ABSTRACT
At some point, even those of us who are primarily interested in contemporary culture seem to end up exploring the past in order to understand the present. I believe that this often happens as a result of frustration, when one feels there is something wrong in today’s world because of something that happened earlier, or because one feels that the contemporary representation of historical facts is based on misinterpretations. Thus, during the last few decades many musical historical notions have been re-evaluated with the intention of adding a new perspective on an institutionalized, taken-for-granted ‘truth’. Established canon formations have been re-examined and music histories have been rewritten by, for example, post-structuralist, gender, minority, ethnic, popular culture and postcolonial cultural critics. 1
