relationship that obtains between powerful agents and mediating factors: institutions and their
gatekeepers, ideologies, patterns of consumption and dissemination involving patrons, audiences,
publishers and publicists, critics, chroniclers, commentators, and so on practically indefinitely until one
chooses to draw the line.
Where shall it be drawn? Becker begins his book with a piquant epigraph that engages the question
head-on, leading him directly to his first, most crucial theoretical point: namely, that “all artistic work,
like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people, through
whose cooperation the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be.” The epigraph
comes from the autobiography of Anthony Trollope:
It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5:30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy.
An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no
mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he was never once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me.
I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had. By
beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.^13Quite a few coffee porters, so to speak, will figure in the pages that follow, as will agents who enforce
conventions (and, occasionally, the law), mobilize resources, disseminate products (often altering them in
the process), and create reputations. All of them are at once potential enablers and potential constrainers,
and create the conditions within which creative agents act. Composers will inevitably loom largest in the
discussion despite all caveats, because theirs are the names on the artifacts that will be most closely
analyzed. But the act of naming is itself an instrument of power, and a propagator of master narratives
(now in a second, more literal, meaning), and it too must receive its meed of interrogation. The very first
chapter in Volume I can stand as a model, in a sense, for the more realistic assessment of the place
composers and compositions occupy in the general historical scheme: first, because it names no
composers at all; and second, because before any musical artifacts are discussed, the story of their
enabling is told at considerable length—a story whose cast of characters includes kings, popes, teachers,
painters, scribes and chroniclers, the latter furnishing a Rashomon choir of contradiction, disagreement
and contention.
Another advantage of focusing on discourse and contention is that such a view prevents the lazy
depiction of monoliths. The familiar “Frankfurt School” paradigm that casts the history of twentieth-
century music as a simple two-sided battle between an avant-garde of heroic resisters and the
homogenizing commercial juggernaut known as the Culture Industry is one of the most conspicuous and
deserving victims of the kind of close observation encouraged here of the actual statements and actions of
human agents (“real people”). Historians of popular music have shown over and over again that the
Culture Industry has never been a monolith, and all it takes is the reading of a couple of memoirs—as
witnesses, never as oracles—to make it obvious that neither was the avant-garde. Both imagined entities
were in themselves sites of sometimes furious social contention, their discord breeding diversity; and
paying due attention to their intramural dissensions will vastly complicate the depiction of their mutual
relations.
If nothing else, this brief account of premises and methods, with its insistence on an eclectic
multiplicity of approaches to observed phenomena and on greatly expanding the purview of what is
observed, should help account for the extravagant length of this submission. As justification, I can offer
only my conviction that the same factors that have increased its length have also, and in equal measure,
increased its interest and its usefulness.
R. T.
El Cerrito, California