Writing words on the way other words were written covers a broad range of academic activity, from semantics and linguistics to literary theory and the classics; this does not mean to say that doing so, writing on writing, can be anything other than the apogee of hermeneutic schizophrenia. Take immortality, a notion on which much has been written. We have accepted that, ultimately, our political, theological, philosophical and even scientific strife has been on account of our effort to attain physical immortality. And yet any relevant rhetoric is currently in denial; all disciplines unanimously declare that ‘we will always be mortal’, and then indulge in all the aforementioned research activity aiming at the contrary. Alternative ways of negotiating immortality do exist of course, albeit only in the realms of megalomanic medical paranoia and mental disorder.

The image of Jimi Hendrix burning an electric guitar on stage has emerged as an emblem of 20th century music. We read that: “The set ended with Hendrix burning his guitar onstage, then smashing it to bits and tossing them out to the audience. The show instantly catapulted Hendrix into US stardom”. A few years prior to that near sacrificial ritual taking place, a well-known and too frequently referred to political group burned books in a square of Europe. No particular sociological insight is required to discern that acts of middle class vandalism–the Western underclasses have always been perfectly aware of the status they enjoy globally, for all the supposed solidarity with the poor of the world–are instigated, staged and promoted by agents whose main interest may only be extraneous to literature or music.

Our western music history is defined by the constant modification of musical activity from intuitive interactions with the phenomena of natural and organised sounds into a set of characteristic and formulaic practices understood in terms of familiarity. Furthermore, in the 20th and 21st centuries, owing to the establishment of copyright laws and the gradual extinction of anonymous music and also due to developments in mass distribution of published materials, the growth of music as an ideological medium has been rapid. Whether it be the blut und boden quality in the music of Sibelius, Vaughan Williams or Strauss, the deliberate innervations of the amorphous post-war avant-garde movements, the seemingly subversive genres of the rock and roll traditions or the aggressive, highly politicised and radical music of the North-American and European under-classes, the framework within which most Western music is conceived and operates in remains the same: through the proliferation of sound products, its role becomes steadily and exclusively emblematic of attitudes ascribed to it by the producer.