very challenging example of that fire is a fusillade by Robert Walser, a scholar of popular music, who
characterizes the repertoire treated here in terms borrowed from the writings of the Marxist historian Eric
Hobsbawm. “Classical music,” writes Walser,
is the sort of thing Eric Hobsbawm calls an “invented tradition,” whereby present interests construct a cohesive past to
establish or legitimize present-day institutions or social relations. The hodgepodge of the classical canon—aristocratic and
bourgeois music; academic, sacred and secular; music for public concerts, private soirées and dancing—achieves its
coherence through its function as the most prestigious musical culture of the twentieth century.^3Why in the world would one want to continue propagating such a hodgepodge in the twenty-first
century?
The heterogeneity of the classical canon is undeniable. Indeed, that is one of its main attractions. And
while I reject Walser’s conspiracy-theorizing, I definitely sympathize with the social and political
implications of his argument, as will be evident (for some—a different some—all too evident) in the
many pages that follow. But that very sympathy is what impelled me to subject that impossibly
heterogeneous body of music to one more (perhaps the last) comprehensive examination—under a revised
definition that supplies the coherence that Walser impugns. All of the genres he mentions, and all of the
genres that are treated in this book, are literate genres. That is, they are genres that have been
disseminated primarily through the medium of writing. The sheer abundance and the generic heterogeneity
of the music so disseminated in “the West” is a truly distinguishing feature—perhaps the West’s signal
musical distinction. It is deserving of critical study.
By critical study I mean a study that does not take literacy for granted, or simply tout it as a unique
Western achievement, but rather “interrogates” it (as our hermeneutics of suspicion now demands) for its
consequences. The first chapter of this book makes a fairly detailed attempt to assess the specific
consequences for music of a literate culture, and that theme remains a constant factor—always implicit,
often explicit—in every chapter that follows, right up to (and especially) the concluding ones. For it is the
basic claim of this multivolumed narrative—its number-one postulate—that the literate tradition of
Western music is coherent at least insofar as it has a completed shape. Its beginnings are known and
explicable, and its end is now foreseeable (and also explicable). And just as the early chapters are
dominated by the interplay of literate and preliterate modes of thinking and transmission (and the middle
chapters try to cite enough examples to keep the interplay of literate and nonliterate alive in the reader’s
consciousness), so the concluding chapters are dominated by the interplay of literate and postliterate
modes, which have been discernable at least since the middle of the twentieth century, and which sent the
literate tradition (in the form of a backlash) into its culminating phase.
This is by no means to imply that everything within the covers of these volumes constitutes a single
story. I am as suspicious as the next scholar of what we now call metanarratives (or worse, “master
narratives”). Indeed, one of the main tasks of this telling will be to account for the rise of our reigning
narratives, and show that they too have histories with beginnings and (implicitly) with ends. The main
ones, for music, have been, first, an esthetic narrative—recounting the achievement of “art for art’s sake,”
or (in the present instance) of “absolute music”—that asserts the autonomy of artworks (often
tautologically insulated by adding “insofar as they are artworks”) as an indispensable and retroactive
criterion of value and, second, a historical narrative—call it “neo-Hegelian”—that celebrates
progressive (or “revolutionary”) emancipation and values artworks according to their contribution to that
project. Both are shopworn heirlooms of German romanticism. These romantic tales are “historicized” in
volume III, the key volume of the set, for it furnishes our intellectual present with a past. This is done in
the fervent belief that no claim of universality can survive situation in intellectual history. Each of the
genres that Walser names has its own history, moreover, as do the many that he does not name, and it will