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 168
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) 447
Index 467
