This sort of thinking has long been seen through—except, it seems, by musicologists. A scurrilous
little tract—David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies—that graduate students of my generation liked
to read (often aloud, to one another) behind our professors’ backs includes it under the rubric “Fallacies
of Question-Framing,” and gives an unforgettable example: “Basil of Byzantium: Rat or Fink?” (“Maybe,”
the author comments, “Basil was the very model of a modern ratfink.”^8 ) There is nothing apriori to rule
out both/and rather than either/or. Indeed, if it is true that production and reception history are of equal
and interdependent importance to an understanding of cultural products, then it must follow that types of
analysis usually conceived in mutually exclusive “internal” and “external” categories can and must
function symbiotically. That is the assumption on which this book has been written, reflecting its author’s
refusal to choose between this and that, but rather to embrace this, that, and the other.
Reasons for the long if lately embattled dominance of internalist models for music history in the West
(a dominance that in large part accounts for Dahlhaus’s otherwise inexplicable prestige) have more than
two centuries of intellectual history behind them, and I shall try to illuminate them at appropriate points.
But a comment is required up front about the special reasons for their dominance in the recent history of
the discipline—reasons having to do with the Cold War, when the general intellectual atmosphere was
excessively polarized (hence binarized) around a pair of seemingly exhaustive and totalized alternatives.
The only alternative to strict internalist thinking, it then seemed, was a discourse that was utterly
corrupted by totalitarian cooption. Admit a social purview, it then seemed, and you were part of the
Communist threat to the integrity (and the freedom) of the creative individual. In Germany, Dahlhaus was
cast as the dialectical antithesis to Georg Knepler, his equally magisterial East German counterpart.^9
Within his own geographical and political milieu, then, his ideological commitments were
acknowledged.^10 In the English-speaking countries, where Knepler was practically unknown, Dahlhaus’s
influence was more pernicious because he was assimilated, quite erroneously, to an indigenous scholarly
pragmatism that thought itself ideologically uncommitted, free of theoretical preconceptions, and therefore
capable of seeing things as they actually are. That, too, was of course a fallacy (Fischer calls it, perhaps
unfairly, the “Baconian fallacy”). We all acknowledge now that our methods are grounded in and guided
by theory, even if our theories are not consciously preformulated or explicitly enunciated.
And so this narrative has been guided. Its theoretical assumptions and consequent methodology—the
cards I am in process of laying on the table—were, as it happens, not preformulated; but that did not make
them any less real, or lessen their potency as enablers and constraints. By the end of writing I was
sufficiently self-aware to recognize the kinship between the methods I had arrived at and those advocated
in Art Worlds, a methodological conspectus by Howard Becker, a sociologist of art. Celebrated among
sociologists, the book has not been widely read by musicologists, and I discovered it after my own work
was finished in first draft.^11 But a short description of its tenets will round out the picture I am attempting
to draw of the premises on which this book rests, and a reading of Becker’s book will, I think, be of
conceptual benefit not only to the readers of this book, but also to the writers of others.
An “art world,” as Becker conceives it, is the ensemble of agents and social relations that it takes to
produce works of art (or maintain artistic activity) in various media. To study art worlds is to study
processes of collective action and mediation, the very things that are most often missing in conventional
musical historiography. Such a study tries to answer in all their complexity questions like “What did it
take to produce Beethoven’s Fifth?” Anyone who thinks that the answer to that question can be given in
one word—“Beethoven”—needs to read Becker (or, if one has the time, this book). But of course no one
who has reflected on the matter at all would give the one-word answer. Bartók gave a valuable clue to the
kind of account that truly explains when he commented dryly that Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus “could
not have been written without Hungarian peasant music. (Neither, of course, could it have been written
without Kodály.)”^12 An explanatory account describes the dynamic (and, in the true sense, dialectical)