In recent years, studies of the British composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) have been undergoing a quiet revolution. Until 1990, Elgar was the provenance of either biographical studies (including those of journalists Robert Anderson and Michael Kennedy, enthusiast Jerrold Northrop Moore, and musicologist Diana McVeagh) or amateur Elgar lovers (within the pages of the Elgar Society Journal). For the most part, these studies, essays, and thought pieces centered on Elgar, only occasionally working outward to other people and events. This was fine, though, since the large body of readers interested in Elgar's music were amateur enthusiasts themselves. Since 1990, with the growth of interest in British music studies generally, more academic music professionals, including Byron Adams, Jeremy Dibble, Jenny Doctor, Daniel Grimley, Christopher Grogan, Nalini Gwynne, Timothy Jackson, Christopher Mark, Deborah Heckert, Matthew Riley, Julian Rushton, Aidan Thompson, among many others, have begun considering Elgar and his place within British history and music history generally. This multiplicity of perspectives has led to a rift, one that pits contextualists who would situate Elgar into the larger world around him with those who would maintain the “biocentric” qualities of past scholarship by focusing on the man and his music. This is not as simple as a history-versus-analysis debate. Almost all the parties involved look to the music at one point or another within their discussion of the composer. But some do so to help inform the context and open Elgar up to the wider world around him, while others do so to close off difficult issues Elgar's context suggests, such as British imperialism and patriotism.

Harper-Scott's book may be an attempt to bridge this divide. Like the contextualists, he hopes to link Elgar to larger issues around the composer. But he also brings to his work strict analytical methods. The contextual focus of his study is Elgar's “ironic, pessimistic” (223) rejection of the commonly accepted nineteenth-century Beethovenian heroic narrative trajectory. This compositional model, called per aspera ad astra (often also stated as “from darkness to light”), signifies an individual's triumph over some tribulation. By overcoming that obstacle, the individual's transcendence further creates a true community among human beings. While this plot archetype works best within Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth symphonies, many other composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries felt it necessary either to refute it (Hector Berlioz within Symphonie Fantastique), to continue it (Schumann's Fourth Symphony), or to transfigure it (Brahms's First Symphony; Vaughn-Williams's A Sea Symphony). Harper-Scott picks two works to demonstrate Elgar's rejection of Beethoven's plot archetype: the First Symphony and the tone poem Falstaff (called a “symphonic study” by the composer) based on William Shakespeare's character in Henry IV and Henry V. Elgar's rejection of Beethoven's model makes Elgar, in Harper-Scott's view, a modernist.

To show this rejection, the theoretical focus of Harper-Scott's monograph is a three-pronged approach, mixing two methods of music analysis with the philosophical system of Martin Heidegger. This is dense and complex writing, though frequently unfortunately clubby in its approach (mixing, e.g., references to Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings, Harold Bloom, Friedrich Hegel, Theodor Adorno, T. S. Eliot, nursery rhymes recently used by the Dave Matthews Band such as “I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal” [226], and a concise definition of “truth” [236]). Harper-Scott has consequently reached his goal of creating an analytical monograph on the composer, but it is one that neither the vast majority of amateur Elgar lovers nor those interdisciplinary scholars interested in the social aspects of Elgar's music will be able to understand or use.

On the musical side, Harper-Scott mixes elements of Schenkerian analysis with the Sonata Theory recently constructed mainly by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy. Both of these methods are hard analyses and essentially reductive ones that focus most easily on elements of nonprogrammatic instrumental music from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (though they have been employed successfully for music written later than that period). Both Schenker and Sonata Theory are not really readily conceived for the highly chromatic music of Elgar. Consequently, Harper-Scott has to shift certain elements of the analytical models to fit his Elgar analyses. Into these two complex musical-analytical methods, he mixes Heidegger's conceptualization of the Dasein, what Harper-Scott calls “Literally, ‘Being-there’; Heidegger's term for the way of Being typical humans, for whom alone of all beings, Being is an issue” (233). Melding these three processes allows Harper-Scott to “form a belief in meaning, and the desirability of discovering it, in musical works and human life” (ix). Of course, this melding means that Harper-Scott must explain his methods in detail. Consequently, he does not begin any earnest musical analysis until page 65 of his book.

Within these pages, Harper-Scott's straw person is the “New Musicology,” a mixture of contextual and social history, along with elements of literary-critical theory, that has been a strong tenet of musicology since the 1980s. While he tries to distance himself from this ideal (on 155 he mentions that any confusion with the “New Musicology” would be a “dangerous misunderstanding, and one I am eager to prevent”), this is precisely what he eventually accomplishes within his book. Using a great deal of philosophical and literary critiques to inform his scholarship, he maps multiple layers of meaning onto these two compositions (what he refers to within his introduction to the Falstaff analysis as a “meta-paratext” to the music itself [109]). These gyrations are often illuminating, and certainly fascinating to follow, but ultimately, Harper-Scott's work (as he might say), even though erudite and wry, is often far too recondite for all but the highly specialized reader. Because of this, Elgar scholarship will remain, for the time being, divided.