Canon and the Traditions of Musical Culture

WILLIAM WEBER

In recent years writing on the canon has been done within the compass of individual cultural fields. Poems are poems, and paintings are paintings, it has been assumed; to attempt to see canonic tendencies common to them both would be to mix the proverbial apples and oranges. A few scholars have seen movements of historicist taste moving among the arts, especially during periods such as the late eighteenth century when aesthetic discourse developed rapidly. Such ideas have not found many supporters, and scholars have implicitly decided that the conceptual problems of the canon in any one field alone are challenge enough.1 I find this a healthy choice, but one whose foundations need to be ...

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