A work that is inherently specialist cannot be expected to concern itself very much with the big picture. On the other hand, it is all too easy for the specialist to criticize a general work for failing to give adequate space to one of the specialist s favorite subjects. Slobin illustrates this latter tendency by restricting his approval almost entirely to specialist essays. The work of the specialist is extremely important to the growth of our knowledge of American music. But it is not the same as the task of the generalist, who must organize, summarize, and perforce arrange the subject into categories.
Categories are a vexing necessity in a survey, whereas in a specialist work they can be ignored.
All that is really necessary for the latter is for the writer to supply a limiting definition to the particular subculture or micromusic being dealt with, without necessarily having to fit it into the larger picture. Subtitles such as Mexican American Music in Los Angeles or Caribbean Popular Music in New York give promise of interesting, in- depth studies, without in themselves promising any contribution to what Slobin calls an overall perspective on American music s fascinating propensity for interchange. Categories are of course arbitrary abstractions with but limited capacity for conveying the whole truth of any subject. Indeed, it is the very challenging of categories working against them, as it were that leads to fresh views. It would be useful to hear additional examples of interchange from others in a variety of fields, together with their ideas about how knowledge of these interchanges could lead to significant renovations of our perceptions of the larger American musical panorama.