be evident to all readers that this narrative devotes as much attention to a congeries of “petits récits”—
individual accounts of this and that—as it does to the epic sketched in the foregoing paragraphs. But the
overarching trajectory of musical literacy is nevertheless a part of all the stories, and a particularly
revealing one.
*****The first thing that it reveals is that the history narrated within these covers is the history of elite
genres. For until very recent times, and in some ways even up to the present, literacy and its fruits have
been the possession—the closely guarded and privileging (even life-saving) possession—of social elites:
ecclesiastical, political, military, hereditary, meritocratic, professional, economic, educational, academic,
fashionable, even criminal. What else, after all, makes high art high? The casting of the story as the story
of the literate culture of music turns it willy-nilly into a social history—a contradictory social history in
which progressive broadening of access to literacy and its attendant cultural perquisites (the history, as it
has sometimes been called, of the democratization of taste), is accompanied at every turn by a
counterthrust that seeks to redefine elite status (and its attendant genres) ever upward. As most
comprehensively documented by Pierre Bourdieu, consumption of cultural goods (and music, on
Bourdieu’s showing, above all) is one of the primary means of social classification (including self-
classification)—hence, social division—and (familiar proverbs notwithstanding) one of the liveliest sites
of dispute in Western culture.^4 Most broadly, contestations of taste occur across lines of class division,
and are easiest to discern between proponents of literate genres and nonliterate ones; but within and
among elites they are no less potent, no less heated, and no less decisively influential on the course of
events. Taste is one of the sites of contention to which this book gives extensive, and, I would claim,
unprecedented coverage, beginning with chapter 4 and lasting to the bitter end.
Indeed, if one had to be nominated, I would single out social contention as embodied in words and
deeds—what cultural theorists call “discourse” (and others call “buzz” or “spin”)—as the paramount
force driving this narrative. It has many arenas. Perhaps the most conspicuous is that of meaning, an area
that was for a long time considered virtually off limits to professional scholarly investigation, since it
was naively assumed to be a nonfactual domain inasmuch as music lacks the semantic (or
“propositional”) specificity of literature or even painting. But musical meaning is no more confinable to
matters of simple semantic paraphrase than any other sort of meaning. Utterances are deemed meaningful
(or not) insofar as they trigger associations, and in the absence of association no utterance is intelligible.
Meaning in this book is taken to represent the full range of associations encompassed by locutions such as
“If that is true, it means that ...,” or “that’s what M-O-T-H-E-R means to me,” or, simply, “know what I
mean?” It covers implications, consequences, metaphors, emotional attachments, social attitudes,
proprietary interests, suggested possibilities, motives, significance (as distinguished from signification)...
and simple semantic paraphrase, too, when that is relevant.
And while it is perfectly true that semantic paraphrases of music are never “factual,” their assertion is
indeed a social fact—one that belongs to a category of historical fact of the most vital importance, since
such facts are among the clearest connectors of musical history to the history of everything else. Take for
example the current impassioned debate over the meaning of Dmitry Shostakovich’s music, with all of its
insistent claims and counterclaims. The assertion that Shostakovich’s music reveals him to be a political
dissident is only an opinion, as is the opposite claim, that his music shows him to have been a “loyal
musical son of the Soviet Union”—as, for that matter, is the alternative claim that his music has no light to
shed on the question of his personal political allegiances. And yet the fact that such assertions are
advanced with passion is a powerful testimony to the social and political role Shostakovich’s music has
played in the world, both during his lifetime and (especially) after his death, when the Cold War was