7T he context for this essay about universals is, paradoxically, the prevalent and pervasive preoccupation with the variability of cultural contexts. My premise is simple: one cannot comprehend and explain the variability of human cultures unless one has some sense of the constancies involved in their shaping. In what follows I have tried to be specific and concrete about the relevance of universals for the theory, history, and criticism of music. Because we are all products of a special and limited time and space, our behavior and beliefs are invariably influenced by the cultural and personal circumstances in which we find ourselves. But, needless to say, it does not follow from this "provenance relativism" that the significance and validity of works of art, theories, and so on are confined to the time and place of their genesis. If they were, the art of the past (for instance, the plays of Sophocles) and the actions of the protagonists in history (Caesar's crossing the Rubicon) would be incomprehensible. And the same is true of concepts, whether in the sciences or the humanities. Darwin's theory of evolution undoubtedly owes a debt to its nineteenth-century, industrial-capitalist context. The validity of the theory is not, however, affected by this provenance, but depends on the empirical testing of the implications derived from the theory. This observation calls attention to questions of methodology.