Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition

by Douglass Seaton

Book Overview

Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition, Fourth Edition, explores the conceptual frameworks that have shaped musical development from antiquity to the present. In a lively narrative that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195379888
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

The PERFECT music history survey text!

I took a graduate music history survey course under the instruction of the author, Douglass Seaton, at Florida State University in the Fall semester of 1997. Though I hold no degree in musicology (all my degrees are in trombone performance), I have found this text to be the perfect reference, both in the context of a survey course, and especially in preperation for diagnostic/preliminary exams.The book is somewhat smaller than either the Grout/Palisca or the Stolba texts (as the book was authored with a one-semester survey course in mind), and perhaps doesn't contain all of the minutia for which the Grout/Palisca "A History of Western Music" is known. The benefit is an extremely readable source, tongue-in-cheek at times, that is still highly detailed, but compelling enough to gain a thorough perspective of the history of western music (historical contexts, performance practices, transitions between defined periods).I have recommended this book to everyone who has asked for my advice for graduate-school entrance/preliminary exam preparation.

A very thorough and interesting text

This was my music history textbook when I was an undergrad, and I found it so fascinating that I changed my major to musicology and reread the book from cover to cover on my own time.