Th e riddle- character of history inheres in the diffi culty of knowing what the past was . By focusing on the projection into the future of a present that is not yet real-ized, and will never come to be without the faithful subject’s nomination of the truth, Badiou invites a writing of history in the future perfect tense: a history of what, at any moment, will have been the case in the evental present of, say, Paris in 1830. At the same time, his “fi nally objectless subject” directs attention away from the empirical data of history, which form the trace, body, and present of a subjective process (in short, the “objects” of historical knowledge), to encompass the nonempirical realm of the subject and truth itself.
Th e methodological strategies and historical genres in musicology aft er Dahlhaus are legible in subjective terms. Strategy 1, the anticanonic focus on infi nitely expanding “contexts” for musical works, holds a postmodern- liberal suspicion of truth alongside a reconstructionist confi dence in the primacy of empirical data. Its scholars believe that truth is not located in the culturally and
historically contingent groupings of signifi cant works that we call the “canon,”
but they do equate truth with the historical facts themselves. If they did not, they would not attempt to counter truth- claims of “old musicology” apropos of the canonic composers by appeal to additional contextual data. Th ey wag a fi nger at the constructionist basis (in Adorno, Bourdieu, Weber et al.) of older historical
“metanarratives” and declare, fi rst, that such a purported truth is unacceptable, and second, that no body of old- musicological historians can be the bearer of such a false claim. To stamp out this double error, they emphasize transcendent Facts, the vast mass of which will eradicate the false witness of alternative views.
Strategy 1 therefore tends toward an obscure response.
Insofar as it shares the fi rst strategy’s suspicion of the canon, Strategy 2 (the analytical study of “peripheral,” non- German, or non- art music) is partly obscure. While the fi rst strategy attacks the scholars whose truth- claims it can-not abide, the second is more concerned to set out the body of musical works that compose the canon. By expanding what counts as musical value, such schol-ars do not eradicate the canon; they expand and otherwise reconfi gure it, to accommodate the musical autonomy represented by the old canon to the situ-ation in which the contents of a broader marketplace should be valorized. Th eir end is therefore a reactive one, to create an extinguished present.
Strategy 3, which focuses on performances rather than texts, is another react-ive response, which partly acknowledges claims to autonomous value but denies that this is located in the text, the emphatic concept of the artwork which was Beethoven’s Promethean gift to music history. Instead, the intentional object, whose value cannot be realized, is reifi ed and put into circulation in the sphere of public performance and recording.
Strategy 4, the drastic domain of Abbate, is the most obscure of all; it insists that there is value only in the experience, in the transcendent “original” mean-ing of music, against the false claims of transcendence and autonomy borne by an evental body of canonic masterworks. Strategy 4’s focus on the instantaneous pleasure of sound represents a capitalist inversion of Dahlhaus’s dualism, redi-recting musical value from the works of individual humans into the hands of private capital that owns the means of distributing recordings in our present. As a mode of writing music history, it is presentist, interested in the past only inso-far as its detritus might be fl ogged at a profi t on the open market.
Th ere is no faithful subject among the four methodological strategies identi-fi ed by Hepokoski in new musicology. Only an evental history, a history based on a subjective presencing of truth, can off er a way through the epistemologi-cal deadlock. Unlike reconstructionism, evental history does not presume an
empirical basis for explaining how things happened in the past. Unlike con-structionism, evental history does not suppose an empirically verifi able process at work, which can be discovered by sophisticated theoretical tools drawn from sociology, vulgar Marxism, gender studies, Orientalist studies, and so on: no empirical basis can test a theoretical explanation. Unlike Deconstructionism, evental history maintains that despite the lack of empirical basis, there is nev-ertheless truth. We cannot discern the event, either by fi nding it in an archive (reconstructionism) or in a suffi ciently powerful theoretical defi nition (con-structionism), but we know that there was an event, partly because we can see its trace, and partly because there must have been one, since the world has undergone a revolutionary change. We can be sure that truth has burst into the situation, left a trace, and been responded to by subjects. Th e truth of history can be known, though not empirically. Capitalism despises history, because the formerly actual cannot be sold. Despite the prognostications of capitalism’s cul-tural logic, postmodernism, a history can be told, and in a small but nontrivial way it can contribute to a better understanding of the ideological tectonics of modernity.
An evental history off ers a genuine break with old- musicological practices, a revolution rather than a reformation in thinking about music history. A focus on subjects enables the historian to avoid the error of attributing too much histor-ical agency to a particular composer (Beethoven or Rossini), genre (symphony or opera), country (Germany or Russia), artistic register (high or low), and so on, because its organizing principle hinges on a structural relation between these empirical details and the nonempirical truth which is not part of the situation.
Th e facts of music history are an indispensable foreground to any chronicle of music history, but they are not what reveals the truth of that history. Objects, such as these facts, do not have a history; only subjects have a history. It is on its subjects, not its objects, that a new music history should focus.
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