Richard Taruskin’s new 3,800-page, 1.25-million-word history of classical music is a thematic telling of the story. “This notion – that even the most “transcendent” music is at the same time part of the complex political and social currents of its time – is Taruskin’s great theme. All that stuff we grew up with about composers being autonomous, divinely inspired geniuses is one of many shopworn intellectual heirlooms from German romanticism that Taruskin turfs out. In his book, composers take their place as “collaborative participants, along with patrons, performers, scribes, editors, publishers, critics, audiences and many others, in what the sociologist Howard Becker calls an ‘art world.’”