ABSTRACT
There are other disjunctions between history and music history. Historians, particularly those for whom social and cultural history have been subsidiary to political and constitutional history, have typically used music as the fodder of footnotes, merely illustrating social and cultural patterns. But can social history-particularly in its newer cultural forms, and employing wider discourses than are offered simply by economic and demographic parameters-offer anything new to music history? The critical reflection within both disciplines in the closing decades of the twentieth century, forced as it has been by wider theoretical debates, makes such questions especially compelling.
