**UPDATED with some off-piste readings!**

As Western Art Music is known to its friends…

It’s a formulation that seeks to get away from the narrower “classical music” and to avoid privileging it (for The listening service on some of the issues, click here). Of course Western cultures, of any kind, shouldn’t be a benchmark for discussing other societies; on the contrary, it’s fruitful to integrate them into a “Martian” view of world cultures (see below, and under Society and soundscape).

At the same time, I find it a red herring to seek to valorise “classical” elements of other world societies (for China, see here). We won’t lift our blinkers merely by offering a few respectable genres membership of our elite club. Neither Western nor any other type of Art Music is any criterion for “excellence”—see Is Western Art Music Superior? and my lengthy article What is serious music?!.

Anyway, WAM is a regular topic on this site—somewhat arbitrarily, some pages appear under the WAM menu, while many more essays on composers and conductors appear as posts. The latter are listed under the WAM category in the sidebar; and under the tags there, as well as conducting, Proms, and so on, you can find various composers, including roundups for Bach, Mozart, and Mahler; note also Ravel and Messaien.

Another fun acronym is HIP: “Historically Informed Performance”, relevant to a range of posts on early music. For leads to great and little traditions, see Popular culture in early modern Europe. For the issue in China, posts such as those on qin (NB John Thompson’s thoughts here, and this documentary) and Recreation are apposite.

A related theme is historical ethnomusicology, for which see e.g.

• Richard Widdess, “Historical ethnomusicology”, in Helen Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: an introduction (The New Grove handbooks in music), pp.219–37
• Jonathan McCollum (ed.), Theory and method in historical ethnomusicology (2014)
• and the special interest group of SEM.

These are just some topics that intrigue me all the more since I ceased to perform professionally; but I come to WAM and HIP mainly from a performing background, my approach not setting forth from scholarly research.

* * *

With the prestige of WAM diminishing over recent decades , it has become even more of a niche, but the plethora of writings on the topic continues unabated. While I have scant knowledge of this scholarship, with my dual background as performer and ethnographer I will now offer an off-piste sample of some general works that I find stimulating.

Within the field itself, on 20th-century musicking:

• Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect pitch, a fascinating autobiography—
• along with his Lexicon of musical invective, a hilarious caveat against hasty judgments
• Norman Lebrecht, The maestro myth (see various posts under The art of conducting)

• The work of Susan McClary
• The writings of Richard Taruskin, on both early and avant-garde musics
• Alex Ross, The rest is noise (often cited in tandem with Taruskin)
• John Butt, Playing with history

From the broader perspectives of ethnomusicology (see also under Society and soundscape):

• Judith Becker, “Is Western Art Music superior?”
• Ruth Finnegan, The hidden musicians
• Christopher Small, Musicking
• Bruno Nettl, notably Heartland excursions
• Peter Jeffery on Gregorian chant.

Ethnographies of orchestral life:

• Stephen Cottrell, Professional music-making in London
• Blair Tindall, Mozart in the jungle
• Felix Warnock, Perfection is NOT the word for it

On this site, I sometimes combine insider’s and Martian viewpoints, such as The crutch of exegesis and Mahler 3 at the Proms. After early evidence of this style in Bach—and Daoist ritual, I pursued it further in What is serious music?!.