A History Of Western Music Burkholder

Using A History Of Western Music Burkholder as a Course Text

The textbook most professors hand out in sophomore music survey courses is technically known as A History Of Western Music Burkholder, though students usually just call it "Grout and Palisca" because the older editions are easier to find on used book sites. The current editions have shifted authorship around, but the core structure remains the same: chronological survey, heavy on notation examples, with sidebars that rarely get read until the night before a midterm. It runs from Gregorian chant through contemporary classical music, roughly 1000 CE to the present, with disproportionate attention to the Common Practice period. The medieval and Renaissance sections are thinner than many students expect. If you're coming in cold on early music, you will feel that gap. The baroque section is the strongest, probably because that's where the source material and scholarly consensus are most settled. The twentieth-century material gets compressed, sometimes annoyingly so. You'll get a paragraph on serialism and three on minimalism, which tells you more about editorial decisions than it does about the music itself. Don't read it cover to cover. That doesn't work for this format. The book is designed as a reference anchor, not a narrative you consume linearly. Read the chapter relevant to your current lecture topic the same week. Flip to the listening guides first if you're struggling to identify periods by ear. The musical examples scattered through the text are where the real pedagogical weight sits. They're not decoration. Professors pull from them for exam questions without warning you about it.

I had a student once who bought the ebook version and complained that the scores weren't clickable or interactive. That's not a flaw in the book. It's a print-to-digital limitation. We ended up pairing it with IMSLP for the primary sources and using the textbook purely for context and terminology. That cut study time roughly in half compared to students who tried to memorize everything from the book alone.

Common Pitfalls

The index is adequate but not great for cross-period topics. If you're researching something like "intonation systems" or "performance practice," you'll bounce between chapters. Use the bibliography at the end of each chapter instead of relying solely on the index. The footnotes in newer editions are more useful than people give them credit for, but you have to actually look at them rather than skipping past them to the next section. Another issue: the listening list. It's comprehensive but not curated for beginners. You'll encounter works you've never heard of with zero introduction. The CD or streaming playlist that comes with the book helps, but it won't explain why a particular composition matters historically. You need outside context for that, usually from lecture recordings or supplementary readings.

Which Edition Matters

If you're on a budget, the 11th edition is functionally nearly identical to the 12th for most course purposes. The differences are mostly in updated scholarship on early music and a few new contemporary composers added to the final chapters. The 10th edition is noticeably weaker on post-1950 material. If your syllabus covers anything after 1970, skip the 10th. The pdf versions floating around academic file-sharing sites are risky because page numbers shift between editions, and professors reference page numbers in assignments. I found that the hardcover 12th edition lasts longer through a full semester than the paperback because the binding actually holds when you're dog-earing pages with musical examples. Not a small thing when you're highlighting three chapters a week for two semesters straight.