ABSTRACT
A striking feature of the brief period of disciplinary unease experienced by English-language musicology during the late 1980s and early 1990s was the way in which—apparently overnight—the term ‘modernist’ acquired the status of an academic put-down. The haste with which the British radicals of the late 1950s and early 60s were taken up by this country’s musical establishment has been noted. To be sure, life was not immediately ‘too easy’ for them. In the 1930s and 40s, such invention was mediated by the new technologies of mass communication. ‘Historically unique new forms of personal power and arbitrariness’, Jameson observes, ‘emerge at once in the space between the new technologies and the underdevelopment of an as yet very incompletely “bourgeoisified” public’. An unsympathetic commentator might dismiss these bars as poorly composed, likewise other similarly ‘difficult’ passages.
