The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy, and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel Harry White New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 pp. xvi + 307, ISBN 978 0 190 90387 9

Abstract

Harry White ’ s The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy, and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel proceeds from an innovative premise, though not one without precedent: the linkage of two composers frequently paired in earlier musicological literature with a third who now-adays scarcely garners attention as a composer, though his oeuvre is of comparable size. The pre-cedent is Charles Burney ’ s, but the intervening two centuries seem to have produced no further instances of such a conjunction, at least not with the degree of absorbing attention devoted to it by White. Yet this stimulating new study manifestly demonstrates the fruits of closely examining Fux ’ s music and its Viennese imperial milieu in order to illuminate what its author terms the European musical imagination of the eighteenth century, as it was diversely realized by three exem-plary figures. White ’ view is defines pre-cariously to balance White ’ ’