While her analysis of "product" is carefully executed and provocative, her 
discussion of "process" seems to need further clarification. Perhaps we can 
look forward to such a study in Miss Carpenter's future publications. 

Richard L. Crocker 

The articles by Miss Carpenter and myself have produced a gratifying 
divergence of responses. But if the respondents had difficulty responding to us, 
I, at least, find it impossible to formulate a response to them that is both 
comprehensive and comprehensible. In availing myself of this opportunity 
kindly provided by the editors, permit me to make only a very small point 
and a very large one. 

As to the small point, one or two of the respondents seemed confused as to 
my own position. I was, in fact, trying to be soft-spoken; now let me speak 
hard: the "common notions" I presented (I think they are clearly identified) 
are emphatically not my own. I fail to see how any intelligent person, upon 
due reflection, could continue to subscribe without qualification to those 
simple-minded ideas I put forward under a politely collective "we." I trust 
that no one shares the ideas in question; if someone does, he does not share 
them with me. 

Mr. Cone seems unwilling to believe that any intelligent person, even 
Miss Carpenter or myself, could really intend to take positions as unreasonable 
as our language might suggest. Mr. Cone seems sure that a quick trip to the 
dictionary will straighten us out. For my part, I must reluctantly assure him 
that my position is still as unreasonable as it first appeared to him. Mr. Cone's 
own position is, of course, quite clear. 

As to the large point: I found both encouragement and horror in the fact 
that Miss Carpenter and seemingly all the respondents either explicitly 
asserted the decisive importance of historical concepts in resolving questions 
of aesthetics, or else tacitly agreed to such importance by invoking historical 
ideas to illuminate their arguments. I myself happen to think that history 
provides the only reliable answers to such problems, but I did not expect to 
find a half-a-dozen aestheticians agreeing with me. From this I take 
encouragement. 

What horrifies me is the content of many of the historical ideas invoked. 
The basic categories in which we have been trained to think about music 
history are not merely open to question; when questioned seriously, they 
often turn out to embody outright fabrication with little or no meaningful 
relationship to observable fact. It would be hard to construct on purpose a 
more fantastic and unwarranted system of assertions about Western society 
from 700 to 1500 than the system retailed under the heading "Middle Ages" 
in books in common use. But, you say, we are not here discussing the Middle 

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Ages. To that I reply that the very substance of many of the ideas advanced 
depends upon their being attached to an alleged historical period "ca. 1420-
1910" and that this substance is clarified, "objectified," perhaps even defined 
by being distinct and different from "the medieval world-view." Descriptions 
of European culture that contrast (no matter how tacitly) high-level generali-
ties about the modern period with high-level nonsense about the medieval 
one risk serious difficulties. Assertions that such-and-such (say, formal 
objectivity) is a distinctive feature of modern thought are weakened if such-
and-such keeps popping up in medieval thought as well. My own feeling is 
that these observations apply, one way or the other, to many of the arguments 
presented in this colloquium. 

I would like to add that more is involved than just my own notorious idio-
syncrasies. Read a paragraph by William C. Bark, in his book Origins of the 
medieval world (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958, p. 109); he is speaking of 
conceptions of the Middle Ages: 

All the old views-the Renaissance aesthetic contempt, the Enlighten-
ment's anticlerical sneers, the economic snobbery of the early twentieth 
century-are still alive. All are the products of ignorance and bias, the 
more surprising because proponents of these views abhorred those evils 
and thought they were free of them. All are primarily negative. All are 
quite wrong. 

And if we have been that badly informed on the first two-thirds of Western 
history, how goes it with the last third? 

What is most horrifying is not that such arbitrary historical generalities 
exist, but that they are blandly accepted in our own field as if they were fact. 
Well-educated, intelligent musicologists will diligently root out errors of 
terminology, bibliographic reference, birth dates of minor composers, or will 
argue endlessly (and sometimes with profit) about the function of a single 
note in a small piece; yet these same intelligent people may accept without a 
wince a statement such as, "The Middle Ages produced, not works of art, 
but a synthesis of the arts ... " It is not just the level of generality I call into 
question here, it is the truth of the assertion. I do not say that we can afford 
carelessness in detail; I merely say that we can afford it even less in our most 
high-level thoughts about history. 

To apply this summarily to the matter at hand, it seems to me that the 
idea Miss Carpenter constructs of the work of art in Western culture was not 
the only one in force during the period she has in mind, was not the way 
Europeans thought about music; and that this same idea could be applied 
with equal validity to certain kinds of pieces in music from the Middle Ages 
-or from other times and places. Et sic de ceteris. It seems to me that Western 
music, along those stretches known to me, shows such a variety of simultan-
eous alternatives that the attempt to marshal them behind a stately procession 
of Weltanschauungen can only continue to yield unsatisfactory results. 

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