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The idea of \"alternative facts\" gained attention in national politics after the 2016 presidential election, and continued with perhaps unprecedented pervasiveness and gravity at the end of that presidential term, but it is unfortunately not a new phenomenon. The mechanisms for this include sustained repetition of the alternative facts from people with the highest levels of visibility and power, backed up through the fallacy of confirmation bias: making a claim (which could be an alternative fact) and then setting out to gather evidence, fabricate evidence, or interpret evidence in a biased way to \"prove\" the claim. From the hermeneutical perspective in musicology, when rational discussion of polarized truths turns into abusive argument, or when the truth seems to reside in an inaccessibly gray area between the poles, the real consequence is cynical apathy, and therefrom, a lack of analysis or interpretation, and a shifting of attention to the offensiveness and defensiveness of the analyzers, rather than on the music. [...]Huscher does not really let the music speak for itself.

In 1988, Steve Reich completed Different Trains, a piece that draws in part on his own autobiography to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. Reich described Different Trains as pointing towards ‘a new kind of documentary music video theatre’, while Richard Taruskin laud ed the piece as one of the very few adequate responses to the Holocaust. In the same year that Reich finished Different Trains, a Jewish intellectual, Yehuda Elkana, sounded an urgent cautionary note about the continued memorialisation of the Holocaust. Taking seriously Elkana’s concerns, this article is concerned with the sonic aestheticisation and spatialisation of autobiography, memory, and archival testimony within the context of Reich’s own claims about the piece. Following an introductory section, it first asks how—creatively and technically—Reich treats traumatic material before addressing the question of how Different Trains articulates its own poietic present in 1988. Godine 1988. Steve Reich završio je kompoziciju Different trains (Različiti vlakovi), komad koji djelomice navodi na vlastitu autobiografiju kako bi komemorirao žrtve holokausta. Sâm Reich opisuje Different trains kao upućivanje na »novu vrstu dokumentacijskog glazbenog video kazališta«, dok je Richard Taruskin pohvalio komad kao jedan od rijetkih adekvatnih odgovora na holokaust. Iste godine kad je Reich d ovršio Different trains židovski je intelektualac Yehuda Elkana obznanio hitnu opominjujuću opasku o trajnoj memorijalizaciji holokausta. Uzimajući ozbiljno Elkaninu zabrinutost, ovaj se članak pozabavio zvukovnom estetizacijom i spacijalizacijom autobiografskog, memorijskog i arhivskog svjedočenja u kontekstu Reichovih vlastitih tvrdnji o ovom komadu. Nakon uvodnog odlomka prvo se pita kako kreativno i tehnički Reich barata traumatskim materijalom prije nego što se postavi pitanje o tome kako Different trains artikuliraju vlastitu poietičku sadašnjost u 1988. godini. Radije nego staviti u prvi plan uski psihoanalitički pristup, kao što je to često bio slučaj u odnosu na glazbu koju pokreće repeticija, autorica se oslanja na djelo Erica Clarkea o ekološkoj percepciji. Sugerira se da traumatski materijal zahtijeva pristup koji takav materijal ne stavlja isključivo u odnos s određenom traumatskom prošlošću, nego da mora ostati otvoren za načine kojima takva prošlost oblikuje određenu sadašnjost. Ovaj članak vodi misao da odgovorna memorijalizacija ne može zarobiti slušatelje u prošlosti kada sadašnjost zahtijeva nove smjerove solidarnosti i nove načine uključivog pamćenja.

Applying the model of “entangled histories” to music historiography, this article takes up discussions on the Cold War’s relevance to globalized art music of the 1950s and 60s. Technique and aesthetics in works by Henry Cowell, Toshirō Mayuzumi, and Luciano Berio from this period may be understood as resulting from entanglements between socio-political and artistic discourses, especially since these composers were closely associated with institutions and events of the Cold War. Idiosyncrasies in their works and aesthetics, however, cannot merely be explained by recourse to the institutionalized politics of the time. They testify to the composers’ increased awareness of global interconnectedness, addressing a (potentially) worldwide audience and reflecting the multipolarity of post-war modernity.

Applying the model of “entangled histories” to music historiography, this article takes up discussions on the Cold War’s relevance to globalized art music of the 1950s and 60s. Technique and aesthetics in works by Henry Cowell, Toshirō Mayuzumi, and Luciano Berio from this period may be understood as resulting from entanglements between socio-political and artistic discourses, especially since these composers were closely associated with institutions and events of the Cold War. Idiosyncrasies in their works and aesthetics, however, cannot merely be explained by recourse to the institutionalized politics of the time. They testify to the composers’ increased awareness of global interconnectedness, addressing a (potentially) worldwide audience and reflecting the multipolarity of post-war modernity.

Applying the model of “entangled histories” to music historiography, this article takes up discussions on the Cold War’s relevance to globalized art music of the 1950s and 60s. Technique and aesthetics in works by Henry Cowell, Toshirō Mayuzumi, and Luciano Berio from this period may be understood as resulting from entanglements between socio-political and artistic discourses, especially since these composers were closely associated with institutions and events of the Cold War. Idiosyncrasies in their works and aesthetics, however, cannot merely be explained by recourse to the institutionalized politics of the time. They testify to the composers’ increased awareness of global interconnectedness, addressing a (potentially) worldwide audience and reflecting the multipolarity of post-war modernity.

The Danger of Music gathers some two decades of Richard Taruskin's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as the New York Times to full-scale critical essays for leading intellectual journals. Hard-hitting, provocative, and incisive, these essays consider contemporary composition and performance, the role of critics and historians in the life of the arts, and the fraught terrain where ethics and aesthetics interact and at times conflict. Many of the works collected here have themselves excited wide debate, including the title essay, which considers the rights and obligations of artists in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of lively postscripts written especially for this volume, Taruskin, America's \"public\" musicologist, addresses the debates he has stirred up by insisting that art is not a utopian escape and that artists inhabit the same world as the rest of society. Among the book's forty-two essays are two public addresses—one about the prospects for classical music at the end of the second millennium C. E., the other a revisiting of the performance issues previously discussed in the author's Text and Act (1995)—that appear in print for the first time.

Eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin states, \"What had united the long nineteenth century were its optimism and its faith in progress, and these were the Great War's first and most permanent casualties. \"1 \"Optimism\" and \"faith in progress\" had produced Romanticism, a music that by the end of World War I no longer seemed possible. \"2 Hulme was killed by a mortar shell while serving as an artilleryman during the war, but not before he issued the call for \"the dry hardness which you get in the classics.3 Critics began to see intimations of just such a \"dry hardness\" in the works of Igor Stravinsky as early as 1913: [...]Stravinsky, with unmatched flair and accomplishment, is bringing about in music the same revolution that is taking place more humbly and tortuously in literature: he has passed from the sung to the said, from invocation to statement, from poetry to reportage.4 The term \"neo-classical\" was first used a few months before the Octet's premiere by the critic Boris de Schloezer (a fellow Russian exile living in Paris) to describe an earlier Stravinsky work: the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. [...]Richard Taruskin, while using the Octet to frame the chapter on neo-classicism in his landmark Oxford History of Western Music, argues that Stravinsky was essentially giving the critics what they were asking for: [...] these writings about Stravinsky are of great historical moment, not only for what they tell us about the reception of Stravinsky's music, but because they had an enormous impact on...

The publication of a magisterial and innovative one-volume textbook on the history of music, Christopher H. Gibbs's inspired adaptation, revision, and condensation of Richard Taruskin's imposing, brilliant, and provocative six-volume Oxford History of Western Music invites a reconsideration of what their subject, and for that matter--music--itself actually is. Additional volumes of annotated anthologies of scores and recordings back up the new textbook. Although musical examples appear in the printed text, music is represented largely, and properly so, by recordings to which students are advised to listen. Here, Botstein discusses the centrality of recordings as the medium of music.