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.