Music and Historical Critique provides a definitive collection of Gary Tomlinson's influential studies on critical musicology, with the watchword throughout being history. This collection gathers his most innovative essays and lectures, some of them published here for the first time, along with an introduction outlining the context of the contributions and commenting on their aims and significance. Music and Historical Critique provides a retrospective view of the author's achievements in bringing to the heart of musicological discourse both deep-seated experiences of the past and meditations on the historian's ways of understanding them.

Contents: Introduction; List of published writings; The web of culture: a context for musicology; Music and the claims of text: Monteverdi, Rinuccini and Marino; Opera and drame; Hugo, Donizetti and Verdi; Italian romanticism and Italian opera: an essay in their affinities; Pastoral and musical magic in the birth of opera; Musical pasts and postmodern musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer and Tomlinson Responds; Giaches de Wert and the discourse of Petrarchism; Cultural dialogics and jazz: a white historian signifies; Unlearning the Aztec cantares (preliminaries to a postcolonial history); Finding ground to stand on; Self, other, and the emergence of musical modernity; Vico's songs: detours at the origins of (ethno)musicology; Ghosts in the machine; Hamlet and Poppea; Learning to curse at 67; Musicology, anthropology, history; 5 pictures of pathos; Il faut méditerraniser la musique: after Braudel; Index.