Music at the Limits

Paul Kennedy, Fukuyama, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Thomas Friedman, Benjamin Barber

what if a new hybrid identity is being slowly made apparent, one for whom neither territory nor traditional identity will serve as they once did?

the older Beethoven abandons an anthropocentric classical worldview inherited from the Enlightenment and, like the literary and philosophic Romantics who were his contemporaries, he returns again and again to a transfigured or renovated classical world, even to the point of adapting classical Greek meters to organize his great Seventh Symphony in an attempt to “evoke the ancient pagan world via a fantasy reconstruction of its music.” This, says Solomon, is a Classic-Romantic revalidation of “the cultural, ethical, and aesthetic premises of Antiquity.” It is also, we need to add, yet another instance of what E. M. Butler has called the tyranny of Greece over