No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But...the common-language approach of the topic… - Harold Powers

[A. Merriam] neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner.

In applications of the music-as-language metaphor we should attend to diverse musical traditions in musical terms, including not only traditions of the music we study but also traditions of how we study music.

Counterpoint texts tend to resemble one another in the underlying principles of voice-leading they espouse and in the kinds of orderings of rules they provide, but no one could accuse the harmony texts of, let us say, Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann, or of Allen Irvine McHose and Walter Piston--or for that matter, of Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Roger Sessions--of being mutually compatible, either in premise or in practice.