At university, a composition lecturer once described his artistic endeavor as freeing “music from the baggage of serious high art music, without actually throwing away the bags.” A similar description applies to the classical music publishing industry today: discarding the baggage accumulated by “history of music” books of old, while retaining the means with which to write something similar. Those new-old bags come in many forms: group biographies of unsung figures, revisionist histories, snapshots of moments in time. Everywhere, histories are being challenged and fragmented, making the discipline of music history gradually more complicated in the process.
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