While Nettl may be establishing the fairness of his method when he shows that he is asking the same questions of his own school of music that, as an outsider, he has asked of Blackfoot and Iranian and South Indian musical institutions, the strength of the book lies in insights only an insider could come to, in analysis driven by passions that Nettl would never allow himself to utter about anyone's culture but his own. His predominant passion is to reveal the structures of power in the school of music, starting with the power of long-dead masters over the whole enterprise. While Nettl demonstrates through this analysis the artificiality of all value judgments within the musical culture, he appears by and large to be preparing the ground for his criticisms of other structures of that culture rather than criticizing the pantheon as such. In fact, the warmth of devotion he displays to the god Mozart throughout the book serves to establish his standing within the community to criticize at all. He is concerned not just with the hierarchy of students, teachers, and administrators but also with the relative prestige of different musical specializations.
Suppression is only part of the problem.
This is the voice of a scholar who has spent his career asking Western musicians to take notice of other musical cultures than their own and who has had some success in bringing music of other cultures into the Heartland music building, only to find that his colleagues have not taken advantage of this opportunity to reconsider their notions of what music is and what they themselves are up to as teachers and perpetuators of musical culture. Nettl treats many more subjects in this short book, illuminating them all with incisive wit. Given his command of structural analysis, I would have liked especially to read his account of the spaces in the Heartland music building. Also, I would like to see him go on writing this book. There are more than a few recommendations for change there, some implied, others fully articulated.