Music in Western Civilization

Lang's monumental history of music and musical culture has stood for the past half-century as the definitive work of its kind.

The scope of the book is vast, beginning with the music of ancient Greece and ending with that of the first two decades of the twentieth century. But music is not viewed in isolation. Rather, the author presents music as one of the many arts that, taken in conjunction, form the essence of the artistic spirit of an era.