ABSTRACT
As Robert M. Pirsig suggests in the “Afterward” he appended in 1984 to his philosophical memoir of the previous decade, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there is something more veracious about the conceptions of past and future held by the ancient Greeks than those implicit in the metaphor of time that presently predominates in the United States public forum. A metaphor compatible with the Greeks’ that usefully represents the present is the notion of a palimpsest, an expanse of parchment or other material that has been written on several times, revealing the remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible on its surface. Anytime we fi nd ourselves in a situation in which we are confounded by the options before us we may be well advised to consider it as a palpable manifestation of past events-a palimpsest. By considering the historical developments that have combined to create the present confused state of affairs in music education in U.S. public schools, for example, we might be able to recognize which of its aspects should be removed or set asideand which should be retained-in order to make most favorable the plane on which we will meet our stealthily approaching future. In fact, that is precisely our present task.
