"The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the music's critic's potential as an intellectual historian. Criticism is valuable because of its historical specificity; it has the capacity to help illuminate an age's intellectual, social, cultural, and political landscape. As serious journallists, critics follow the rapid and extraordinary pace of musical culture. Writing for a mass media audience, they provide a comprehensive portrait of music that attempts to place cultural events in the context of the social and intellectual tenor of contemporary society. Sensitive to their audience, critics have the capacity to set and direct the musical agenda. They explain new composers and their music to a diversified reading audience.... The analysis tracks the transformation of the critic throughout the 1960s from a professional, authoritative, journalistic personality to an interpretive one whose personal insights and responses to music's aesthetic impact could be scrupulously scrutinized by listeners who sampled from potentially every domain of genre and taste that contemporary music offered." Making Order out of Chaos: Music Criticism in U.S. Newspapers in the 1960s



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