Music’s Odyssey. An Invitation to Western Classical Music
by Robin Holloway
Published 2025
1184 pages, hardback
ISBN: 9780241183014
Allen Lane

Robin Holloway’s Music’s Odyssey joins a select list of single author works which seek to give a picture of the development of classical music. For me that list starts with Percy Scholes nearly 90 years ago now. Although The Oxford Companion to Music was of course an alphabetically ordered reference book, its joy was in the cross-referential connections Scholes’s idiosyncratic style and intellect enabled. Much more recently there is the (literally) towering achievement of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music. At its best, for example in the volume on the early twentieth century, it was riveting and revelatory, Taruskin’s opinionation and selectivity being part of the attraction. Or, for some readers, not. Less broad in scope historically, but similarly enlightening, have been Alex Ross’s books. The Rest is Noise, a more manageable, accessible and inclusive traversal of twentieth century music than Taruskin, beautifully written, and Wagnerism, his superb history of the musical and cultural influence of the eponymous composer. Holloway’s new book has seemingly felicitous combinations of all the above: an ear for influence and sometimes unlikely connections found in Ross; an authority and forthrightness bestowed by erudition as with Taruskin; and an attractive concision similar to Scholes. But of course, Holloway is very much his own man, possessing the invaluable dual standpoint of a highly distinguished composer and academic.

How then to categorise Music’s Odyssey? Holloway stresses at the start that the book is not a methodical history but rather a more select ‘appreciation’. And because it’s not a history he says it’s a book for ‘dipping/browsing/skipping’. This absolutely works. The book’s indexing is clear and simple, helpfully indicating connections where relevant (‘Wagner and Palestrina’ anyone? – page 49) and it’s a simple matter to see what, if anything Holloway has written about a particular composer or piece. But despite what at first seems its daunting length, it’s possible, indeed rewarding, to read the book entire as a mostly chronological and always fascinating account of the evolution of classical music. What I first thought might be a problem in reading right through, the style Holloway has adopted, actually proves a strength and a help, once one adapts. It’s a sort of high class, exalted shorthand, at various times eschewing pronouns, conjunctions and verbs but permeated with an elegance of style and lapidary assessment. Never has the semi-colon been used to greater effect. Once you’re into its rhythm it propels you through a dazzling succession of canonical works, personalities and styles about which, for good or bad, Holloway almost always has something memorable to say.

There’s some interesting and helpful introductory material though before one reaches the ‘odyssey’ proper. First there’s a charming and affecting account of Holloway’s own journey, as a teacher, academic and composer, someone who readers of these pages will be pleased to hear has always been an ‘avid consumer of recorded music’, one who has an early memory of ‘running in diminishing circles round the back garden singing Purcell’s Trumpet Tune, timed to end with the smallest revolution – attempting to be a record’. There is also an early indication of Holloway’s remarkable gift for clarity. In a section entitled ‘Some Basic Technicalities’ he dazzlingly explains the fundamentals of music theory in seven pages, without resort to notated examples. Hold on, I thought, after I read it, surely he’s not going to attempt the whole book without a single stave of musical illustration? That is just what he does, and he brings it off remarkably successfully. It’s something that Taruskin wouldn’t have contemplated I’m sure, and even Donald Tovey, who figures in Holloway’s ‘Select Bibliography’ (ultra-select in fact for such a huge book), was happy to populate his pedagogical prose with copious examples. Whether this was making a virtue out of a necessity borne of the costs of producing the book, or was a courageous authorial decision, it results in a bravura demonstration of accessible technical writing, and a real area of differentiation, important for the more general reader.

Holloway renders the substance of the book via a series of what he calls, quoting Matthew Arnold, ‘touchstones’. His method is ‘intense concentration on exemplary choices’. So, for example, for the two composers who are Holloway’s ‘twin centres’, we have 30 pages of superb analysis on 20 of Bach’s Church Cantatas, and 15 Schubert songs persuasively evoked by Holloway as representative of his genius, interestingly grouped (‘Archaic Mythology’ and ‘Pantheistic Ecstasy’ amongst others) and penetratingly examined. For Mozart the canonical operas and piano concertos are investigated as illustrating the best of him, for Beethoven the quartets and the piano sonatas. Arguable of course, but not deeply controversial, and beautifully done. And I haven’t yet found a work focussed on by Holloway whose choice initially surprised me that on listening to again hasn’t been a revelation. So, for instance, I’ve been glad to revisit the Alto Rhapsody and Kullervo with fresh ears after reading the book. Above all so far, I’m grateful to him for his study of Israel in Egypt, reading his account of the oratorio serendipitously for me coinciding with the release of a blistering new recording of the work from Le Concert Spirituel and Hervé Niquet. Indeed, the section of the book on Israel in Egypt and Messiah, ‘Oratorio and motet: Old Testament promise; New Testament fulfilment’ is an exemplar of what music writing can achieve, helping readers not just to make new discoveries of the subjectively neglected, but finding new and interesting things to say about profoundly familiar works. I loved for example his perfectly reasonable and inevitably amusing dissection of the less than narratively and theologically cogent numbers in the second half of Part II of Messiah.I said so ‘so far’ advisedly though in my appreciation above of music Holloway has caused me to reconsider. There’s quite a long list. Will I ever get to David Del Tredici I wonder?

There’s also quite a lot of music it turns out which one thought had at least some merit, whereof Holloway spells out in plain terms the gravity of one’s error. He’s rather good at this. Hildegard of Bingen is ‘a psychedelic bore’; the beloved Heilige Dankgesang movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132 mere ‘pious emotional blackmail’; and Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes commit a similar sin, being ‘a monument of piety [to Bach’s 48] …surpassed in dismalness only by Hindemith’s gruesome Ludus Tonalis…’ (talk about two birds, one stone). Yet there’s balance here too. Holloway singles out the distinctive quality of Hildegard’s texts, ecstatic and intoxicating’; follows the comment on Op. 132 with the most brilliant and ravishing account of a work in the whole book, six pages on Op. 131, where you feel the quartet unfolding before your ears in real time (like all of the pieces in the book one gets the most out of the writing by listening to the music first unless you are deeply familiar with it, then reading and listening again with the book in front of you); pairs the dismissive comment on Shostakovich with a gem of a reading of the composer’s Symphony No. 14, ‘a masterpiece of exiguity’; and is even prepared to admit that poor old Hindemith wrote a couple of masterpieces himself, Das Marienleben and Cardillac, in their original versions (both added to my aforesaid list).

Holloway is extraordinarily perceptive on influence and connections. Going back to Handel, for example, he’s careful to preface his appraisal of the composer with an enlightening account of the links between Handel and Bach, Rameau, Corelli and Purcell. But his writing on nexus is at its peak when considering the late German Romantics, where his notes on the nexus between Bruckner/Brahms, Bruckner/Mahler and Mahler/Strauss are stimulating and original. The first of these pairings, Bruckner/Brahms, has the appearance of delightful eccentricity, being a set of bullet-pointed jottings, but each is razor sharp and enlivened by wit, e.g. ‘Opera absolutely unimaginable for either: the mind boggles!’ Quite.

Early on, Holloway makes the point that an attempt at comprehensiveness is impossible. I’d add particularly so for a single volume work. He’s also careful to say it’s partial and personal. So, in a sense it’s beside the point to chide him for omissions (and there is the precedent of Taruskin, who, despite being allowed six volumes and many thousands of pages by OUP, pointedly avoided substantive discussion of some major composers). I ought to mention though that there are very few female composers featured, and the cast of contemporaries has gaps which I found slightly frustrating. Frustrating in the sense that I’d like to have known what Holloway thinks of them rather than regretting their lack of representation per se. One can of course draw obvious conclusions, but in any event, you’ll search the index in vain for reference to Kaija Saariaho or Mark-Anthony Turnage to name a couple of prominent absentees. Holloway taught George Benjamin and Judith Weir at Cambridge and writes briefly and interestingly about both, including a typically pithy and illuminating analysis of the Weir’s The Vanishing Bridegroom. However, there’s nothing on Thomas Adès, also a pupil at Cambridge, which is a pity.  

I’ve been wondering whilst reading Music’s Odyssey, how much the additional perspective of Holloway the composer has added to the richness of its content. It feels to me that on top of the acute critical sense and learning one might expect from the distinguished academic he is, there’s an intuition and understanding which can only come from years of creative experience. I could give many examples of where this struck me, but one of the most powerful comes in his discussion of Britten’s Winter Words. It’s Holloway’s favourite Britten song cycle, so much so that he completed a masterly orchestration of it in 2020 (recently released in a first class performance by Nicky Spence and Edward Gardner and the LPO) and one feels privileged to read his insights. He rather modestly calls his analysis a ‘florilège’, but it absolutely delivers on its aim of showing how deeply Hardy’s poems and Britten’s music ‘are interfused, each underlying theme subtly and profoundly rhyming across eight songs on the face of it so miscellaneous’. What Hardy has enabled Britten to do he continues is ‘bare his heart by indirection, and it beats ardent.’ It’s wonderful, acute, and one feels, instinctive critical writing.

What to say at the end of all this? It would be wrong to expect an aesthetical thesis at the conclusion of the journey, and this is nimbly avoided. Instead, in the final section marked ‘Envoi’, Holloway fantasizes on a ‘lingua franca from c. 2000 on, a common practice for composition in which every promising discovery of the century before has been assimilated’. In typically nuggety fashion he breaks this down into what it might mean for Harmony, Melody, Counterpoint etc. His ecstatic final paragraph, too long to quote here and whose effect shortening would damage, is a tantalising glimpse of what such a compositional synthesis might look like. Now he has nothing to do after completing this monumental, profoundly valuable book, I hope he attempts it.

Dominic Hartley  

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