Few today would dispute Michel Foucault's intellectually seismic assertion that discourse defines or “authorizes” knowledge: it renders visible, it “produces” what we see. As he so incisively demonstrated, discourse not only furnishes those conceptual categories through which we conceive reality within a period, but shapes or articulates all our subsequent discoveries. An outstanding feature of the humanities and social sciences in the past several decades has been the entry of those new discourses developed originally by the French Left in the sixties. Within the humanities, figures like Jacques Derrida have had an unquestionable impact, while in anthropology, sociology, and history the cynosures have been Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.

Yet musicology has neglected Bourdieu – we have slighted his insights into power and its deployment of symbols in favor of the social, symbolic analyses of Adorno and Geertz. Among my aims, then, is to raise the question of why those symbolic exchanges that Bourdieu has made “visible,” stimulating insights in so many other fields, still have not done so in ours. For the issue of why we have skirted his political and social grounding of symbols compels us to recognize premises that persist in our field and have buttressed the predominance of other paradigms. However, my focus shall be on how Bourdieu's semiotic analysis of power relations reveals contestation within French music, and particularly opera, of the 1920s, which is obscured by the now prevalent models.