Contents
- preface against utopia / ix
- 1. Et in Arcadia Ego; or, I Didn't Know I Was Such a Pessimist until I Wrote This Thing (a talk) / 1 From the New York Times, mostly
- 2. Only Time Will Cover the Taint / 21
- 3. "Nationalism": Colonialism in Disguise? / 25
- 4. Why Do They All Hate Horowitz? / 30
- 5. Optimism amid the Rubble / 37
- 6. A Survivor from the Teutonic Train Wreck / 43
- 7. Does Nature Call the Tune? / 46
- 8. Two Stabs at the Universe / 51 Away with the Ives Myth: The "Universe" Is Here at Last / 51 Out of Hibernation: Ives's Mythical Beast / 55
- 9. In Search of the "Good" Hindemith Legacy / 60
- 10. Six Times Six: A Bach Suite Selection / 66
- 11. A Beethoven Season? / 71
- 12. Dispelling the Contagious Wagnerian Mist / 81
- 13. How Talented Composers Become Useless / 86
- 14. Making a Stand against Sterility / 94
- 15. A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the Twenty-first Century / 98
- 16. Calling All Pundits: No More Predictions! / 104
- 17. In The Rake's Progress, Love Conquers (Almost) All / 109
- 18. Markevitch as Icarus / 118
- 19. Let's Rescue Poor Schumann from His Rescuers / 124
- 20. Early Music: Truly Old-Fashioned at Last? / 129
- 21. Bartok and Stravinsky: Odd Couple Reunited? / 133
- 22. Wagner's Antichrist Crashes a Pagan Party / 138
- 23. A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism / 144
- 24. Corraling a Herd of Musical Mavericks / 153
- 25. Can We Give Poor Orff a Pass at Last? / 161
- 26. The Danger of Music and the Case for Control / 165
- 27. Ezra Pound: A Slim Sound Claim to Musical Immortality / 181
- 28. Underneath the Dissonance Beat a Brahmsian Heart / 186
- 29. Enter Boris Goudenow, Just 295 Years Late / 191 For the New Republic, mostly
- 30. The First Modernist / 195
- 31. The Dark Side of the Moon / 202
- 32. Of Kings and Divas / 217
- 33. The Golden Age of Kitsch / 241
- 34. No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage / 261
- 35. Sacred Entertainments / 280
- 36. The Poietic Fallacy / 301
- 37. The Musical Mystique: Defending Classical Music against Its Devotees / 330 From the scholarly press
- 38. Revising Revision / 354
- 39. Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology / 382
- 40. She Do the Ring in Different Voices / 406
- 41. Stravinsky and Us / 420 Envoi
- 42. Setting Limits (a talk) / 448
- index / 000