Can there be such a thing as music criticism?
John Deathridge, 20 February 1986
Music and Civilisation: Essays in Honour of Paul Henry Lang
edited by Edmond Strainchamps, Maria Rika Maniates and Christopher Hatch.
Norton, 499 pp., £35, March 1985,0 393 01677 3 Show More
edited by Edmond Strainchamps, Maria Rika Maniates and Christopher Hatch.
Norton, 499 pp., £35, March 1985,
The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901-1914
edited by Kay Dreyfus.
Macmillan, 542 pp., £25, December 1985,0 333 38085 1 Show More
edited by Kay Dreyfus.
Macmillan, 542 pp., £25, December 1985,
“... Musicologists are notorious both in and outside academic circles for their arcane habits of mind and their usually enraptured view of the mediocre and obscure. Paul Henry Lang – doyen of American musicology and the author of the magisterial Music in Western Civilisation – was never slow to point this out: ‘A scholar who, like a Hindu ascetic immersed in self-contemplation, confines himself to his narrow field of specialisation, loses the larger view ... ”
