ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the notion of 'fixated listening', so important to the eventual territorialization of concert music in the middle of the nineteenth century, has a short and fragile history. Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History is an attempt to understand these attachments without falling for the charm of the ever more numerous attempts to recuperate classical music from a putative decline. The monolithic compulsory masculinity of earlier forms of musicology is certainly in profound crisis, but rumours of its death have been greatly exaggerated. To put it perhaps more starkly, for classical music, the claims it makes are always to the detriment of its lower others, always in an antagonistic relationship with them, however many times it might try to give carnivalesque room to one or more vernacular voices.
