Music In Western Civilisation

Music in Western Civilisation is the sort of book that looks at several thousand years of human noise-making and says, with admirable confidence, “Let us impose some order on this.”

Paul Henry Lang takes the reader on a grand tour through Western music, from chant and churchly solemnity to the increasingly elaborate business of composers, orchestras, patrons, revolutions, salons, symphonies, and everyone pretending they fully understood Wagner. This is not a slim “easy guide” to music history. It is a proper mid-century cultural brick: learned, sweeping, serious, and quite possibly capable of improving your posture if carried regularly.

Published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1963, this is music history from an age when civilisation was still expected to come with footnotes, discipline, and a firm belief that the past could be arranged into chapters. Lang writes about music not as background entertainment, but as one of the great engines of culture: an argument, a ritual, a social signal, a spiritual exercise, and occasionally an excuse for people in wigs to behave with immense drama.

This very good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for anyone who likes their music books substantial, civilised, and mildly intimidating. A fine volume for the shelf, the study, or the person who has decided that merely listening to music is no longer enough and that what they really need is historical context, intellectual ballast, and a much better excuse for owning recordings of obscure masses.

A grand, serious, faintly theatrical book about the long Western effort to turn sound into art, status, worship, rebellion, and sometimes very expensive seating.

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