"This is one of the most important books about music you'll read this year... No one has bridged the gap between music scholarship and mainstream media as virtuosically as Taruskin."--The Guardian "Very entertaining."--New York Review of Books "A collection of essays by the fearsomely intelligent Berkeley-based musicologist [offering] a passionately engaging perspective."--The Guardian "Intellectually generous compendium that merits serious and sustained engagement."--Classical Music Magazine

Richard Taruskin is Class of 1955 Chair of Music at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (UC Press), among many other books.

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