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.

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.

I begin by look­ing at the ways in which avant-garde com­posers during the Cold War were able to gain polit­i­cal sup­port for the idea that their music pos­sessed an inher­ent supe­ri­or­ity (cul­tural high­ness). I then dis­cuss the fail­ure of this model in the early 1990s, as well as alter­na­tive strate­gies devel­oped to fill the gap left by the end of the Cold War and chang­ing cul­tural atti­tudes toward high art. I pro­pose that these new strate­gies ulti­mately fail as well, because inter­net music tech­nol­ogy has destroyed any pos­si­bil­ity for unique cul­tural value within music and re-situated this value in the indi­vid­ual listener’s per­spec­tive. Ideas of cul­tural high­ness there­fore become unten­able, and I end with sev­eral exam­ples of how com­posers today are adapt­ing their values and behav­iour as a result.