Gerald Abraham's reputation as an authority on Russian music has tended to obscure his deep interest in the music of Poland and Czechoslovakia, and of the nineteenth-century generally. From a lifetime's devoted scholarship in these fields Abrahams selected his best work to make up this volume (first published in 1968), one of exceptional breadth and fascination. The subjects range from the relationship of Slavonic music to the western world, to detailed essays on figures such as Chopin, Dvorak, Rubinstein and Mussorgsky. A study of realism in Janacek's operas contains a particularly fine analysis of From a House of the Dead and there is an account of the fantastic 'erotic diary' for piano in which Zdenek Fibich, one of the finest nineteenth-century Czech symphonists, recorded the secrets of his love affair with former student and librettist Aneka Schulzova. Gerald Abraham (1904-1988) was a distinguished musicologist, among his official posts those of Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool and Assistant Controller of Music at the BBC.

The Concise Oxford History of Music, written by one of the world's most respected musicologists, remains the one-volume history for anyone seriously interested in the subject. This comprehensive work covers the whole history of music by genre from its first recorded emergence in Egypt to the death of Stravinsky.

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, he asks why certain traditions persist while others wither, and how composers from Luther to Bach, Berlioz, and Mussorgsky stand within—and sometimes against—their inherited legacies. The book insists that the history of Western music is never just a chronicle of works but a record of responses, reinterpretations, and constant change. Abraham interweaves studies of plainsong, chorales, folk traditions, and modern performance practices with broader reflections on nationalism, cross-cultural exchange, and the effects of religion, politics, and technology on musical form. Written in an accessible yet scholarly style, The Tradition of Western Music offers students, performers, and general readers alike an interpretive guide to understanding how music has functioned as both a shared cultural inheritance and a site of perpetual renewal. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.