Music, Memory, History

Abstract

For several decades now historians have felt threatened by a loss of interest in history, even believing at times that their existence as an institution is in jeopardy [ … ]. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was taken for granted that we had to know the origins of a thing in order to know its essence. By now, however, this basic tenet has forfeited much of its credibility. (Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 3.)