I want to put one of my favourite exerpts from the book on the same thread.
If people think it is off topic I will remove it. May be we could start a new thread with the favorite parts of the book too.

Here is a part from Nicholas Cook Music (a very short introduction):
 
Nicholas Cook writes that there are many reasons that rumours of the death of classical music have been greatly exaggerated. He continues:
Lawernce Kramer, for instance, writes that

It is no secret that, in the United States anyway, this music is in trouble. It barely registers in our schools, it has neither the prestige nor the popularity of literature and visual art, and it squanders its capacities for self-renewal by clinging to an exceptionally static core of repertoire. Its audience is shrinking, graying, and overly pale-faced, and the suspicion has been voiced abroad that its claim to occupy a sphere of autonomous artistic greatness is largely a means of veiling, and thus perpetuating, a narrow set of social interests.

But author proves that the music industry has successfully repositioned classical music as a largely profitable niche product - a major niche product - in contemporary consumer culture.

I really liked this book (at least for the first half before I got tired for some reason.

The audience for classical music in the USA:



(With apologies to eruanto)

I leap in to mention that Richard Taruskin is referred to above ;-)

If only Taruskin had stuck to his title "Western Music" and not got mired into the Shostakovich controversy, I'd find him slightly easier to take.

I don't have a book, but based on the review that Ian kindly posted I am interested to read this book. There are interesting points one can make while reading. For example the possibility to discuss limitations of written music score. It is good to discuss this aspect with students. There is a lot of confusion about how one has to approach the score. From one point of view it is a blue print and has to be interpreted freely (who knows how they really played it in practice, we have no recordings of that from far away era). The other approach is to try to reproduce written score slavishly.

Also I never knew about Beethoven's political views. I knew that he tore the dedication to Napoleon from his score, but nothing more. I knew that he had friends in high places, but I did not know he had any views on "ruling classes". I did know from somewhere that he liked to put von in front of his name, but that his origins were not aristocratic.

Also I don't know about Russian music and if it should be included in the history of music. We in college had a semester of it after completing the West European course of music. I don't remember how long this semester was.
Also if one includes everything in a textbook it is huge. The XXth century and now the XXI are may be too much to be included in one course.
However, I don't know since this is not my area.

I think that's the most bothersome aspect. If it was called 'The Taruskin History of Western Music' it would be rather easier to stomach, but the use of 'Oxford' in the title, and the 6 volumes, confer an authority on it that it cannot claim (never mind the fact that what Taruskin turned in was hardly what Oxford commissioned, if rumours are to be believed).