I'll begin autobiographically. Several early drafts of this paper had an initial section noting how seldom music theorists raised political questions about their work. Eventually I decided to omit that section, for two reasons. One, simply, was that making that sort of argument isn't what I do best or what most authentically interests me. The other was that in working out the details of the argument I read some of the essays in Richard Leppert's and Susan McClary's collection, Music and Society.' These essays seemed to me already to have made the point I had been trying to make, and to have made it better than I could in any case. But also they had a very different relation to formal analysis than I had expected. In my field, people who seek to raise historical or political questions about formal analysis are by and large pretty hostile to that sort of analysis and to the analysts who perform it, and vice-versa. The former accuse the latter of willfully masking ideology; the latter accuse the former of willfully importing it. So I was unprepared for the generosity I found in, say, Rose Subotnik's essay "On Grounding Chopin." She writes,