A Dialectical Approach to Music History

Abstract

History is a dialogue with the dead. And the difficulty of the historian's task, as well as the heavy moral responsibility that this task imposes upon him, lies in the truism stated by Professor Woodbridge, that The questions we ask of the dead, only we can answer (Woodbridge, 1916:9). What is deplorable is that we so seldom attempt to engage in a genuine dialogue with the dead. We substitute instead a pseudo-dialogue, in which the answers to the questions we ostensibly ask are prepared by us in advance in our own minds, conditioned by prejudice or by pre-established theoretical concepts.

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