Evolution and Western European Music
The following essay relates the history of music in the Western European tradition to the evolution of consciousness as described by Rudolf Steiner and makes no claim to be more than a sketch of certain aspects.
Music history as taught in my younger days (the 1940’s) concerned itself largely with composers from Germany, Austria, France, Italy and, sparingly and somewhat grudgingly, England. England got in because Henry Purcell decided to incarnate there and Hӓndel changed his name to Handel. Books like Percy Coles’s The Growth of Music would have been altered very little if Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and the whole of Scandinavia had been left off the map, and the standard texts would have been only a few pages shorter if they had started in the middle of the sixteenth century and ended in 1914.