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Peter Henry Lang, a Hungarian-born musicologist, just a week after reviewing one of David Tudor’s performances, steps on the philosophical soapbox. He compares Tudor’s composers to children who ignorantly destroy the highly valued tradition of Western Art Music. Echoing contemporaneous critiques of high formalism leveled by Theodor Adorno, Stanley Cavell, and many others at midcentury, Lang also critiques the excessively scientific approaches to musical composition as insensitive to the texture of “human frailty.” In Lang’s view, the avant-garde, driven by an excessive love for machines and science, has become in its own way metaphysical, cleaving to an apocalyptic vision of life. His critique exhibits the reflexes of midcentury positivism (“the facts contradict it”) and nostalgic conceptions of genius, originality, and universal historical progress based in a “heartbeat of culture.” Elliott Carter, a comparatively traditional high modernist who left considerable place for human gesture in his work, serves as the more accessible foil for the nihilistic indulgences of Tudor’s experimentalism.