OXFORD HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC (5 BOOK SET)

The history of "history"--our changing perspectives on the act of narrating and trying to "recapture" the past--encompasses the most profound seismic shifts in modern consciousness. Once seemingly commonsensical, the science-aspiring ambition of historiography to recount the past "as it actually was" (to borrow Leopold von Ranke's famously misunderstood phase) now betrays anachronistic naivete, if not a dangerous arrogance masquerading as objectivity. And the business of cultural history provides a particularly fascinating--and contentious--index to the larger issues at stake. The very urgency of the debate over "how" to tell the story (and indeed what the story is) continues to intensify in proportion to the uncertainty of our times.