Robin Holloway: Music's Odyssey review - lessons in composition

Robin Holloway is a composer and, until his retirement in 2011, don at Cambridge, where he taught many of the leading British composers of the last half-century. He has also always written on music, including a long-standing column in The Spectator, previously publishing two collections of “essays and diversions” (which I confess I haven’t read).

Now comes his summa, Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, styled as “an invitation to western classical music”. The first thing to say is: it’s very long. Indeed, the proof copy of 1,216 pages didn’t fit through my letterbox. It’s not something to carry on the train. (The admission that the first draft was “half as long again” made me boggle.) The next thing is that it is a very idiosyncratic book, which though compendious makes no claim to comprehensiveness: it is one (very well-informed) person’s individual take on the story of classical music, with blind-spots admitted to, and preferences based on nothing other than taste openly described as such. “This book is not History: it’s Appreciation, partial and personal.” It is certainly not a book for, say, undergraduates looking for a methodical, neutral, factual textbook.

Which leads to the question – who is it for? A book this size is likely only to appeal to those already with some knowledge of the subject. But Holloway establishes from the start that he will be eschewing technical vocabulary and musicological analysis. So he has ended up with something he sees as a guidebook – “let me be your Ruskin or Baedeker” – which risks being neither fish nor fowl: too hardcore for the casual reader, too superficial for someone more expert. Holloway has achieved his aim of being an entertaining, acerbic and thoughtful tour guide, but I’m not sure who his audience might be.

The format of the book is to work through from the origins of notated music at the turn of the previous millennium, broadly chronologically but also geographically, for example following German music through the whole 19^th century before ducking back to the French and Russians. It’s a fairly straightforward this-person-then-that-person account, taking in the usual suspects, with some notable omissions, and having no truck with adding women or non-white composers retrospectively to the canon. Those discussed are given a telegraphic paragraph of biography followed by a programme-note style description of some illustrative pieces. The experience of these was like being led around a gallery blindfold while an expert describes the pictures, and left me wondering what to do while I read. Should I, so to speak, remove the blindfold, seek out the music, and follow along? It would have made reading the book a very long process indeed, and I didn’t do that apart from a brief experiment. And if I had the music playing, what would be the function of the prose descriptions? Should I just read, and enjoy the words on their own account, untethered from the music? There didn’t seem to be a good solution.

Holloway is entertaining in his dismissal of music he doesn’t care for. He confesses his “story really starts with JS Bach”, which means that the first 50 pages consist of dismissing Hildegard of Bingen as “a psychedelic bore”, Perotin as “faintly ridiculous”, Obrecht as “a Lego-composer”, Taverner as “dullish and grey-ish”, Tallis’s keyboard music as “dreary” and Heinrich Isaac’s Missa di Apostolis as “a real clunker”. Similarly, baroque opera is given short shrift and, at the end of the book, he has little truck with minimalism, giving over only a handful of pages to surely the most impactful group of classical composers of the last 60 years. Glass’s “vacancy is blatant”, John Adams is “threadbare”, the whole movement “shallow waters”.

Where he really wants to be is in the 19^th century, although Bach is also a towering influence. There are some lovely insights in the Bach chapter, especially on why his music is so amenable to adaptation, but the bulk of it is taken up with detailed descriptions of a selection of church cantatas. Schubert is for Holloway at “the very heart of music” and he writes about his undervalued impact on later composers. Likewise Bruckner, not a favourite of mine – but Holloway’s writing sent me back to revisit the symphonies with fresh ears. Other enthusiasms include Wagner, Debussy and Ravel – whose small output makes him the only composer where every single piece gets a mention.

Holloway’s writing has a distinctive and individual voice – most enjoyable when he is either rhapsodising or excoriating – but the style is relentlessly high-flown and gets a bit exhausting. That is partly because I was required by the job of reviewing to do the very thing Holloway recommends against: “this is a book for dipping/browsing/skipping” rather than reading straight through. But even in chunks, writing at this length some tics become noticeable, not least the overuse of the word “facture”, which, once noticed, becomes unignorable.

At its best, this book is like sitting in a university tutorial with a most inspiring teacher, which is what Holloway has been to such luminaries as Judith Weir and Thomas Adès (who is completely, and without explanation, absent from these pages). It opens up lines of thought, of unlikely linkages and starting points for further exploration. But in its tougher passages, it is long descriptions that are a little bit like someone telling you about their dreams: more enjoyable for them than you.

If you want a detailed, scholarly, technical history on this subject, the go-to is Richard Taruskin’s magisterial – and four times as long – Oxford History of Western Music (there is a one-volume “reduction”). If you are a beginner in this world and want a straightforward, no-frills, 350-page introduction, I would recommend Howard Goodall’s The Story of Music (and can feel Holloway shudder even as I write that).

And the best way, perhaps, to delve into Holloway’s understanding of, and feeling for, music history is through his Gilded Goldbergs, an immensely enjoyable re-working for two pianos of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The different movements start from the Bach originals and spin off into riffs on, and tributes to, composers ranging from Dowland and Scarlatti, to Brahms and Ligeti. It is a brilliant achievement, kaleidoscopic, universal, technically dazzling – but also humane, touching and humble. It is a love-letter to Bach but also to music more widely, and a more immediately rewarding place to start than Music’s Odyssey.

• Music's Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music by Robin Holloway, (Allen Lane, £45.00)
• More book reviews on theartsdesk

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