Conceptual Origins of “Europen Music”

The terms “European music” and “Western music” are so ubiquitous today in common language that they appear to represent timeless and concrete concepts. Musicians, public commentators, and academics all regularly use these labels to refer to large-scale categories of human musical practice, but perhaps without thinking about when and how they arose. David R. M. Irving’s new book The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2024) is the first study to trace “European music” as a compound term and singular concept in European-language sources. It shows how this term emerged in contexts of worldwide intercultural engagement from c.1670 to c.1830, becoming common in published literature only from the 1770s. It also demonstrates that the related term and concept of “Western music” (in the broad sense of a “cultural system”) took hold from the 1830s, and often in discussions of “Eastern music”. These ways of thinking arose from specific conditions of cultural transition and are not timeless. Music is inherently related to personal and collective identities, but continental and hemispheric concepts of music involve comparisons and contrasts with abstract entities of similar scales. Supranational ideas of “European music” and “Western music” thus owe more to intercultural comparisons around the world, in contexts of colonialism and orientialism, than to resolutions of national cultural differences within the continent. The book also traces the role played by musical settings of the myth of Europa and Jupiter, and of allegorical representations of Europe, in constructing European identity. It examines eighteenth-century ideas about Europe’s musical boundaries, the rise of a conceptual “Republic of Music”, and the influence of taxonomic categories of “Europeans” on musical thought. It critiques how notions of “modernity”, “perfection”, and “progress” became problematically fused to essentialist discourses about “European music”. Overall, this study urges musicologists to be mindful of anachronism when using large-scale terms, and promotes a new approach to the musical past within current moves to decolonise music history curricula.