The Tradition of Western Music

In The Tradition of Western Music, Gerald Abraham distills his Ernest Bloch Lectures at Berkeley into a sweeping meditation on how music both embodies and transforms cultural life. Rather than treating tradition as “the dead hand of the past,” Abraham frames it as a dynamic process: a living, evolving dialogue between communal memory, individual creativity, and shifting historical circumstances. Across essays on musical language, social forces, and the balance of continuity and innovation, ...