ABSTRACT
This chapter critiques Adorno and Taruskin as exemplars of ‘capital H’ and ‘small h’ approaches to music history. Highlighting the anomalous prominence granted to Adorno even as his arch-modernist ideals seemed most at odds with nascent ‘postmodernism’, I note a similar historiographical tension in Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music. Challenging Taruskin’s ostensibly anti-Hegelian ‘superperiodization’ and ‘quasi-dialectical’ constructs, I let Boulez inspire fresh reading of Baudelaire’s oft-misunderstood framing of modernity.
