Between Centres and Peripheries leans into, rather than overcomes, the ‘historical dichotomy’ of the c/p framework. It offers no satisfying ‘between’. But such an intervention is not the purpose of this volume. The title is more a canopy than a frame, encompassing nineteen unique cases, conclusions, and dramatis personae.
Perhaps future productions will invite more local voices to speak more directly on issues that are impossible to ignore in downtown Detroit, namely the presence of expensive “high” culture within close proximity to decades of racist and classist urban neglect. One only needs to drive a few minutes from the Detroit Opera House to see the disparities between the privatized, hyperactive development in the downtown corridor, and the overtaxed and underserviced residential communities to the east.
The question remains, however, what it means to be a “Berliozian” outside the shadow of Jacques Barzun, and whether the defense of Berlioz’s place in the nineteenth-century canon can finally be laid to rest. The story of Berlioz’s global “afterlife” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—what Bloom reluctantly dubs “Berliozism” as a nod to Alex Ross’s book Wagnerism (p. 289)—is, I think, a story worth telling.