Frank Kogan

maybe the social practice of processing* all music via note-and-staff would be a paradigm? i think there's a pretty tight relationship between its use and the start and end of a particular -- eefinable -- era in composed music: from the introduction of note-and-staff (in the 1500s?) and its breakdown in the 1920s (when people started writing music that couldn't be notated (or required non-agreed-on variants on orthodox notation: the futurists, for example; or the microtone composers)

*you didn't get to be a part of this sub-world of music unless you could read note-and-staff: composition meant writing on note-and-staff; and from pretty early on the music was actually unperformable without its presence -- it LITERALLY got everyone onto the same page!

i also think that harold bloom is offering up something that *might* function as a paradigm in his "anxiety of influence" argument: that this kind of oedipal relationship* is not only present in all the poetry he considers worthy of the name; its central to its practice

(obviously his claim is -- to say the least -- controversial, since it requires casting out lots of writing as not poetry the way he means the team which most other people think IS poetry: in other words, it ISN;T a paradigm bcz half the poets on his list would dispute it; but if he were RIGHT maybe it would be?)

*it's not just a passive or descriptive relationship, in his account; in its active placing of yourself in relationship; and he has seven technical terms of art to describe the stages of the process of this active placing (which i can never remember)