I work with music, and as such have come into frequent contact with works that use intellectual thinking about music to talk about the way people think about music. Karol Berger, for instance, in his Bach's Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, argues that there was a fundamental shift in thinking about time in the eighteenth century, a "transformation in the way educated Europeans began to conceive of time: just as their experience and image of historical time shifted from cyclical to linear, composers dropped the predominantly cyclical model of time in favor of a predominantly linear one" (Berger, 9). The argument is that thinking about how time is directed within music reveals important differences in the interpretive and aesthetic shades of music in the early vs. late eighteenth century, and that we can see this in the intellectual discussions of the time. That a "cyclical" approach to time is in some way more authentic of an approach to music by Bach or Handel whereas a linear or teleological approach is more appropriate to thinking about the music of Haydn or Mozart.

The problem is that you are using thinkers like Acquinas or Rousseau to ground claims about how Bach's churchgoing audience reacted to his compositions. But how much of the intellectual debates of the day are indicative of, much less influencing the way the general public is thinking about time? As Varwig notes in her "Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach," it isn't at all clear what it might mean for time to be cyclical to a general populace. And that the difficulty of ascertaining the relevance of Intellectual trends on general aesthetic thought in a populace is "one of the many pitfalls associated with reading musical forms or styles as being representative of larger intellectual trends." (Varwig, 178).

My question for this subreddit is how are these issues generally navigated in the historical field? How does one determine what intellectual currents are just that, a discourses that occupy intellectuals but not something the general populace is feeling at all, and which might have an actual impact upon the way normal people interact with the world.

Of course, this would vary from place to place and time period to time period, but I'm asking more about how one navigates this question than seeking an answer. What is the critical discourse on this subject in the literature of historiography? What pieces really want to say intellectual currents have a direct impact on day-to-day lives (I hear Jonathan Israel kind of wants to say this in his Radical Enlightenment series) and what are the critiques of that line of thought?

I'm especially interested in the eighteenth century, but discussions that deal with earlier or later periods are also welcome!

Thank you for any clarification you can provide!

Edit: for the record, I have no problem with intellectual currents being used to think about music. If reading a music theorist reveals some insight or mechanism for thinking about this music that is interesting, then it isn't a problem to incorporate that into how we talk about or theorize about music today. What I am wary of is going further to claim that the differences in the way theorists or philosophers from the past thought about music or time or anything else reflects a fundamental difference in the way everyone thought about these issues. To use a historical source not to say "Hey, here's the way one person thought about something in an interesting way" or even "this issue was really important for a group of really smart and well-educated philosophers," but rather to say "See? This shows how differently people at this time thought about a subject than we do today."