"Conventional Wisdom offers an analysis of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues. McClary looks at musical history from new angles and moves across a broad range of repertoires - the blues, eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap.".

"McClary shows how conventions perform cultural work and how musical form offers models for the channeling of social energies. Her discussion examines the ways in which composers such as Vivaldi and Mozart drew on the conventions of classical tonality to animate very different cultural agendas, and she demonstrates how Bessie Smith and Eric Clapton could make use of the blues for purposes of their own places and times."--BOOK JACKET.