Events, dear boy, events [Review of the book The Event of Music History, by J.P.E. Harper-Scott]

Abstract

J.P.E. Harper-Scott’s The Event of Music History (TEMH) is a difficult, intermittently brilliant and often frustrating book that is at the very least to be commended for taking such a bold, revisionist approach to the task of writing music history. Harper-Scott’s wide and prolific output may be already familiar to readers of this journal: a musicologist and thinker explicitly of the political Left whose writing has focused on the relations between music, social class, capitalist ideology and revolution, as well as questions of psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality. Over the years he has in addition made contributions to the critical conversation about Wagner. In TEMH, Harper-Scott’s latest (and allegedly final) published monograph, Wagner is only a minor figure. However, this review seeks to draw attention to the book as a significant, albeit flawed, contribution to a wider discussion about music history, one to which neither a critical understanding of Wagner, nor a popular appreciation of his works, will be immune. [Excerpt]