Events, Dear Boy, Events: Jeremy Coleman dives down a Dahlhausian rabbit hole in search of Badiou

J.P.E. Harper-Scott’s The Event of Music History is a difficult, intermittently brilliant and often frustrating book that is at the very least to be commended for taking such a bold, revisionist approach to the task of writing music history. Harper-Scott’s wide and prolific output may be already familiar to readers of this journal: a musicologist and thinker explicitly of the political Left whose writing has focused on the relations between music, social class, capitalist ideology and revolution, as well as questions of psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality.