Using A History Of Western Music Tenth Edition As A Reference
You pick up A History of Western Music by Pickring and Grout, 10th edition, and you quickly realize it is not a book you read cover to cover. It is more like a detailed map. When I was an undergraduate, I bought the international student edition because it was roughly a third of the price of the hardcover. The content is identical, the pages are thinner, and the binding will not survive past midterms without a re-staple. The legitimate routes are your university library reserve shelf, campus bookstore for the rental, or direct purchase from Norton's website. There are also third-party sellers on Amazon and eBay offering used copies. Anything labeled as a free PDF download of the full textbook is almost certainly an unauthorized scan. They tend to have missing pages, garbled music examples, and inconsistent image quality that makes reading the notation nearly impossible. I learned this the hard way after spending two hours trying to read a plate of musical excerpts from a sketchy file, only to find three pages were blank. The workaround was going to the library and pulling the actual copy off the shelf. The 10th edition added updated scholarship on medieval and Renaissance polyphony, revised coverage of 20th-century music including expanded discussion of minimalism and postmodernism, and several new case studies. The music examples are reproduced in color now, which matters more than you might expect when you are trying to distinguish voice leading in a 15th-century motet. The companion website has streaming audio linked to each chapter, though the playback quality varies by browser.
The international edition removes some of the American-centric supplemental content and shifts the page numbering slightly. The core chapters remain the same, so cross-referencing between editions is straightforward if you already own an earlier printing. I once had a student who compared the 9th and 10th editions side by side and could not identify a single chapter that had been materially restructured. The changes are mostly in the footnotes and the expanded bibliographies.
How To Actually Use This Book In Practice
Most students approach it wrong. They treat it as a novel and try to absorb everything in order from chapter one through seventeen. That will not work. The book is designed for selective reading alongside your lecture schedule. Assignments usually point to specific chapters, and the real value is in the detailed chapter introductions and the primary source readings scattered throughout. I recommend this workflow for anyone taking a survey course: read the chapter overview first to get the timeline, then skim the music examples before class, and only after listening to the recordings do you go back and read the detailed analysis. That sequence typically cuts review time from about three hours per chapter down to somewhere around forty-five minutes. The music examples section is where most people lose their way. Do not skip it. The notation is small in the international edition, so keep a magnifying glass or your phone camera zoom function handy.
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Common Pitfalls To Avoid
The index is surprisingly useful but underutilized. Students tend to flip forward hoping to stumble across what they need rather than looking up the term directly. Another issue is assuming the chronological order means causation. The book covers events in sequence, but medieval musical development did not move in a straight line from Gregorian chant to polyphony to the Renaissance style. Regional variation existed simultaneously, and the text sometimes obscures that by prioritizing the Franco-Flemish school as the primary narrative thread. I spent an entire semester frustrated by this gap until I supplemented it with Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, which lays out the regional differences much more explicitly. The companion audio tracks are helpful but not synchronized with the page numbers in a reliable way. The QR codes or web links embedded in the book sometimes redirect to outdated pages. If you encounter a broken link, navigate manually through the Norton companion site by chapter rather than relying on the embedded redirect. This saved me roughly ten minutes per sitting during my own junior year seminar.
The International Edition Specifics
The paper is thinner and the ink is less saturated, which affects readability of the musical staves. The typesetting is tighter, so margins are narrower. If you take extensive notes in the margins, you will run out of space by chapter four. I started using sticky flags and a separate notebook instead of writing directly in the book, which preserved the text for later reference and made annotation more efficient. The binding on the international edition is also perfect bound rather than Smyth-sewn, so the book does not lay flat when opened. If you plan to use it at a desk with the book open to two facing pages, consider getting a book cradle or simply propping it up. If you are only taking one survey course, the rental or library copy is sufficient. The book does not lend itself well to long-term reference unless you are a music major who plans to revisit it. The secondhand market has plenty of copies from previous editions that still cover the same core material. The 9th edition remains functional for most course requirements, though you will miss the updated coverage of contemporary composers and some of the revised musicological perspectives. If your professor specifically references 10th edition page numbers in assignments, stick with the current edition to avoid confusion. The price differential between the 9th and 10th editions on the used market is usually small, sometimes as little as five dollars. In those cases, getting the newer edition is worth the marginal cost because of the updated source readings and the revised bibliography. The older editions also tend to have accumulated more used-book damage, dog-eared pages, and highlight marks that distract from the text itself.
Supplementary Resources Worth Pairing With It
Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music provides deeper analytical coverage and corrects several oversimplifications in Grout. The Norton Anthology of Western Music pairs well if your course includes score study. Online, the Music Theory Online journal and the Journal of Musicological Research occasionally publish articles that update or challenge claims made in the textbook, particularly around early music performance practice. The Wikipedia entry for each composer covered in the book is serviceable for quick facts but should never be cited in academic work without verification against a primary source. For listening, the Pickring Grout Companion Playlist on major streaming platforms has the tracks referenced in the book. The playlist is unofficial but reasonably complete. Streaming quality on these tracks ranges from acceptable to poor depending on the source, so for serious study, the CD sets or downloadable library recordings are preferable.
