Pages From Harper-Scott - The Event of Music History

Part 1
Towards a
Historical Method
1
Music History Since the
Fall of the Berlin Wall
The Style Dualism
R eflecting its advent in an age when the wonted

relation between tradition and new forms of subjective
experience had been cast into revolutionary doubt, the aes-
thetics of music composed, performed, and listened to in
the decades after 1789 seemed preoccupied with a question:
What kind of object is music? Is it a ‘work’, the product of
creative labour by one or more human beings (operating at
a level anywhere between genius and incompetence), whose
identity as a work can be fixed by its notation in a score;
an object to some degree autonomous from general history
because it exists for its own internal compositional logic?
Or is it some species of quantum sonic event discernible
only in performance, which may or may not have a notated
trace; its salient attribute not logic but expression (of an
idea, an emotion, or the joy of bodily stirring)? If music is
better understood as performance, then its essence is to be
found in the social functions it discharges and supports; if it
is better understood as a ‘work’, then in its disinterested and
self-ruling inner workings we can descry a form of cognition
without representational concepts, which betokens latent
14 Th e Event o f Mus ic Hi sto r y
danger for a social world that it no longer assuredly flatters

by imitation.1
A more abstract and pointed question therefore forms
the half-hidden foundation for the busy surface of musi-
cal activity: Is it possible to critique convention, and thus
become free from it, or should one find a comfortable
accommodation with convention, and so remain bounden
to it? At this point music’s theme discloses itself as an unex-
pected analogue to the political question asked in the 1770s
and 1780s, first in the British colonies of North America and
then in France: Should people be subjects of a monarch or
citizens of a republic?2 And in this neither politics nor music
was breathing peculiar air, as even the briskest scrutiny of
developments in science or the other arts would corrobo-
rate. If urged to fix a name to the spectre haunting the age,
one could do worse than submit that almost every theoret-
ical, moral, practical, and amatory sphere of human activity
was preoccupied with considering what to make of the call
to emancipation – which can be considered the watchword
of the unfinished project of modernity.3
1
Martin Zenck encapsulates Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory of
music in the bourgeois period from the French Revolution to the
present in the formulation ‘art as conceptless cognition’ (Zenck
1977).
2
That the political question could be answered definitively while
the musical one could not is a consequence not of any difference
in the seriousness of the issue to music history but of the fact that
political life, unlike musical life, is held in place by systems of gov-
ernment which must be ordered according to one principle or an-
other. Art is freer than politics, but therefore unsettled and often
anxious.
3
On the sense in which modernity is a project which is not yet,
but should be, completed, see Habermas 1996. Habermas identi-
fies three modes of discourse in modernity, theoretical (scientific),
moral–practical (political), and aesthetic (artistic). My addition of
the fourth term, love, derives from Alain Badiou (Badiou 2009a),
although his ultimate source is Plato, whose four preoccupations
Mu s i c Hi stor y Si nce th e Fal l of th e Berl i n Wal l 15
Carl Dahlhaus claimed that a new possibility for musical

emancipation appeared quite suddenly in the form of ‘the
emphatic concept of art, which Beethoven appropriated for
music in a downright usurping grab, providing music for the
first time with the same rights as poetry and the plastic arts’
(Dahlhaus 1989a, 9, translation modified; p. 7 in the original
German, Dahlhaus 2010).4 This ‘emphatic concept’ precisely
allots music the capacity to voice autonomous thought, to
speak as a critical observer of the world rather than purely
to entertain. Music’s aptness to muse is dynamically person-
ified in Beethoven, whose ‘symphonies represent inviolable
musical “texts” whose meaning should be deciphered by
means of interpretations which are to be understood as
“exegeses” [Auslegungen]’ (Dahlhaus 2010, 7 [9]). The claim
is that Beethoven’s symphonies are, like religious or philo-
sophical texts, competent to reveal truths about the world,
and therefore demanding of their listeners as careful and
meditative analysis as a proposition by Hegel.5 The religious
resonance of the word ‘exegeses’, which Dahlhaus holds coyly
they are. The reason for focusing on these four ‘conditions of phi-
losophy’, as Badiou calls them, will become apparent in chapter 2.
4
Dahlhaus’s history of nineteenth-century music, together with the
theoretical volume which preceded it (see Dahlhaus 1983, original-
ly published as Dahlhaus 1967), remains the most compelling and
serious work of its kind in the field. Since translations of Dahlhaus
are sometimes problematically approximate, and miss important
nuances, references will henceforth be given to the German orig-
inal of his works, with the location in the English translation in
square brackets. In most cases the translations are mine, not the
published translations. Despite their many insights, more recent
histories lack either Dahlhaus’s elegant historiographical theory
or his synthetic sweep. See the very different Samson 2001a, and
Taruskin 2010.
5
Adorno confided to his notebook (though never published) his
view that the identity of composer and philosopher was total: ‘Bee-
thoven’s music is Hegelian philosophy: but at the same time it is
truer than that philosophy’ (Adorno 1998, 14).
between scare quotes, must be precisely understood: he does

not mean, as some have supposed, that nineteenth-century
art works were taken for relics of the saints, i.e. that the
art-religion (Kunstreligion) of the nineteenth century should
primarily be viewed as an enrapturing experience that opi-
ates the people in the Marxist sense (although there is a
long history of Wagner’s music dramas being interpreted
in that way).6 Nor does he stumble into fatuous political
exaggerations which allege false links to twentieth-century
fascism. Indeed, Dahlhaus is measured precisely in the case
of Wagner: while agreeing that Parsifal is ‘undeniably a doc-
ument of the nineteenth-century “art-religion”’, he insists
that ‘the idea means less that art should be understood as
religion (or as pseudo-religion, from the viewpoint of [the
Nazis’] Positive Christianity) and the artwork as a religious
rite, but rather that religion – or its truth – has passed from
the form of myth into that of art’ (Dahlhaus 1996, 206).7 An
6
Actually, for reasons I shall explain in a later section of this chapter,
it was the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, which successful-
ly managed to reify music as a precious – and saleable – object. An
important reason for rehabilitating the nineteenth-century con-
cept is therefore to throw later developments into proper relief.
7
In her translation, Mary Whittall misses what I gloss in mine:
Dahlhaus’s allusion to the Nazi concept of ‘positiven Christen-
tums’ and the ‘Pseudoreligion’ of its völkisch (a German archaism
for ‘national’, halfway between that and ‘folksy’) philosophy. See
(Dahlhaus 1979, 144), where Whittall, normally excellent, mis-
translates it as ‘fundamentalist Christian views’. ‘Positive Chris-
tianity’ was declared by Hitler as an official commitment of the
Nazi Party at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich in 1920, as article 24 of
the party’s 25-Point Programme: its aim was, as always for Hit-
ler, to eradicate ‘the Jewish materialist spirit’ from Germany. On
‘positive Christianity’, see further Steigmann-Gall 2003. Dahlhaus
specifically counters the kind of knee-jerk reading of Parsifal as
proto-Nazi that has blighted some recent musicology and gener-
al commentary on Wagner. It is, unfortunately, still necessary to
point out that there is a difference between believing in truth and
abyss gapes between this limning of art-religion and the car-

icatures of the anti-German propagandists who have left a
stubborn smudge on music history.
Dahlhaus’s conception of art-religion is denomina-
tionally specific, and since it informs his (and subsequent
musicologists’) reading of music history, it is important to
note the effects of his bias. Protestant traditions of Chris-
tianity insist on the primacy of the biblical text and on the
freedom of the individual to interpret it and so to attain
(theoretically) unmediated access to the ‘truth’, which they
attribute to God; salvation comes through faith alone, which
is to say through theory rather than praxis. Catholicism, by
contrast, insists on the primacy of emotional experience –
through the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist and con-
fession, and through regular church attendance – and on
the authority of the Church, which alone may interpret the
text (the laity, in theory at least, are expected to abide by
the dogma of the Church); salvation comes through ‘works’,
which is to say through praxis, and access to salvation is
granted through the mediation of the Church (both on earth
and in heaven). The art-religion that Dahlhaus has in mind
is quite clearly of a Protestant sort, with Beethoven a like-
ness for Martin Luther, dragging music out of pre-modern
superstition and into a modern world of reason – ‘an eso-
teric Romanticism’ (Dahlhaus 2010, 76 [92]).8 In Dahlhaus’s
genealogy of art-religion in Die Idee der absoluten Musik, the
originator of the term (Terminus) was the Protestant theolo-
gian Friedrich Schleiermacher, but its dogma (Dogma), rich
in reference to the traditional Protestant pair of faith and
revelation, came from the poet Ludwig Tieck: see Dahlhaus
1978, 91–3, translated as Dahlhaus 1989b, 88–90. The parallel
believing in a cramped, deficient, and totalitarian denotation of

truth.
8
Beethoven was born into a (non-religious) Catholic family. But
then so was Luther.
between music and the tendency of Protestantism to merge

with philosophy is underlined by Dahlhaus’s subsequent
remarks: ‘that a musical text, like a poetic or a philosophical
one, stores a meaning which is indeed made manifest but
not absorbed by sonic representation, that a musical object
can therefore be “an artwork of ideas” which as a text has
an immaterial existence beyond its interpretations [Ausle-
gungen] – that was the new idea that Beethoven forced onto
the aesthetic consciousness of the age’ (Dahlhaus 2010, 8
[10]). Note the fluctuating meaning of the word Auslegung,
which has moved within the space of a page from a scare-
quoted Protestant metaphor of ‘exegesis’ to ‘interpretation’
in a directly philosophical and then in a musical sense of the
word: the flexibility of Dahlhaus’s concept resides in this free
movement between different spheres of signification, which
enable it to undergo a dialectical mediation.
But this revolution, like the religious one of the sixteenth
century, was not total: in strong contrast to this new, height-
ened intellectualism was a stress on the material existence
inhering within music’s interpretations, so that a score by
Rossini, a composer that Dahlhaus locates as Beethoven’s
antipode, appears as a ‘mere recipe for performance’ (Dahl-
haus 2010, 7 [9]). Instead of Beethoven’s (quasi-Protestant)
focus on an ‘inviolable text’, ‘the point of reference on which
Rossini’s musical thought turned was the performance as
event – and not the work as a handed-down text, which is
from time to time sonically “interpreted” [ausgelegter]; and
a score could be fitted to the changing needs of different
theatres, without the intervention doing it an injury’ (Dahl-
haus 2010, 8 [9]). In each parish, so to speak, the text (which
the audience has no direct contact with) can be adapted
according to the needs of the individual audience (con-
gregation) and the inclinations of the performers (clergy):
the interpretation is, then, taken out of the hand of the
receivers and left with the highly trained musical mediators –
the quasi-Catholic alternative. Both sides of the split can
be argued to represent a ‘democratization’ of culture, the
Beethoven–Protestant side because it offers the individual

listener a direct and unmediated communion with the truth
embosomed in the music, although its high intellectual
demands might exclude much of the population; the Ross-
ini–Catholic side because it implies the need for no special
intellectual training, though music is received only via the
mediation of performers with privileged access to the text.
In an age when art in some sense took on the quality of a
religion, the possibility for tension is patent.9
This profound aesthetic and temperamental segrega-
tion concerned Dahlhaus for the same reason that it has
concerned many musicologists writing since his book was
published in English translation: by clamping the intel-
lectual, critical, and autonomous qualities of music to
Germany’s most influential nineteenth-century composer,
conventional music history, which holds a special place for
Beethoven, encourages an aesthetic germanophilia which
seemingly condemns the rest of Europe – to say nothing
of the rest of the world – to a marginal importance. Dahl-
haus’s aim was to write a history which would show that
the nineteenth century could not be understood as ‘the age
of Beethoven’ but only as ‘the age of Beethoven and Ross-
ini’, which is to say that musical romanticism could not be
reductively interpreted as following a single course but must
be grasped as a ‘style dualism’ (Stildualismus) in which those
composers act as placeholders for instrumental and vocal
styles in music. The test of his theory would be whether this
9
The high intellectual demands of Protestantism have become a
strong theme of histories of the English Reformation: Christopher
Haigh notes that Protestantism, as a religion of the Word, was
more popular in towns than the countryside, and Eamon Duffy
paints a gripplingly vivid picture of the consequences for ordinary
Catholics: see Haigh 1987, 24, and Duffy 2005. I shall return to cer-
tain important late twentieth-century shifts in historical trends,
of which this is an example, in a discussion of Beethoven’s heroic
style in part 2.
even-handedness could suck the poison out of what appears

to be an aesthetic division between meaningfulness (Bee-
thoven) and empty pleasure (Rossini).
To put it mildly, views differ as to whether Dahlhaus’s
goals were achieved. For some, the style dualism thesis
permits an understanding of the past that might better fit
the view of nineteenth-century musicians, by reminding
us not to ‘assume that our present-day view of Beethoven
as the central figure of early nineteenth-century music
would have been shared by his contemporaries, or that a
so-called “tradition” of German sonata-symphonic music
would have been given greater privilege than Italian opera.
To the historical subject Rossini was arguably the towering
figure’ (Samson 2001b, 12). By this light, Dahlhaus’s attempt
to valorize alternative musical traditions appears as a posi-
tive contribution to understanding (even if in his own work
he too often lapsed into an old-fashioned favouring of the
German tradition). But for others, notably Richard Taruskin
and his followers, Dahlhaus’s project was an act of German
supremacism proffering ‘liberating’ American scholarship a
handy contrivance for ideology critique. For such writers,
if a piece of music or a musical opinion can be shown to
be tainted by ‘Germanness’ in the period from the French
Revolution to our present, it automatically achieves pariah
status by participating in the totalizing intellectual tradition
of bourgeois Idealism which led, step by nationalist step, to
Auschwitz. To tell what Taruskin quite ingenuously calls his
‘true history’, all the historian must do is to hold the already
guilty suspect under a hot light until the full extent of its
crimes is revealed.10 From this perspective, Dahlhaus’s lapses
into German-centredness bespeak a deeper corruption.11
10
See Taruskin 2010, vol. 1, introduction, where the claim to ‘true
history’ comes in the second paragraph.
11
Although by no means widespread in the United States, where
there is as much variety in thinking as anywhere else, this
Entrenchment on both sides of the debate makes historio-

graphical advance seem unlikely.
Strategies of Gauging Work and Performance

The trouble is of course that Dahlhaus loaded the dice, as he
must have known he was doing, by cinching the brains to
the Beethoven side. In the past quarter of a century musicol-
ogists have put themselves to increasingly weird contortions
in the attempt to show either that musical intelligence is more
copiously distributed across the style dualism (which would
knock the Beethoven style off its perch) or else – in a forlorn
gesture of scholarly self-abnegation – that enjoyment is more
important than thought (which does not actually valorize the
Rossini style, but does denigrate intellectual activity).12 Dahl-
haus’s bequest to musicology, the work–performance binary,
has been put to disciplinary use in the form of what James
Hepokoski describes as four ‘methodological strategies’ for
wrestling with the opposition (Hepokoski 2013, 25). It is fair
to say that these strategies, which I see as more clearly ide-
ologically marked than Hepokoski does, shape (almost) the
entire field of musicology as it is currently practised, at least
apropos of music (‘high’ and ‘low’) since 1789. Hepokoski’s
taxonomy, which provides an indispensable orientation for
germanophobic prejudice is more virulent there than in Europe –

for obvious cultural and national reasons in both cases. But that
such xenophobia passes for scholarship at all among portions of
the discipline is the scandal of contemporary musicology.
12
One can hear the King of Navarre twitting Biron for imprecat-
ing scholarship while being a scholar himself: ‘How well he’s
read, to reason against reading’ (William Shakespeare, Love’s
Labour’s Lost, 1.1.94). It would also be a strange sort of message
to tell to students – ‘switch off your minds and just enjoy!’ –
were it not so clearly an ideological commitment to forgo any kind
of critical engagement with the world, in the interest of inculcating
an unreflective docility and acquiescence to hegemonic power.
my ideological elaboration, does not provide a rationale for

the vestiges that remain in modern musicology of what can
only be called ‘old musicology’. These traditions are identifi-
able by their failure or refusal to criticize the assumption of
the centrality of the score and of the canon of masterworks
to the study of music history, or for new-musicology-style
scholarship on old-musicology topics, i.e. critical–analytical
study of canonic works, and as such represent a suppressed
Strategy Zero, to which I shall return. Hepokoski does,
however, wither a few scholars whose devotion to what he
considers this pre-critical mode of musicology is especially
pronounced: ‘Within persisting neo-Adornian strains the
impulse remains fundamentally reverential: that of “believing
in Beethoven” in one way or another. The implicit assump-
tion is that comparable verities could not be leveraged out of
lesser (usually non-Austro-Germanic) styles of composition’
(Hepokoski 2013, 23). His characteristic epigonal studies are
Chua 1995, and Spitzer 2006, which are ‘deployments of the
Austro-Germanic concept of text or work in excelsis, music
as ultimate disclosure, here approachable only by those
committed to the writings of Adorno – believers in a new,
secular doctrine of sola scriptura. “Beethoven could be said,
perhaps, to contain the truth of Adorno” [Spitzer 2006, 275].
Who could ask for anything more?’ (Hepokoski 2013, 24).
The ‘reverential’ quality that Hepokoski finds in this writing
identifies it, to return once more briefly to Dahlhaus’s reli-
gious metaphor, as not only Catholic but pre-Reformation:
this is musicology which attempts to leap back in time to
before the appearance of the ‘new musicology’, to a purely
awesome response to masterworks. Hepokoski misfires
here, for reasons I shall pursue in more detail in the third
section of this chapter, but which boil down to an uncharac-
teristic extinguishing of the critical light he should shine on
the ideology of late capitalism.
Strategy One can be summarized as the performance
of a critique of ‘the presumed canon of Western European
artworks, along with the ideologies that have supported

and sustained them’ (Hepokoski 2013, 25). The notion of
music’s autonomy is from this position judged to be what
Michel Foucault would call an ‘apparatus’ (Foucault’s term
is dispositif), a form of connivance with power (Foucault
1980). This strategy, in common with all four of Hepokoski’s
set, is openly postmodern, viewing claims to ‘truth’, in art
or anything else, with the deepest scepticism. From this
perspective, truth claims – i.e. any authoritative statement
about what is true – are a moral outrage because they ele-
vate a single voice to a position of authority over others.
Such thinkers might begin with what they take to be a
revealingly illiberal proposition, and ask questions such as:
‘Who are we to say that cannibalism is a bad thing, when it
only appears so from our enlightened Western perspective?
To the natives of another part of the world, to whom our
ethics make no sense, the practice might be part of a harmo-
nious relation to the natural world’.13 The imposition onto a
non-Western society of the Western revulsion to cannibal-
ism – or capital punishment, or clitoridectomy, or any other
culturally determined moral matter – is adjudged by such
scholars to be an aggressive act of domination of the West’s
cultural Others. Appearing to the initiates of Strategy One
as steps on the road to imperialism and totalitarianism, the
three horsemen of the illiberal apocalpyse – (1) truth, (2) its
locus in the ‘work’, and (3) its high priests of interpretation
(music analysts in particular) – must be ambushed wherever
they lurk. Instead of being given ‘sacramental treatment’,
musical works must accordingly be denied their autonomy
and thrown back into their ‘material–historical entangle-
ments’, so that ‘Beethoven’s music becomes an event, too,
13
This argument is of course part of Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘Of
Cannibals’. Montaigne’s status as a sixteenth-century forerunner
of modern liberalism, the political commitment of Strategy One,
is often remarked. See, for instance, Losurdo 2011.
replanted back in the rich, untidy soil of history’ (Hepokoski

2013, 25). The supposition that Dahlhaus actually proposed
a ‘sacramental’ view of musical works is, as I have shown,
a misunderstanding of his religious metaphor as Catholic
rather than Protestant, but there are real Catholic theorists
of the musical sacrament, and they will shortly appear under
Strategies Three and Four.
Methodologically, Strategy One is overwhelmingly
empirical, ‘scouring relevant books, periodicals, newspaper
articles, concert or opera programs, academic regimens,
and the like in order to draw forth potentially incriminating
discourses and ignored subtexts, nationalist and otherwise,
surrounding canonical composers and their works’, though
it can also draw candidly on the Foucauldian theory that
underpins it (Hepokoski 2013, 26). In almost all cases the
strategy solemnly abjures music analysis, which it fancies to
reinforce claims to truth and authority, in preference for a
broadly conceived ‘criticism’. In particular this means a spe-
cial interest in reception history and the population of a ‘thick
present’ in which specifics that to other historians would
seem to be the signal facts of music history – the appearance
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, say – are cast into a welter
of relativizing data. Hepokoski cites in this connexion the
work of Stephen Rumph, which reads ‘late Beethoven’s stile
antico obsession (imitative counterpoint, fugato, and fugue)
… not as a dialectical-aesthetic synthesis of musical past and
present’, as Adorno argued, ‘but rather as a cultural signifier
of what may be the composer’s correlation with the reac-
tionary artistic movements of political romanticism’ (citing
Rumph 2004), and Nicholas Mathew, who brings Beethov-
en’s frankly populist occasional pieces from around 1815
(especially Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick)
into direct contact with the Third Symphony as ‘Rosetta
stones’ (Hepokoski 2013, 27) which invert the priorities of
the Dahlhaus dualism: ‘instead of being a debased version
of the Eroica, Wellingtons Sieg tells us what the Eroica really
means’ (Mathew 2013, 44). That is, the strategy mixes the
wheat back in with the chaff, and argues that the latter is the
key to determining the nutritional value of the former. In
short, Strategy One – which is set against all that Dahlhaus
stood for, and makes a moral virtue of the unwillingness of
its adherents to perform music analysis – bundles music’s
claims to intellectualism with the absurd (art as religion),
the presumptuous (music as sublimity), and the megaloma-
niac (music as Lebensraum for a greater German Geist, or, as
is currently fashionable, classical music and its analysis as a
base facet of ‘whiteness’), and locks it all into a box which is
inscribed ‘The Problem of the Canon’ and emblazoned with
the head of a demon.
Strategy Two is, in part, an attempt to domesticate that
demon through socialization, but it remains vigilant to
prevent the induration of a newly dilated canon. In place of
the canon of masterworks that, like Strategy One, it sees as
elitist, anti-democratic, and German-centred, this strategy
substitutes ‘exemplars from the “event” [i.e. the Rossini] side
of Dahlhaus’s binary as texts to explicate in their own right:
Mediterranean opera, for instance, or performer-centered
compositions and virtuosity, or nationalist potboilers, or
genres of popular or commercial music’ (Hepokoski 2013,
28). Siting the canon in the broadest cultural context, reach-
ing across the classical music of the rest of Europe and the
West and into popular traditions and scores for films, and
embracing the entire subdiscipline of ethnomusicology, this
second strategy shares the liberal convictions of the first, but
instead of attacking what it similarly takes to be a histori-
cal and critical hegemony, it strives to unfetter and valorize
its preferred alternative forms of cultural expression. A
second important difference, this time methodological, is
that Strategy Two follows ‘traditional’ musicology such as
Dahlhaus’s by performing music analysis, ‘employing the
insider-awareness of a professionalized music-technical
language, to the individual compositions of, say, Rossini,
Bellini, Paganini, Verdi, Johann Strauss Jr., Irving Berlin,

Duke Ellington, or Stephen Sondheim – or to the recorded
performances of John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna’,
and so on (Hepokoski 2013, 28). From this perspective,
not only is analysis seen as a mechanism for arraying this
‘peripheral’ music’s attractive features, but as a tool for
ideology critique, since Others from within the art-music
tradition, from a non-Western country, or from Western
popular traditions, can be extolled as sites of resistance to
the supremacy of what are proclaimed to be the ‘conserva-
tive’ cultural products of the musical canon. Hence, music
analysis retains its epistemic role, but the knowledge it vali-
dates is wrested free from ideology so that the subaltern may
speak (Spivak 1998). Hepokoski shows a connexion between
this strategy and the ‘new formalism’ in literary studies, and
his interpretation draws approvingly on Levinson 2007.
The bulk of Hepokoski’s own scholarly output, in both its
early (Verdian) and later (symphonic modernism, theory of
sonata form) phases, fits broadly under Strategy Two.
Together, Strategies One and Two comprise the liberal–
postmodern core of musicological scholarship in the West
where the focus sharpens on music as ‘text’. The first shuns
analysis, the second does not: thus, most of the historical
musicology published in the major ‘generalist’ journals such
as The Journal of the American Musicological Association
and Music & Letters adopts Strategy One; most analytical
musicology, working either on ‘high’ or ‘low’ musical styles
(including non-Western Others), and appearing in journals
such as Music Analysis and The Journal of Music Theory,
embraces Strategy Two. Note that both may be as historical
in focus as each other. The split over analysis leaves Strategy
Two out on a limb, and its practices are damned as ‘for-
malism’ in a sense close to the old-fashioned Stalinist one
which Taruskin describes as ‘a vague term with a checkered
history, defined in a post-1948 Soviet music encyclopedia
as “an esthetic conception proceeding from an affirmation
of the self-sufficiency of form in art, and its independence

from ideological or pictorial content.” In practice it was
code for elite modernism, something that the doctrine of
socialist realism expressly forbade’ – a distaste warmly
encouraged by musicologists outside Strategy Two, Tarus-
kin not least.14 This uncanny inheritance of socialist realism
is not always as ‘paranoically anti-Western’ (ibid.) as its
model, insofar as it retains a focus on Western art music,15
but the postmodern discomfort at being a Western subject
imparts a redolent flavour.
The two remaining of Hepokoski’s four methodologi-
cal strategies, likewise postmodern, describe scholarship
whose focus tends more towards performances than works.
It is here that many musicologists who consider themselves
the most radical in the discipline can often be found. Both
strategies, willingly or not, convert the aesthetics of social-
ist realism into one better suited to advanced capitalism by
denouncing reflective attitudes to music – that is attitudes
which consider music an object for scrutiny more than con-
sumption – with the reified commodity replacing the Soviet
focus on the collective social good as the ‘truth’ of music.
Strategy Three governs the branch of musicology which
censures not only analysts but the music they tend to ana-
lyse: while scholars of the first kind continue to write about
canonic German composers, here attention confronts music
on the ‘Rossini side’ – Donizetti, Verdi, Paganini, Liszt –
and the academic space for the study of music-as-perfor-
mance is policed to prevent an incursion of ideologically
corrupting ‘formalism’. This is, in short, our first vision in
musicology of the Counter-Reformation to Beethoven’s
14
See Taruskin 2010, vol. 5, chapter 1, section ‘Denunciation and
contrition’. The condemnation of ‘elite modernism’, i.e. the work of
Strauss, Mahler, and the Second Viennese School, occupies most
of Taruskin’s vol. 4; Carter and the Darmstadt School are subjected
to the same heavy-handed treatment in vol. 5.
15
Ethnomusicology is an obvious exception in this respect.
nailing of the ‘inviolable text’ to the concert-hall door, which

seeks to restore at the level of music criticism the Catholic
emphasis on the medium between the work and its public.
The ostensible interest for such scholars tends to lie ‘not
so much in “Una voce poco fa” or Il barbiere di Siviglia as
relatively stable works somehow captured permanently in
notation … but rather in the individualized performances of
“Una voce poco fa” and Il barbiere as the actual texts under
examination’ (Hepokoski 2013, 31). In a typical example
of this strategy which Hepokoski cites, Mary Ann Smart
points to the moment when, as analytically based doctoral
dissertations began to be focused on opera, their ‘attention
to both large-scale form and musical detail began to feel
self-indulgent, esoteric, and hopelessly out of touch with the
ways opera mattered historically and socially’ (Smart 2008,
129 – the section is entitled ‘The rise and fall of formalism’).
Smart’s attitude characterizes much of the study of Italian
opera before Dallapiccola – by which point in its history,
one supposes, the genre had already turned towards ‘elite
modernism’ and thus ‘formalism’. And this is a strategy with
a strong basic appeal in the context of early twenty-first cen-
tury ideology. Hepokoski hints that Strategy Three scholars
generally respond positively to the technological medi-
ation of performance. The commodity form of music, the
recorded object which the last century demonstrated to be
an immeasurably superior way of profiting from music than
selling concert tickets (and which, during the lockdowns of
2020, proved the only way of profiting from music), is not
only the dominant means by which the Western subject
currently encounters music, but it has a handy side-effect as
it ‘overturns at a stroke the work–event Stildualismus that
Dahlhaus had in mind’ and ‘can resituate Beethoven and
Rossini – and every other notated (or non-notated) piece –
on equal ground: what is performed can be subordinated
to an investigation of the discourse of performativity as an
object in its own right’ (Hepokoski 2013, 32–3). But Strategy
Three does more than this. The really existing human sub-
jects who perform music are furtively subtracted from the
concept of music altogether: by centring music’s ontology
on the recorded sound rather than the embodied performer
of that sound, such scholarship dissimulates a focus on what
the market cares about in music, its saleability as sonic
object, under a specious focus on real, ordinary people.
The pro-market tendency is shown particularly clearly in
the move, among scholars of this strategy and the next, to
try to rebrand the entire discipline of musicology as ‘sound
studies’, which would formalize the break with intellectual
traditions that, while focusing in part on sound, also seek
to engage with aspects of music lying beyond the sonic; this
rebranding, if effective, would make permanent the schol-
arly realignment with capital. Although Strategy Three is
thus little more than a scholarly buttressing of economic
normality, it poses as a radical rejection of the anti-dem-
ocratic esotericism and social aloofness that is alleged in
others. Naturally, analysis is a principal target, on the famil-
iar Foucauldian grounds that since its theory and method
constitutes a body of knowledge, music analysis must be an
agent of elite or ‘white’ power.
Strategy Four completes the ideological motion, moving
musicology further into the sumptuous and enticing bou-
doir of capitalism and barricading the door shut with a
heavy beam of theory-laden language. To Hepokoski it
seems to offer in effect ‘a reversal of the Dahlhausian posi-
tion – the sleeve pulled inside-out’ (Hepokoski 2013, 34). Its
most striking expression is a much-cited article by Carolyn
Abbate (Abbate 2004). Her stratagem is first to borrow the
terms ‘drastic’ and ‘gnostic’ from Vladimir Jankélévitch (a
philosopher whose resolute opposition to the German
philosophical tradition makes him a befitting postmodern
inspiration), second to focus on the reception of music
rather than the music itself (according to Abbate, reception
focused on interpreting works is ‘gnostic’, reception focused
on performance is ‘drastic’), and third to reverse what she

takes to be Dahlhaus’s value-laden polarity, so that work/
gnostic is bad, and performance/drastic is good. The insist-
ence of scholars such as Abbate that ‘our proper response to
music is gratefully to accept and love it, to be filled by it as a
freely bestowed gift of presence, analogous to an act of grace’
(Hepokoski 2013, 35), returns us, as Hepokoski observes, per-
haps stifling a wry chuckle, to the ‘religion of art’ hypothesis
which Taruskin tries to affix to Dahlhaus, and with precisely
the opiating effect that those pesky Germans were meant
to produce. Providing an almost unmarked and dull coun-
terpoint to the lyrically written melody of the ‘drastic’ call
is a fundamental ideological bass, the superego injunction:
‘don’t think about your situation, don’t criticize your world:
just enjoy!’16 The cunning of this discourse is its seizure on,
and maligning of, the difficulty of thinking about and analys-
ing music, as opposed to simply listening to it. By this sleight
of hand it can declare itself the only modern and democratic
approach to the study of music. But this is brought about
only at the cost of arguing an anti-intellectual case in prose
that is actually denser with jargon than the Frankfurt School
critical theory whose elitism it anathematizes at the same
moment that it upends its progressive priorities; that den-
sity in turn, paradoxically, gives it a reassuringly substantial
aura for those musicologists who seek it. Hepokoski catches
the irony: ‘in its curt dismissal of the “gnostic” metaphysics
attributed to work-analysts we find here more than a touch
of its own style of metaphysics as well, not to mention a
stunningly ahistorical, perhaps universalized view of music
and its purposes’ (Hepokoski 2013, 37). Perhaps the most
significant flaw in the Abbatean project is that the terms
16
The uses to which this anti-intellectual command are put in the
cultural space of late capitalism are a recurrent theme of Slavoj
Žižek. See, for example Žižek 1991.
itself are not opposite, and her definition of the ‘solution’ is

already part of what she considers the ‘problem’:
The claim of music’s preemptive sensory immediacy
simply rewrites a certain traditional figure of disem-
bodied sound, escaping all interpretation, as a figure of
embodied sound, precluding all interpretation. But the
embodiment of sound is itself matter for interpretation,
in part because any separation of sensation and cogni-
tion is no longer tenable; sensation is already cognition
(Kramer 2011, 11–12).
Music History and the Logic of Capital

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max
Weber argued that capitalism emerged as a direct conse-
quence of the Protestant work ethic, as increasing numbers
of individuals took on secular work and accumulated wealth
for capitalist investment (Weber 1930). The work itself is pro-
foundly flawed, and many critics have exposed irremediable
problems with its central claim that there was a causal rela-
tion between the two historical phenomena. His argument
remains pertinent here only insofar as, in an accommodation
of this classic reading to a late twentieth-century dialectics,
Fredric Jameson has argued that the rationalization of the
modern world used Protestantism as a ‘vanishing mediator’
(Jameson 1973). The de-sacralization of the world, i.e. the
blossoming of secular modernity, entailed a transformation
from a world in which religious means structured society in
line with a religious explanation of the meaning of human
life (the medieval world), into one in which rational means
structured society in line with a secular explanation of the
meaning of human life (the modern world). Protestantism
(specifically Calvinism) pursued religious ends (half of
medievalism’s logic) by rational means (half of modernity’s
logic), and could thus mediate between the two worlds.
What happens here is essentially that once Protestantism

has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of
innerworldly life to take place, it has no further reason for
being and disappears from the historical scene. It is thus
in the strictest sense of the word a catalytic agent which
permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise
mutually exclusive terms (Jameson 1973, 78).
The mediator vanishes, but because this is a dialectical
process of change, what is left after this vanishment is not a
world that is entirely different from the medieval one, but a
world which retains a radically transformed version of one
of the former world’s central structural features.17 It was the
indulgences of the medieval church which offended Luther.
The indulgence system enabled individuals to buy certain
holy objects as a means, without any other form of effort,
of obtaining the salvific effects of ‘charity and good works’
(fides caritate formata). A jingle traditionally credited to
Johann Tetzl, the papal indulgence-seller whose visit to Ger-
many to raise money for the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica
in Rome caused Luther considerable offence, had it that ‘as
soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory
springs’ (sobald der Pfennig im Kasten klingt, die Seele aus
dem Fegfeuer springt). The familiar absurd image, from our
historical perspective, is of credulous medieval Catholics
purchasing fragments of skulls of minor saints, or a sliver
of the baby Jesus’s foreskin, either of which would have
been as large as respectably sized mountains, had all their
parts been assembled in the same place. Irrespective of their
17
Badiou first theorizes a ‘vanishing term’ as the structurally nec-
essary element in any historical situation, this is clarified as the
suddenly appearing and equally rapid disappearing of a ‘site’ in
which the truth born of an ‘event’ is brought into presence. As with
Jameson, this disappearance leaves a remainder which establish-
es the outlines of a new world. Badiou’s concept is subtler than
Jameson’s, and I shall put it to use as a foundational idea for music
history in chapter 2.
credibility as discrete articles, such indulgences satisfied a

medieval Catholic desire to attain salvation through ‘works’
and the mediation of the Church, but this desire Luther
declared false. What was offensive about indulgences was
less that selling a skull-shard is itself an outrage, and more
that the desire the indulgence was meant to satisfy (the relief
of time from Purgatory) was an empty lie. A holy foreskin
was a bad item of sale because the desire to gain relief from
Purgatory – which on the Protestant view does not exist – is
a false desire.18 What the Church was selling was therefore
not something but nothing – pure desire without content –
and that Luther could not stand. Although an effect of the
Reformation was to end the sale of indulgences, the vacu-
ous atom of desire that they represented was left over as
a remainder of the dialectical transition from medieval to
modern worlds. In the rationalized bourgeois economic
space of modernity, the sale of nothing could no longer be
managed by the Church, whose temporal power was com-
promised; but it could be assumed by the commodity form –
i.e. in the new world, it is in order to sell a fake desire, but
not in order for the Church to do it.
It has been seen that Dahlhaus’s dualism of works and
performances has a family resemblance to the Protestant
and Catholic sides of Christian doctrine, and that his bias in
favour of Beethoven’s unsentimental intellectualism grants
higher value to the former. What the scholars adopting
Strategies Three and Four, who esteem performances more
highly than works, are seeking to achieve can be troped as a
Counter-Reformation. Their aim is nothing less than to treat
the ‘esoteric Romanticism’ of the ‘inviolable text’, whose
18
As Luther puts it in the Smalcald Articles, ‘Purgatory … with all
its pomp, requiem Masses, and transactions, is to be regarded as
an apparition of the devil. For it … is against the chief article that
Christ alone (and not human works) is to help souls’ (Kolb, Wen-
gert, and Arand 2000, 303).
premier mouthpiece is Beethoven, as a vanishing mediator

between, on the one hand, the feudal music of Hasse and
Haydn and, on the other hand, capitalist music, the music of
pure commodity. As always with capitalists, this radical end
is justified on the pseudo-democratic grounds that because
‘everyone can own it’, commodity music must be an anti-elit-
ist force. In order that this can make even a semblance of
sense, the financial benefits which accrue to the infinitesi-
mal class of people who own the means to reproduce those
musical commodities are therefore played down. Music,
music history, and the modes of music’s consumption have
been undergoing a process of reformation for the last two
centuries, occasioned by the new focus on the ‘inviolable
text’. The text is not at all uniquely related to Beethoven, but
for heuristic convenience I shall continue for the moment to
tie its fortunes to his.
The problem with that text, looked at from the perspec-
tive of a capital investor, is that it is strictly impossible to sell.
Modern intellectual property laws make it practically easier
to try to sell such entities, but still not especially attractive,
since satisfaction for the musically uneducated musical
public’s desire is sought in the sound rather than the text
of music, just as the uneducated Catholics of sixteenth-cen-
tury England preferred the sacramental experience to the
biblical text which the educated people of the town placed
at the centre of their new Protestantism. But even intel-
lectual property cannot fully monetize music, because its
ontological status is that of an ‘intentional object’, a pure
mental content.19 Even if a publisher could have exclusive
publishing rights for Beethoven’s Third Symphony, there
are qualities in that work which can no more be captured in
its score than in a performance. These qualities include the
thought I am currently having of it as I write, and the one
19
The description of music as an intentional object comes from In-
garden 1986.
that you are having as you read. No capitalist has yet devised
a means of fully capturing the monetary value of the inde-
pendent thoughts of a million minds, and if all the scores
and recorded performances of the symphony were some-
how destroyed tomorrow morning, the work would persist
in memory and could in principle be recreated. Intentional
objects may be real (the current President of the United
States) or unreal (a Muslim Marxist President of the United
States), and music lies somewhere between those two posi-
tions. Thus there is no ‘real’ ‘Eroica’ Symphony: every score
will erroneously present at least one note, every performance
badly realize at least one tempo or expressive indication or
commit at least one error of orchestral balance, and so on.
This intentional object, rather than a particular score, is the
‘inviolable text’, against which, indeed, the acceptability of
all editions is judged. Since the text is unsaleable, because it
cannot be grasped by a financial product, it was a moment
of the greatest significance to capital when reliable means of
sonic recording became available in the twentieth century.
Although it is still impossible to turn a profit from every
performance, very substantial profits can still be made from
the sale of such performances as are recorded, these being
economically more efficient than costly live performances,
which incur relatively large costs in wages. Since these
recordings are more attractive than scores ever could be
to a musically uneducated musical public, capital imposes
three requirements in order to maximize its increasingly
meagre profits from music: (1) recordings must be sold in as
profitable a way as possible, even as the rate of profit from
recorded music falls, (2) attempts must be made to valorize
a lack of musical education, and (3) as a concomitant of the
preceding, the prestige of musical knowledge must be dras-
tically lowered. And this ‘drastic’ drive is, as we have seen, an
explicit focus of recent disciplinary attacks on knowledge,
or in Greek gnosis, the ‘gnostic’ (Abbate 2004).
By the same token, music history itself is a problem for

investors, because nobody can hear it. Until the late 1970s
teaching of musicology in universities had emphasized the
study of medieval and renaissance music. Dahlhaus was in
fact one of the pivotal influences on a historical re-centring
of the discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
New musicological attacks on the limited purview of ear-
lier scholarship, which was preoccupied with questions of
authorship and edition-making (limitations which even
today characterize the study of the fifteenth century, where
two of the main questions are ‘is this piece by Josquin?’
and ‘if so, how can we edit it?’), successfully marginalized
the study of early music, and although it is now undergo-
ing a small resurgence through the work of more critically
minded younger scholars, medievalists remain on the
endangered species list. The near annihilation of knowledge
of early music and music history has opened up a new front
in the capitalist war on history, and the adoption of the four
strategies discussed in the last section has diverted attention
to the modern period. Taruskin does not equivocate about
the ‘basic claim’ of his survey of all of Western art-music his-
tory: ‘its number-one postulate [is] that the literate tradition
of Western music … has a completed shape. Its beginnings
are known and explicable, and its end is now foreseeable
(and also explicable)’ (Taruskin 2010, vol. 1, introduction).
This belief in the end of history is by no means particular
to musicologists, as the next chapter will show, but it pro-
vides a respectable intellectual sacrifice to the gods of the
music market. Strategies Three and Four, and the subfields
of pop and jazz musicology, film musicology, and ethnomu-
sicology, revile and usually entirely reject history, seeing no
value in its study whatever. Insofar as historical artefacts
such as Brahms’s chamber music remain the focus of such
studies, it is only as commodities capable of consumption
in the present: their historical sediment is discarded as
an irrelevant gnostic distraction from the rapture of the
instantaneous drastic experience. If our cultural inheritance

were entrusted to Strategies Three and Four, then Brahms
would last into the second half of the present century only
if his music retains some value in the music market – i.e.
for reasons which are extrinsic both to the music and to
the shrinking store of cultural possibilities that are not yet
reified and sold by capitalism. Classical music is for such
people as fully exchangeable as the ‘low’ musical forms that
are sold alongside it in record shops and as downloads: this
is the true meaning of the insistence from such quarters on
the qualitative equivalence of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music, and the
chastisement of gnostic explanations of the fundamental
differences between the two cultural spheres: the equiva-
lence being argued for is an equivalence as exchange value.
Music history, as ‘text’, thus finds itself threatened with an
ignominious end on the scrap-heap.
Beethoven, Modernity’s Profane Vanishing Mediator

Beethoven has become a scapegoat whose sacrifice ena-
bles a re-sacralization of music. The sacredness of music
as a means of capturing the memory of a first kiss or the
flavour of a teenage summer is its truly inviolable facet in
today’s marketized aesthetic. A proof of this sacredness is
that attempts to criticize the banality of purely nostalgic
responses to music, and to argue for an intellectual reflex-
ion, are curtly dismissed as elitist babble. But the idea of
sacredness, as Giorgio Agamben observes, results from a
separation of reality into two jurisdictions, the sacred and
profane (Agamben 2007). Though control over the sacred –
i.e. what is ideologically determined to be the Real – once
lay in the hands of the priests of pagan religion and medieval
Christianity, it is now the initiates of global neoliberal capi-
talism who determine the parameters of what is meaningful
on earth, and that meaning is ‘quilted’ not by a transcend-
ent God but by monetary value. Not only the definition of
what is sacred but also the ownership of it is their exclusive

preserve: and in a new age of enclosures, in which not only
physical but intellectual and biomedical ‘spaces’ (everything,
from means of communication to riverside paths and tra-
ditional medicines) are being privatized, this sacralization
matters. What stands outside of sacred space is by definition
profane, and it is here that what has been wrested out of
public hands can be returned to common use.
Profanation … neutralizes what it profanes. Once pro-
faned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its
aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations:
the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it
back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the appa-
ratuses of power and returns to common use the spaces
that power had seized (Agamben 2007, 77).
The task before us is, with Beethoven, to make music
profane once more, to tell a history of its profanity. Musi-
cology has for too long wrongly assumed that Dahlhaus
proposed a ‘sacramental’ view of musical works. In the con-
temporary world, in which postmodern intellectual means
drive neoliberal economic ends, and the high priests of cap-
ital apportion meaning to the masses, it is – in an absolute
reversal of conventional understanding in our discipline –
the ‘inviolable texts’ which remain forever profane, inten-
tional objects which resist their reification as sacred objects
and indulgences to be sold. What is sacred, in the zealous
Counter-Reformation spirit of scholars of music-as-perfor-
mance, is the supposedly ‘direct’ encounter with the music,
the commodity form of which conceals its actual media-
tion by capital: the relations of production which shape
the existential experiences of real human beings lie hidden
beneath the surface gleam of the sonic commodity.20 The
20
The insights of Marx’s analysis of the commodity, the first move
of his study of capitalism, are still on the whole insufficiently ad-
dressed by musicology: see Marx 1990, chapter 1.
means to achieve this do not lie in any of the strategies that

Hepokoski sees as active forces in contemporary musicol-
ogy. The reason for this is that all four of them simply find
a place to inhabit the work–performance dualism. But this
dualism is essentially an empty one, since without excep-
tion all music is partly work and partly performance. The
discipline has a choice: it can idly occupy itself with an
inexhaustible troubling of a relationship of poles the ten-
sion between which can no more be definitively resolved
than that between the mental and physical aspects of
human existence; or it can set the empty dualism aside and
ask a different set of questions.
I began this chapter by saying that the aesthetics of
music in the nineteenth century seemed preoccupied with
the question ‘what kind of object is music?’, but must con-
fess that to a degree I have been deliberately misleading my
readers since the first sentence. That has certainly seemed to
be the question to musicologists responding to the legacy of
Dahlhaus, with the results that have been seen: the moment
that music is considered to be an object the discourse under-
goes a plummet into reification, and music (but not the
indigestible bones of its history) is devoured by the bound-
less appetite of capital. What the early nineteenth-century
question really was, and should become again for a new
history of music, is actually: ‘What kind of subject is music?’
Asking this new question will enable us to address the
subsidiary ones about convention and emancipation that
I raised in my opening pages. But before those questions
can be approached, it is necessary to lay a historiographical
foundation for this history. Hepokoski’s four methodolog-
ical strategies have clarified the focuses and emphases of
current musicology, but beyond the extremists’ revulsion
to the gnostic, music history’s epistemology – its attitude
towards the possibilities of knowledge about that history –
is entirely unknown. Dahlhaus had foregrounded epistemo-
logical questions in his Foundations of Music History, and
to present an epistemology of music history adequate to

penetrate the sacred spaces of the postmodern world, it will
be beneficial to consider some recent work by theorists of
history.
2
What is a Subject of Music History?
Genres of Historical Writing
C onsciously writing in the shadow of Hayden

White’s pioneering work (White 1973, 1990), contem-
porary theorists of history, principal among whom are
F. R. Ankersmit (Ankersmit 1994, 2001, 2012), Keith Jenkins
(Jenkins 1991, 2003), and Alun Munslow (Munslow 2006,
2010), advocate a theoretically sophisticated model of his-
tory-writing which can treat what they diagnose as a crisis
of epistemology for the writing of history in the post-war
West. Broadly postmodern–deconstructionist, and for that
reason explicitly anti-empiricist, the theory of history which
has taken shape in their writings is one that requires tradi-
tional historical scholarship to respond to the ‘devastating’
challenge represented by an assortment of intellectual
repositionings which are familiar across the humanities –
‘the linguistic turn, deconstructionism, post-structuralism,
post-feminism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, postmod-
ernism, etc.’ (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 1). The crucial
doctrine of this postmodern historiography is that histo-
ry-writing is fictive, i.e. that as a form of writing above all
else, it is an act of imagination which recasts the past in
narrative form. This does not mean, though, that history is
fictional, ‘for in fiction the imagined goes “all the way down”’,
but it is rather ‘fictive in the sense of fictio; that is to say,
made up, fashioned, created, fabricated, figured’ (Jenkins
and Munslow 2004, 3).
In consequence of this contention they advance an

interesting critique of what might seem like a historical
commonplace, namely an epistemological commitment to
what philosophers call ‘the correspondence theory of truth’.
Simply expressed, the theory holds that ‘x is true if and only
if x corresponds to some fact’ and therefore ‘x is false if and
only if x does not correspond to some fact’. Philosophers
between Aristotle and Immanuel Kant were largely content
with this theory, but it has come under general fire since.
Although arguments have taken various forms, the closest
to that of the postmodern theorists of history is one which
echoes the ‘immaterialist’ dictum of George Berkeley that
‘an idea can be like nothing but an idea’ – though the theo-
rists’ more proximate source may be Jacques Lacan’s claim
that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’, which is
to say that the attempt to forge a connexion is a structural,
rather than merely a practical impossibility (Berkeley 1710,
8).1 It might seem obvious that a historical claim is true if
and only if a historical statement corresponds to some fact,
but the constitutive structural difference between the facts
of the past (which are actual) and the narrative of those facts
(which is fictive) ensures that history is a more vexatious
enterprise than novel-writing:
Because the ‘before now’ doesn’t have in it a shape of its
own, because the ‘before now’ doesn’t have in it ‘events’
that have, as it were, the shape of narratives, there is
nothing against which we can check our imagined nar-
rative orderings to see if they ‘correspond’, for there is
literally nothing for them to correspond to (Jenkins and
Munslow 2004, 3).2
1
For a succinct explanation of the most important arguments
against the correspondence theory, see David 2013, and see Down-
ing 2013 for a fuller context. For an accessible introduction to
Lacan’s dictum in a musical context, see Žižek 1996.
2
Lawrence Kramer makes a similar point a little less translucently:
‘The claims of interpretation are both testable and contestable in
W hat i s a Su b ject of Mu si c Hi stor y ? 43
While it is therefore impossible for postmodern histo-

ry-writing to establish a connexion of truth between the
past and the historical narrative, this may be a boon to
liberalism. Since there is no truth-relation based on a cor-
respondence between the past and historical writing, the
problem for the historian who has written an ‘unconvinc-
ing’ history is not simply that he or she has not scrutinized
sufficient empirical data, but rather that there is no possi-
bility of a fact-to-narrative correspondence. It follows that
no quantity of additional contextual data will ever settle the
‘truth’ of the past, so that the past will always remain ‘open’,
resistant to authoritative summary, and accessible to per-
petually contemporary, democratic reclaiming. However, as
so often, what is convenient for liberalism is convenient for
capitalism. The repudiation of a potentially universalizable
truth, of history or of anything else, means not only that
all voices are equally weighted but also that the radically
relativist postmodern ideology of capitalism is immunized
to criticism.3 Beneath the copiously applied varnish of
relation to history, practice, logic, and reflection on the symbol-

izing process. But they are not accountable to the means or ends
of empiricism because they address objects of knowledge of a dif-
ferent order than those of empiricism, objects to which empiri-
cal methods can at best be applied poorly’ (Kramer 2011, 30). In
a critique of four musicological studies from the 1980s and 1990s
which ‘discipline deconstruction for musical appropriation’, Adam
Krims likewise locates its problem in ‘the extent to which the mu-
sic-theoretical concepts themselves seem [in ‘deconstructive analy-
sis’] exempt from the radical critique of representation from which
deconstruction, whichever account one accepts of it, is inextrica-
ble’ (Krims 1998, 299, 304). That is to say, such work assumes that
there is a correspondence that can be checked between the work
and the analysis; Krims’s argument (a deconstructive one) is that
this checking cannot be done.
3
Jameson 1991 is the classic account of the identity of late capitalism
and the ideology of postmodernism, argued with a degree of am-
bivalence as to its effects.
progressive democratism it is not difficult to discern the

familiar postmodern commitment to the service of capital.
Whether it comes with or without a heavyweight theoretical
justification of its predilections, liberal scholarship believes
that by avoiding authoritative insight it is resisting the cap-
italist system of meaning-generation, but it is by now clear
that it is in fact operating comfortably within the system’s
central intellectual parameters.
Since its assumptions are shared with the contemporary,
postmodern discipline of musicology, the explicitness of
the theorizing done by postmodern theorists of history is
an invaluable tool for identifying what must be avoided if
a new music history is not to be as vulgarly ideological as,
on the one hand, a crypto-capitalist study of democratic,
‘immediately accessible’ (read: commodity) music or, on
the other hand, the most reductive Marxist histories of the
Cold War period.4 Jenkins’s and Munslow’s exceptionally
clear mapping of the conceptual space (in their The Nature
of History Reader) enables us to read music historiography
by a new light, and so to make very plain the route through
the impasse of the post-Dahlhaus historiographical nexus.
Their argument is simply that there are only three genres of
history-writing – Reconstructionism, Constructionism, and
Deconstructionism – plus a fourth position, endism, the first
two being modernist, the latter two being postmodernist
modes of historical inquiry. Their schema shares a tripar-
tite outline – to which they add a supplement – with one
recently advanced by Ankersmit, who in a discussion of ‘the
“new” versus the “old” historiography’ breaks the philoso-
phy of history into the three possibilities: ‘historiography,
speculative philosophy of history, and critical philosophy
4
Five stimulating case studies of the appropriation of canonic works
of the Western classical canon in the German Democratic Repub-
lic, where most of the most interesting post-war Marxist musicol-
ogy was written, are given in Kelly 2014.
of history’ (Ankersmit 1994, 125). But the Jenkins–Munslow

formulation is more useful for present purposes. Situating
music histories within these genres of general history-writ-
ing is an illuminating enterprise, but Jenkins’s and Munslow’s
implied judgement of intellectual respectability of these
four possibilities – least respectable first, most respectable
last – must be dismissed as a tendentious argument for the
end-of-history triumph of postmodernism.
Reconstructionism is purely empirical, and its authors
believe in the possibility of reconstructing the past ‘as it
actually was’ (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, in the famous
formulation of Leopold von Ranke (Ranke 1874, vi)). The
location of historical truth is in the historical sources, and
the epistemology of history is certain: it can be known, as
long as the historian stands outside his or her own situation
and reports as objectively as possible. Among their readings
from Reconstructionist history the reader’s editors include
Edward Royle, who typifies the genre’s commitment to
the ‘comprehensive survey’ model (Royle 2012). Although
today’s musicologists often scorn this approach, it remains
the basis of the construction of music history syllabuses in
Europe and the anglophone world, and is the genre both of
Taruskin’s Oxford History and of such textbooks as Pearson
Education’s Prentice Hall History of Music Series, where the
survey liberally extends to non-Western music and an intro-
duction to the habits of ethnomusicology (see Malm 1996).
Taruskin has spent much time since the publication of the
Oxford History policing musicology journals to defend his
Reconstructionist methodology, recently upbraiding a critic
who ‘bids me acknowledge that “not every idea can be fully
historicized”. But of course I answer this with what I call
the historian’s trick: what I am prepared to admit, and do
admit, is that not every idea can be fully historicized yet.
That little “yet” is the saving difference between scholarship
and dogma’ – or between Reconstructionist scholarship and
epistemological critique, at any rate (Taruskin 2014, 286).
The final section of Taruskin 2011 argues for an idiosyncratic

view of music analysis. He claims that there is an important
difference between using musical analysis to uncover tech-
niques of composition and using it to uncover musical form.
The former, he thinks, is ‘a real historical activity’, the latter
‘a fiction produced by a set of premises that only become
“real” when historically contextualized’. What ‘really’ hap-
pened in the past can, he seems to think, be written down
as history without it becoming fictionalized in that act. In
truth there is no epistemological difference: both scholarly
processes are essentially fictive.
Inevitably there are omissions in any historical survey,
and criticisms ordinarily proceed on the correspondingly
Reconstructionist basis that too great a stress has been
laid on some things rather than others (as in the familiar
criticisms that Dahlhaus’s history is too German-centred,
Taruskin’s too interested in Russia and the United States, or
that music histories in general pay too little attention to pop,
jazz, film music, and so on). The authoritative tone which
is typical of the genre ‘flows in large part from the assump-
tion that a detailed knowledge of the events of the past will
insulate against those who might wish – through preju-
dice and lack of empirical knowledge – to abuse the past
through their ideological prejudices’ (Jenkins and Munslow
2004, 27). Related to the survey model, and often forming
its unique selling point, are focuses on ‘myth debunking’,
in which a barrage of additional factual detail is believed
to provide ‘the antidote to all historical fables’ (Jenkins and
Munslow 2004, 39),5 and on ‘speaking through the sources’,
i.e. allowing contemporary accounts to tell the ‘true history’.
The eminent Tudor historian D. M. Loades is their archetype
of this approach: see Loades 1991. Mathew 2013 is a recent
musicological exemplar.
5
Their example is Fischer 1994. Taruskin’s history of course explic-
itly sets out to debunk what many musicologists consider to be the
German-centredness of Dahlhaus.
Reconstructionism can also have epistemological foun-

dations in the secondary literature, whose more than usually
extensive citation can create what Ankersmit calls a powerful
‘reality effect’, i.e. a sense, eventually becoming unassaila-
ble, that since so many historians are agreed that such and
such is the case, it must be so. The origin of the notion of
the ‘reality effect’ in a sense like this is an essay on literature
by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1986), which Ankersmit applies
directly to his theory of history (Ankersmit 1994, chapter
5, ‘The reality effect in the writing of history: the dynamics
of historiographical topology’). The reader’s example of this
‘reality effect’ is Hassan 1998, and musical examples include
Born 1995. In American musicology in particular – though
there are also similar, if small, clusters around particularly
influential figures in the UK and elsewhere – this procedure
is related to a ‘tenure effect’, whereby senior scholars across
the United States (and Europe, insofar as they are consid-
ered professionally useful) are cited by younger scholars
desperate for permanent employment. This procedure reas-
sures the big beasts of the discipline, perhaps rather more
than ordinary readers, of the rightness of existing interpre-
tations, and while it does not guarantee sterile conformity of
thought in the academy, it certainly encourages it.6
Constructionism took its current form, which dominates
the discipline of history, in the 1960s, though it has roots
in nineteenth-century positivism. Its focus is on ‘patterns of
human behaviour which, in the mid-twentieth century, the
philosopher of history, Carl Hempel, called “covering laws”’
(Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 9). These ‘laws’ undergird his-
torical investigations in a powerful new way, but the belief
is still that the past can be understood in an empirically
6
Whatever its cause, this truth-telling method typically takes a
form such as: ‘As Edward Said has shown, the whole of Western
culture is imbricated in the process of imperial domination and
white racial and ideological hegemony (see Said 1978).’ I am grate-
ful to Ian Pace for suggesting this example.
verifiable way through its traces. The truth cannot therefore

be discovered purely on the basis of the sources, but it can be
accessed ‘by using sophisticated conceptual tools and social
theory’ whose explanatory power is not bluntly employed
(as in stereotyped application of Marxist determinism) but
rather checked against the empirical evidence: the theory,
while central to the construction of a historical narrative,
remains provisional until proven, and is used only as a means
of understanding history as a story of human agency in large
social, political, economic, and cultural groups (Jenkins and
Munslow 2004, 11). Examples of this genre in musicology
include the unorthodox and highly flexible Marxist studies
of Georg Knepler: see Knepler 1961 and 1977.
One of the earliest and most recognizable forms of
Constructionist history is the Whig view of history. The
‘covering law’ of such a history is that it drives forwards
according to the dictates of a (generally ill-defined) notion
of ‘progress’. The Whig view of history, like all Construc-
tionist histories, is ‘dogmatic’ in the sense of the word that I
will discuss in chapter 3. They all depend on the assumption
that history can be determined by a priori covering laws.
One of the most striking current forms of Constructionist
writing in musicology is one drawing on Robin Di Angelo’s
‘whiteness studies’, which holds that it is only for reasons
of what she calls ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo 2018) that we
hold Beethoven to have been a great, rather than simply a
better-than-average composer – his greatness not being a
feature of some of his music, but rather of the whiteness,
maleness, Europeanness (terms of reproof tumble over one
another) of our music histories and theories.
Permission is not granted by the current discourse to call
for theoretical nuance. All features of ‘whiteness’ are known
a priori, and apply universally in all times and all places.
Yet without remarking the difference of racial history in the
US and Europe, there is a double danger: first, of applying
the US reality in a blanket fashion across all other nations
of the earth, and so contributing to the growth of Ameri-

can supremacism and cultural imperialism; and second, of
failing the material test of determining what is needful for
human beings living in different countries, for whom the
historical causes of their present situation are pressing real-
world matters, impacting on their economic and political
condition. The difference that cannot be drawn is that ‘the
history of the black population in America – beginning with
slavery and forced segregation – is unique, and quite dif-
ferent from that of migrant groups’ in Europe, where social
mobility is higher and the relative socio-economic status
between immigrant and native populations is more fluid
(Scheffer 2011, 49, emphasis mine).
A black scholar of linguistics, John McWhorter, calls
DiAngelo’s book ‘a racist tract. Despite the sincere inten-
tions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the
name of dignifying us. … The book is pernicious because of
the authority that its author has been granted over the way
innocent readers think’ (McWhorter 2020). Given the ide-
ological frame of our moment, it seems unlikely that such
critiques will dim enthusiasm for DiAngelo’s theory among
Constructionist historians.
Although it plies many modes, one of Constructionism’s
most productive has long been social history. Among the
Constructionist social and cultural historians whose influ-
ence has been most felt in musicology we may count Eric
Hobsbawm and T. C. W. Blanning. Jenkins and Munslow
cite Hobsbawm 1997, but his four studies of historical ‘ages’
are more frequently cited by music historians (Hobsbawm
1989, 1995, 1996a, 1996b). Hobsbawm pays more attention
to artworks than most historians, which partly explains
his interest to musicology; his Marxism is quietly ignored.
Even more than Hobsbawm, Blanning has endeared him-
self to music historians by placing music at the centre of his
cultural history: see Blanning 2002 and 2010. Hobsbawm’s
broadside against postmodern theories of history, which
strikes at the foundation stone of the epistemological ques-

tions they raise concerning the relation of fictive history to
actual past facts, is briskly argued through an extremely
powerful example.
Without entering the theoretical debate on these mat-
ters, it is essential for historians to defend the foundation
of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their
texts are fictions, as in some sense they are, being literary
compositions, the raw material of these fictions is verifi-
able fact. Whether the Nazi gas ovens existed or not can
be established by evidence. Because it has been so estab-
lished, those who deny their existence are not writing
history, whatever their narrative techniques (Hobsbawm
1997, 271, cited in Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 68).
Against the expected counterblast that ‘verifiable facts’
are prejudicially selected to fit an already existing theory (an
argument which is, incidentally, customarily made by dis-
paragers of music analysis), John Tosh replies that while bad
applications of theory may be ‘mere supposition and wishful
thinking’, and that ‘almost any theory can be “proved” by
marshalling an impressive collection of individual instances
to fit the desired pattern’, all historians (even those who
reject theory) are prey to this danger. The solution is ‘not
to retreat into an untenable empiricism, but to apply much
higher standards to the testing of theory’ (Tosh 2010, 218,
cited in Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 71): the usefulness of a
theory is demonstrated not by the support that can be found
for it among the infinite data, but by the fact that no matter
how devastating a critique it is subjected to, it nevertheless
still holds together and makes sense of the data.
Hobsbawm and Tosh are, without being credited as
such in the reader, modernist theorists of history, their
arguments as potent in defence of their position as those
of Jenkins, Munslow, Ankersmit, and White are of theirs.
The modernists’ blindspot is ironically one that might be
occasioned by their writing in the age of postmodernism,
namely that despite their confidence in the ultimate

empirical verifiability of the historical record, they are as
incredulous towards metanarratives as their confrères in
the postmodernist camp – this is their concession to their
postmodern age. That is to say that the modernist theorists
of history are only willing to base their narratives, in the
final analysis, on the empirical data: any non-empirical
theory, which would otherwise congeal into metanarrative,
must be subordinated to that data. The postmodernists, by
contrast, argue that since there is only empirical data, then
history itself is almost or completely impossible to write,
since the more powerful the explanatory theories that his-
torians have at their disposal, the more ‘fictive’ their final
interpretations become. As in general history, the Con-
structionist genre dominates music history, with examples
that wear their theory lightly, in the spirit of Tosh, including
DeNora 1995 and Ellis 2005.
Deconstructionism emerged out of an awareness that
‘we can only “know” the past through our concepts which,
rather than being constituted out of the evidence, are created
through our language use’ (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 12).
History is therefore as performative as it is empirical – as
drastic as it is gnostic – but unlike the most extreme of musi-
cological postmodernists, the claim is not that the empirical
data are unreal. That would be to deny, as Hobsbawm is quick
to point out, the reality of the gas ovens. A postmodern his-
torian would therefore not make a historical equivalent of
this dubious music-historical claim: ‘There is no music apart
from the meanings it invokes and invents. There are no
musical works apart from the constantly changing frame-
works in which we play and hear them’ (Kramer 2011, 20).
Nevertheless, while the facts are real their interpretations
do not correspond to them. Interpretations only emerge
‘through … contrast with other interpretations; they are
what they are only on the basis of what they are not. … Every
historical insight, therefore, intrinsically has a paradoxical
nature’ (Ankersmit 1994, 168).7 And that paradox guarantees

that ‘there is no original or given meaning that history can
discover; that there is no story, no narrative, no emplotment
or argument in the past per se and that the past has in it
neither rhyme nor reason’ (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 12).
In deconstructive history, then, the writer’s role in creating
the history rises in importance relative to the facts that are
being interpreted – and by conscious design: since their
claim is that the past, while real, cannot be directly inter-
preted, the ‘objective historian’ imagined by modernism
must be replaced by a ‘subjective’ one whose ‘multi-voiced,
multi-perspectival, multi-levelled, fragmented’, frequently
lyrical prose ‘plays with the possibility of creating new ways
of representing and figuring “the before now”’ (Jenkins and
Munslow 2004, 115). One relatively straightforward answer
to the question ‘how can we “do” history in the face of this
epistemological deadlock?’ is to forgo narrative altogether –
since narratives suggest ‘beginnings, middles and ends, and
… an inherent meaning that the historian sets out to discover
and convey’ – and, instead of writing a linear narrative, to
follow Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s example of writing history
of a single year ‘in which nothing significant seems to have
happened … simply to evoke what living in 1926 might have
been like’ (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 171, on Gumbrecht
1997). Among recent musicology which consciously follows
Gumbrecht’s model, see Irvine 2013, and also the develop-
ment of interest in ‘quirk historicism’, in which a quirky and
essentially insignificant artefact of history is used as the
basis of a microhistorical study of some kind. The special
issue on ‘Quirk Historicism’ in Representations, vol. 132
(2015), edited by Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart,
7
Kramer makes a similar point in Kramer 2011, 30, as does Dahl-
haus in Dahlhaus 1983, 36 – though in the latter case more as a his-
toriographical truism than with any intention to advocate radical
scepticism of the possibility of writing history.
offers several examples. The process of locating these micro-

historical ‘gems’ is rather like an expert shopper scouring
the little-trodden shopping streets of a major city in order to
find the least mainstream, least obvious commodity, whose
purchase will confirm the shopper’s superior abilities and
shed a distinctive light on what is available, desirable, and
fashionable at any given time: it is a musicological equiva-
lent of the shopping website ‘Not on the High Street’.
A second, more complex mode of Deconstructionist
scholarship is one which proceeds from the observation that
its method is fictive to the conclusion that the historians
themselves must be literary wordsmiths, writers as fine and
lyrical as the best contemporary novelists, albeit that their
writing is not fictive ‘all the way down’. Dahlhaus advocates
a modernist style of history writing, drawing on Proust and
Joyce, on the grounds that to write in a pre-modernist style
would be, like Ranke, to be writing in the style of Scott: since
all history-writing is a form of literary narrative, there is no
available mode which is not marked by a literary context such
as romanticism or modernism (Dahlhaus 1967, 80). How-
ever, like Hobsbawm, Dahlhaus remains a Constructionist:
his vision of history-writing, which avoids ‘authoritative’
(Reconstructionist) statement in favour of a presentation of
history from a range of perspectives which may contradict
as often as they complement one another, is nevertheless
committed to narrating, simply in a fragmentary, modernist
manner. The historian Greg Dening’s elaborate acting-out of
this view aims to demonstrate through the form of its own
expression that writing history is performative, with the
historian receiving equal billing with the past. It provides
a model of what a ‘drastic’ music history might read like
(and reads like much ethnomusicology, whose focus on the
author is the same, and for the same epistemological reason).
Having been invited to write a professional autobiography,
Dening instead writes about the flight of the yolla (opting
for their culturally sensitive Tasmanian Aboriginal name),
beaches, and his reading of Herman Melville. So, instead of

opening with the informative but prosaic description of his
research interests that one might expect, his essay opens in
the following way.
Every year in late September, if I am lucky, I can look
down from the desk where I do much of my writing,
across the tops of eucalyptus trees, over the beach and
rocky coastline, and see for hours a long black procession
of birds snaking its way south around the headlands and
into bays.
‘Kaoha!’ I say to them. ‘Welcome home!’ They are the
yolla – the shearwaters, the ‘short-tailed shearwaters’,
‘slender billed puffins’, Puffinus tenuirostris, ‘moon-birds’,
‘mutton-birds’ (Dening 2002, 1).
A similar strategy motivates a recent study of polytextual
motets in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France
(Dillon 2012). Its argument (depending in part on the pos-
itivistic mode of manuscript source study, though without
music analysis: in this sense, it conforms to Hepokoski’s
Strategy One)8 is that the organized sounds of this reper-
toire had a ‘supermusical’ relation to the sounds around
them – extraneous sounds of the kind that interested the
8
Although they are consistent in their vocal opposition to musi-
cal analysis as being irrelevant to the listening experience, perfor-
mance-focused musicologists from time to time inadvertently re-
veal holes in their argument. In an unguarded moment, Mary Ann
Smart, for instance, lets slip that ‘many of the individual pieces
in Rossini’s operas are patterned elaborations of repeating formal
structures that were – and are – as audible to audiences as a son-
net or a twelve-bar blues’ (Smart 2008, 128). Not only does pop-
ular music, perceived as that great bulwark against the supposed
elitism of classical music, have recognizable ‘forms’ that listeners
attend to (12-bar blues; the alternation of verse and chorus, etc.),
but such attentiveness to patterning – such ‘music analysis’, to use
the technical disciplinary term – is a fairly basic and widespread
amateur activity.
composer John Cage – which, in this case, subordinate

the sung words of the motets to the noises off. Since the
sound of this repertoire is for us unknowable, because we
have no continuous performing tradition to give us much
of a sense of how it might have sounded at the time (or,
to put that thought in postmodernese: it only emerges for
us ephemerally, and performatively, through a plurality of
multi-perspectival, polyvocal representations), the only
viable scholarly possibility is to write a deconstructive his-
tory in which the author’s involvement in the generation
of meaning is given special emphasis. Hence, instead of
opening with a (Re)Constructionist, modernist, ‘objective’
introduction to the repertoire under investigation or the
central claim of the interpretation, a contemporary scene
is evoked, with carefully limned contrasts of the culturally
high and low. That the scene is a commercial one (on a
shopping street), that this scene provides the imaginative
basis for the performative deconstruction of the motets
(what is described here is the ‘supermusical’), and that this
capitalist filter for the investigation is unremarked by the
author, is typical of the genre.
Exeter High Street is much like that of any other West
Country town in England. Cutting through the center of
the city, it is host to the usual busy scenes of commerce
and people. You can also depend on a musical presence.
Somewhere in the arcades around Marks & Spencer,
within sight of the fifteenth-century Guildhall and the
Norman towers of the cathedral, street musicians take up
their pitch. These days, it is likely to be the comic turn
of the man accompanied by his ‘wonder’ dog who barks
on cue; or the suave, professional busker, strumming
an amplified guitar. And on any shopping day, you may
find all of them. They settle at corners of the shop front,
in competition and oblivious to cacophony forgiven in
the city context, where all sounds are in free exchange.
Indeed, song, guitar, and barking intermingle with other
sonic fixtures: the white-noise of chatter and feet, the
uneven roll of bus wheels on cobbles, the cry of seagulls;

and, on the hour, the resonances of the cathedral bell. If
the scene is familiar the country over, it is the distinctive
elements in the conversation – musical, verbal, avian,
mechanical – that make Exeter sound unique, that make
it sound like Exeter. It is by listening to this colloquy –
and music’s place within it – that I want to explain the
project that has become this book. …
So let’s walk (Dillon 2012, 3, 4).
Often, as in Roger Parker’s essay on ‘the two styles’ in
1830s London, an ostensible Deconstructionist (because
‘lyrical’, microhistorical, etc.) bent is little more than a veneer
on an essential Reconstructionism (Parker 2013). Parker’s
microhistory supposes a structural background – of xeno-
phobia, elitism, bigotry, and imperialism – but reveals his
broader contextual data (which does not support his claims)
only by exclusion.
A particularly impressive lyric expression in history-writ-
ing is found in Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘constellation’
method, especially in his incomplete Arcades Project (Ben-
jamin 1999). Jenkins and Munslow diagnose Benjamin as a
Deconstructionist historian but I think that their judgement
is imprecise. Although his lyrical writing style superficially
explains his inclusion in this genre, nothing else does: in fact,
far from endorsing a postmodernist epistemology, Benja-
min’s theory of history, like his insistence on the immanent
truth content of artworks, is thoroughly modernist. In a
stout disassociation of Benjamin from French postmodern-
ist thinkers, Sigrid Weigel writes that:
Benjamin’s writings resist being read as deconstructive
in a rhetorical sense to the extent that the target of his
deconstructive approach to images is not images as
tropes [the post-Hayden White view in theory of his-
tory], but rather constellations. This method apprehends
not only the representation, but also at the same time
what is not, nor can be, represented – the reverse side of
the thought-figures, the dialectic of things and of history.

In this way image-desire and thinking-in-images are in
Benjamin always tied to the ‘weak Messianic power’ of an
historical trope (Weigel 1996, xiv–xv).
Benjamin’s objection to Rankean history ‘as it really was’ is
made not on epistemological but on ontological grounds:
for all his distaste for the philosopher, his view of history is a
Heideggerian one. While his thought is too resistant to sys-
tematization to be applied straightforwardly as a historical
method, its relation to the method I prepare in the remain-
der of this part of the book will become obvious.
For Benjamin, the problem with historicism (Historis-
mus) – a term that he applies to what I have been calling
Reconstructionist or Constructionist history – is that, like
the sciences, it stresses temporal continuity from past to
present, a sequence of temporal nows, ‘in which’ historical
events occur – it is simply the addition of a fourth dimen-
sional axis, t, to the three-dimensional spatial coordinates
marked by x, y, and z. This concept of time, when it is
taken over into historicism, stresses logical, causal con-
nexion from one moment to the next along the axis: the
attitude to empirical historical data characteristic of the
(Re)Constructionists. But for Benjamin (and Heidegger),
temporality is better understood as ‘ekstatic’, or ‘standing
outside’ this continuous sequence: human temporality pro-
jects possibilities from an individual and culturally shared
past into a future which is authentically created in an act of
‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit).9 In this way, the encoun-
ter with the past ‘bears to the highest degree the imprint of
the perilous critical moment [den Stempel des kritischen,
gefährlichen Moments] on which all reading is founded’:
9
The expression here is Heideggerian: see his analysis of ‘Temporal-
ity and Historicality’ in Heidegger 1962, 424–55. His discussion of
the t-axis concept of time is in Heidegger 1978. For a good intro-
duction to Heidegger’s conception of history, see Hoffman 1993.
the interpretation or reading of history is ‘perilous’ for

the present because it precipitates a realignment with
that present’s potential future (Benjamin 1999, N 3, 1). For
Benjamin, then, the problem with historicism is not that it
fails to establish a truth correspondence, as is the case for
the Deconstructionists, but that it misunderstands human
temporality. The facts of history are therefore not at issue,
but Benjamin avers that we must grasp their ontological
relation to the present not as fixed and linear, along the
t-axis, but as fundamentally disruptive, antagonistic, and
‘spatialized’ alongside the present.
On the Benjamin–Heidegger view – and here the out-
lines of my own historical theory can begin to emerge – the
temporality of historical understanding embroils historical
subjects (writers and readers) in an active interaction with
it: history is not shut off from the present in its temporal
flow, but something that subjects seize on with a clear eye
to the future. Far from merely observing something from
which they are shut off in an irresistible linear progress,
subjects can seize it – ‘in a downright ursurping grab’, to
deploy Dahlhaus’s image of Beethoven’s subjective response
to the history of aesthetics – as a means to construct a sub-
ject, a self, in the present, though crucially without reducing
history to present concerns (that is the practice of ‘endism’,
which I am about to discuss). That being so, history is not
‘completed’, not ‘past’ in the sense of being ‘gone’: it is a
clamorous disturbance that poses a threat to the presentist,
postmodern world of commodified enjoyment. If history
as a discipline is under threat, the ideological basis of the
assault could hardly be more patent.
Endists offer a final, and relatively recent, response to
deconstructive attitudes to history. For all the points they
score against (Re)Constructionists, even the Deconstruc-
tionists rely on narrative by virtue of writing history at all.
Endists, though, wonder whether in some sense the practice
of history-writing has reached its end point. Capitalism has
brought all of reality into a totality in which nothing has a

meaning which can escape the circuits of commodity pro-
duction and exchange. In such a world, they suggest, history
itself appears to end, not in the Fukuyaman sense that it has
reached its apogee in the nirvana of post-soviet global cap-
italism but because events no longer have a shaping effect
on the present or future. (Fukuyama 2006 is the much-rid-
iculed argument that with the passing of twentieth-century
socialism, history has culminated in American-style dem-
ocratic capitalism.) In perhaps the best example of this
‘endist’ position, Jean Baudrillard begins by observing that
progressive linear histories of a Marxist or a Fukuyaman
sort, which include Taruskin’s ‘completed shape’ of Western
art music, have become untenable, fabulist ‘metanarratives’.
But more than that, we seem to live in a world without
meaningful events. A significant historical event should
change the future course of things, but recent events such as
the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he calls ‘the last great “his-
toric” event’, have on the contrary simply come to lay bare
‘an immense repentance on the part of history which, rather
than heading off towards fresh perspectives, seems rather
to be splintering into scattered fragments and reactivating
phases of events and conflicts we had thought long gone’
(Baudrillard 1997, 449, cited in Jenkins and Munslow 2004,
332). History has, he suggests, stalled: ‘the work of history
has ceased to function’ (Baudrillard 1997, 453).
But has it? The fall of the Berlin Wall certainly changed
reality in Germany, but it ought to come as no surprise that it
did not ‘function’ as a historical event in Baudrillard’s sense,
since it was one of the late twentieth-century symptoms of
the triumph of neoliberalism. Alongside the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the development of a command capitalist
economy in China, the reunification of Germany symbol-
ized the takeover of democratic capitalism. If Mauerfall was
an ‘event’, it was at least in part a Fukuyaman one, a struc-
tural perfect cadence which brought the fundamental line of
twentieth-century history to a close. Recent history has been

littered with ‘functionless’ events of this kind, spectacular
moments which mysteriously appear to have generated no
new historical motions. But they are very readily explained
by another kind of ‘endist’ thinking, one not included in the
Jenkins and Munslow reader, exemplified by Alain Badiou
(2012). For Badiou, the period since 1976 (the Cultural Rev-
olution in China) can be understood as an ‘interval’ between
‘communist sequences’ (Badiou 2008, 105). In such a period,
the idea that an egalitarian politics is possible is dismissed
as impossible fancy, and the catastrophes of its last mani-
festation (for us, the Soviet Union; for the belle époque, the
period from the Terror to the Paris Commune) are reckoned
to be a guarantee of its perpetual unrealizability. In the first
‘interval’, from 1871 to 1917, the events of history congealed
into a narrative of ‘the age of empire’ (to borrow Hobsbawm’s
denotation) that Badiou describes as ‘the apogee of the
bourgeoisie, which occupied the whole planet, laying waste
and pillaging whole continents’ (Badiou 2008, 111; see also
Hobsbawm 1989). In our current interval, whose action
began at the raising of the Iron Curtain, there is for the first
time in history (for the moment) only one totally dominant
imperial force in the world, the United States; but excepting
that unprecedented historical development, it is difficult to
imagine an intelligent and non-partisan commentator who
would not broadly agree that Badiou’s picture of the waste
and pillage of the belle époque has a chillingly close reflex-
ion in the current situation. If history seems to have ‘ended’
in the way that Baudrillard identifies, it is only because we
are – like Mahler, Elgar, and Sibelius – living in an interval
between communist sequences. When a third one comes,
history will, even on Baudrillard’s definition, be reborn.
Badiou 2012 discerned signs of its emergence in (then) recent
political developments in Europe, the United States, and the
Middle East, where forms of collective action quite different
from anything witnessed since 1989 were growing in waves
of mounting energy, still unpredictable before SARS-CoV-2

and now anybody’s guess after a putative ‘recovery’.
Rising from the Ruins

In the meantime, what are those of us interested in writing
history left with after the comprehensive demolition of the
discipline? On the one hand, we may commit to certain res-
olutions, namely:
1 the facts of history are not history, since history is fic-
tive not empirical, and in some sense a performative
construction;
2 history cannot be objectively narrated or known, and
all narrative forms (even Deconstructionist ones) fal-
sify the past;
3 specifically, simple appeals to empirical verification
of history ‘as it really was’ (Reconstructionism) are as
untenable as more complex appeals to theorizing the
empirical data by means of ‘covering laws’ or social
history (Constructionism);
4 empirical evidence is an insufficient explanation of
history, so archival work on primary and secondary
sources is a methodologically unsound basis for his-
tory-writing, except perhaps as a means of furnishing
illustration.
These resolutions may be translated into the terms of music
history in a way which begins to unsnarl the riddle of how
to write music history after Dahlhaus. First, the question
‘What is a fact of music history?’ (the title of chapter 3 of
Dahlhaus’s Foundations of Music History) begins to look
like a misguided one to ask, since any answer will, like Dahl-
haus’s, tend to be empirical in basis. Since there is no way of
checking the correspondence between facts and narratives
in history, even were it possible to decide that the main facts
in narrating the history of, for instance, Beethoven’s heroic
style are the cultural traces of Congress-period Vienna,

undertaking extensive archival work would be a poten-
tially futile gesture. This seems to devastate Hepokoski’s
four methodological strategies, all of which have empiricist
Achilles heels: Strategy One, written documents; Strategy
Two, analysis of works; Strategy Three, analysis of actual
performances; Strategy Four, facts of reception. His sup-
pressed Strategy Zero, historical analysis of canonic works,
is no different in this respect. It will never be possible to
achieve a resolution of – or, better, to move beyond – the
tension between texts and events, which these strategies
attempt, so long as both text and event are approached
empirically. The writing of history in any of these strategies
is also doomed to fail: irrespective of whether a historian
follows Taruskin’s Reconstructionist example in writing a
strongly linear narrative in the manner of Scott, or adopts
Dahlhaus’s Constructionist advice to write like Proust or
Joyce and produce a fragmented and sometimes contradic-
tory history, or even joins the Deconstructionist Abbate in
writing about experience in the moment (the empirical basis
of Mozart’s Idomeneo being the fact that it is ‘fun’ to play
on a piano – Abbate 2004, 511), the effect will be the same:
insofar as it is narrative in form, all music history will be
struck into hazard.
And yet the postmodern theory of history which appears
to cast the historian’s enterprise into such doubt leaves as a
remainder a large and unresolved problem. Although it is
unarguable that the truth of history is not contained within
the empirical data, it does not follow that there is no truth in
history at all: the truth might be verifiable by non-empirical
means. The postmodern doctrine of truth is not that truth
does not exist, but merely that truth is hateful, and that
appeals to truth are reprehensible. Truth is, to postmodern-
ists, a demonic presence in world history, liable to stumble
into totalitarianism at the slightest dropping of the Decon-
structionist guard. But intellectually and politically there is
every reason to seek the truth, for even if truth is the sole
property of totalitarianism – and it is by no means demon-
strated that it is – then it is an act of the purest folly to hand
it over to the totalitarian barbarians and let them enslave
the rest of us with its aid. (For a repudiation of the claim that
truth and totalitarianism go hand in hand, which argues that
the claim is normally made in order to deny the possibility of
Leftist critique, see Žižek 2001.)
Even on its own postmodernist, liberal–democratic
terms, postmodernism ought to be rejected: since it is the
intellectual and cultural expression of capitalist ideology,
which establishes thought as a commodified value-in-
motion to be discursively judged by an intellectual ‘market’
in which the ideological hegemon holds sway, postmodern
history-writing is as compromised by its association with
the dominant ideology of Western neoliberalism as vulgar-
Marxist historical determinism was by its association with
the ideology of the Soviet bloc. Although all history-writing
emerges from a particular political situation and is a contri-
bution to political discourse, it behooves us to find a means
to write a history which, while emanating from a leftist
political viewpoint, does not miscarry as propaganda. And
the route out of this quagmire turns on the object–subject
dualism that has been haunting this opening part of the
present book.
The chief prey of postmodern theorists of history is
the discipline’s focus on empirical objects. Dahlhaus is
acutely sensitive to this vulnerability, and therefore asks a
promisingly different question, ‘Does music history have
a “subject”?’ (Dahlhaus 1983, chapter 4). My yoking of the
titles of Dahlhaus’s third and fourth chapters in the title of
the present one is an intentional tribute. For the Recon-
structionists who focus on biographies of individual human
subjects such as Beethoven and Rossini (or apply the ‘biog-
raphy’ metaphor to genres or styles such as the symphony or
romanticism), the answer is a naive yes: the historian (who is
also a human subject) engages in urbane colloquy with the

empirically recoverable historical subject. But while Rossini
was clearly a subject in the sense that he was a living person,
his treatment by historians has the effect of reifying him as
an object, and so collapsing him ontologically into the pro-
digious alluvium of ‘the traces of the past’. The act of doing
history, of writing a narrative of empirical data, can thus be
seen as a process of reification, of objectifying subjectivity.
To rescue history-writing from the impossible conjunction
of the fictive and the empirical, it is necessary to elaborate
a theory of the subject which can resist this falling into
objectivity by somehow transcending the limitation of being
factual without ceasing to be real.
Such a model of subjectivity has been proposed by
Badiou. His essay ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’ is the
most condensed form of his theory, though it contains only a
third of the conception that would gradually appear in Being
and Event and (most importantly) Logics of Worlds (Badiou
1991, 2005, 2009a).10 A first requirement is to state what the
subject Badiou refers to is not, and I will gloss his abstract
definitions throughout in a musical sense which will imme-
diately indicate the new kind of historical attention that this
model compels.11
1 ‘A subject is not a substance’ (a res extensa). This
means (contra Reconstructionism) that a subject is
not a human being, a composer, performer, or lis-
tener, nor even (contra Constructionism) a social
individual, part of a collective. And, to open out the
10
All English translations of Badiou, who writes quite plainly, are re-
liable, so I shall refer to them rather than to the originals. For an
accessible summary of Badiou’s theory of the subject, see Besana
2010, and for an invaluable discussion of its impact on the under-
standing of art, see Hallward 2003, chapter 8.
11
This list, taken from Badiou 2005, 391–2, is a slightly amplified ver-
sion of the ‘negative delimitations’ that are given at Badiou 1991,
26–7.
definition again into the metaphorical musical ‘sub-

ject’ that Dahlhaus points to in traditional music
histories, it is also the case that Badiou’s subject is not
a musical score, a performance, a document of recep-
tion, a genre, a style, or a cultural context in which
music is written, performed, or heard.
2 ‘A subject is not a void point’ (a res cogitans), such as
the musical work as an intentional object, as mental
content, a composer’s intention, or any abstraction of
any sort.
3 ‘A subject is not, in any manner, the organizing of a
sense of experience’, i.e. it is not a Kantian transcen-
dental schema which explains the link between a
concept and a sense impression. In musical terms this
means that a subject is not a technical understand-
ing such as a Schenkerian analysis, which constructs
a bridge between the immanent content of the work
and its realization in performance.
4 ‘A subject is not an invariable of presentation’, which
is to say that ‘the subject is rare’.12 This means that
the subject is not at all a dominant feature of, say, the
whole of a period of music history, in such a way that
the subject can account for all of that history.
5 ‘Every subject is qualified’ i.e. by an adjective, so that
‘there are some individual subjects inasmuch as there
is some love, some mixed subjects inasmuch as there
is some art or some science, and some collective
subjects inasmuch as there is some politics’ – these
four fields accounting for the range of individual or
collective human possibilities. This means that there
are some subjects whose effect is felt only on the indi-
vidual (the situation of love), some where it is only felt
on the collective (the situation of politics), and some
12
Actually he means here that a particular kind of subject (the faith-
ful subject) is rare. Though I shall defer unpicking this for the mo-
ment, the meaning of this will become clear very soon.
where an individual agency has ramifications on the

collective (art and science, which are to be under-
stood in a broad sense to include the full range of
rational and creative forms of knowledge). The ‘mixed
subject’ of music history will therefore emerge as one
which links precisely individual musical matters with
collective human ones.
6 ‘A subject is not a result – any more than it is an origin’,
which means that it neither causes a state of affairs to
exist nor is the result of a new state of affairs having
come into being: ‘it is the local status of a procedure,
a configuration in excess of the situation’. Musically
speaking, a subject is not, for instance, a work such
as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Schoenberg’s Second
String Quartet, or Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître,
which ‘causes’ a revolution in musical consciousness;
and nor is it a work of consolidation following such a
revolution and which confirms that it has taken place,
perhaps the same composers’ Götterdämmerung, Das
Buch der hängenden Gärten, or Improvisations sur
Mallarmé.
Immediately these definitions open a clearing that is
free from purely empirical definitions as well as from any
kind of theory which might account for empirical data. This
clearing is necessary because everything which is actually
the case in a given amatory, political, artistic, or scientific
situation (to use Badiou’s term for the finite totality of data)
is the realm of empiricism, while the subject operates in the
realm of truth – which by definition therefore lies outside
of the situation and is non-empirical. Once this subject and
its truth is understood, a new historical method can emerge
which will set music history free from the text–event dual-
ism of Dahlhaus (and its kaleidoscopic refractions since
1989) and establish a believable basis for a historical narra-
tive which does not have to appeal to the unreliable witness
of empirical data.
Subjective Historical Truth

The history of all four ‘conditions’ is a subjective mediation
of a truth which bears witness to an Event. An Event in Badi-
ou’s sense is, again, partly defined by what it is not. It is not
something like the storming of the Bastille or the signing of
the Treaty of Frankfurt. Such things are empirically verifi-
able facts, like Hobsbawm’s example of the Nazi gas ovens,
and they belong to the real data of history. But the Event
is something else: it is a kind of rapture of ontology which
brings the actors involved closer to a truth. John Deathridge
misrepresents the Badiouvian Event as a kind of demented
Maoist longing for a bloodless revolution in the streets of
Paris, but his explanation of the concept, which he disin-
genuously says is ‘the simple version’, is a falsification. He
claims, for instance, that a radical individual has a feeling
‘of finding oneself in a void with no option but to call up
something that cannot be named out of nothing’, and that
Badiou is interested in exemplary individuals ‘who engender
truths in the plural … by their words and deeds’ (Deathridge
2014, 12, 13). But Badiou makes no suggestion that subjects
create a truth: quite the opposite; and the implication that
his ‘subject’ is anything like a revolutionary individual on
the barricades is wholly incompatible with the definition of
the subject I have given above. The aim of such writing is to
besmirch a theory, and to inform readers that they do not
have to engage with it.
Postmodern history (rightly) calls into question the rela-
tion between facts and history, but it cannot take hold of the
Event because the Event represents that which postmod-
ernism holds in darkest suspicion: the truth. The facts of a
situation are finite – very great in number, perhaps, and not
susceptible of listing within the span of a single human life,
but nevertheless finite: a finite number of human beings have
a finite number of thoughts and perform a finite number
of actions, and those finite facts are the data of empiri-
cal history, the facts explained by scientific theories, the
biographical data of a lover’s life, and the sounds, technical

features, and reception history of a musical work. We could
envisage a list of this finite data in abstract form, where facts
are represented by letters (a, b, c), which can be listed for a
very long time (…) before terminating eventually in the last
remaining fact (z) which is the last of the set:13
romanticism = {a, b, c, …, z}
This could look even more straightforward, so that the set of
all the empirical data to do with romanticism is summarized
by a single element, x:
romanticism = {x}
In the face of this finite quantity of empirical data, post-
modernism once again rightly observes that there are two
choices: to allow the people equal, common, democratic
access to and control over it, or to vest an authoritative (or
authoritarian, or totalitarian) figure with the sole right to
interpret and control it. This doctrine which emerges from
liberal-postmodernism takes the form of a mantra Badiou
expresses as there are only bodies and languages (Badiou
2009a, 1). In a world in which the forging of narrative out of
the ravelled thread of individual thoughts and experiences
looks fraught with moral danger, the stringent insistence on
a relativist and value-free discourse has the air of being the
only form of intellectual probity. The best we can say is that
there are people (bodies), who have ways of making sense
of their world (languages), and we must not rank one above
another when their understanding causes nobody else any
harm: nobody should have authority to interpret the set of
facts {a, b, c, …, z}, because such interpretations bring with
13
The following equations employ the conventions of mathematical
set theory, on which Badiou bases his abstract theory. The theory
itself can be grasped entirely without the mathematics, but it is
useful to have some kind of visual representation of it, which it is
hoped that these simple notations can provide.
them the power to control. But Badiou’s philosophy pro-

poses a new statement, there are only bodies and languages,
except that there are truths (Badiou 2009a, 4). The obser-
vations of postmodernism are accurate as far as they go,
but because they only refer to the empirical data, they have
nothing to say about that which causes empirical reality to
occur as it does, which for short is called truth. And unlike
the finite facts which are ‘in’ a situation, the truth is not only
‘outside’ the situation but is infinite: not exhausted by a par-
ticular expression, not articulable in only one language, not
limited to a single historical appearance, but universally and
infinitely available to all people, in all times and places.
Again it is instructive to grasp the idea abstractly before
fleshing it out with real-world examples. The Event can be
compared roughly to a human mind. Say that the definition
of my mind is that it is the set of things about which I can
form an impression. This includes notebooks, roast chicken,
love, … and my mind. Written abstractly, with letters again
being used to represent things (with M indicating my mind
itself ), this set of things would be:
M = {a, b, c …, M}
Clearly, to define the human mind in this way entails an
infinite regress, because the last element in the set of things
about which my mind can form an impression is my mind
itself – which is the set of things about which I can form an
impression, the last element of which is my mind – which
is the set of things … (and so on, infinitely).14 The mind, like
the Event, is infinite, and therefore not part of the situa-
tion, but it also counts as one of the empirical facts of the
14
For an accessible and very readable introduction to infinity, from
which my example of the mind is drawn, see Rucker 1982. In
set theory, such a set is called a ‘non-well-founded set’, which is
prohibited by traditional set theory but has become a very use-
ful mathematical model in recent years, especially in computing.
Aczel 1988 offers a technical discussion.
situation: so it has a paradoxical quality, albeit one that is

readily understood (and it means that the Badiouvian Event
is no more eerie an idea than the human mind). The abstract
form of the Event has a similarly paradoxical form because
in any given situation, say France in 1789, there are all the
really existing empirical facts (a man called Robespierre, a
prison called the Bastille) which one can count finitely, but
also the Event. This element does not have a purely empirical
existence, because while it appears in France in 1789, it is not
only to be found there – it is, as I have already said, available
at all times and in all places. In this historic instance it took
the particular form of a call to liberty which had already
been made by Spartacus in 73 bce and by the Roundheads
during the English Civil War, and would be made again by
the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the crowds on either side of the
Berlin Wall in 1989. The elements of an Event (E) are thus all
of the empirical contents of the situation, plus the Event (E):
E = {a, b, c, …, E}
The paradox of the Event means that it is impossible to find
it in a situation, but again it is not a paradox that ought to
be impossible to credit: in just the same way, we cannot find
the value of a coin or the flavour of some food by looking
inside it, and yet we know the value and flavour to be both
true and truly present. Analogously, although we cannot see
it directly, we know that an Event is acting on a situation
because it leaves a trace.15 The trace will differ according to
which of the four four fields of human experience (Badiou’s
‘conditions’) the truth procedure is operating in. In politics
15
A final analogue to the Event might be the meteor which struck
earth and killed the dinosaurs. We cannot find it, since it was de-
stroyed by the impact, but we can see its trace in the Chicxulub
crater in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The analogy breaks
down insofar as the meteor was at some stage an empirically ver-
ifiable, single, finite thing, while the Event is not – but it remains
basically useful.
(where there are ‘collective subjects’) the trace will be a

statement such as (in 73 bce) ‘we slaves, we want to return
home’ (Badiou 2009a, 51), or (in the 1790s) liberté, égalité,
fraternité ou la mort, which declares the errancy of the
pre-evental state power over the people. In science and art
(where there are ‘mixed subjects’), the trace is the theoreti-
cal or formal movement from impossibility to possibility. In
science, it takes the form of something which was formerly
recalcitrant to knowledge becoming accounted for by a new
theory: e.g. the heliocentric view of the solar system in the
time of Galileo. In art, it appears when a formal effect which
was once considered an inappropriate way of achieving
balance between the competing demands of expression and
form (some quality of dissonance treatment, say, in musical
terms) suddenly becomes appropriate, and ‘what seemed to
partake of the formless is grasped as form’ (Badiou 2009a,
73). In amorous situations, where there are ‘individual sub-
jects’, the trace will be a ‘universal object’ (Badiou 2009a,
73) in which two formerly separated persons participate
(nobody need know what that object is, but its existence is
clear). Our concern is the artistic truth procedure, so I shall
increasingly focus my exposition of the theory on the musi-
cal case, but will continue to offer side-lights into parallel
truth procedures in the other ‘conditions’.
Subjects form when an Event is recognized in a trace. As
I have been at pains to point out, subjects are not individ-
ual persons, and so to speak not ‘things’ at all, but of course
really, empirically, factually existing people like Beethoven
or Galileo do become involved in the process of ‘subjectiv-
ization’. They do so by forming a body: in politics this is a
political organization (the Bolshevik Party, Spartacus’s slave
army), in love a couple, and in the ‘mixed subjects’ of science
and art, a ‘result’ of some kind (a law, theory, set of prin-
ciples), or a work (symphony, concerto, sonata).16 There is
16
Badiou provides a tabulation of the four truth procedures (Badiou
2009a, 77).
thus a theoretically finite but practically countless number

of possible elements of the body of a truth, a bewildering
set of empirical facts that no individual historian of pol-
itics, science, art, or love could even begin to synthesize.
Every narrative based on the body alone would assuredly
be thwarted, and there can be no way of checking the facts
against the narrative: so much has been demonstrated by
postmodern theory. And yet despite the daunting mass of
facts that compose the body, the function of the body is actu-
ally straightforward to grasp: it is ‘the bearer of the subjective
appearance of a truth’ (Badiou 2009a, 451) – the carrier (an
organization, a theory, an artwork, a lover) of a truth into
the empirical reality of history.17 The desire to understand
the function of the body of the French Revolution does not
impose on the historian the burden of discovering all of the
facts apposite to France in the period from 1789 to Napo-
leon’s coup in 1799 (or, on some readings, his fall in 1815).
That were a flagrant impossibility. But it is not necessary. To
understand the history of music from 1789 to the present,
we need to understand the make-up of the body of works
which carried the nominated truth into the new artistic con-
figuration, and it poses no difficulty to apprehension that it
is not possible to account for every part of that body. The
body’s incompleteness is signified by Badiou’s writing of it
as body, a crossing-out which indicates the concept’s inabil-
ity to be captured as a fixed identity. I shall follow Badiou’s
notation from this point. What is required is to understand
the only three conceptually possible subjective responses in
a given situation, all of them contemporary with the Event,
which go by the names faithful subject, reactive subject, and
obscure subject.18
17
Badiou’s exposition of the nature of the body takes up the whole of
Part VII of his book (Badiou 2009a, 449–503).
18
See (Badiou 2009a, 45–89), for the fullest general exposition of the
metaphysics of these subjects.
The Faithful Subject

This ‘revolutionary’ subject:
1 discerns a truth in some kind of trace;
2 forms part of a body which is committed to the
instantiation of the evental truth;
3 is an operation which produces a new present in
which the truth will have been manifested.
The present is the distinctive creation of the faithful subject.
In love the present is a new existential intensity, an enchant-
ment of a world now seen through two consciousnesses
instead of one; in politics it is a new egalitarian maxim which
plays out as a political sequence (73–71 bce for Spartacus,
1792–94 for the Jacobins); in science it will be a new enlight-
enment, manifested as a theory that can account for the new
truth (heliocentrism, general relativity); and in artworks it
is a new intensity of expression, an artistic configuration
enriched by the inbreaking of new possibilities for mediat-
ing expression and form (an emancipated tonic–dominant
polarity emerging not as a mere artefact of convention but
as a subjective necessity unfolding in a newly heightened
drama within a body of musical works). The faithful subject
is revolutionary because it exhibits a high degree of ‘fidelity’
to the truth. It subordinates the body entirely to the pro-
duction of the present, heedless of the cost. So, the slaves
in Spartacus’s army incorporate themselves into the body
without regard for their individual existence, determined
only to ‘found a new truth in the present: that the fate of
the wretched of the earth is never a law of nature, and that
it can, if only for the duration of a few battles, be revoked’
(Badiou 2009a, 53). The subordination of a body of artworks
to the faithful production of a present from the trace of a
truth can similarly lead to ridicule or rejection (Beethoven’s
late quartets, Schoenberg’s free atonal music after 1908,
Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge). But more often than
not it is met in the situation by a moderate reaction, a realis-

tic response in the form of the second subjective operation.
The Reactive Subject

This ‘realistic’ subject:
1 denies that the truth which it discerns in the trace is
realistic;
2 distances itself from the faithful subject as a means of
denying the reality of the discerned truth;
3 is an operation which produces an extinguished pres-
ent in which the truth is accommodated to existing
modes of understanding.
The reaction does not come as an attempted reinstatement
of the old and the abolition of the new; the reaction denies
but it does not destroy, and it remains productive. The reac-
tive subject is the majority response to an Event: if in politics
the faithful subject is represented by Soviet-style socialism,
the reactive subject is represented by European-style social
democracy and the welfare state, representing ‘realistic’
reform rather than ‘unrealistic’ revolution. If in music the
faithful subject is embodied in works which declare a new
world of artistic communication, the reactive subject is
embodied in works which adopt some of the new expres-
sive possibilities but accommodate them to existing formal
archetypes. In the Spartacus context, the reactive subject was
embodied by the slaves who did not join Spartacus’s army,
but informed against those slaves to enforce the maximum
separation from them. Their hope was not emancipation,
which was risky, but just an amelioration of their conditions
on the basis that they were respecting traditional authority.
The musical reactive subject between 1789 and 1876 might
recognize the expressive value of the hexatonic organization
of tonal space as something which can enable a response to a
contemporary new subjective necessity; but the tonic–dom-
inant polarity of the handed-down forms from the classical
and baroque periods is not (as in the case of the faithful sub-
ject) reconstructed from the bottom up, emerging from the
nature of the musical material itself. There is a heightened
freedom, but not an emancipation, of melody and harmony,
so that, for instance, all manner of keys may be accommo-
dated within a sonata exposition, and the drama may be
appreciated more at the level of melody than of key. These
are examples of what Badiou calls reactionary novelties, the
inventions of the reactive subject which offer new forms of
resistance to the faithfully produced present. As evidence of
the resistance to revolution, one can observe the traditional
architecture of the diatonic form returning conventionally
to strap the whole into place: the exigencies of the form, the
pre-existing functional background of the configuration that
held sway before the Event, are the principal features of this
extinguished present. The new expressive intensity of the
faithful subject is therefore directly referenced, perhaps on
the surface of the music, only to be set aside, differentiated
from the goals of the piece, so that the body of works does
not submit to the same dangerous advocacy of the radical
new present, and the reactive subject may enjoy some of the
chic of progressiveness without any of the attendant dangers
of losing an audience in the salon or concert hall. Although
the extinguished present of the reactive subject is still a pro-
duction of something new (reactive novelties), its energetic
denial of the trace of the truth clears the way for the final
subjective response.
The Obscure Subject

This ‘ideological’ subject:
1 affirms and endorses that there is a hegemonic Body
of supreme, transcendent power;19
19
I follow Badiou’s translators in giving this Body an initial capital,
and no cancellation, to distinguish it from the body of the faithful
2 flatly denies both that there is any validity at all in the

trace and that it is legitimate for any body to affirm
such a trace;
3 is an operation which examines and destroys the new
present brought into being by the faithful subject.
In Badiou’s Spartacus example, the obscure subject was the
power of Rome itself, crucifying the rebel slaves and lining
the Appian Way with their corpses; closer to our own time,
its totems are Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989, and
Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, Cairo, in 2013. The obscure sub-
ject is the only response to an Event which is certain to use
violence of either a physical or a conceptual kind, or both.
The obscure subject conceives the creation of the present
as altogether impossible, base, fallacious, and unacceptable
for intellectual or moral reasons. Structurally it is recog-
nized by its blank refusal of the present. In order to appeal
to an uncontaminated, pre-evental form of appearance, the
obscure subject proposes a pure and transcendent Body,
that is to say a Body conceived as if it were natural and eter-
nal, morally neutral, obviously ‘right’, and not a product of
history or cultural relations of power (all of which claims are
ideological). Familiar examples include the Vendeean resist-
ance to the French Revolution (which appealed to a Body
of church and king) and the 1930s fascists who opposed the
spread of communism (by appealing to a Body of Volk free
from Jewish taint, or black-shirted Italian supermen).
The assertion of this immaculate Body eradicates both
the trace and the body of the faithful subject. So, the sev-
enteenth-century trace of the truth of heliocentrism, and
Galileo, the most famous part of the body that bore it,
yielded an obscure response from Pope Urban VIII, whose
subject. An important difference between the two concerns their

relative power: the Body is transcendent, singular, and immensely
powerful, while the body is multiple, divided, and composed of in-
dividual persons who or things which by themselves are very weak.
Inquisition extracted a recantation under threat of torture

and then placed the scientist under house arrest for the
remaining decade of his life. The idea and its spokesperson
are thus negated by the assertion of the Body, and the pres-
ent of a new enlightenment is ‘occulted’ by the exigencies of
the subjective operation. The effect of this double negation
of the trace and body is to restore a pre-existing ideological
framework which maintains the power of figures who bene-
fit from it, at the cost of the majority.
In artistic terms the obscure subject manifests as icon-
oclasm in service of the governing ideology; it conceives of
the body of faithful works as formalist abominations: ‘we
go from the pagan statues hammered by the Christians to
the gigantic Buddhas blown up by the Taliban, via the Nazi
auto-da-fes (against “degenerate” art) and, more inconspic-
uously, the disappearance into storage facilities of what has
fallen out of fashion’ (Badiou 2009a, 73). The great physical
violence of these famous iconoclastic gestures should not
becloud the subtler metaphysical violence of the related
final idea, which was elsewhere expressed pungently by Hei-
degger in a vision of artworks reduced to their pure material
basis, lifeless and ignored: ‘Beethoven’s quartets lie in the
publisher’s storeroom like potatoes in a cellar’ (Heidegger
2002, 3). For in modernity, the obscure subject’s principal
goal has, time and again, been the maintenance of the influ-
ence of capital and the centuries-long process that has led us
close to the commodification of everything: this is its funda-
mental ideological commitment, however much it may vary
the means of achieving it. Thus one finds the obscure sub-
ject not only in the development from nineteenth-century
‘trivial music’ to twentieth-century ‘popular music’, or in the
historically parallel shift in focus from sheet music to sound
recording as the favoured commodity form, but also in the
mechanization of compositional process (a rationalization
in keeping with capitalist developments in the broader
economy and culture of Europe), and in certain areas of
critical writing on music. One cannot simplistically speak

of a division between high and low, art and popular styles
(though there is some truth in the generalization), since
the obscure subject’s rejection of a subjectively reclaimed
diatonic tonality in favour of a conventional presentation
of utterly familiar, undemanding, saleable, and ephemeral
music (this last quality being vital for capitalist circulation)
can equally be perceived in the work of ‘great’ composers
or in instrumental genres that were important to art com-
position. Hence the playfully iconoclastic commodification
of Wagner in Fauré’s and Messager’s Souvenirs de Bayreuth,
and a kind of ‘instant mazurka manual’, Franciszek Mirecki’s
One Million Mazurs, Meaning a Method for Composing Mil-
lions of Mazurs Even for Those Who Do Not Know Music,
a nineteenth-century book which came with twenty-one
packets of musical snippets that anybody, even without
musical training, could work up into individual composi-
tions. To a subject such as this, as to the neoliberal initiates
of our current ‘interval’, claims to transcendence and eman-
cipation make absolutely no sense.
Subjects, Strategies, and Genres of History

The riddle-character of general and musical history inheres
in the difficulty of knowing what the past was. By focusing on
the confident projection into the future of a present which is
not yet realized, and will never come to be without the faith-
ful subject’s nomination of the truth, Badiou in effect invites
a writing of history as it were in the future perfect tense: a
history of what, at any moment, will have been the case in
the evental present of, say, Paris in 1830. At the same time,
his ‘finally objectless subject’ opens attention up from an
exclusive focus on the empirical data of history, which form
the trace, body, and present of a subjective process (in short,
the ‘objects’ of historical knowledge), so that it can encom-
pass the non-empirical realm of the subject and truth itself.
It is these two last-named elements which neither postmod-

ern history nor postmodern musicology can endure, but
which together proffer a potent means of writing a history
that accounts for the production of the present in the past.
The methodological strategies and historical genres
that have been employed by musicologists since Dahl-
haus’s history of nineteenth-century music are legible in
subjective terms. Strategy One, the anti-canonic focus on
infinitely expanding ‘contexts’ for musical works, holds a
postmodern–liberal suspicion of truth alongside a blatantly
Reconstructionist confidence in the primacy of empirical
data. Its scholars believe that the truth is not located in his-
torical writing, for instance about Beethoven’s heroic style,
or in the culturally and historically contingent groupings of
significant works that we call the ‘canon’, but they do believe
that the truth is in the historical facts themselves: if they did
not, they would not attempt to counter the truth-claims of
the ‘old musicology’ apropos of the canonic composers by
appeal to additional contextual data. In revealing the ideo-
logical basis of the doctrine of musical ‘autonomy’, they wag
a finger at the Constructionist basis (in Adorno, Bourdieu,
Weber, et al.) of older historical interpretations, which they
call ‘metanarratives’, and declare first that such a purported
truth is unacceptable, and second that no body of old-musi-
cological historians can be the bearer of such a false claim.
To stamp out this double error, they lay a strong, Gradgrin-
dian emphasis on transcendent Facts, the vast mass of which
will eradicate the false witness of alternative views. Strategy
One therefore tends towards an obscure response.
Insofar as it shares the first strategy’s suspicion of the
canon, Strategy Two (the analytical study of ‘peripheral’,
non-German, or non-art music) is likewise partly obscure,
although much less extremely so. While the first strategy
attacks the scholars whose truth claims it cannot abide,
the second is more concerned to set about the body of
musical works which compose the canon. By expanding
the definition of what counts as a musical value (not only

sonata form but also song form; not only German-style
motivic dynamism but also lyrical or static forms, and so
on), such scholars do not attempt to eradicate the canon but
to expand and otherwise reconfigure it, to accommodate the
radical claims to musical autonomy represented by the old
canon to the situation in which the contents of a broader
marketplace should be valorized. Their end is therefore at
bottom a reactive one of creating an extinguished present,
accepting some of the truth claims to autonomy but refusing
to produce a new present of a radically new configuration.
The tendency of Strategy Two to prepare the ground for the
obscure response of canon-destruction and the denial of
truth claims to musical value is, however, symptomatic of
the second subjective response.
Strategy Three, which focuses on performances rather
than texts, is another reactive response, which once again
partly acknowledges claims to autonomous value but denies
that this is located in the text, the emphatic concept of
the artwork which was (on Dahlhaus’s view) Beethoven’s
Promethean gift to music history. Instead, the intentional
object, whose value cannot be realized, is reified and put
into circulation in the sphere of public performance, and
subsequently recording. Thus the tripartite operation of the
faithful subject – that there are artworks which are a locus
of truth (a body), that the truth is a call to emancipation
(the trace), and that this body can compose a new present
(a world of romantic works, with their extraordinary claims
to transcendence) – is held before the critical gaze as an
unrealistic and excessive one. In its place is offered an extin-
guished present in which performances and recordings, not
the revolutionary upstart of the autonomous work, are the
main focus.
Strategy Four, the drastic domain of Abbate, is the most
obscure of all; it insists that there is only value in the expe-
rience, in the transcendent ‘original’ meaning of music,
which obtained before the false claims of transcendence

and autonomy were borne by an evental body of canonic
masterworks. Strategy Four’s focus on the instantaneous
pleasure of sound, and (like Strategy Three) on the study
of it as ‘sound studies’, grants the most easily commodified
form of music, its reified physicality, the designation ‘real
music’. Such scholars are certain that the claim that music is
about anything other than simple enjoyment are false, and
that it is illegitimate to focus intellectual attention on such
a body of intelligible works. Thus this strategy represents an
almost purely capitalist inversion of Dahlhaus’s dualism, and
redistributes musical value directly from the works that are
the products of individual humans into the hands of private
capital which owns the means of distributing recordings
in our present. As a mode of writing music history it is the
most presentist of all, interested in the past only insofar as
its detritus might be flogged at a profit on the open market.
There is, then, no faithful subject among the four
methodological strategies identified by Hepokoski to have
emerged from new musicology. His taxonomy implicitly
presents the suppressed Strategy Zero, which I have alluded
to before, as a pre-evental one which does not bear witness
to the ‘revolution’ of new musicology. But this was in fact
no revolution. New musicology subscribes, on the whole, to
a position between a mild and swingeing postmodernism,
which is to say that at the least it suspects and at the most
it definitively repudiates truth. That continuum of suspicion
accounts for the distribution of new-musicological modes
of history writing within the reactive and obscure subjects.
The new-musicological ‘revolution’, then, has a disavowed
starting element, a Strategy Zero (historical analysis of
canonic works), in which can be discerned the outlines of
a faithful response. And yet this faithful strategy is only
present in outline, its full appearing being prevented by an
excessive focus on positivistic accounting for reliably edited
scores and elucidation of technical features of the music.
Like Strategies One to Four, it fails the epistemological test

of postmodern theorists of history.
Only an evental history, a history based on analysis of
the subjective presencing of truth, can offer a way through
the epistemological deadlock. Unlike Reconstructionism,
evental history does not presume there is an empirical basis
for explaining how things happened in the past. There is
no pot of gold at the end of the historian’s rainbow. Unlike
Constructionism, evental history does not suppose there
is an empirically verifiable process at work, which can be
discovered by sophisticated theoretical tools drawn from
sociology, vulgar Marxism, gender studies, Orientalist stud-
ies, whiteness studies, and so on: there is no empirical basis
that can be used to test a theoretical explanation. Unlike
Deconstructionism, evental history maintains that despite
the lack of an empirical basis, there is nevertheless truth. We
cannot discern the Event, either by finding it in an archive
(Reconstructionism) or by finding a sufficiently powerful
theoretical definition of it (Constructionism), but we know
that there was an Event, partly because we can see its trace,
and partly because there must have been one, since the world
has undergone a revolutionary change. So we can be sure
that truth has burst into the situation, left a trace, and been
responded to by subjects. The truth of history can therefore
be known, even thought it cannot be known empirically. A
totally capitalist world despises history, because the formerly
actual cannot be sold. But despite the prognostications of
capitalism’s cultural logic, postmodernism, a history can be
told, and in a small but non-trivial way it can contribute to
a better understanding of the ideological plate tectonics of
modernity.
An evental history offers a genuine break with old musi-
cological practices, a revolution rather than a reformation
in thinking about music history. A focus on subjects ena-
bles the historian to avoid the error of attributing too much
historical agency to a particular composer (Beethoven or
Rossini), genre (symphony or opera), country (Germany or

Russia), artistic register (high or low), and so on, because its
organizing principle hinges on a structural relation between
these empirical details and the non-empirical truth which is
not part of the situation. The facts of music history – about
which no two methodological strategies can agree, and
which no genre of history-writing can rehearse in such a
way that the correspondence between the past and its narra-
tion can be established – are an indispensable foreground to
any chronicle of music history, but they are not what reveals
the truth of that history. Objects, such as these facts, do not
have a history; only subjects have a history.

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Part 1

The Style Dualism

R eflecting its advent in an age when the wonted

danger for a social world that it no longer assuredly flatters

Carl Dahlhaus claimed that a new possibility for musical

between scare quotes, must be precisely understood: he does

abyss gapes between this limning of art-religion and the car-

believing in a cramped, deficient, and totalitarian denotation of

between music and the tendency of Protestantism to merge

Beethoven–Protestant side because it offers the individual

even-handedness could suck the poison out of what appears

Entrenchment on both sides of the debate makes historio-

Strategies of Gauging Work and Performance

germanophobic prejudice is more virulent there than in Europe –

my ideological elaboration, does not provide a rationale for

artworks, along with the ideologies that have supported

replanted back in the rich, untidy soil of history’ (Hepokoski

Bellini, Paganini, Verdi, Johann Strauss Jr., Irving Berlin,

of the self-sufficiency of form in art, and its independence

nailing of the ‘inviolable text’ to the concert-hall door, which

on performance is ‘drastic’), and third to reverse what she

itself are not opposite, and her definition of the ‘solution’ is

Music History and the Logic of Capital

What happens here is essentially that once Protestantism

credibility as discrete articles, such indulgences satisfied a

premier mouthpiece is Beethoven, as a vanishing mediator

By the same token, music history itself is a problem for

instantaneous drastic experience. If our cultural inheritance

Beethoven, Modernity’s Profane Vanishing Mediator

what is sacred but also the ownership of it is their exclusive

means to achieve this do not lie in any of the strategies that

to present an epistemology of music history adequate to

Genres of Historical Writing

C onsciously writing in the shadow of Hayden

In consequence of this contention they advance an

While it is therefore impossible for postmodern histo-

relation to history, practice, logic, and reflection on the symbol-

progressive democratism it is not difficult to discern the

of history’ (Ankersmit 1994, 125). But the Jenkins–Munslow

The final section of Taruskin 2011 argues for an idiosyncratic

Reconstructionism can also have epistemological foun-

verifiable way through its traces. The truth cannot therefore

of the earth, and so contributing to the growth of Ameri-

strikes at the foundation stone of the epistemological ques-

namely that despite their confidence in the ultimate

nature’ (Ankersmit 1994, 168).7 And that paradox guarantees

offers several examples. The process of locating these micro-

beaches, and his reading of Herman Melville. So, instead of

composer John Cage – which, in this case, subordinate

uneven roll of bus wheels on cobbles, the cry of seagulls;

the thought-figures, the dialectic of things and of history.

the interpretation or reading of history is ‘perilous’ for

brought all of reality into a totality in which nothing has a

twentieth-century history to a close. Recent history has been

of mounting energy, still unpredictable before SARS-CoV-2

Rising from the Ruins

style are the cultural traces of Congress-period Vienna,

also a human subject) engages in urbane colloquy with the

definition again into the metaphorical musical ‘sub-

where an individual agency has ramifications on the

Subjective Historical Truth

biographical data of a lover’s life, and the sounds, technical