH18 left me feeling angry; and my annoyance may seem disproportionate, because I have not yet fully accounted for it. I crossed the threshold from ennui into exasperation when I read the blast of propaganda that lies at the very centre of CH18, John Irving's ‘Interlude’ on ‘Performance in the Eighteenth Century’. One expects a multi-authored book to be uneven, and one is prepared to forgive the inevitable lapses and contrasts in style, and the inevitable longueurs, so long as one is convinced that all concerned have done their best in the face of hindrances. But with the condescending tone of Irving's ‘Interlude’ everything changes:

From what, exactly, is the author quoting here? From the memoirs of the fly on the wall? In a book belonging to a genre in which all citations are presumed to have a source, and the source is to be named, this bit of folklore from Roger North, which was not contemporary with Corelli to begin with, and which has become a standby for performance-practice fantasists (see, for example, Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 123), is unsourced. It then becomes a watchword: ‘The composer (who in the eighteenth century was so often also the performer) expected his music to be rendered sensible, expressive, meaningful by being spoken’. Thence follows a pretence of corroboration using properly sourced extracts, none of which, however, contains the crucial word. The author comes closest by employing a bait-and-switch, equating speech with rhetoric and then quoting the harpsichord treatise by Monsieur de Saint-Lambert, who writes, ‘Just as a piece of rhetoric [‘une pièce d’Éloquence’] is a whole unit which is most often made up of several parts, each of which is composed of sentences, each having a complete meaning, these sentences being composed of phrases, the phrases of words, and the words of letters, so the melody of a piece of music is a whole unit which is always composed of several sections.' (Les Principes de Claveçin [sic] (1702), trans. and ed. Rebecca Harris-Warwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 32; I looked up and supplied the crucial phrase in the original French, which Harris-Warwick included but Irving suppressed.) But this description refers not to the act of speaking but to the structure of the utterance as composed, not performed. Irving's ruling concept, musical speech, is Irving's invention – unless he pinched it from Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Musik als Klangrede (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1982). He educes from it, as performance practice scholars were wont to do in the bad old days, a set of prescriptions for the modern performer, couched dogmatically in the language of ethics or morality – dogmatically because musical speech is nowhere defined in relation to other possible performance ideals, such as faux-Tartini's ‘per ben suonare, bisogna ben cantare’, which connotes something rather different about the relationship between violins and voices, and which has a pedigree no worse than faux-Corelli's, coming as it does from Pierre Baillot's Notice sur J.-B. Viotti (Paris: Hocquet, 1825), an obituary for an eminent ‘grand pupil’ of Tartini, who heard it from his teacher Pugnani. In any case, here are Irving's exaggerated and overconfident prescriptions:

A familiar mystique is being constructed, and a footnote appended to the word ‘appropriately’ completes the edifice:

This is not … a defence of using only original instruments. Oh yes it is; but worry not. I am not about to unpack the wonted rhetoric for the millionth time. I don't have to – not only because it has been discredited so many times over by so many writers besides me, including the more responsible performance-practice historians (like José Bowen or Bernard Sherman), but also because Irving's musealer Klangmaterialismus (to give it the term Hans Redlich invented for it some seventy-four years ago) is so patently anachronistic with respect to the eighteenth-century performance practices he himself describes, which entail the free alteration of the notes and the scoring far beyond any difference the use of ‘original instruments’ could make. But even as he reports Geminiani's orchestral arrangements of Corelli's solo sonatas, or Clementi's edition of the same sonatas with supplementary dynamics, or the extent to which Mozart updated Handel at van Swieten's request, or embellished (and expected others to embellish) the solos in his concertos, or C. P. E. Bach's insistence on spontaneous (or seemingly spontaneous) variation in notes, dynamics and articulation; and even as he casts fashionable aspersions at ‘museum-like practices of enshrining and representing the musical canon in concert culture and in intellectual traditions of pedagogy, criticism and scholarship’ (445), Irving also insists on the need to ‘police the style of such embellishments’ on behalf of the composer's intentions, and returns obsessively to the matter of original instruments, particularly where his own instrument, the so-called fortepiano, is concerned. He even repeats the canard, which seems to have originated with Malcolm Bilson, about the physical impossibility of articulating eighteenth-century music on a modern piano:

Reading this, I was transported to the many splendid demonstrations I've been privileged to witness at which Malcolm Bilson played a phrase from Haydn or Mozart on a fortepiano, then donned his boxing gloves and showed that one simply can't get the same exquisite effect from a Steinway. I forgive him his excesses, of course, because the cause for which he crusades is so eminently worthy if it wins talented performers to the side of the classical repertory. I suspect I'd forgive John Irving, too, the moment he sat down to play. I don't even blame him, really, for making his pitch. Rather, the blame must go to whichever editor allowed that pitch into such an inappropriate venue. It is one of many ways in which the editing of this volume failed both publisher and readers, and rendered the book a £120/$200 white elephant.