Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History

While the number of scholars writing on music and politics continues to mushroom, relatively few of them, I suspect, see their work as a form of political activism. Aside from those researching pressing questions of racial identity, gender, and sexuality, most musicologists are content to approach politics purely as a spectator sport, or to segregate any personal political commitments from their research. Those who do seek to create politically useful work in the field of musicology may seem doomed to failure, particularly if their focus is on Western classical music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, above all, the canon of instrumental works at its heart. Much effort has been devoted on the one hand to exposing the dubious ideologies that helped shape this musical tradition, and on the other to idealizing the utopian values supposedly embedded in it. Yet to regard these kinds of approaches as meaningful...

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