Thoughts on Writing a Comprehensive History of 
18th-Century Music 
Vincent Duckles 

To approach the 18th century as a self-contained historical 
entity is to invite problems at the outset. We all know that there 
is nothing inherently significant about a time span of one hundred 
years. Centuries come and go, and can be measured from any 
arbitrarily selected date in the calendar. Most historians are well 
aware of this, at least in theory, but few are ready to give up the 
convenient practice of dividing time into one-hundred-year 
parcels. They have created an 18th century for us whether we 
like it or not. The concept itself is an established historical fact. 
The generations of scholars who have devoted themselves to the 
music of the period between 1700 and 1799 have produced a 
substantial body of literature that calls for some kind of synthesis. 
History is to a large extent the product of its own documentation; 
it is made by the men who write the history books. At one time 
it was thought that all a historian had to do was to describe the 
facts as he saw them. Now we are less confident of that simple, 
Positivistic approach, recognizing that the historian's data; 
particularly in the realm of the arts, is highly selective and 
projected through a'series of interpretations and re-interpreta-
tions in which the writer's taste and sense of values are necessary 
ingredients. 

The first task of the historian of 18th-century music is one of 
organization-the problem of clarifying the structure of the age. 
It does not suffice to explain it merely in terms of a prolonged 
transition from the Baroque to the Classic. In a century that 
begins with Buxtehude and ends with Beethoven, the patterns 
are infinitely complex. As Daniel Heartz has observed (in a 
paper presented at the Tenth Congress of the International 
Musicological Society in Ljubljana) features commonly identified 
with mature Classicism are to be found iIi the Neapolitan opera 
as early as 1740. Jens Peter Larsen has called attention to the 
recurrence of aspects of late Baroque style in the instrumental 
music of the last decades of the century.! There is still consider-
able confusion as to what is meant by "Classicism" or "the 
Classic style." Frits Noske, for one; is prepared to abandon the 

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terms altogether. He favors a periodization in which disinte-
grating Baroque forms lead directly into emerging Romantic 
ones.2 In many respects the terms Baroque, Rococo, pre-Classic, 
Classic, Style galant, Sturm und Drang, Empfindsamkeit (all 
borrowed from other disciplines) have outlived their usefulness. 
Larsen's point seems to be well taken when he advises us to 
"forget these labels and what they stand for, and limit ourselves 
to the of the music." 

Yet these "labels," inadequate as they are, bear witness to a 
key problem for the historian of 18th-century music-the 
problem of explaining the diversification of styles. The 18th 
century was an age of style consciousllt;ss. It expanded the 
familiar categories of Church, Chamber, and Theater style into a 

system of descriptive terminology. For the 18th-
century opera goer, distinctions were made in terms of some 
variation on the theme: French vs. Italian opera. But other 
national influences and local schools contributed to the picture: 
English ballad and comedy opera, for example, and a variety of 
instrumental styles fostered in Bologna, Venice, Padua, Berlin, 
Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna. Sacred music throughout the 
century displays a spectrum of styles ranging from survivals of 
the Renaissance ars antiqua to a type of "modernism" closely 
related to t,he Neapolitan operatic tradition. 

One can applaud Larsen's suggestion that the proper study of 
the music historian is music, and at the same time insist that, as 
far as the 18th century is concerned, the ideas that lie behind 
the music are of great importance. Theory, methodology, 
aesthetics, and historiography are pedestrian terms in our 
vocabulary, yet they stand for vigorous aspects of 18th-century 
musical thought. Our own historical viewpoint takes its start 
from the Enlightenment. The great histories of Burney, Hawkins, 
and Forkel in the last decades of the century do not mark the 
beginnings of historical method as applied to music; rather they 
are the culmination of a line of development that can be traced 
through the lexicons of Brossard, Walther, Rousseau, and Gerber, 
gaining momentum in the critical journals edited by such men 
as Mattheson, Marpurg, Scheibe, and Hiller. Similarly, we owe 
to the 18th century the establishment of a systematic approach 
to musical aesthetics. Aesthetic views were anything but remote 
and abstract in that context. We cannot understand the musical 
creativity of the time without becoming conversant with the 

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contemporary concepts of imitation, expression, and the 
relationships between music and its sister arts, painting and 
poetry. 

Another area of crucial concern for the historian of 18th-
century music resides in the continuing pursuit of what lies 
behind the notation. The understanding of 18th-century 
performance practices is made all the more difficult because the 
notational conventions employed are, by and large, identical 
with our own. The baffling elements are those which the early 
musicians took for granted. Some valuable work has been done 
to shed light on these problems in recent years-studies such as 
George Buelow's Thorough-bass accompaniment according to John 
David Heinichen, for example, or Edward Reilly's exposition of the 
wealth of information to be found in Quantz's Versuch. The 
approach through the theorists and pedagogues is only one of 
many that should be brought to bear on the task of restoring 
18th-century music to life. 
NOTES 

1 Larsen,J. P. "Some observations on the development and characteristics of the 
Vienna Classical instrumental music," in Studia Musicologica Scientiarum Hungaricae 
(1967) 9: 115-39. 

2 Noske, F. R. Besc/wuwingen over de periodisering der muziekgeschiedenis. Leiden, 1965. 

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