Table of 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. Bartók 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
