White Musical MythologiesIn a narrative that extends from fin de sicle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non European and pre modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of "pure sound." Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that