The Tradition of Western Music

In The Tradition of Western Music, Gerald Abraham distills his Ernest Bloch Lectures at Berkeley into a sweeping meditation on how music both embodies and transforms cultural life. Rather than treating tradition as “the dead hand of the past,” Abraham frames it as a dynamic process: a living, evolving dialogue between communal memory, individual creativity, and shifting historical circumstances. Across essays on musical language, social forces, and the balance of continuity and innovation, he asks why certain traditions persist while others wither, and how composers from Luther to Bach, Berlioz, and Mussorgsky stand within—and sometimes against—their inherited legacies.

The book insists that the history of Western music is never just a chronicle of works but a record of responses, reinterpretations, and constant change. Abraham interweaves studies of plainsong, chorales, folk traditions, and modern performance practices with broader reflections on nationalism, cross-cultural exchange, and the effects of religion, politics, and technology on musical form. Written in an accessible yet scholarly style, The Tradition of Western Music offers students, performers, and general readers alike an interpretive guide to understanding how music has functioned as both a shared cultural inheritance and a site of perpetual renewal.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.