This talk works through some under-examined troubles besetting de-Romanticized criticism that uses the mechanisms of music to negate the force of subjectivity. It does so by drawing on a pair of categories first developed for the analysis of literature and the visual arts: A. D. Nuttall’s “transparent” and “opaque” modes. Nuttall’s categories present both a challenge and opportunity by bringing back into view an older mode of criticism that can see not just different things from the new, but more things, and with no loss of intellectual rigor or weakening of validity as historical and aesthetic insight.