Irving, D. R. M. - The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century

Traces the emergence of the term and concept of European music in European-language sources
• Shows how music played a role in the shaping of early modern European identity
• Demonstrates the changing meanings of the term Western Music before and after 1800
• Problematizes the anachronistic use of reductive and essentializing labels in music history

In this book, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories as European music and Western music, showing how they originate from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the European continent rather than the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates how reductive labels for the musics of a continent or a hemisphere often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.