"What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives. You want a system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type. And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum hopelessly separated."
— William James, Pragmatism
As readers may have begun to suspect, a certain amount of what I offer on this blog — including the ongoing series of Unused Epigraphs — is derived from the first draft of my book, which was nearly twice as long as the end result. One portion of the introduction was originally devoted to expounding a "pragmatist theory of modern music" (to take a phrase from Martin Brody), one that would attempt to overcome or escape the ideological disputes between "progressives" and "conservatives" that have dominated so much discussion of twentieth-century music. My article "Listen To This" also emerged from sketches for the introduction. But I figured that it would be better to just get on with it, so, in the end, I kept the Preface short.
