The genre of out­sider music is prob­lem­atic in many respects. Unlike its art brut or naïve art cousins in the visual realm, it is dif­fi­cult to come up with a spe­cific cat­e­go­riza­tion of out­sider­ness in music. Once we begin an attempt at such a def­i­n­i­tion, philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about con­scious­ness and the nature of art com­pli­cate the issue. There­fore, I address the ques­tion of whether or not out­sider music should be con­sid­ered a genre at all, or if more spe­cific descrip­tors for this music might be more useful.

I begin with an explo­ration of Irwin Chusid’s def­i­n­i­tion of out­sider­ness, as out­lined in his book on the sub­ject, Songs in the Key of Z. From there, I extrap­o­late sev­eral impor­tant ele­ments of his def­i­n­i­tion: out­sider musi­cians must be sin­cere in their work, they must not have self-awareness of their out­sider­ness, and so forth. These are then pre­sented with prob­lem­atic exam­ples, both from the artists Chusid con­sid­ers and from other sources. After deal­ing with Chusid’s def­i­n­i­tion, I sug­ges­tion that the term out­sider music be aban­doned in favour of more spe­cific cat­e­gories. The paper ends by con­sid­er­ing two musi­cians that have some out­sider sen­si­bil­i­ties but that do not fall within Chusid’s def­i­n­i­tion, com­poser Richard Ayres and singer-songwriter Parker Paul.

There is sur­pris­ingly lit­tle musi­co­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture devoted to the sub­ject of nos­tal­gia, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing how widely it is used by musi­col­o­gists in their writ­ing. In this paper, I deal with the ques­tion of nos­tal­gia as a dis­cur­sive tool, and espe­cially with the ways that it can be used as a lit­er­ary authority.

The dis­cus­sion opens with an exam­i­na­tion of the prob­lem­atic term “nos­tal­gia”. I even­tu­ally set­tle on a more open-ended term that is bet­ter suited to my project: nos­tal­gic poten­tial­ity. From there, I look at vary­ing degrees of nos­tal­gic poten­tial­ity as it is used by a wide range of authors; from Wag­ner to Berio to Kaija Saari­aho, to name a few. The two main cat­e­gories of exam­ples that I draw from are: (1) nos­tal­gic poten­tial­ity used to jus­tify progress or a forward-looking atti­tude; and (2) nos­tal­gic poten­tial­ity as it is used to sup­port anti-nostalgic sen­ti­ments. I close the dis­cus­sion by sug­gest­ing other areas that a study of nos­tal­gic poten­tial­ity could be use­fully applied to, and then com­ment on the value of being aware of the use of nos­tal­gic poten­tial­ity in our writ­ing and that of others.