Economic History and Music

Abstract

It is a privilege for an outsider to be allowed to address a distinguished body of professional musicians. But such excursions across the conventional frontiers of academic disciplines are hazardous. Even if we escape the trammels of professional jargon, it is difficult to avoid an appearance of futility or of arrogance: a posture of such humility as to offer nothing worth notice, or one of such pretension as to incur resentment from specialists who rightly distrust intrusion by amateur busybodies. I have therefore prefaced this paper with a quotation chosen, insidiously, for its modesty and the distinction of its author. But it would be less than honest to pretend that I entirely share its pessimism. Not that Tawney ever doubted the existence of a ‘connexion between the quality of intellectual activities and the dull facts of social systems’. He was determined, however, to trounce those who found ‘in infallible formulae of universal application a painless alternative to thought’.