In his 1993 book La passion musicale, Antoine Hennion noted a key difference between the analysis of music and that of other cultural forms. Those studying literature or art history, he suggested, struggle against the selfevident solidity of their objects. The literary scholar or art historian is up against the seemingly irrefutable concreteness of a book or painting, and so confronts prejudices which assert the self-sufficiency of the artistic object unto itself. In the face of this concreteness, skill and perseverance are required to expose the mediations (the social structures and processes) that made such an object possible, and to convince others that they are of more than secondary interest. For the analyst confronting music, in contrast, “critical discourse finds itself thrown off balance.” Music, Hennion writes, “far from concealing the mass of its interpreters and instruments behind the object that they make visible, is all too happy to reveal them; they are the only visible guarantees of its existence” (Hennion 1993, 13; my translation).