Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability 0190871202, 9780190871208

Citation preview

Broken Beauty

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Broken Beauty Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability Joseph N. Straus

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Joseph N. Straus 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Straus, Joseph Nathan, author. Title: Broken beauty : musical modernism and the representation of disability / Joseph N. Straus. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] Identifiers: LCCN 2017048648| ISBN 9780190871208 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190871239 (companion website) Subjects: LCSH: People with disabilities in music. | Music—20th century—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Modernism (Music) Classification: LCC ML3877 .S77 2018 | DDC 780.87—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048648 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

For Sally, as always

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CONTENTS

Preface  ix About the Companion Website   xiii 1 . Representing Disability   1 2. Narrating Disability   40 3. Stravinsky’s Aesthetics of Disability   69 4. Madness   88 5. Idiocy   104 6. Autism   125 7. Therapeutic Music Theory and the Tyranny of the Normal   155 Works Cited   185 Index  199

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P R E FA C E

Modernist music is centrally concerned with bodies and minds that deviate from normative standards for appearance and function. The musical features that make music modern are precisely those that can be understood to represent disability. Modernist musical representations of disability both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic age, a period when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a corresponding urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a corresponding urge to incarcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about. The most characteristic features of musical modernism—​ fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—​can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/​ disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. These features of musical modernism can, of course, be understood and explained in many different ways. Disability is only one of many forces at work, but I will argue that it is a central one, and that it has been generally overlooked. In making this argument, I draw on two decades of work in disability studies (sometimes known as cultural disability studies or critical disability studies) and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of disability into musicology and music theory. This interdisciplinary enterprise offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability, and shifting our attention from biology and medicine to culture. Disability is simultaneously real, tangible, and physical and an imaginative creation whose purpose is to make sense of the diversity of human morphology, capability, and behavior. Against the traditional medical model of disability, which sees it as a bodily defect requiring diagnosis and normalization or cure (under the direction of medical professionals), this new sociocultural model of disability sees it as

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cultural artifact, something that is created by and creates culture, including musical culture. Disability is simultaneously a material reality and a cultural manifestation. Its impact on modernist music and the ways that modernist music in turns shapes disability are the subjects of this book. Along the way, I  will try to reclaim a number of formerly stigmatized terms. The first of these is disability itself. In the disability/​ability system, there is no overarching term, like gender (for male and female) or sexuality (for straight and LGBTQ). Instead, disability itself acts as both the overarching category and one of its terms. And the stigma is built right into the term: its dis. A central premise of this book, as of disability studies in general, is that disability marks a difference, not a deficit. I will thus use the term in the spirit of biodiversity and neurodiversity, as entailing a welcome and enriching variation in human embodiment. This book claims disability. For the disability conditions I  will be exploring, I  prefer traditional, common-​language terms to their medicalized counterparts. Thus, I  will speak of madness (not mental illness) and idiocy (not mental retardation). And I  will speak directly of deformity and disfigurement, without euphemism. In the case of autism, there is no common-​language equivalent—​ this was a medicalized category from the outset, split off from earlier classifications of madness and idiocy. In every case, my goal will be to strip the term of stigma and to claim it as a positive and enriching human identity, as well as a resource for artistic and musical creativity. At the same time, I will fully acknowledge and explore the contradictions, conflicts, and paradoxes at the core of musical modernism’s representations of disability. Musical modernism draws on traditional tropes of disability representation, sorting disabled bodies into a small number of stereotypical categories. Some of these tropes are explicitly stigmatizing, like the Obsessive Avenger or Demonic Cripple. Others seem laudatory (the Sweet Innocent, the Saintly Sage, the Mad Genius), but are no less dehumanizing. These tropes have arisen from and encouraged critical responses that marginalize and enfreak disabled bodies. Within modernist music, the disability representations we will explore very often embody pernicious stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable resource, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized, eugenic-​era attitudes toward disability. Music is both blessed and cursed with a technical language that permits us to describe musical objects and relationships with wonderful precision but that can be an impermeable barrier to comprehension for the uninitiated. In the text for this book, and in the brief descriptions of specific musical passages it includes, technical terms are generally kept to a

[ x ] Preface

minimum, and used more for their suggestive metaphorical and figurative implications than their precise definition (consonance and dissonance, harmony and counterpoint, sentence, phrase, inversion, symmetry, development, cadence). Instead of the traditional musical examples in staff notation, this book incorporates more than one hundred short analytical videos. These videos are designed to guide readers into the musical representation and narration of disability. The analytical videos were directed and engineered by Tim Mastic, a brilliant graduate student at the City University of New York. Other wonderful graduate students—​Megan Lavengood, Simon Prosser, and Kristi Hardman—​assisted in the preparation of examples in music notation and with proofreading. Also at CUNY, I am grateful to my colleague, William Rothstein, for guidance in Schenkerian matters. In writing this book, I benefited enormously from the incisive critique offered by two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press, as well as from conversations over many years with Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson, Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-​Moulton, Jennifer Iverson, William Cheng, Bruce Quaglia, and many other scholars in the emerging field of music and disability. An earlier, highly condensed version of c­ hapter 1 appeared as “Modernist Music and the Representation of Disability” in the colloquy “On the Disability Aesthetics of Music,” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 69/​2 (2016): 530–​36. Earlier versions of ­chapters 3 and 6 appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies as “Representing the Extraordinary Body:  Musical Modernism’s Aesthetics of Disability” and “Autism and Postwar Serialism as Neurodiverse Forms of Cultural Modernism.” The Oxford Handbook was the brainchild of Suzanne Ryan, whose advocacy for scholarship on music and disability has been crucial for the development of the field and for the writing of the present book. I am deeply grateful to Suzanne, and to the entire editorial team at Oxford University Press. As with my previous books, my deepest debt of gratitude is owed to my beloved life partner, Sally Goldfarb. This book is gratefully dedicated to her.

Preface  [ xi ]

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ABOUT THE COMPANION WEBSITE

Instead of traditional musical examples in staff notation, this book incorporates more than one hundred short analytical videos. These videos include musical scores in staff notation, analytical annotations, and audio recordings, all with the author’s narrative voiceover. Each video is available in two versions: with captioning and without captioning. These videos are available on the Companion Website that accompanies this book. Videos available online are indicated in the text with Oxford’s symbol .

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Broken Beauty

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CHAPTER 1

Representing Disability Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation of disabled bodies. Its most characteristic features—​ fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—​can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/​ disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Although modernist music embodies negative, eugenic-​era attitudes toward disability, it also affirmatively claims disability as a resource, thus manifesting its disability aesthetics. Disability Aesthetics   2 Defining Disability   4 Defining Musical Modernism   6 Locating Cultural Modernism within the History of Disability   7 Literary Representations of Disabled Bodies   10 Typology of Disability Representation   10 Modes of Apprehension   12 Before and After Modernism   13 Modernist Musical Representations of Disability   16 Deformity/​Disfigurement   17 Mobility Impairment   24 Madness  26 Idiocy  31 Autism  33 Claiming Disability   38

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DISABILITY AESTHETICS

In their search for new kinds of beauty, modernist artists claim disability as a valuable resource.

Disability scholar Tobin Siebers contends that modern art espouses a disability aesthetics, finding new sorts of beauty in bodies that are fractured, disfigured, and otherwise extraordinary in comparison to bodies that are presumptively normal. According to Siebers (2010, 3), the representation of disability is one of modernism’s “defining concepts”: Disability aesthetics refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body—​ and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—​as the sole determination of the aesthetic. Rather, disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and yet it is not less beautiful but more so, as a result.1

Whether one thinks of the still-​shocking depictions of wounded World War I veterans by Otto Dix; Picasso’s cubist portraits of fractured bodies; the asymmetrical, disfigured bodies in the Viennese expressionism of Schiele and others; or the large number of paintings and sculptures in the first half of the twentieth century that depict strange or distorted bodies, it does seem as though Siebers is right to ask, “To what concept, other than the idea of disability, might be referred modern art’s love affair with misshapen and twisted bodies, stunning variety of human forms, intense representation of traumatic injury and psychological alienation, and unyielding preoccupation with wounds and tormented flesh?” (2010, 4). For Siebers and other scholars of modernism in the arts, disability functions as an artistic resource:  a source of images and an impetus for narrative. Disability is not a deficit to be filled, an obstacle to be overcome, or a deviation to be avoided; rather, it is a desirable and defining artistic quality. To put it most simply, disability enables artistic modernism. Disability scholars and activists speak of claiming disability, that is, of 1.  Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (2010), provided the impetus for this book, and his reference to “beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken” provided its title. For related studies of the representation of disability in modern art, see Ann Millett-​Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (2010) and Carol Poore, Disability in Twentieth-​Century German Culture (2007). For a related perspective on disability and aesthetics, one that takes full account of the modernist dalliance with eugenic ideas of degeneration, see Michael Davidson, “Aesthetics” (2015a) and “The Rage of Caliban: Disabling Bodies in Modernist Aesthetics” (2015b). Like Davidson’s discussion of Zemlinsky’s opera Der Zwerg, this book treats modernist music “as a site for studying musical representation of bodily difference.”

[ 2 ] Broken Beauty

destigmatizing it and choosing it as an affirmative political, social, and cultural identity.2 In that sense, modernist art claims disability. Modernist art aestheticizes disability into new forms of beauty. Aestheticizing disability does not mean prettifying it or normalizing it to conform to traditional standards of beauty, however. Rather, it means the significant broadening and, in some cases, the radical subversion and disruption of traditional notions of beauty. Artworks that exemplify an aesthetics of disability may thus “turn traditional conceptions of aesthetic beauty away from ideas of the natural and healthy body” (Siebers 2010, 134)  and toward bodies that are deformed, disfigured, fractured, fragmented, and thus disabled. In short, modernist art bends beauty in the direction of disability. Siebers claims bluntly that “the modern in art manifests itself as disability” (2010, 140). Is it possible to make a similar claim about modernist music? Can we say that the modern in music manifests itself as disability? Can we say that modernist music has a fundamental interest in representing the disabled human body? Can we say that modernist music claims disability? This book will argue the affirmative for each of these questions. The sorts of qualities that make music distinctively modern—​forms made of discrete blocks, stratified textures, immobile harmonies, radical simplification of materials, juxtaposition of seemingly incommensurable elements, extremes of internal complexity and self-​reference—​can be understood as representations of disabled bodies. Modernist music does many things, of course, and for many different reasons, but it maintains a fundamental interest in disability. In moving disability representation from a stigmatized periphery to a valorized center of artistic expression, modernist music claims disability. Modernist music claims disability by making it a central concern and drawing on it as a valuable source of new kinds of musical combinations and musical effects. But the specific manner in which it stakes that claim varies quite a lot. The claim of disability is made amid—​sometimes in defiance of and sometimes in compliance with—​traditional stigmatizing attitudes toward disability, given added weight during a eugenic era. As a result, modernist representations of disability are often complex, riven with conflicts and internal contradictions. Amid these cross-​currents, however, we often find in modernist music some sense of pleasure in and celebration of the disabled body.

2. On the idea of affirmatively “claiming disability” as a personal and political identity, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (1998).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y  

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DEFINING DISABILITY

Disabled bodies (and minds) make up a heterogeneous category whose members are marked as abnormal with respect to local norms of appearance and function, provoking the questions: What happened to you? What’s wrong with you? How did you get this way?

Disability is a broad category with poorly marked and permeable boundaries. Even in comparison with other expansive “minority” identities (like woman or Latinx or queer), disability is notably heterogeneous, embracing a wide range of differences in bodily functioning and appearance, including (but not limited to) facial deformities, unusual bodily proportions, missing limbs, chronic diseases, sensory impairments (like deafness and blindness), mobility impairments, psychiatric and developmental disorders, and cognitive or intellectual impairments. We might imagine disability as a category with central, prototypical members: more peripheral members enter the category based on their degree of resemblance to the prototypes. Just as the category of “bird” is populated by prototypical members (sparrow and robin) and less typical members (penguin and ostrich), we might think of disability as having prototypical members like blindness, deafness, facial or bodily deformity, mobility impairment, madness, and intellectual or developmental disabilities. For the most part, this book will be concerned with the relatively central and uncontroversial members of this category.3 Rather than attempt to impose and enforce a clear boundary on this category based on the bodily (dis)qualifications of its members, this book shifts attention away from the inherent qualities of bodies and toward the social and cultural contexts in which some bodies are understood as disabled. In thinking of disability this way, I  follow a broad consensus within the field of disability studies. For Mitchell and Snyder, disabilities are “cognitive and physical conditions that deviate from normative ideas of mental ability and physiological function.”4 For Garland-​Thomson, disability is “a pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of

3.  On general philosophical and cognitive issues associated with categorization, see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things:  What Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987). For exploration of specifically musical categories, see Ian Quinn, “General Equal-​Tempered Harmony” (2006) and Lawrence Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (2002). 4.  David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation” (1997), 1.

[ 4 ] Broken Beauty

bodily variations.”5 In similar terms, this book will understand disability as any culturally stigmatized bodily difference.6 By “difference,” I refer to deviation from whatever is understood as normal in a particular time and place. By “bodily,” I refer to the full range of physical and mental differences to which the human body is subject, whether congenital or acquired, including physical and mental illnesses or diseases, temporary or permanent injuries, and a variety of nonnormative bodily characteristics understood as disfiguring. By “stigmatized,” I  refer to any negative social valuation (Goffman 1963). By “culturally,” I  embrace a conception of disability as socially and culturally constructed, a historically contingent term whose meaning varies with time, place, and context. Disabled bodies are marked as abnormal with respect to some prevailing normative standard for bodily functioning or appearance. The concept of the normal (including related terms like abnormality, norms, normative, and normalization) is central to this broad conception of disability. Disabled bodies are perceived as abnormal, as violating norms of appearance and functioning, and as therefore in need of normalization. In the real world, such bodies typically provoke a series of familiar questions:  How did you get that way? What happened to you? What’s the matter? What is wrong with you? Disability creates a commotion, a disturbance in the norms that regulate bodily appearance and function, and these sorts of questions are a common response. Indeed, we might define a disability as any bodily condition (including appearance and/​or behavior) that leads people to ask such questions. Disability seems to require an explanatory story, and it is the telling of the story, rather than any inherent quality of a mind or body, that signals the presence of disability.7

5.  Rosemarie Garland-​ Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” (2004a), 76. 6.  This broad definition of disability underpins my previous study of disability in music: Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (2011), 9–​11. 7. The role of the concept of “normal” in constructing disability is the central theme of Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995). For Davis’s more recent reconsideration of normality and disability, see The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era (2013). The sorts of questions evoked by nonnormative bodies, and the range of possible responses to these questions, are explored in three important publications by Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson:  “The Story of My Work:  How I Became Disabled” (2014); “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” (2002); and Staring: How We Look (2009). The idea that disability creates a commotion comes from Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (2005).

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6

DEFINING MUSICAL MODERNISM

Modernist musical works make up a heterogeneous category whose members are marked as abnormal with respect to the normatively sounding and functioning music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provoking the questions: What happened to you? What’s wrong with you? How did you get this way?

Like disability, musical modernism is a broad category with poorly marked and permeable boundaries. Rather than seek firm starting and ending dates, or a definitive list of shared style characteristics, we might take the same route as with disability, imagining it as a category with central, prototypical members; more peripheral members enter the category based on their degree of resemblance to the prototypes. The category of musical modernism might be conceived with reference to prototypical composers and works, including Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire, String Quartet No. 2, String Trio); Stravinsky (Petrushka, Three Pieces for String Quartet, Rite of Spring, Piano Concerto, The Rake’s Progress, Requiem Canticles); Ives (String Quartet No. 2); Bartók (String Quartets No. 3 and No. 4, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta); Webern (Bagatelles, Op.  9, Piano Variations, Op.  27); Berg (Wozzeck, Lyric Suite); Ruth Crawford Seeger (String Quartet); and Babbitt (Composition for Four Instruments). These prototypically modernist works will be the focus of the disability-​oriented interpretations in this book. In addition to whatever musical qualities these works may share, they are united in their agonistic relationship to the conventionally tonal, classic-​romantic music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With that in mind, we can define modernism in music as we defined disability a moment ago, not as a quality that inheres in a body or work, but rather in its relationship to a regulating, normative standard. Modernist music is marked as abnormal with respect to the normatively sounding and functioning music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like disabled bodies, modernist music causes a commotion and seems to require an explanatory story. Its deviations from musical convention are shocking and profound and have provoked endless critical response to the implicit questions, How did you get that way? What happened to you? What’s the matter? What is wrong with you? Modernist music in general seems to provoke those questions, as (synecdochically) do lots of specific features of modernist music.8 As Maus (2004, 156) observes with respect to atonality, “Non tonal music seems almost to require a story about how it 8.  Standard accounts of modernist music that implicitly seek to answer these questions include Robert Morgan, Twentieth-​Century Music (1991); Brian Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (1996); Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early

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got that way. . . . The dependence of non-​tonal music on a special narrative of origins marks it as different from the self-​sufficient, individualized works of tonal music at the center of the repertoire.”9 This sense of modernist music as a deviant Other with respect to a self-​evidently normal musical tradition has been remarkably persistent, coloring critical reception up to the present day. Traditional tonal music is understood as normal in appearance and function; atonal music is understood as disabled, in the specific ways I  will discuss. From that point of view, we might define modernist music not in terms of any inherent features, but rather as music that leads people to ask for justification and explanation.   DEFINING DISABILITY AND MUSICAL MODERNISM

As a heterogeneous

Disability

Musical Modernism

Blindness, deafness, mobility

Stravinsky, Bartòk,

category with

impairment, facial or bodily

Schoenberg, Webern, Berg,

prototypical

deformity, madness, idiocy

Crawford Seeger, Varèse,

members

(intellectual and developmental

Ives, Babbitt.

disability), autism. In relation to normative standards

Understood as deviant or abnormal

Understood as deviant or

with respect to traditional and

abnormal with respect to

prevailing standards for bodily

traditional and prevailing

appearance and function.

standards for musical form and construction.

As provoking and seeming to require

How did you get this way? What’s wrong with you?

How did you get this way? What’s wrong with you?

an explanation

LOCATING CULTURAL MODERNISM WITHIN THE HISTORY OF DISABILITY

The period of cultural modernism coincides with the consolidation of the medical model of disability during a eugenic age.

Twentieth Century (2010); Glenn Watkins, Soundings:  Music in the Twentieth Century (1988); and Arnold Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (1999). 9. Fred Maus situates musical modernism in relation to regulating norms of gender and sexuality in “Sexual and Musical Categories” (2004).

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8

In the very broadest historical terms, there are three ways of conceptualizing disability, each of which is deeply intertwined with representational regimes in literature and the arts, including music. First, in the religious model, which begins with the first recorded discussions of disability and persists to some extent to the present day, disability is understood as an outward mark of divine disfavor or sinfulness or, in some cases, of transcendent spirituality. Second, in a medical model gathering force through the nineteenth century and achieving epistemological hegemony in the early twentieth century, disability is understood as a pathological condition that inheres in a body or mind, and which it is the task of medical professionals (physicians or psychiatrists) to diagnose and, if possible, to normalize or cure. Within the medical model, two apparently contradictory, but actually complementary approaches came to dominate thinking about disability in the first half of the twentieth century. On one hand, this period coincides with what Stiker (2000) calls “the birth of rehabilitation.” In response especially to the carnage of the Great War, medical science and medical institutions turned their attention increasingly toward the normalization and possible cure of physical and psychic wounds. On the other hand, a eugenic approach achieved unprecedented heights of influence. As a result, people with disabilities, especially cognitive and emotional disabilities, were widely understood as a menace to the health of the community and nation, and were incarcerated in institutions, sometimes sterilized, and often left to die of neglect in appalling conditions.10 Cultural modernism emerges in an eliminationist, eugenic age, and its disability representations often bespeak a corresponding horror and fear of the nonnormative body or mind. As Siebers observes, “eugenics weds medical science to a disgust with mental and physical variation” (2010, 27). These apparently contradictory responses, both aspects of the medical model of disability, are two complementary features of what Garland-​ Thomson (2004b) calls the “cultural logic of euthanasia”:  the imperative either to normalize disabled bodies (through medical intervention) or to eliminate them (either by sequestration in institutions or in more direct

10. On the coincidence of cultural modernism with the “birth of rehabilitation,” see Henri-​Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (2000). On eugenics and euthanasia as central features of disability history and culture, see Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson, “The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia:  ‘Sad Fancyings’ in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartelby’ ” (2004). For more general historical accounts of eugenics, see Thomas Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016) and Paul Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America:  From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Project (2011).

[ 8 ] Broken Beauty

ways)—​“cure or kill,” in a widely used phrase. Rehabilitation points toward normalization or cure, eugenics points toward elimination, and both involve a desire to see disability and disabled bodies disappear. A third model, with roots in the earlier twentieth century and a dramatic flowering beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, sees disability as a social and cultural formation. In this model, disability is valorized rather than stigmatized, and may be affirmatively claimed as a personal and political identity. The decline of cultural modernism coincides with the end of the eugenic age, symbolized by the late twentieth-​century deinstitutionalization of people classified as mad or feebleminded. The sociocultural model of disability has flourished in a postmodern cultural world, after the passing of high cultural modernism. Nonetheless, in its incipient embrace of disability aesthetics, the origins of a valorizing attitude toward disability may be traced right into the heart of cultural modernism in all of the arts, including music. Cultural modernism expresses a deeply ambivalent attitude toward disability.11 On one side, we find the medical model of disability and the cultural logic of euthanasia. At the same time, modernist artists, writers, and composers are aware of disability as a resource for artistic creativity, simultaneously a liberating way of shattering conventions and of establishing radically new canons of beauty. In modernist art as in the societies from which it arose, disability is thus simultaneously a focus of pity (leading to normalization or cure), horror (leading to segregation and institutionalization), and fascination (leading to valorization and celebration). These contending impulses are apparent in all forms of cultural modernism. The affirmative claim of disability always contends with the cultural logic of euthanasia.

11. Standard accounts of cultural modernism (mostly literary, rarely musical) include Tim Armstrong, Modernism (2005); Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–​1930 (1976); Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–​1916 (1994) and Modernism: A Very Short Introduction (2010); William Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-​Century Thought (1997); Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (2010); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–​1918 (2003); Michael Levenson, Modernism (2011); Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007); and Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2009). None of these sources considers disability as a significant feature of cultural modernism. Music (but not disability) plays a more central role in Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (2000) and Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872–​1927 (2015). In just the past few years, we have seen disability scholars begin to rethink literary and artistic (but not musical) modernism in relation to disability. In addition to Siebers 2010, see Maren Tova Linett, Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature (2017) and Rebecca Sanchez, Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (2015).

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01

  THREE WAYS OF CONCEPTUALIZING DISABILITY Religious Model Disability as a punishment, or a compensating gift, from the gods.

Divine affliction. Punishment for

From earliest written

sin. Outward mark of inner evil.

accounts to the

Divine inspiration. Compensation

present. A premodern

for bodily deficiency. Outward

conception with

mark of transcendent

remarkable

spirituality and wisdom. Medical Model Disability as a pathology or abnormality that inheres in a defective body. The

Cure. Rehabilitation.

endurance. From roughly 1800 to

Normalization. Pity and an

the present, with

impulse toward care.

hegemony in the first

Kill. Segregate, incarcerate,

half of the twentieth

cultural logic of euthanasia

sterilize (eugenics). Horror and

century. Coincident

(“cure or kill”).

an impulse toward elimination.

with cultural modernism.

Sociocultural Model Disability as a social or

Difference, not deficit. A political

From roughly 1970

and cultural identity to be

to the present,

cultural construction, a

claimed. Fascination and an

with roots in the

historically contingent way

impulse toward celebration.

earlier twentieth

of sorting and classifying

century. Coincident

the naturally occurring

with cultural

diversity of human

postmodernism.

embodiment.

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABLED BODIES

Modernist literary representations of disability place traditional disability types (Obsessive Avengers, Charity Cripples, Holy Fools) and modes of response to disabled bodies (wondrous, sentimental, eugenic, exotic) in conflict with a new disability aesthetics, and are thus more likely to be created and received in a realistic mode that moves disabled bodies from the stigmatized periphery to the valorized center of the artwork.

Typology of Disability Representation

These three models of disability (religious, medical, and sociocultural) give rise to and in turn are shaped by the representation of disabled bodies in literature (including opera libretti), which contains such representations in profusion. As Michael Bérubé observes, “disability is almost always taken as a sign of something else” and is therefore “necessarily representational”—​as a sign of divine favor or disfavor, a mark of moral health or sinfulness, an indicator of character (Bérubé 2015, 154; italics in original).

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Throughout Western literature, disability representations have tended to accrete into three broad types. The first involves a demonic figure whose disability is a mark of evil. Shakespeare’s Richard III would be a prototype of this category. The second is a presexual or asexual innocent whose disability, often blindness or intellectual impairment, is a mark of spiritual purity. Dickens’s Tiny Tim would be a prototype of this category. The third is a saintly visionary whose disability is a mark of transcendent wisdom. Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin would be a prototype of this category. The list is far from exhaustive, and a disabled character might well have aspects of more than one, but it provides a starting point for an evaluation of literary representations of disability.12 Disability conditions may vary among these different types. Blindness, for example, may be an attribute of any of the three categories: it might signify moral blindness, or sexual innocence, or a profound inner vision. Similarly, madness might take the form of megalomania, paranoia, or sadistic cruelty, or it might have a visionary, inspired quality. Intellectual or developmental disability might connote childlike innocence or a spiritual awareness uncorrupted by sophisticated civilization. Physical deformity might be understood as a mark of sinfulness and a provocation to violence (hunchbacks and missing limbs are particularly common in this connection) or an invitation to pity (where mobility impairment is a more likely disability).

  THREE TYPES OF DISABILITY REPRESENTATIONS

Types (Following Holmes 2004, Kriegel 1987, and Norden 1994)

Literary Exemplars

The Obsessive Avenger. The Demonic Cripple.

Richard III, Ahab, Long John Silver,

The Begging Imposter. The Degenerate Criminal. The Sweet Innocent. The Charity Cripple. The Afflicted Child. The Saintly Sage. The Holy Fool. The “Idiot Savant.” The Inspirational Super-​Crip. The

Quasimodo, Rigoletto, Wozzeck, Darth Vader Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy, Dickens’s Smike, Mr. Dick, Tiny Tim, Barnaby Rudge. Tiresias, Moses, Parsifal, Prince Myshkin, Sherlock Holmes.

Mad Genius. The Hyperrational Calculator.

12. For typologies of literary and cinematic representation of disability, see Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2004); Leonard Kriegel, “The Cripple in Literature” (1987); and Martin Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (1994).

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Modes of Apprehension

To describe the impact of these disability representations on the reader/​ viewer, Garland-​Thomson has identified four “visual rhetorics of disability,” that is, modes of responding to disabled bodies.13 To her original four, I have taken the liberty of adding a fifth. The wondrous mode directs the viewer to look up in awe of difference. This mode is often evoked by representations of disabled bodies as Saintly Sages, Mad Geniuses, Idiots Savants, or Hyperrational Calculators. It is associated with the religious model of disability, where disability may be seen as a mark of divine inspiration. The sentimental mode instructs the spectator to look down with benevolence. This mode suggests pity and evokes an impulse toward care and cure. It is particularly associated with Sweet Innocents and Charity Cripples. Although it has a strongly moralizing aspect, and is thus allied with the religious model of disability, it is perhaps even more deeply implicated in the medical model of disability and the associated cultural logic of euthanasia, with its impulse toward normalization, rehabilitation, and cure. The eugenic mode, my own contribution to Garland-​ Thomson’s list, encourages the viewer to respond with fear, horror, revulsion, and disgust to an object that seems bestial and thus subhuman. This mode suggests loathing and an impulse toward elimination. It is evoked most often in relation to Demonic Cripples, especially during the eugenic age, when disabled bodies are seen as a threat to the health and safety of the community. Like the sentimental mode, it has a moralizing quality in its concern with sin and evil, but it is linked even more closely to the medical model of disability and the cultural logic of euthanasia with its impulse toward segregation, institutionalization, and elimination. The exotic mode coaches the observer to look across a wide expanse toward an alien object. This mode is associated with what disability scholars call “enfreakment,” that is, the treatment of an unusual body as a monstrous spectacle. Any disability may be exoticized or enfreaked in this way, and all three basic kinds of disability representations may entail exoticization or enfreakment.14 Like the sentimental and eugenic modes, the exotic mode 13.  Garland-​Thomson describes her modes of response to disabled bodies in “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” (2002) and Staring: How We Look (2009). 14. The freak show is a common point of reference for cultural disability studies. See Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.:  Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (2001) and Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).

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is associated with the medical model of disability, with its fundamental interest in sorting bodies as normal (us) and abnormal (others). The realistic mode suggests that the onlooker align with the object of scrutiny. This mode is extremely rare in disability representations prior to modernist art and literature. None of the three disability stereotypes would come into play because within the realistic mode, representations are relatively neutral: the disability is only one (possibly minor) attribute of a character and is designed not to signify. It suggests a move beyond the medical model of disability, beyond a pathologization of difference, substituting empathy for pity and horror. It is thus aligned with the sociocultural model of disability.

  FIVE MODES OF RESPONSE TO DISABLED BODIES (MOSTLY FOLLOWING GARL AND-​T HOMSON) Wondrous mode

Saintly Sages, Mad Geniuses, Idiots

Religious model

Savants, Hyperrational Calculators Sentimental mode

Sweet Innocents, Charity Cripples

Religious or medical model

Eugenic mode

Demonic Cripple

Medical model

Exotic mode

Any representation

Medical model

Realistic mode

None of these—​disability does not

Sociocultural model

“signify”

Before and After Modernism

All three of these disability types and the first four of these modes of apprehension stigmatize disability, marking it as something bizarre, freakish, grotesque, and abnormal. When represented and apprehended in these ways, disability is constituted as an undesirable Other. Disabled characters in literary fiction before the modernist period are almost invariably stigmatized Others in this sense. They are almost always secondary characters rather than protagonists. They tend to be fully engulfed by their stigmatic traits: the character and the disability are mutually constituting and coextensive.15 Such stigmatized, secondary characters rarely change, grow, or develop over the course of the story. Rather, they remain static and invariant throughout, functioning as a catalyst and touchstone for moral

15.  Garland-​ Thomson introduces the concept of “engulfment” in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997).

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and personal growth in the more normative protagonist. I will have much more to say in ­chapter 2 about narratives of disability, but I will observe here that the standard literary narrative of disability prior to modernism is one of overcoming. Narrative closure, in conjunction with the cultural logic of euthanasia, requires the cure of Charity Cripples and the elimination of Obsessive Avengers. Both types, and Holy Fools as well, function to reaffirm the normativity of other, more central characters. And, within narratives involving any of these disability types, the disability is overcome and normality is restored. Modernist literature (including opera libretti) often treats disability differently. First, it moves disability from the periphery to the center. While disabled bodies are a common feature of literary and artistic representation throughout the ages, with the rise of cultural modernism we find a sudden profusion of disabled bodies dominating the story and fill­ ing the narrative frame. There is a paradoxical quality to this increase in fictional representations, coming as they do during a eugenic era in which people with disabilities are increasingly absent from public spaces. As Alice Hall notes: This public and legal refusal to see the disabled was accompanied by the gradual decline in public displays of “freaks”; it formed part of a wider shift towards institutionalization, medicalization and the segregation of people with disabilities. In the same period, when disability was becoming less visible in public places and in spectacles, representations of impairment became hyper-​ visible in novels. (2016, 63)

Second, disabled bodies are more likely to be treated sympathetically, with disability understood as affirming rather than negating a deeper, shared humanity. In that way, modernist representations of disability may encourage a realistic mode of apprehension, in which “the onlooker aligns with the object of scrutiny.” In the process, disability may be valorized rather than stigmatized. Third, the disabled character is less likely to have his or her identity fully engulfed by the stigmatic trait. In other words, characters may have more going on in their lives than their disability, which may be incidental rather than character-​defining. But I don’t wish to give the impression that all is sweetness and light in modernist responses to disability. To a significant degree, modernist art navigates between the twin poles of the “cultural logic of euthanasia.” On the one hand, disability inspires pity—​that power-​imbalanced dark twin

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of human empathy—​and a concomitant desire to help, to care, to cure. On the other hand, disability inspires horror and loathing—​a disgust with deviant, deformed flesh—​and a concomitant desire to avert the gaze and to hide these loathsome bodies from sight, to segregate them from the human community. Modernist representations frequently enfreak disabled bodies, making a spectacle of bodily difference. In some respects, this is an aspect of the modernist imperative to “make it new” (in Ezra Pound’s familiar formulation). Modern artists sought to shock a bourgeois audience out of its complacency by subverting and attacking conventions of all kinds. In the language of disability, which has so often been turned against modern art (as sick, diseased, crazy, degenerate), modern artists sought to apply a form of shock therapy to cure society of its somnolence, its convention-​induced coma, by positing innovation as a mark of health and vitality. In short, modernism values transgression, and nothing can be more shockingly transgressive than a nonnormative body. The profusion of disabled bodies in modern art, and the central position they come to occupy there, are vivid signs of the modernist commitment to shatter artistic conventions and canons of beauty. But even as it operates within a eugenic frame as an object of either pity or horror, disability fascinates modern artists for its liberatory potential. Like racial Others, disabled bodies may be simultaneously frightening and fascinating. Not only do they help to shatter ossified artistic conventions, but also they may enable a broader view of what it means to be human.

  LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY

Model

Type

Mode of Apprehension

Religious

Holy Fool. Saintly Sage. Mad

Wondrous mode.

Genius. Idiot Savant. Religious and medical

Cripple. Degenerate Criminal. Religious and medical

Inspirational.

Obsessive Avenger. Demonic

Charity Cripple. Sweet Innocent. All of these.

Eugenic mode. Horror leads to segregation/​ elimination. Sentimental mode. Pity leads to care/​cure. Exotic mode. Enfreakment.

Sociocultural

None of these.

Realistic mode. Empathy.

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MODERNIST MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY

Modernist music is centrally concerned with representing the disabled body, either as an object of horror or pity or as a valued resource. Modernist music is itself a disabled body.

Music consists of nothing but tones and is thus self-​evidently nonreprese­ ntational. And yet music has been widely understood as involving actors, agents, and characters in an unfolding story or drama. In c­ hapter 2 I will talk about musical narratives that involve disability. Here, I  focus on the representation of disability in music. I begin by invoking the familiar metaphorical conflation of a work of music with a human body, both its morphology and its behavior. Musical works are often understood as bodies, as living, sentient beings with form and motion, and often with blood, organs, limbs, and skin as well. In some cases, the bodies at issue may seem to incorporate disabilities. Recall my general definitions of disability: Disabled bodies are marked as abnormal with respect to some prevailing normative standard for bodily functioning or appearance. Disability is any bodily condition (including appearance and behavior) that leads people to ask:  How did you get that way? What’s wrong with you? In the traditional tonal music of the classic-​romantic period, there are many sorts of musical phenomena that are marked as abnormal in some way and that seem to require rationalization with respect to the normative frame. Such marked events include dissonant tones (which deviate from the prevailing consonant framework), chromatic tones (which deviate from the prevailing diatonic framework), and formal “deformations” (which deviate from formal norms). In some cases, the rationalization of these nonnormative phenomena takes place within the work itself: dissonances resolve; chromatic notes give way to their diatonic progenitors. Indeed, many works from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries traverse a narrative in which a normative opening condition is challenged by an anomalous event (Schoenberg terms such things “tonal problems”) that the piece must ultimately subsume in some way. As we will see in c­ hapter 2, the narrative of disability overcome is the standard trope of classic-​romantic music, and it unfolds over both short and long temporal spans. In other cases, the rationalization of the nonnormative elements is not so much the business of the piece itself as of subsequent critical commentary. This is particularly true in the area of musical form, where musical configurations are sorted into norms and deformations, with the latter always understood in relation to the former. (Critical commentary with a

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therapeutic, rehabilitative thrust is the subject of ­chapter 7.) As with literary representations of disability in this period, anomalous events like dissonances, chromaticism, and formal deformation are peripheral to the musical mainstream. They are marginalized, secondary events whose role is ultimately to affirm the solidity and centrality of the norms they appear to challenge. In modernist music, however, as in modernist literature and art, disability moves from a stigmatized, marginalized periphery to an increasingly valorized and aestheticized center of artistic representation. And, despite the fear and horror inherent in eugenic attitudes toward disability, it nonetheless becomes an object of fascination and a valuable artistic resource for modernist composers. Within modernist music generally, very much including nontexted instrumental music, the musical body is frequently disabled by, or understood to represent, five disability conditions: deformation/​disfigurement, paralysis/​mobility impairment, madness, idiocy (“feeblemindedness”), and autism. Needless to say, this list is not exhaustive or definitive, and many of the musical phenomena I discuss might well be described under more than one of these rubrics. Two of these disabilities are primarily of the physical body (deformity/​disfigurement and mobility impairment), and three are primarily of the mind (madness, idiocy, and autism), but all are disabilities as defined previously: culturally stigmatized differences from established norms in appearance and/​or functioning. Modernist music is replete with and distinguished by its representation of these five disability conditions. Deformity/​D isf igurement

For most of recorded human history, deformity and disfigurement have been understood in religious or spiritual terms, as a punishment for sin and an outward mark of an inner evil. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, and greatly accelerated by the appearance in the public space of wounded veterans of increasingly devastating wars, bodily deformities were increasingly medicalized, to be remediated through surgical or other medical interventions or normalized with prostheses. At the turn of the twentieth century, coincident with the rise of cultural modernism, the history of deformity/​disfigurement observed both impulses within the cultural logic of euthanasia: toward normalization (cure) or elimination (kill). First, in response to the shocking severity and pervasiveness of combat-​related wounds inflicted during World War I, society proposed a regime of rehabilitation, of medicalized eradication of deficiency. As noted

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earlier, this is what Stiker (2000) refers to as “the birth of rehabilitation.” He observes, “The war-​injured will take the place of the disabled; the image of disability will become one of an insufficiency to be made good, a deficiency to eradicate” (124). The second decade of the twentieth century thus marks a culmination of the medicalization of deformity/​disfigurement, with a broad societal commitment to normalization via rehabilitation, understood as a medicalized regime to eradicate bodily deficiency. At the same time, the early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a sharply negative, stigmatizing response to visible bodily anomalies. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, various cities in the United States enacted what were known as “ugly laws.” Partly in response to wounded veterans from a previous, devastating war, the American Civil War, San Francisco in 1867 banned from its public spaces “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” Similarly, in 1911, Chicago prohibited “exposure of diseased, mutilated, or deformed portions of the body.”16 Cultural modernism thus arises at a time of deep societal antipathy toward deformed bodies. Deformity and disfigurement enter modernist music as the shattering of traditional norms of formal continuity: the modernist musical body is fractured, deformed, and grotesque.17 The extensive literature on modernism in the arts identifies “fragmentation” as a central, defining feature. Many modernist works prefer a collagelike juxtaposition of discrete parts to the more continuous forms of the classic-​romantic tradition. Works like that have a feeling of being shattered, fractured, or dismembered. In Stravinsky’s music, for example, this phenomenon is called “block juxtaposition” or “splinteredness,” and this fracturing of musical form is widespread in modernist music, with its apogee in the music of Ives and Varèse.18 Musical works that approach form in this way may give the impression of Demonic Cripples or Obsessive Avengers, evoking a response in eugenic 16. On “ugly laws,” see Kim Nielson, A Disability History of the United States (2012) and Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009). 17.  On a related attempt among modernist authors to “de-​form” the novel, see Linett 2017. 18.  On the “splinteredness” of form in Stravinsky’s music, see Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through “Mavra” (1996b). On its “block juxtaposition,” see Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Stravinsky (1983). Jonathan Kramer adduces Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and several works by Ives as early examples of “moment form” in “Moment Form in Twentieth-​ Century Music” (1978). Matthew McDonald, “Ives and the Now” (2013), offers an interpretation of “The Things Our Fathers Loved” that emphasizes its fragmentary qualities.

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mode, in fear and horror of difference. In other cases, the musical fragmentation may have a milder quality (a Sweet Innocent calling for a sentimental response) or even a religious quality (a Saintly Sage calling for a response in wondrous mode). At the same time, in many of these musical representations, there is more than a hint of unrestrained delight in new formal combinations, however abrupt, and a good-​humored pleasure in incongruity. These disabled musical bodies are represented to be appreciated on their own terms, in celebration of difference. In such cases, we find an approach to a realistic mode of apprehending and representing disabled bodies. Stravinsky, Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2. Instead of the sense of directed continuity that characterizes most classic-​romantic music, this passage conveys jagged abruption, with isolated fragments juxtaposed in an apparently haphazard way. Things begin and end unpredictably, with maximum contrast, and little sense of connection to what comes before and after. If this music is a body, it is a fractured, fragmented, Cubist body. There is humor and playfulness in this disability representation, but also a somewhat darker side:  the body in question is something of a Demonic Cripple and its apparent grotesqueness might encourage response in exotic or even eugenic mode. Stravinsky, Symphonies of Wind Instruments. This work has often been described as an extreme instance of Stravinsky’s predilection for formal splinteredness. It states a chunk of musical material, abandons it for contrasting chunks, and then resumes as if nothing had happened. A  normative continuity and wholeness, dimly glimpsed through the fragments, has been chopped into bits, dismembered. There is a somewhat solemn, even religious atmosphere in some of these blocks of musical material, perhaps evoking a Saintly Sage and the concomitant wondrous mode, in which we look up in awe of difference. Stravinsky, Serenade in A, first movement. The neoclassical reorientation of Stravinsky’s style brought not only a revival of compositional interest in consonant triads, diatonic scales, and major or minor keys but also a greater sense of formal continuity. At the same time, however, the forms remain splintered, carved into discrete chunks that resist integration into a formal whole. The sense that a more normative continuity has been sliced into bits is confirmed by Stravinsky’s compositional sketches, which show him literally slicing things open, creating a new formal space, and inserting contrasting material into it. And yet the difference between this and the normative, tonal musical body evokes little sense of pity or horror; the mode of apprehension approaches a

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realistic mode: the form of the piece is what it is, and its disjunctions seem almost not to signify. Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles, “Exaudi.” Even as his pitch language changed radically in his final compositional period, Stravinsky maintained his commitment to formal fragmentation. Within his distinctive twelve-​tone musical language, discrete bits of musical material contrast with each other not only in every obvious way (instrumentation, texture, register) but also in their structural underpinnings. The religious ambience, evident in both the music and the text, suggests that the formal deformities constitute a disabled body that is something of a Saintly Sage, evoking a response of wonder, in awe of difference. Varèse, Octandre, first movement. Varèse’s pitch language is so radically new and captivating that it tends to obscure the equally shocking fragmentation of its form, which refuses continuity. The music often sounds like a series of attempts to move forward, with each attempt blocked, as the flow coagulates into massive, widely spaced, dissonant chords. This musical body is experiencing mobility impairment in ad­dition to its formal deformation. There is something menacing about the intense dissonance, a hint that this disabled musical body is something of an Obsessive Avenger. Ives, “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” A good deal of Ives’s music is characterized by rapid changes of scene and mood. Often, each short scene has not only a distinctive character but also its own defining texture, melody, and harmony. In some of the larger works, the rapid changes follow a fast-​moving literary program (as in the second movement of the Fourth Symphony, Putnam’s Camp, and the Fourth of July), but even in more abstract works (like the Hawthorne movement of the Concord Sonata), extreme contrasts create a sense of radical discontinuity. The same fragmentation of form is apparent in “The Things Our Fathers Loved,” where rapid changes in the music correspond to quick shifts in the flow of reminiscence in the song’s text. There is something of the Sweet Innocent in this disabled musical body, encouraging a response in a sentimental mode. Many modernist works fracture and dismember traditional forms, creating grotesque parodies. The grotesquerie often involves disproportion and asymmetry, as traditional forms are deformed. In many cases, the grotesquerie resonates with representations of disabled bodies as Obsessive Avengers and Demonic Cripples—​ bodies that violently challenge the normal order, encouraging a response in exotic or eugenic mode. At the same time, modernist deformations of traditional forms

[ 20 ] Broken Beauty

often have a celebratory air, delighting in a sense of liberation from traditional constraints. We will consider modernist musical responses to two sorts of traditional formal types: the sentence and the waltz. The sentence is a standard, traditional type of phrase. Normally, it is in two balanced parts: a presentation (containing two statements of a basic idea) and a continuation (with developmental intensification to a cadence). In modernist music, many thematic statements evoke the traditional sentence but undermine, distort, and deform it in various ways (see c­ hapter 2 for more on modernist sentences and other traditional tonal forms). Bartòk, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. The opening thematic statement strongly evokes the traditional sentence. But this is a grotesquely disproportioned sentence, with a lengthy, intense continuation and cadence. The developmental and cadential tail is wagging the thematic dog, and a conventionally symmetrical form has been rendered wildly asymmetrical. This musical body is deformed and disfigured, its appearance rendered abnormal. Its aggressive tone might suggest a Demonic Cripple, but in its own context, it creates a challengingly new sort of beauty. Varèse, Octandre, first movement. The proportions of this sentence are quite normal, but its traditional impact is undermined from within, as an aimless continuation leads to an unexpected cadence (unexpected in both pitch and location in the phrase). The musical body is disabled both in appearance and in function. It challenges traditional canons of beauty in what might seem a violent and menacing way. Stravinsky, Serenade in A, first movement. The proportions of this sentence are oddly asymmetrical. The basic idea is followed by a long silence—​a shocking discontinuity. Then, it is repeated exactly not once but twice, producing a strangely static and repetitive presentation. The continuation that follows is only half the length of the presentation. The silence and the literal repetition create a sense of fragmentation, undermining the normally continuous, developmental, goal-​oriented nature of the sentence form. This musical body has a mobility impairment in addition to its abnormalities of appearance: it both looks and moves in a different way. In its relatively gentle, unthreatening way, the music seems almost to naturalize its differences and invite an appreciation in something approaching a realistic mode.

A surprising number of modernist musical works explicitly evoke traditional dances, like minuets, waltzes, and gavottes. Each of these dances has

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an associated formal plan, one typically characterized by formal balance and symmetry, as well as metrical simplicity and continuity—​sharp breaks, sudden contrasts, and shocking juxtapositions would contradict their essential dancelike qualities. Modernist renditions of these dances tend to be grotesque parodies that deliberately deform their formal models, often by distorting their proportions. Among traditional dances, the waltz is a particularly common topic for modernist revision (Frymoyer 2017). Francesca Draughon argues that modernist waltzes are frequently aligned with the grotesque and the degenerate (both of which have strong associations with deformed and disabled bodies), and Michael Cherlin contends that Schoenberg’s waltzes in particular often signify horror.19 Degeneracy and horror are associated with the eugenic mode of response to a disabled body. The formal deformations may encourage the listener to experience a sense of fear or revulsion in the presence of a body that has been stripped of elegance and refinement, and thus rendered something less than human. At the same time, modernist waltzes may seem to take a countervailing delight in tweaking tonal conventions and may do so in a spirit of good (if somewhat black) humor. Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 3, Waltz (Ballerina and Moor). Stravinsky’s music incorporates and parodies two popular waltzes by Joseph Lanner. Lanner’s waltzes are formally simple and symmetrically balanced:  sixteen-​measure phrases are divided into 8 + 8, the eights into 4 + 4, and the fours into 2 + 2.  The symmetrical form is articulated by conventional cadences. Stravinsky distorts the form by adding measures at the beginnings and endings of phrases, and even more by composing a new countermelody that obscures both Lanner’s harmonies and his formal boundaries. The form is deformed, distorted, unbalanced, and rendered asymmetrical. The ballet places us in the inherently childlike world of puppets, and the musical texture reflects a related tendency toward simplification. The deformed musical body that this music represents is thus a sort of Sweet Innocent perceived in an exotic mode, due especially to the character of the Moor, an explicitly racialized Other. Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 2, second movement. Schoenberg’s setting of the blackly humorous waltz “Ach, du lieber Augustin” deforms

19.  On modernist waltzes, see Francesca Draughon, “Dance of Decadence:  Class, Gender, and Modernity in the Scherzo of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” (2003) and Michael Cherlin, “Memory and Rhetorical Trope in Schoenberg’s String Trio” (1998).

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and distorts it in various ways. An added, chromatic counterpoint undermines the normal, simple harmonies. The oom-​ pah-​ pah bass is strangely disconnected from the melody, wandering off on its own, and eventually trailing off. The melody is similarly fragmented and then liquidated. Formally, the standard 4 + 4 phrasing is distorted by overlapping—​the phrases intrude on each other instead of following sequentially in the usual symmetrical layout. The mood is wry and humorous, ironic rather than grotesque, with no sense of menace. This body is deformed beyond any hope of recuperation (in the words of the song: “Alles ist hin”), and the work responds with a sense of weary resignation. Schoenberg, “Valse de Chopin” from Pierrot Lunaire. This waltz invokes a sickly, tubercular Chopin. The titular waltz is so fragmented, so thoroughly ironized, as to be only intermittently audible. The traditional harmony and melody are disfigured, and the traditional symmetrical form is deformed. The waltz is dimly perceived as an exoticized bodily Other. Babbitt, Minute Waltz. Babbitt invokes Chopin’s famous waltz in his title, but his humorous, satirical intent is clear in the time signature: the measures that are not in the usual 3/​4 meter may be either shrunk or extended by one eighth-​note. Traditional waltz features include major and minor triads and frequent oom-​pah-​pah rhythms (although never extending for a full measure). The waltz is thoroughly disfigured, its form thoroughly deformed. It is not sentimentalized or exoticized, however, nor does it appear menacing in any way. This disabled musical body appears in a virtually realistic mode, the object of gentle humor, perhaps, but not enfreaked in any way. In the real world, deformation and disfigurement usually evoke pity or horror, and the same is true to some extent in the arts, including music. Modernist artists of all kinds have used deformity and disfigurement for their shock value and to scandalize a bourgeois audience. Representations of disability in modernist music frequently draw on familiar and stigmatizing tropes (Obsessive Avengers, Charity Cripples, and Saintly Sages), and they often evoke responses in exotic and eugenic modes. But formal fragmentation and deformation often have a positive aesthetic value in modernist music. By deploying its fractured forms and fragmented textures as a sign of liberation from conventional restrictions, modernist music often claims deformity and disfigurement as a valuable and aesthetically desirable resource. (Chapter 3 contains a more extended discussion of representations of deformity and disfigurement in modernist music.)

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Mobility Impairment

The history of mobility impairment closely tracks the history of deformity/​ disfigurement, but now we are talking about bodily functioning rather than appearance. This disability, traditionally understood in religious terms (“the halt and the lame”), was increasingly medicalized throughout the nineteenth century, spurred by the wounds experienced by the combatants in increasingly destructive wars. With the Great War, Stiker’s “birth of rehabilitation” signals the hegemony of the medical model, with its emphasis on normalization (in part through the use of increasingly sophisticated prostheses). And we find the same eugenic-​era bifurcation of attitudes of pity and fear. The idea of motion—​usually toward climaxes or cadences—​plays a central role in traditional canons of musical beauty. But modernist music very frequently prefers harmonies that are relatively static, turning in on themselves, lacking a sense of direction, circular rather than teleological. The time of modernist music is relatively nonlinear, preferring a sense of simultaneity to a sense of one thing leading purposefully toward a logical successor:  instead of one chord leading to another, their notes may be commingled.20 In modernist music, which usually avoids both the resolution of dissonance as a means to impel motion and the traditional linear progression as a means to direct motion, the harmony may appear relatively immobile. In the music of many modernist composers, harmonic immobility is related in part to a preference for inversional symmetry, that is, for chords that are mirror images of themselves, with the same intervals from top to bottom as from bottom to top—​palindromes in register. Just as deformation results from an apparent deficit of (formal) symmetry, immobility may result from an apparent excess of (inversional) symmetry.

Debussy, “Voiles” (from Préludes, Book 1). One common characteristic of Debussy’s harmony is a slow rate of change: individual harmonies persist for a long time, animated by active figuration, until being replaced (suddenly or gradually) by a different harmony. In this passage, a single whole-​tone harmony persists throughout. Unlike the functional, goal-​ oriented harmonic progressions of an earlier period, this music is harmonically static and immobile. The music appears lost in the moment,

20.  The idea that the time of modernist music is nonlinear is the central contention of Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music:  New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (1988). Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (2003), considers simultaneity a principal defining feature of cultural modernism.

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in a sort of religious trance. We seem to be in the presence of a Saintly Sage, and look up in wondrous awe of difference. Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 1, and The Rake’s Progress, Act 1, Scene 1. In the opening of Petrushka, a single harmony persists throughout, shimmering in the accompaniment and arpeggiating in the melody. There is no sense of motion or progression. In the opening of The Rake’s Progress, the same type of harmony prevails, presented as an alternation of two smaller chords. The chords simply oscillate, with no sense of directed progression. The static usage of these harmonies is enhanced by their internal symmetry. Unlike the unbalanced consonant triad of traditional music, which engenders motion, Stravinsky’s symmetrical harmonies prevent motion:  they impair mobility. Their immobility contradicts traditional canons of musical beauty and suggests a disability aesthetics. Bartók, “Subject and Reflection,” No. 141 from Mikrokosmos. Inversional symmetry is an important feature of a great deal of posttonal harmony, and it often has the effect of immobilizing the music. In this passage, the musical lines maintain a strict inversional balance. In keeping with the title of the piece, everything that happens in the pianist’s right hand is mirrored by what happens in the left hand. The result is harmonic immobility: the music is fixed in its place. Webern, Piano Variations, Op. 27, second movement. Everything that happens in this movement involves a mirror reflection around a central tone. That note is literally the central pitch of the music, with everything else balanced symmetrically around it. Amid the widely dispersed bursts of melodic activity, there is an absolute harmonic stasis:  the music is immobile; it goes nowhere. It’s a paradoxical effect: manic melodic activity animating a single static harmony. The underlying immobility aligns with a disability aesthetics, finding new sources of beauty in the extraordinary (musical) body. The relative immobility of modernist music has inspired a strong reaction of horror among antimodernist critics. Heinrich Schenker is the most extreme example—​he repeatedly describes the inhibition of musical motion toward predefined goals as a form of “paralysis.”21 Observing a cultural logic of euthanasia, anti-​modernist critics have argued that if this music cannot be cured of its defects, it should be eradicated entirely from the 21.  Schenker develops his sense of musical “paralysis” in two sources:  “Further Consideration of the Urlinie” (1926/​1996) and “Rameau or Beethoven? Creeping Paralysis or Spiritual Potency in Music?” (1930/​1997).

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corpus of great music. But for modernist composers, the disability of mobility impairment has often seemed a valuable artistic resource. If sounds are freed from their conventional obligations, no longer compelled to move in foreordained ways toward prescribed goals, they can be enjoyed on their own terms rather than as part of a directed continuity. Stasis (nonlinearity, simultaneity) then becomes a source of liberation and a cause for celebration. In that sense, with its static (often inversionally symmetrical) harmonies, modernist music claims mobility impairment as a valuable resource and a mark of its disability aesthetics. (Chapter 3 contains further discussion of musical representations of mobility impairment.)

Madness

Throughout human history, some people have “heard voices,” that is, have heard verbal utterances in the absence of any actual external source.22 Traditionally, such voices were understood within a religious framework, as something either divine or demonic, and associated with madness in either case. In the mid-​nineteenth century, however, in tandem with other disabilities, this experience fell increasingly under the control of medical science. Under the medical model, the experience of hearing voices was pathologized as “aural hallucination” and understood as a symptom of mental illness, especially schizophrenia (a diagnostic category created by Eugen Bleuler in 1908).23 Indeed, one might argue that the category of schizophrenia was created, in part, to provide a diagnostic home for the phenomenon of hearing voices. As with physical disabilities, mental disabilities were brought fully under the medical regime during the first decades of the twentieth century. This is the period when the idea of “mental illness” was consolidated—​the culturally contingent idea that affect and behavior that deviate from normative standards are disease entities that require diagnosis and remediation from medical professionals. This is also the eugenic era of psychiatry, marked by a transition from the hope of cure via “moral education” to the pessimism of large institutions designed primarily for segregation of an

22. There is a large literature on this topic, some of which we will survey in ­chapter 4. The best single source is Charles Ferneyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (2016). 23. Eugen Bleuler presented his new diagnostic category of schizophrenia in a public lecture in April 1908, published later that year as “Die Prognose der Dementia praecox (Schizophreniegruppe)” (1908).

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undesirable population. Just at the moment that rehabilitation gains momentum for physical impairments, it is increasingly abandoned as an ideal for psychiatric disorders, for which horror increasingly trumps pity in the broader societal response. Both schizophrenia and modernist art and music are centrally concerned with the splitting of consciousness, of which hearing voices is the epitome and conspicuous outward mark. Modernist art and literature frequently explore multiple perspectives, with a cacophony of competing narrative voices and extreme heterogeneity of style and content. In modernist music, quotation practices that involve an ambient atonality and the sharp intrusion of traditional tonal references give a vivid impression of heard voices. In modernist music, these heard voices involve different sorts of disability representations and elicit different sorts of responses. The voices may seem threatening in some way, a sign of some deep disturbance. Certainly they have been apprehended in eugenic mode by critics who hear in the voices a threat to the treasured coherence of the musical work. Music theorists and analysts have been particularly concerned with containing the threat posed by the heard voices and demonstrating the ways in which they are subsumed and normalized musically. (Critical response along these lines is the topic of ­chapter 7.) But while heard voices may sometimes be understood in eugenic mode, the music often makes possible a different approach. The voices often appear welcome in some way, not a threat to be contained but the bearers of wisdom—​the voices are Saintly Sages. Or the voices may originate from the beloved dead, and may be heard nostalgically in sentimental mode as Sweet Innocents. The urge to normalize these voices—​to cure them as though they were a sickness of some kind—​ is common in critical commentaries, but modernist music often makes possible hearings in a more realistic mode, where the voices, and the division in consciousness they signal and enforce, are celebrated on their own terms, as a manifestation of disability aesthetics.

Ives, String Quartet No. 2, first movement. Out of a dissonant, densely chromatic, imitative environment, a series of recognizable tunes emerges:  “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” “Dixie,” “Marching through Georgia,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Hail Columbia.” These tunes are heard as though from outside the frame of the piece, and they stratify the texture into discrete layers. The consciousness of the piece is thus divided between its ambient atonality and the traditional tonality of these well-​known tunes. These heard voices pose a threat to the unity and coherence of the music, and critics have been tempted to try to show how,

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despite their profound contrast with the ambient atonality, they nonetheless really fit in. In that way, they seek to cure the piece of a troubling disability. But the music itself makes possible a response in a more realistic mode:  the voices come and go without causing any damage. Indeed, they are sweet reminiscences of a bygone era, the voices of the beloved dead. Schoenberg, Quartet No. 2, second movement. After an extended and intense imitative development of two contrasting themes, everything slows down and stops, with a portentous pause. Then we hear a different voice, seemingly from outside the frame of the piece:  the blackly humorous folk tune, “Ach, du lieber, Augustin,” with a simple oom-​pah-​pah accompaniment—​a deformed waltz—​layered against a tune from earlier in the movement. The folk tune sounds like a heard voice, and has the effect of stratifying the work into contrasting layers, expressive of a divided consciousness. From the point of view of the ambient atonality, the folk tune (and its waltzy accompaniment) are a brief, blackly humorous digression, neither demonic nor sweetly innocent. The voice is heard as though from a great physical and stylistic distance, but is accepted rather than exoticized or pathologized. Berg, Lyric Suite, sixth movement. The music is a sort of densely chromatic labyrinth, with several different forms of two twelve-​tone rows unfolding simultaneously. Then the texture thins, and rising from the depths we hear a different voice, Wagner’s voice from the opening of Tristan und Isolde. It disappears, and the music then builds to a wild outburst of grief, back in Berg’s now-​familiar twelve-​tone style. The voice is reminiscent, but not sweetly nostalgic. Rather, it signals an uncurable psychic wound in the consciousness of the piece. Even in the absence of quotation, modernist music frequently stratifies the musical texture into discrete layers. These layers are often identified by different, clashing centric tones (an effect sometimes referred to as bitonal), and are further differentiated by distinctive internal rhythms and a lack of rhythmic coordination among the layers. Furthermore, neither layer functions as a ground for the other’s figure, or as a norm for the other’s deviation; rather, the layers are heard as independent and self-​ sufficient, and the piece that contains them is irrevocably divided. In some cases, the division is felt as a disabling wound that elicits a response in eugenic mode:  emotional horror and a desire to normalize or somehow eliminate. More commonly, however, such bifurcations of musical consciousness elicit a more realistic response:  these divisions represent difference, not deficit, and are among the new forms of beauty provided by

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musical modernism. That is the sense in which musical modernism claims madness—​as a way of overthrowing stultifying traditions and as a source of new forms of beauty. Bartók, Forty-​Four Duos for Two Violins, No. 33, “Harvest Song.” Each melody is quite simple, with repetitive statements of scalar, or near-​scalar, fragments of just three or four tones. But the melodies are arranged so as to repel each other rather than fuse. The consciousness of the piece is bifurcated. Neither part is felt as anomalous with respect to the other; rather, they inhabit the same space as mutually uncoordinated equals. The bifurcation is offered in realistic mode, as simply a new way of arranging materials, without any sense of pathologizing or enfreakment. Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 2. Stravinsky himself described this as “music in two keys [conceived] as Petrushka’s insult to the public” (Stravinsky and Craft 1981, 136). Although neither “key” is fully established, there is certainly a basic underlying clash between major triads with roots a tritone apart: the music consists of a static oscillation between them. In this ballet, we are in a world of puppets, and Petrushka’s insult is more the bravado of a disobedient child than a menacing gesture of violence or vengeance. The musical bifurcation represents more the disordered mental life of a Sweet Innocent than the fear and horror of an Obsessive Avenger. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, “Dance of the Young Girls.” The “Petrushka chord” involved major triads related at the tritone. This equally famous formation consists of a triad and a seventh chord whose roots lie a semitone apart. This time, there is no static oscillation between the components, just a brutal, dissonant conflation of them. The music is harmonically motionless and fundamentally divided. There is something demonic about the division here—​ something dark and violent. The music represents it as an emblem of the “primitive mind”—​a place of degeneracy and savagery. The disability condition is an Obsessive Avenger, and elicits a response in eugenic mode (horror and fear) and exotic mode (looking across a wide expanse at a racialized Other). Stravinsky, Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 1. The fundamental clash here is between two melodic fragments (as in the Bartók Duo) that lie a tritone apart (as in the Petrushka chord). The music does not harmonize or reconcile these fragments but maintains their mutual repulsion. The mood is one of playful humor, and elicits a response in a realistic mode.

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Crawford Seeger, String Quartet, fourth movement. Like much of her music, this movement upholds Crawford Seeger’s concept of “heterophony,” understood as a maximally intense “sounding apart”:  the competing elements are maintained in permanent, irreconcilable opposition to each other. In this passage, there are two melodies that contrast with each other in every possible way. The shared melody in the lower strings is strictly serialized with respect to its first ten notes; it starts softly with lengthy utterances, which get louder and shorter as the music progresses. The contrasting melody in the first violin is free from any systematic organization and contains very little repetition; its utterances go from short and loud to longer and softer. The consciousness of this music is deeply bifurcated. But the bifurcation does not appear as a wound in the piece requiring a cure. Rather, it elicits a realistic response, understanding it as a difference, not a deficit—​a new form of beauty emblematic of disability aesthetics.

Stylistically, many modernist musical works incorporate an apparent jumble of contrasting musical styles, with jarring juxtapositions of low and high, as folk or popular music mingles with more learned styles. This stylistic heterogeneity produces stratified musical textures, just as formal splinteredness and discontinuity produce fractured forms. When one of the layers consists of quoted material, this “heard voice” may provoke in analysts a therapeutic urge, a desire to rationalize it in relation to its surroundings. Analysts have often tried to insist that, despite their apparent source outside the frame of the piece, these quotations are nonetheless organically integrated into the fabric of the piece. Other times, however, the music seems to suggest that different voices may coexist without the need for reconciliation or cure, as a valuable component of a new modernist aesthetic of divided consciousness. The heard voices signal a radical divergence from the hegemony of a unified Romantic organicism and have the potential to help rewrite familiar scripts of mental disorder. In some works, the heard voices may have a dark and menacing quality, eliciting a response in eugenic or exotic mode. But more commonly, modernist music uses its divided consciousness, realized in stratified textures, often reinforced with bitonal effects and extreme quotation practices, to claim madness as a valuable resource and a new source of beauty. (Chapter 4 provides a more thorough exploration of madness [especially schizophrenia and its heard voices] in modernist music. Chapter 7 considers medicalized approaches of music theorists to madness and other disability conditions in modernist music.) [ 30 ] Broken Beauty

Idiocy

Over the course of the nineteenth century, idiocy was gradually split off conceptually from madness:  both are characterized by a deficiency of reason, but madness came to be understood as acquired and temporary, while idiocy was inborn and permanent. In nineteenth-​century literary representations of idiots, the most prevalent type is the Holy Fool, whose intellectual deficiency is compensated by a purity of understanding and a deeper, if inarticulate, wisdom. In works by Wordsworth, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, idiot characters are associated with a series of literary tropes:  they are authentic and sincere; uncivilized and primitive; prelinguistic and prerational; natural and animal-​like; childlike and innocent. They inspire pity and an impulse of care. In the eugenic age of the early twentieth century, there was widespread concern with a perceived “menace of the moron,” a fear that idiocy—​literally a breeding ground for criminality and promiscuity—​would undermine and demoralize an otherwise healthy social body. The result was a proliferation of institutions for the “feebleminded,” designed to segregate rather than to remediate. In modernist literary representations like Faulkner’s Benjy and Steinbeck’s Lenny (note the diminutive quality of these names), while some vestiges of the Holy Fool trope remain, the idiot now projects an aura of menace or violence, especially sexual violence, and inspires horror and an impulse to kill or incarcerate. In modernist music, idiocy is represented by an extreme simplification of melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture. As in literary representations, idiocy in music may connote a wise simplicity (in association with the natural, the pastoral, the folk, the childlike) or, more darkly, the menace of the feebleminded (in association with the primitive). Ives, “The Seer.” In this song, an old man sits outside a grocery store all day long and watches what goes on. His intellectual limitations are represented musically by the extreme simplification and repetition of his melody, especially for the final words of the text. At the same time, there is reference to the Holy Fool tradition in the title of the song—​the man is both an idiot and a seer. Satie, Parade, music for the entry of the First Manager. Compared especially to the music of many of Satie’s modernist contemporaries, this music is extraordinarily simple, almost simpleminded. Hardly anything happens at all, and whatever does happen is repeated endlessly. The musical materials are as simply triadic as they can be, but any traditional tonal implications are stripped away by the repetitions: no progression,

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no motion, no development is possible in this environment. The music is something of a Sweet Innocent and something of a Saintly Sage. We tend to hear it in wondrous or sentimental mode. Stravinsky, “Tilimbom.” This is one of many works by Stravinsky and his contemporaries that are about animals and evocative of childhood. The musical components are extraordinarily simple, including a four-​ note ostinato in the bass and the simple alternation of two triads in the upper parts. The melody consists mostly of just four notes of a scale, heard again and again. In its radical simplification of means, and its textual association with animals and childhood, this music is a distilled representation of the sorts of intellectual activity that are conventionally stigmatized as idiocy.24 Stravinsky’s setting, however, does not appear to enfreak his subject; rather, the idiocy seems a source of playful pleasure, welcomed as a new and unconventional source of beauty. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Introduction to Part 1. Although the Rite of Spring has a reputation as a fantastically complicated piece, its materials are mostly quite simple: melodies that are scale fragments and harmonies that are basically triadic. The sense of complexity results from the varied and sometimes violent juxtapositions of these simple materials. The opening melody of the ballet is taken from a folk tune and lies mostly within a simple four-​note segment of a scale. The accompaniment consists of just two notes. That these two notes do not conform to the tonal implications of the melody is what lends the passage its distinctive sound. The musical simplification here serves a darker expressive purpose than in Stravinsky’s musical representations of the prerational world of children and animals. The Rite of Spring uses the radical simplification of musical materials to associate idiocy with primitive racial Others, and thus invites a response in exotic and eugenic modes. Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts. The libretto (by Gertrude Stein) engages many of the principal literary tropes associated with idiocy. It disassembles language to the point of nonsense, cultivating a deliberate sense of linguistic incompetence. Amid frequent references to animals and the natural world, the libretto maintains a religious focus: we are in the world of the Holy Fool. The desire to convey a sense of simple, unsophisticated religiosity was Thomson’s principal motivation in insisting that the opera be performed by an all-​black cast. His idea, rooted in familiar and pernicious racial stereotypes, was that blacks were inherently 24. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996b) identifies “a radical simplification of means” as an essential component of Stravinsky’s musical style.

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childlike, and thus well suited to conveying Stein’s nonsense verses with their atmosphere of innocent religiosity. In this way, Thomson fixes the association between idiocy and racialized Others. His music is correspondingly simplified in all domains. Like the text, the music, with its radical simplification of materials, its incessant repetition, and its refusal of normal harmonic progression, deliberately cultivates a sense of musical incompetence. The normally abled musical body maintains a reasonably high level of intellectual complexity (especially in its counterpoint and voice leading). The disabled modernist musical body is deliberately emptied out, stripped of its contrapuntal complexity; it is static and repetitive. As a result, it has often seemed to its detractors to be comparatively simpleminded (Adorno’s terms for this sort of simplification in Stravinsky’s music are “primitive,” “childish,” “regressive,” and “infantile”) (Adorno 2003). But modernist composers have found in idiocy a rich compositional resource, both as a way of deflating the grandiose pretentions of late nineteenth-​ century Romanticism and as a source of directness, authenticity, and sincerity, and, more darkly, as a window into the “primitive mind.” Insofar as it is interested in extreme simplification, with a corresponding emphasis on the natural, the childlike, the folk, and the primitive, modernist music claims idiocy as a valuable resource and thus affirms a disability aesthetics. (Chapter 5 offers a more extended discussion of representations of idiocy in modernist music.) Autism

The term autism originated with Eugen Bleuler, as part of his constitution of the diagnostic category of schizophrenia, with autism understood as “detachment from reality, together with the relative and absolute predominance of the inner life” (Bleuler 1911/​1950). In 1943, Leo Kanner appropriated the term to refer to a group of children whose behavior he distinguished in two ways from other forms of madness or idiocy.25 First, there was an unusual degree of social isolation, which Kanner refers to as “an extreme autistic aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, 25.  Leo Kanner announced his new diagnostic category of autism, which he understood as a kind of schizophrenia, in “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” (1943). Some of the now-​vast literature on autism both as a psychiatric diagnosis and as a cultural manifestation will be surveyed in ­chapter 6.

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shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside” (1943, 242). Second, there was an unusual rigidity and aversion to any change in habit or routine, what Kanner referred to as “autistic sameness”: “[The children shared an] inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations [and an] anxiously excessive desire for the maintenance of sameness” (1943, 245). Autism has experienced a spectacular rise in diagnostic prevalence since the 1990s, but it has its roots firmly in an earlier period, namely, the period of the musical modernism under study in this book. In modernist literature, art, and music, autistic aloneness manifests itself as self-​reference, recursion, radical subjectivity, withdrawal from social consensus, withdrawal from consensual language, hermeticism, autonomy, subjective self-​reliance, and inwardness (all of these qualities are featured in the vast literature on cultural modernism). Modernist musical works are relatively contextual (Milton Babbitt’s term):  they have a wealth (some would say a surplus) of internal relations but relatively few external ones (Babbitt 1987). Robert Morgan’s description of the hermeticism of modernist musical discourse, focused on Schoenberg but with broader relevance, emphasizes its resistance to communal communication and its insistence on private meanings and thus its autistic “aloneness”: “Music became an incantation, a language of ritual that, just because of its inscrutability, revealed secrets hidden from normal understanding” (Morgan 1984, 458). The wealth of modernist music’s internal relations often gives the impression of extreme complexity and difficulty. Its autistic aloneness manifests itself as a tough, thorny surface that simultaneously conceals and reveals an unusual complexity of internal, contextual relationships. The complexity of some modernist music reinforces its aloneness, its isolation from listeners, its relative inaccessibility. In a familiar criticism, modernist music is likened to a built environment (a space, a building, a room) to which normal, conventional listeners cannot gain access. Musical innovations and difficulties, in this view, create an impermeable barrier to access. A  thorny, forbidding exterior conceals the inner meaning (in contrast to the more conventional arrangement in which the musical surface reflects and manifests—​gives transparent access to—​the structural depths). These sorts of metaphors—​an impenetrable wall of incomprehensible signs that prevents access to an inner life—​are extraordinarily pervasive in the autism literature.26 The quality of inaccessibility is thus

26. Two early classics of the modern autism literature enshrine the idea of inaccessibility in their titles: Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth

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understood as a feature of autistic aloneness, for both autistic individuals and modernist music. In some modernist music, including a good deal of twelve-​tone music, autistic aloneness (manifested as complex self-​referentiality) finds a corresponding autistic sameness (manifested as a compositional commitment to derive everything in the piece from a single source). In most twelve-​ tone music, everything is related to a single referential ordering of the twelve notes. That row or series makes up a basic shape, and other shapes are derived from it by transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-​ inversion, those traditional contrapuntal devices. Indeed, the basis of this music is imitative counterpoint. The basic shape (the imitative subject), although endlessly reshaped, remains the source for all the harmonies and melodies. In that sense, and at a deep level, the music remains always the same. These autistic features of twelve-​tone composition have elicited a strongly negative response from many listeners, critics, and musicologists. Very often, they have responded in exotic mode, looking across a vast gulf at a kind of music that seems hardly musical, or in a eugenic mode, imagining it as a threat to the health of the musical community, and wishing it away. From these points of view, twelve-​tone music is characterized as a Demonic Cripple, threatening to destroy music in a vengeful manifestation of its own deficiencies; an Idiot Savant, whose hypertrophy of rationality is undermined by a corresponding atrophy of feeling; or a Hyperrational Calculator, devoid of human warmth. (Chapter 6 explores more fully the intertwining of negative responses to autism and twelve-​ tone music.) But a more sympathetic response in a more realistic mode is also possible. Autistic aloneness and sameness, both in music and in individuals, can be understood as differences, not deficits—​indeed, as sources of particular strength and interest. There are unquestionably barriers to traditional sorts of sociability and apprehension, but remarkable and distinctively autistic appeal resides within.

Schoenberg, Piano Piece, Op. 33a. Schoenberg’s twelve-​tone music typically balances a theme against its inversion. In that way, a sense of imitative counterpoint is hard-​wired into the basic structure of the music. In addition, within the theme statements and their inversional

of the Self (1967) and Clara Claiborne Park, The Siege: A Family’s Journey into the World of an Autistic Child (1967).

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imitations, there are frequent cross-​references and imitations at a more local level. The music is highly self-​referential: to paraphrase Schoenberg, the tones are related only to one another and to the referential series, not to any external, communal notion of tonality or key. The music is highly varied, but always with reference to the same single series. In that way, it manifests a striking sense of aloneness and sameness. Its complex self-​referentiality makes it difficult to approach for some listeners, and even to describe its technical processes is to risk stereotyping it as a Hyperrational Calculator. But on its own terms and in its own way, the music is as engaging and expressive as any. Webern, Quartet Op.  22. Webern’s music is often overtly contrapuntal, with two or more melodies presented at the same time, and the melodies are often related by inversion. The melodies are not only derived from a shared twelve-​tone series but also typically share an intensive concentration on one or two intervals. The result is a music that is highly self-​referential (contextual) and endowed with a remarkably high degree of self-​similarity, although its repetitions are often somewhat concealed. The music is laconic and avoids traditional expressive gestures, offering instead an extraordinary refinement and concentration. Stravinsky, Double Canon. Late in his life, Stravinsky became a twelve-​tone composer, in his own highly individual way. In the Double Canon, as the title suggests, he divides the string quartet into two pairs of instruments, with each pair presenting a canon. The subjects for both canonic pairs consist of statements of a single twelve-​tone series and its transformations (transposition, inversion, retrograde, retrograde-​inversion). As a result, the music weaves a dense contrapuntal web that embodies a high degree of both contextuality (aloneness) and intervallic/​motivic homogeneity (sameness). These are not problems to be solved or defects to be cured, but differences to be celebrated. Babbitt, Composition for Four Instruments, opening clarinet solo. In the early postwar period, Babbitt’s music often projected four distinct musical lines, and these are organized into two inversionally related pairs. All of the lines are derived from the same or similar twelve-​ note series and all project the same three-​note motive, which occurs four times in each twelve-​note series. The extraordinary intensity of the internal relations is the likely source of the common perception that Babbitt’s music is inaccessible. Crawford Seeger, Diaphonic Suite No. 1, third movement. Ruth Crawford Seeger was interested in exploring the extremes of strict,

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systematic control and total, rhapsodic freedom. This movement represents the first extreme by projecting a single seven-​note idea simultaneously at three levels of structure (the composer referred to the movement as a “triple passacaglia”). With its single generative source, this movement offers a vivid and engaging musical representation of aloneness and sameness. Excessive aloneness and sameness have often been stigmatized as pathological conditions, for both musical works and individuals, evoking pity or horror in the eugenic mode, and inspiring efforts at normalization. The works and the individuals have been stereotyped as Idiot Savants and Hyperrational Calculators. But taking these works, and these individuals, on their own terms, one might see their high degree of self-​reference and their refusal of organicist evolution as defining strengths. Insofar as it makes a virtue of aloneness and sameness, and affirms the values of contextuality and commitment to a single referential source, modernist music claims autism as a valuable resource, and thus affirms its disability

  DISABILITY CONDITIONS IN MUSICAL MODERNISM

Deformity/ ​disfigurement

In History

In Literature

In Music

Age of rehabilitation. Ugly

Obsessive Avenger.

Formal deformation.

laws.

Demonic Cripple.

Fractured,

Degenerate

dismembered

Criminal.

forms. Deficiency of symmetry.

Mobility impairment

Age of rehabilitation. Ugly laws.

Obsessive Avenger.

Immobile, paralyzed

Demonic Cripple.

harmony. Excess of

Degenerate

symmetry.

Criminal. Charity Cripple. Sweet Innocent. Madness

End of moral education, beginning of mass

Obsessive Avenger. Mad Genius.

Stratification into conflicting layers.

incarceration (institutionalization). Idiocy

End of moral education,

Holy Fool.

beginning of mass

Degenerate

incarceration

Criminal.

Radical simplification. Nondevelopmental repetition.

(institutionalization).

Deficiency of internal

“Menace of the

relationships.

feebleminded.” (continued )

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Autism

In History

In Literature

In Music

At core of schizophrenia

Idiots Savants.

Self-​referentiality

(1908). Later splits off

Hyperrational

(contextuality).

into “early infantile

Calculators.

Derivation from a

autism” (1943). Aloneness

single basic shape.

and sameness.

Excess of internal relationships.

aesthetics. (Chapter 6 explores the representation of autism in modernist music, especially twelve-​tone music.)

CLAIMING DISABILITY

Critics of musical modernism, especially on the political right, have explicitly identified it as disabled: sick, diseased, and mad. This line of criticism reached its culmination in the Nazi condemnation of modern music as “degenerate.” Beyond the obvious nationalist, racist, and anti-​Semitic aspects of that label, it is attached to modernist music because the Nazis recognized (correctly in my view) that this music does have a profound connection to disability, especially in its penchant for representing and aestheticizing the disabled (nonnormative, stigmatized) human body. Proponents of modernist music have also adopted the language of disability, but from the opposite direction. Modernist art is sometimes seen as a cure for a sick culture, a sort of shock therapy administered to a complacent bourgeois audience. For conventional audiences, the music may appear disabled. For the composers and their supporters, it is the audience that is disabled. And it is precisely the music that disables them, renders them unable to listen with comprehension and enjoyment. Modernist music both represents disability and disables conventional listeners. In response to questions posed at the beginning of this chapter, I contend that the modern in music manifests itself as disability, that modernist music has a fundamental interest in representing the disabled human body, and that modernist music claims disability. For modernist composers, disability is a source of enduring fascination, a means of shattering conventions and establishing new structural paradigms and new kinds of beauty, a cause for celebratory delight. At the same time, modernist music is enmeshed in the history and culture of disability, which it simultaneously reflects and shapes. It thus evinces a deep ambivalence toward disability, as something that should be either

[ 38 ] Broken Beauty

cured (normalized, rehabilitated) or eliminated (segregated, institutionalized, sterilized, or killed, following the eugenic imperative). Modernist musical representations of disability often conform to oppressive regimes of representation: disabled bodies are often represented musically in stereotypical ways and elicit stereotypical and stigmatizing responses. In short, the modernist musical response to disability is complicated, abounding in ambivalence, conflict, and self-​contradiction, both in the corpus as a whole and in individual works. But even amid a eugenic culture and a tendency toward the exoticization and enfreakment of disabled bodies, modernist musical representations of disability often open up new perspectives on disability. They reveal the aesthetic and physical beauty of disability, and change our sense of the beautiful in the process. All of these sorts of artistic representations—​those grounded in pity, horror, and fascination—​ are worth taking seriously. Representations matter in the real world: how people act depends on how they think about things. If we want to know how a particular culture thought about disability, its artworks (including its music) are a good place to look. There, we will discover the ways that disability history shapes modernist music, and the way that modernist music shapes disability history and the lives of people with disabilities. In that sense, the representation of disability has an ethical as well as an aesthetic dimension.

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CHAPTER 2

Narrating Disability The stories that modernist music tells about disability tend to avoid traditional overcoming and quest narratives in favor of chaos and acceptance narratives. Chaos narratives represent disability as permanent, incurable, and incomprehensible; acceptance narratives represent disability as a potentially desirable way of being in the world, with no impulse toward normalization or cure. Disability Narratives   41 Overcoming/​Restitution/​Cure   Quest/​Conversion   43 Chaos  44 Acceptance  44

41

A Single (Marked) Tone   46 In Traditional, Tonal Music   46 In Proto-​Modernist Music   48 In Modernist Music   49 Passing and Neighboring Tones   52 As Overcoming Narrative   52 Aimless Passing Tones and Frozen Neighbor Tones   53 Sentences  56 Traditional Sentences as Quest Narratives   56 Dissolving Sentences as Chaos Narratives   58 Immobilized Sentences as Acceptance Narratives   59 Sonata Forms   61 Traditional Sonata Forms as Overcoming Narratives   61 Symmetrical Sonata Forms as Acceptance Narratives   61 Open-​Ended Sonata Forms as Chaos Narratives   63 Inversional Symmetry   64 Conclusion  67

DISABILITY NARRATIVES

Narratives of disability (including musical narratives) tend to follow one of four trajectories: the disability is overcome; the disability is the means for achieving a higher wisdom; the disability is permanent and incomprehensible; the disability is incorporated into daily life, where it becomes a distinctive source of identity and pleasure.

Music tells stories, including stories about disability (culturally stigmatized, nonnormative minds and bodies). Modernist music has particular sorts of stories it tells about disability, and particular ways of telling them. Surveying the long history of disability narratives, including first-​person accounts of the experience of disability, it is possible to identify four principal sorts of stories: overcoming/​restitution/​cure narratives (the disability is overcome and normality is restored); conversion/​quest narratives (the disability catalyzes a voyage of self-​discovery toward a higher wisdom); chaos narratives (the disability shatters normal conventions of life and resists comprehension); and acceptance narratives (the disability is assimilated and accepted as a welcome way of being in the world). As Michael Bérubé (2005, 570) tells us, “Disability demands a story,” and these are the four sorts of stories that have generally been told.1 Modernist music, while occasionally invoking overcoming and quest narratives of disability, is more often and characteristically associated with narratives of chaos and acceptance.

Overcoming/​R estitution/​C ure

Of these four disability narratives, overcoming/​restitution/​cure narratives are by far the most common. Indeed, throughout much of Western cultural history, they define the standard, received manner of thinking about disability. This is the narrative expression of the medical model of disability, that is, the conceptualization of disability as a problem to be solved, a disease to be cured, an abnormality to be normalized. As Arthur Frank observes, “The plot of restitution has the basic storyline: ‘Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, but tomorrow I’ll be healthy again.’ . . . Behind the restitution narratives of popular culture and sociology is medicine [with its] single-​minded telos of cure” (1995, 77, 83). The overcoming narrative 1. On literary narratives of disability, especially first-​person narratives, see Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995) and two books by Thomas Couser:  Recovering Bodies:  Illness, Disability and Life Writing (1997) and Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (2009).

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deploys a rhetoric of triumph (Couser 2009)  and the disability is often apprehended in exotic mode, inviting the observer to look across a wide expanse toward an alien object (Garland-​Thomson 2002 and 2009). The narrative of disability overcome shapes the novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Lennard Davis explains, novelistic plots usually involve the restoration of a disrupted normality, often presented as the overcoming or cure of a disability: “The identity of the novel revolves around a simple plot. The situation had been normal, it became abnormal, and by the end of the novel, the normality, or some variant of it, was restored. . . . The novel as a form relies on cure as a narrative technique” (2003, 542). To consummate the traditional marriage plot, for example, a normative protagonist often must overcome a disabled rival or antagonist (in Jane Eyre, Rochester must overcome monstrous, mad Bertha; in David Copperfield, the eponymous hero must overcome monstrous, writhing, deformed Uriah Heep; in Barchester Towers, Arabin must overcome his fascination with crippled Madame Neroni, and she must be expelled from the community [LaCom 1997]). In novels involving a disabled character of the Obsessive Avenger type, he (it’s always a man) must be either killed or expelled for the narrative to achieve closure (Ahab in Moby Dick; the Monster in Frankenstein; Long John Silver in Treasure Island). Still more broadly, disability scholars have conflated the overcoming narrative of disability with narrative itself. Mitchell and Snyder contend bluntly that “Narrative issues to resolve or correct a deviance marked as improper to a social context. . . . Disability has functioned throughout history as one of the most marked and remarked upon differences that originates the act of storytelling” (2000, 54). In this view, to tell a story is necessarily to tell a story about disability, and to narrate is to engage the narrative of disability overcome. In musical works in the tonal tradition, historically coextensive with the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century novel, the narrative of overcoming disability is a familiar presence. Chromatic tones, dissonant tones, and foreign keys must be subsumed into the diatonic, consonant frame of the main key. That story—​of a normal beginning, a deviation into abnormality, and a restoration of normality—​is virtually entailed within the dynamic of traditional tonality, with its insistence on tonal closure at the end of each formal unit and each whole work (Straus 2006a, 2011). But in modernist music (as with modernist art and literature of all kinds), the cure narrative comes to seem increasingly problematic. Indeed, one important strand in artistic modernism involves challenging any narrative that requires definitive closure, with all “tonal problems” definitively

[ 42 ] Broken Beauty

solved. On the terrain of disability, modernist art resists or refuses the overcoming narrative. Ultimately, the refusal of the overcoming narrative may entail a refusal of narrative itself. As Thomas Couser argues, “A comic plot may seem entirely inconsistent with the lives of those whose master status is permanent disability. Indeed, if chronic physical impairment—​for example, paralysis—​is perceived as stasis, it may seem incompatible with plot of any type—​and thus seem unnarratable” (1997, 183). The overcoming narrative is closely associated with the medical model of disability, with its commitment to normalization and cure. A  refusal of the overcoming narrative thus also marks a rejection of the medical model and a search for other ways of understanding and narrating disability.

Quest/​C onversion

If overcoming narratives are associated with the medical model of disability, quest/​conversion narratives are associated with the religious model. In these narratives, disability is understood as an emblem of divine inspiration, and a catalyst or crucible for a higher wisdom or spiritual knowl­ edge. In traditional overcoming narratives, a secondary character with a disability frequently serves as a catalyst for spiritual growth in a normative protagonist: the disabled secondary character teaches the normative protagonist important lessons about life and about him-​or herself. In quest/​conversion narratives, it is the normative protagonist who passes through a state of disability on a trajectory of spiritual growth toward a higher wisdom. In some cases, the disability is not overcome or cured, but remains as the enduring outward mark of transcendent understanding. In other cases, the disability is cured, but the protagonist is profoundly changed by the experience. Quest/​conversion narratives deploy a rhetoric of spiritual compensation (Couser 2009)  and engage the wondrous mode that directs the observer to look up in awe of difference (Garland-​ Thomson 2002 and 2009). Among nineteenth-​century novels, for example, Rochester’s blindness (Brontë, Jane Eyre) and Esther Summerson’s smallpox and resulting disfigurement (Dickens, Bleak House) catalyze the spiritual growth of these normative protagonists. In modernist music, disability-​ related quest narratives often play out as a process of what is sometimes called “disambiguation” (Babbitt 1987):  meaning emerges from a chaotic or ambiguous initial state. The narrative involves seeking and finding a previously unsuspected musical order. In twelve-​tone music by Babbitt and Schoenberg, for example, the

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underlying structures are sometimes initially ambiguous or withheld, and are clarified over the course of a passage or composition (Boss 2014). Such a narrative might involve a series of false starts or dead ends, and might be only partially successful. Indeed, in modernist quest narratives, complete and definitive success would be an unlikely alternative. In modernist music, quest narratives often dissolve into chaos narratives.

Chaos

If the overcoming narrative enacts a comic master plot, then the chaos narrative is associated with the tragic: the narrative agent’s attempt at restitution is ultimately crushed. This is a narrative type that is rare in literature before modernism. But in modernist literature and art, including music, the chaos narrative is the most common and characteristic, part of a broader modernist program that involves shattering conventions of all kinds. A work may begin in a relatively normative, orderly state and then descend into chaos, without the possibility of ever extricating itself. The narrative may take the form of a series of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to restore order. Chaos narratives are associated with a rhetoric of horror (Couser 2009)  and encourage the disability to be understood in eugenic mode: the disability strips away the normal trappings of humanity. Modernist literary chaos narratives of disability include Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (Benjy Compson’s cognitive disability leads to his castration and ultimate incarceration in a mental hospital) and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Jake Barnes’s disabling war wound directly prevents the consummation of a comic marriage plot). In modernist music, chaos narratives of disability often involve the progressive undermining or dissolution of traditional sonorities and forms, preventing them from behaving and, especially, from achieving closure in their traditional way. Passing notes fail to form spans; dissonances fail to resolve; cadential closure is endlessly thwarted. The music resists any attempt to make sense of it in traditional terms.

Acceptance

Chaos narratives sometimes veer over into acceptance narratives:  disability is understood as a permanent condition, not susceptible to cure or overcoming, but also not necessarily stigmatized or incomprehensible. Modernist music finds new ways of making sense of disabled musical

[ 44 ] Broken Beauty

bodies. For example, if tonal problems are left unsolved, dissonances become emancipated and music becomes fully chromatic, vastly enlarging the possible harmonic combinations. If linear progressions lose directionality, we learn to revel in these new combinations, to enjoy them for their own sake. If there is no cadential closure, we learn to enjoy the musical journey without concern for its destination. Acceptance narratives deploy a rhetoric of emancipation (Couser 2009)  and encourage apprehension in a realistic mode:  the onlooker identifies with the disabled body (Garland-​Thomson 2002 and 2009). Acceptance narratives thus embody the aesthetics of disability. Abnormal, problematic elements move from the stigmatized periphery to the valorized center of artistic works. Liberated from normative or conventional constraints, formerly abnormal and problematic elements are revealed as beautiful, if in strange and new ways. In acceptance narratives, disabling conditions do not make sense in traditional terms, but may come to be celebrated on their own terms, accepted as fundamental, inescapable, and ultimately desirable. The disability is not overcome, not transcended in a quest for higher wisdom, and not a permanent barrier to meaning; rather, it is claimed as constitutive of human identity and action.

  DISABILITY NARRATIVES Overcoming/​ Restitution/​ Cure

The situation was normal, got deranged in

Associated with the

some way, and then normality was restored. “I was okay, then got messed up, and now I’m okay again.”

medical model of disability. Rhetoric of triumph. Apprehension in exotic mode.

Conversion/​ Quest

The experience of disability is the gateway to a richer understanding, a higher wisdom.

Associated with the religious model of

“I labored in the darkness of disability, but

disability.

now, through that experience, I see the

Rhetoric of spiritual

light of a higher vision.”

compensation. Apprehension in wondrous mode.

Chaos

The disability is a permanent condition,

Associated with the

impossible to make sense of in traditional terms. Telos of tragedy.

disability.

“My disability is a source of never-​ending pain and confusion.”

medical model of Rhetoric of horror. Apprehension in eugenic mode. (continued )

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Acceptance

The disability enables a different sort of life. It is accepted, accommodated, and welcomed as a distinctive and desirable way of being in the world. “I have learned to claim my disability, with all of its complexities and challenges, as a

Associated with the sociocultural model of disability. Rhetoric of emancipation. Apprehension in realistic mode.

formative aspect of my human identity.”

A SINGLE (MARKED) TONE

A single tone, marked by its deviation from a normative context, may be the locus or instigator of various narratives. In traditional tonal music, these are usually overcoming narratives; in modernist music, they are usually chaos or acceptance narratives.

Given two qualities in opposition to each other (like major and minor, consonance and dissonance, diatonic and chromatic), one is typically unmarked (understood as normal, regular, natural) and the other is marked (understood as deviant, irregular, unnatural). Because of an inherently asymmetrical valuation, the marked term carries a greater expressive and emotional charge—​it often seems to be laden with meaning.2 In this sense, markedness is akin to a stigmatic mark on a body, like the mark of Cain: it identifies a body as disabled (nonnormative). In the real world, disabled bodies, bodies that bear a stigmatic mark, often provoke certain questions: What’s wrong with you? What happened to you? How did you get that way (Garland-​Thomson 2014). Like bodies that bear a stigmatic mark, marked musical tones are defined by their power to elicit such questions. To answer these questions, a story is told, and that story is a disability narrative.

In Traditional, Tonal Music

For a musical tone to become marked, it must defy conventional expectations for appearance (sound) and functioning. Dissonant and chromatic tones are often marked in this sense. In traditional, tonal music, by far the most common narrative emanating from a single marked tone is an overcoming narrative:  the marked tone intrudes on a scene of diatonic 2. Markedness is a central term in music semiotics; see, especially, Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (2004).

[ 46 ] Broken Beauty

normality, propagates itself in ways that challenge musical stability, and is ultimately subsumed within a normalizing tonal frame. These “tonal problems” have been widely discussed in the literature, including the disability literature. They set in motion a narrative that concludes with the cure of the stigmatic mark.3 Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E♭ major (“Eroica”), first movement. Early in the movement, a rhetorically marked chromatic note (C♯) intrudes on a scene of diatonic normality. Unresolved in its local context, it spawns great harmonic tumult later. In the vast literature on this movement, the problematic C♯ is often understood as a pause, hesitation, or stumble in the progress of the narrative’s protagonist:  a hero strides forth, but then falters momentarily, his mobility impaired either by an external obstacle or an internal apprehension or foreboding. As the work proceeds, this mobility impairment threatens to disable the heroic progress, but is ultimately overcome in a glorious blaze of triumph. Schubert, Piano Sonata in B♭ major, Op. Post., first movement. Early in the movement, an ominously trilled, chromatic G♭ is heard deep in the bass of an otherwise diatonically unimpaired choralelike passage. That foreboding G♭ eventually produces all sorts of striking harmonic reactions. In the critical literature, this G♭ is sometimes understood as a wound, which potentially disfigures the musical body. And there is debate about the extent to which this movement, or the piece as a whole, is able to heal that wound. While the larger narrative is still one of overcoming or cure, there is no Beethovenian sense of triumph. Brahms, Symphony No. 3 in F major, first movement. The principal key of the movement is clouded almost immediately by A♭, drawn from the parallel minor. The darkening of major by minor evolves into a persistent theme through much of the piece. Susan McClary (1993) has associated the deviant A♭ with feminizing and Orientalizing impulses in the music that compete with its normative, heroic masculinity. The

3. On “tonal problems” and their musical solutions in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​ century music, see Patricia Carpenter, “A Problem of Organic Form:  Schoenberg’s Tonal Body” (1988); Steven Laitz, Pitch-​Class Motive in the Songs of Franz Schubert: The Submediant Complex (1992); Murray Dineen, “The Tonal Problem as a Method of Analysis” (2005); Patrick McCreless, “The Pitch-​Class Motive in Tonal Analysis: Some Historical and Critical Observations” (2011). I discuss this issue from a disability perspective in Extraordinary Measures (2011), including observations about Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) and Schubert, Piano Sonata in B♭ major. Susan McClary discusses Brahms, Symphony No. 3 in related terms in “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute’ Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony” (1993).

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disabled body is thus exoticized. In relation to the disability conditions and narratives under discussion here, I would think of Brahms’s A♭ more like Schubert’s G♭, as a disfiguring wound in the musical body that is never fully healed, amid a narrative of overcoming that, however, falls short of heroic triumph.

In Proto-​M odernist Music

There are pieces in the tonal tradition, however, in which the marked tone persists far beyond the usual duration and either resists or entirely refuses to be subsumed into the diatonic frame. Such tones may suggest a deforming mark on and a disfigurement of the musical body.

Smetana, String Quartet No. 1 (“From My Life”), fourth movement. According to the composer, a piercing E, played loudly in the highest register, represents the tinnitus that was a feature of his deafness: “The long insistent note in the finale . . . is the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-​pitched tones which, in 1874, announced the beginning of my deafness. I permitted myself this little joke because it was so disastrous to me” (Large 1970, 318). The music, which had been in a rollicking major key, never recovers. Rather, the marked E—​marked not by its chromaticism but by its extreme register, its loud dynamic, and its sheer persistence—​diverts the narrative from comedy to tragedy, from overcoming to chaos. The disability is a Demonic Cripple, represented in something like a eugenic mode, and eliciting a musical rhetoric of horror.

Blake Howe (2016) has argued that, if sufficiently marked and unassimilated, a single tone may come to exemplify obsession or other forms of mental derangement to the point of madness. A  small number of unusual nineteenth-​ century compositions are obsessed with single tones in that way. In such works, the refusal of the marked tone to submit to the normalizing tonal frame precludes the possibility of an overcoming narrative; instead, we find early examples of chaos narratives that have a striking tendency to veer over into true acceptance narratives.

Chopin, Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4. For a piece in A minor, Chopin’s mazurka has a strange obsession with F, marked as a tone alien to the tonic triad. That note persistently clouds the tonic, intruding just

[ 48 ] Broken Beauty

at those moments when a tonic arrival is expected. It lingers through the final measure of the work; it is never assimilated or overcome; it remains as a permanently disfiguring mark on the tonality, an integral and ineradicable part of its identity. From a tonal point of view, the result is something much closer to a chaos than an overcoming narrative:  the disabling element resists comprehension. But the musical rhetoric is gentle and slightly nostalgic, almost sentimental. The disability condition is valorized and the narrative trajectory tends toward its acceptance. Alkan, Recueil de Chants, Op.  38, No. 8 (“Fa”). The piece is in A  minor, but the tone F is stated on every eighth-​note beat of the work, a total of 414 times.4 If the Fs were stripped away, this would be a modest and quite conventional work, with regular eight-​measure phrases, and simple tonic and dominant harmonies in the small number of keys it moves through. But the F, occupying a fixed registral space between melody and bass, persists throughout the work, right through its final cadence. Howe (2016) adduces this work as an exemplar of obsession, but the refusal of the F to assimilate itself to the harmonies of the work might also be taken as an autistic refusal of compulsory sociality (Rodas 2008), clinging instead to autistic aloneness and sameness. From the point of view of the conventional frame, the F is a stigmatic mark that threatens deformation of the music and refuses a cure. The melody and harmony try to bring the F into conformity, to subsume it, to normalize it, and they seem close to success on various occasions, but the F is never assimilated or overcome. From the point of view of traditional tonality, the result is a chaos narrative. But the musical rhetoric is not one of horror. Indeed, there is something quite matter of fact about the whole proceeding—​the F is not destructive or destabilizing; it is just there. It invites a hearing in realistic mode, and suggests a narrative of acceptance.

In Modernist Music

In twentieth-​ century musical revisions of the same obsession/​ autism trope, many of the identifying features of the topic remain intact, 4.  The obsessive, seemingly mad qualities of Alkan’s music, including “Fa,” are discussed in Poundie Burstein, “Les chansons des fous: On the Edge of Madness with Alkan” (2006).

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including its expression as a chaos narrative or an acceptance narrative. What changes is the relative power of the conflicting parties. In the traditional arrangement, one of the parties to the conflict is the normative standard against which the other is understood as deviant. In modernist pieces that make similar use of obsessive repetition of a single tone, either of the conflicting strands may be taken as the appropriate frame for the other. The relative ascriptions of valued normativity and stigmatized deviation thus become blurred. Such single tones may have the effect of bifurcating the work into two distinct and irreconcilable streams. In that way, they may represent the sort of divided consciousness that is associated with the form of madness that was, in this period, likely to fall into the diagnostic category of schizophrenia. Whether associated primarily with disfigurement, obsession, autism, or madness, however, these single tones are usually identified as Obsessive Avengers experienced in eugenic mode amid a rhetoric of horror. Ravel, “Le Gibet,” from Gaspard de la Nuit. A single tone, B♭, is heard throughout the piece, present on every single beat. At the beginning, it is not felt as a stigmatic mark, because it belongs comfortably to the prevailing tonic key (E♭ minor). But as the piece goes on, the B♭ persists through harmonic changes, heard in contexts where it is truly foreign and disturbing. By the end of the piece, the B♭ has taken over entirely—​it has hijacked the whole structure, heard not only in the melody but also in the bass. Any conventional sense of E♭ minor has been overthrown, and the music enacts a chaos narrative—​the ending refuses to make sense in traditional tonal terms. Such a narrative is particularly well suited to the poem that underlies this music as a program, with its images of a tolling bell and a corpse hanging from a scaffold. The fixed tone here seems to evoke the obsessive fixity of a viewer’s response to such an image—​ unable to tear his or her gaze away. The disabled musical body, like the body hanging from the scaffold, is apprehended in eugenic mode, amid a rhetoric of horror. Berg, Wozzeck, Act 3, Scene 2 (Marie’s murder). Berg described this scene as an “invention on a single tone,” and there is a B♮ that is heard persistently throughout the scene. The B♮ is registrally mobile in the early parts of the scene, but near the end, it settles in the bass. From that position, it obliterates the rest of the music in a ferocious, deafening crescendo. Far from being normalized within a conventional frame, this single note becomes both frame and content within a searing chaos narrative. It would be hard to imagine a more

[ 50 ] Broken Beauty

chilling, hair-​raising representation of Wozzeck’s obsessive and violent madness. The scene enacts a chaos narrative amid a rhetoric of horror. Webern, Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, No. 3. The opening of the piece poses a basic opposition between a pulsing, repeated C♯ low in the cello and harsh, fleeting three-​note chords in the upper three instruments. These two elements contrast starkly and seem to have little to do with each other. As the piece moves ahead, the chords attempt to assimilate the C♯, and the C♯ attempts to deflect the chords. At the end, there is no clear victor: the C♯ remains powerfully in force, but now embedded in the same sort of harmony that previously sounded far above it. It is never clear which element is figure and which ground. There is no sense of overcoming. Rather, both the harmonies and the marked single tone compose an irresolvably conflicted musical character embarked upon a chaos narrative. In traditional, tonal narratives, the marked note is subsumed into the tonal fabric—​normalized and cured. In proto-​modernist works, the marked note hangs around obsessively, refusing to decay and release (to borrow some suggestive terms from acoustics). Chaos narratives are modernism’s preferred response to the provocation of the single marked tone, and certain highly unconventional works of the late nineteenth century may be taken as manifestations of musical modernism in this sense. But something far more radical happens in the modernist atonal music of the twentieth century:  the marked tone not only refuses to be assimilated but also actually hijacks and dominates the structure. The basis for traditional storytelling has been stripped away, and we find ourselves in the midst of chaos narratives that offer no consolation for their bleakness, no happy ending, and hardly a real ending at all.

  NARRATIVES OF A SINGLE (MARKED) TONE In traditional tonal music

Overcoming/​cure. The marked tone is normalized; the tonal problem

Disfigurement (a disfiguring mark). Mobility impairment.

it poses is solved; the wound is healed. In proto-​modernist music

Chaos. The distinction between

Disfigurement and mobility

normal/​abnormal and ground/​

impairment. Madness

figure is maintained, but the

(obsession). Autistic

opposed forces are held in equal

aloneness and sameness.

balance. (continued )

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25

In modernist music

Chaos. The distinction between

Madness (obsession

normal/​abnormal and ground/​

and schizophrenia).

figure is dissolved. The marked

Disfigurement and mobility

tone moves from periphery

impairment. Autistic

to center.

aloneness and sameness.

PASSING AND NEIGHBORING TONES

In modernist music, passing and neighboring notes (traditionally conveyors of directed musical motion amid an overcoming narrative) become aimless and frozen (as emblems of immobility and narrative chaos). At the same time, the resulting harmonies become appealing and generative in their own right: from stigmatized periphery to valorized center, with the possibility of narrative acceptance.

As Overcoming Narrative

Single tones can be marked in various ways, most conspicuously by being chromatic (in relation to a normative major or minor scale) or by being dissonant (with respect to a normatively consonant major or minor triad). Dissonances are most often presented as passing tones (connecting two different consonant tones) or neighboring tones (departing from and returning to the same consonant tone). In traditional tonal contexts, both passing and neighboring tones entail a narrative of disability overcome. A  normative initial situation is disrupted. A  marked, dissonant tone is introduced that instigates a narrative journey, which concludes with the restoration of the initial state. The marked tone is subsumed within the narrative frame; the tonal problem is solved; normality and stability are restored.

Passing and neighboring tones. Both passing and neighboring tones enact narratives of disability overcome in three stages: (1) an initial tone begins the narrative arc at home, as a source of motion, in an unmarked state of consonance; (2) a middle tone signals a departure from home along a path toward a goal, in a marked state of dissonance; and (3) a final tone signals a return home as the goal of a journey, in an unmarked state of consonance restored.

Passing notes have the capacity to form linear progressions: single, unified gestures that span time and space. The narrative implications of linear

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progressions have long been a theme for musical commentary, especially within the Schenkerian tradition. Here is Schenker himself at his most poetic:  “Every linear progression shows the eternal shape of life—​birth to death. The linear progression begins, lives its own existence in the passing tones, ceases when it has reached its goal—​all as organic as life itself” (1935/​1979, 44). The path traversed by a linear progression may encounter obstacles. These obstacles play the role of disabling elements, simultaneously motivating the journey and requiring its normalizing conclusion: “In the art of music, as in life, motion toward the goal encounters obstacles, reverses, disappointments, and involves great distances, detours, expansions, interpolations, and, in short, retardations of all kinds” (1935/​1979, 5). But music, if it is to make sense in traditional terms, must bring the journey to a satisfying conclusion. As dissonances, passing notes may be richly expressive, but they must ultimately yield to the demand for structural and narrative closure. All of this is true of neighbor notes as well, although now we are talking more about departure and return than directed motion toward a predetermined goal: the logic of overcoming still applies.

Aimless Passing Tones and Frozen Neighbor Tones

In modernist music, we often find simulacra of passing and neighboring notes—​these are tones that maintain the appearance but not the traditional function of such tones. The musical rhetoric arouses the expectation that these notes will perform a passing or neighboring role, but other musical features (especially a resistant, unsupportive harmony) undermine and thwart those roles. Specifically, the passing notes are stripped of directionality and tend to wander aimlessly within an intervallic frame, while the neighbor notes, instead of being permitted to depart and return melodically, are frozen and immobilized within static harmonies. Modernist uses of passing and neighboring tones thus often entail an acceptance narrative that negates the “telos of cure.”

Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 1. This ballet begins in a kind of D minor, but instead of a triad (D-​F -​A), the principal harmony is D-​E-​ G-​A . The main tones (D and A) are embellished by neighboring tones (E and G), but these are frozen into the harmony—​immobilized. The melody seems to wander almost aimlessly: like the people at the fair in the scenario of the ballet, the melody is just looking around, without a particular destination in mind. The repetition vitiates any sense of

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purposeful motion toward a goal. By immobilizing the neighbor tones and stripping the passing tones of directionality, the music conveys new narrative possibilities. Instead of being normalized within a subsuming triadic framework, these traditionally decorative dissonant tones become structurally generative, producing new combinations that permeate the whole ballet. Passing and neighboring notes have moved from stigmatized periphery to valorized center. The narrative is one of acceptance. The apparent mobility impairment is incorporated into the life of the music, where it functions as a source of identity and pleasure. Stravinsky, Orpheus. The melody in the opening of Orpheus wanders within a small intervallic frame, and its Phrygian associations are important to the lamenting quality of the music. The passing notes do not take us on a journey toward a goal. Instead, they confine us within a narrow span. The harmonies are not simple triads, but have neighbor notes frozen into them. By liberating the passing notes from their subservience to the directed linear progression, the music is able to give a pretty good representation of a sort of obsessive despair. The music doesn’t go anywhere—​it’s stuck. Amid a rhetoric of grief, the chaos narrative brings this nonnormative emotional condition to center stage, and refuses any cure or consolation. Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, Act 1, Scene 1. The initial harmonies freeze the neighbor notes B and D within the stable perfect fifth, A-​E. The melody moves aimlessly up or down within the different framing intervals. The immobilization of the neighbor notes and the aimlessness of the passing notes have the effect of reifying sonorities that are  central in the opera as a whole. The mobility impairment of the harmony is celebrated as a new source of beauty within a narrative of acceptance. Bartók, String Quartet No. 4, fifth movement. The main harmony in this movement can be thought of as freezing neighbor notes D♭ and F♯ within the consonant interval C-​G. The resulting harmony is not only a central, generative structure for this particular movement but also a familiar, idiomatic harmony for Bartók’s music in general. The neighbor notes do not connote an overcoming narrative, as they would in traditional, tonal music. Instead, they engender an acceptance narrative within which they function as integral, valorized elements. In tonal music, passing notes and the linear progressions they engender are directed toward a goal. When the goal is attained, we have a sense of

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arrival. That sense is enhanced by the coordination of the linear progression with the harmony. The traditional narrative of the passing tone is a narrative of overcoming: the music pushes through the obstacle created by the marked tone, the passing tone, to achieve its goal: the nonnormative condition is normalized. In modernist music, however, especially of the Stravinskyian and Bartókian varieties, the passing notes have lost their sense of direction: they move up or down within the spans in a somewhat aimless way within a static, fixed frame. The frequent literal repetition vitiates any sense of arrival: if you move again and again to a certain place, no one motion will have any particular force. Any sense of directed motion is further undermined by the lack of coordination between melody and harmony. As a representation of disability, the music is static, motionless, impaired in its mobility. As a narrative of disability, the modernist passing and neighboring note gives rise to a chaos or acceptance narrative: we descend into a soup of aimless activity with no way out, and the resulting situation is either a source of painful incomprehension or a celebration of new sources of identity and beauty. Acceptance narratives are closely bound up with disability aesthetics. Free from normative or conventional constraints, formerly stigmatized musical elements can be appreciated on their own terms, as a focus of fascination and a new source of beauty. Aimless passing notes and frozen neighbor notes are felt simultaneously as a repudiation of conventional binaries (normal/​ abnormal and consonant/​ dissonant and structural/​decorative) and an embrace of harmonies that would previously have been understood as occupying the second term of those binaries. As they move from stigmatized periphery to valorized center of the musical narrative, they thus open up the new sound world of musical modernism.

  NARRATIVES OF PASSING AND NEIGHBORING TONES In traditional tonal music

Overcoming/​cure. Dissonance normalized in resolving to

Mobility unimpaired. From source along path to goal.

consonance. In modernist music

Chaos/​acceptance. Creation of

Mobility impairment (paralysis).

new harmonies. Decorative tones become structural. From stigmatized periphery to valorized center.

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SENTENCES

Traditionally sentences are quest narratives (a musical identity is liquidated in the service of a higher cadential goal), but modernist sentences are more commonly dissolved or immobilized, creating narratives of either chaos or acceptance.

Two of the most common (and most often discussed) phrase types in classical music are the period and the sentence. A period is a combination of two shorter phrases: the first ends with a harmonically unstable cadence; the second answers with a similar phrase that, however, ends on a harmonically stable cadence. The identity of the period depends heavily on the balance between the two constituent phrases—​it is basically a symmetrical form. As such, it embodies an ideal of able-​bodiedness. But its able-​bodiedness is fragile: a loss of symmetry and of cadential power means a loss of identity. As a result, in modernist music, with its interest in formal asymmetry and its lack of interest in traditional cadence formation, one finds very few phrase pairs that can be recognized as periods, even deformed periods. The sentence, however, is more robust. It can withstand considerable deformation while still recognizable as a sentence, and modernist music is full of sentences that, in their deformation of the traditional form, both represent and narrate the disabled body. Normally, a sentence is eight measures long, with four measures of presentation and four measures of continuation. The presentation phase consists of a two-​measure basic idea, which is repeated. The continuation phase involves an increase of momentum leading to a cadence.5

Beethoven, Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, first movement. The opening phrase of this Beethoven sonata is adduced by William Caplin (following Schoenberg) as a prototypical classical sentence. Its presentation phase consists of two statements of a basic idea. In the continuation, the momentum increases amid fragmentation and liquidation of the motive and weakening of the harmony, leading to a cadence.

Traditional Sentences as Quest Narratives

As described by Schoenberg, Caplin, and other theorists, sentences are quest narratives:  a passage through a disabling chaos is redeemed by 5. Arnold Schoenberg offered the first systematic description of the musical sentence in Fundamentals of Musical Composition (1970). The principal contemporary theorist of

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the attainment of a higher goal. The presentation involves the formation of an identity; it creates the protagonist of the story: a distinctive individual, one “different from other themes.” There is a stability and solidity to this formation of identity:  we are in the presence of a well-​ articulated individual, and whatever happens next will be the story of that dramatic agent. The continuation phrase has three disability-​ related qualities: weakening, fragmentation, and liquidation. The destabilizing weakening of the harmony enables increasing melodic and rhythmic activity and mobility, intensifying a sense of momentum toward the cadence. Fragmentation involves shearing off parts of the basic idea—​these fragments are heard within shorter temporal spans, creating a sense of acceleration and increasing momentum within the continuation phrase. Liquidation involves “stripping the basic idea of its characteristic features, thus leaving the merely conventional ones for the cadence.” The goal of all of this accelerating activity—​the weakening, the fragmentation, and the liquidation—​is the cadence. Indeed, it is precisely because the basic idea has been weakened, fragmented, and liquidated that a cadence is possible. In that sense, the classical sentence is a quest narrative. An identity is established and then dissolved. But it is through the dissolution of identity that a higher goal is achieved, redeeming the journey through a disabling chaos. The musical rhetoric is often that of spiritual compensation. Modernist music makes surprisingly extensive use of the sentence as a thematic type.6 Some modernist sentences conform closely to the classical prototype, including its implicit quest narrative. Schoenberg, Piano Piece, Op. 33b. Schoenberg uses the rhetoric of the sentence as a way of forging a link to traditional practice. The piece opens with a literal, direct, un-​ironic translation of the sentence into his mature twelve-​tone style. Berg, Wozzeck, Act 1, Scene 3 (Marie’s Lullaby). Like Schoenberg, Berg uses the sentence as a way of connecting directly with the rhetoric of classical tonality in the context of a radically reconceived harmonic

the classical sentence is William Caplin (Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven [1998]). 6.  For studies of the postclassical and modernist musical sentence, see Matthew BaileyShea, “Beyond the Beethoven Model: Sentence Types and Limits” (2004) and Per Broman, “In Beethoven’s and Wagner’s Footsteps: Phrase Structures and ‘Satzketten’ in the Instrumental Music of Béla Bartók” (2007). See also David Forrest and Matthew Santa, “A Taxonomy of Sentence Structures” (2014).

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language. In this lullaby, the inherent tendency of the sentence toward dissolution—​fragmentation, liquidation, and a dying fall into a cadence—​reflects the generic imperative of a lullaby, which ends in sleep, as the culmination of this musical quest.

Dissolving Sentences as Chaos Narratives

More commonly, however, modernist sentences challenge and undermine the prototype, and suggest different narratives. One type of modernist sentence is what I will call a dissolving sentence. In sentences of this type, the identity of the basic idea is weakly formed and the continuation peters out without leading to a secure cadence. There is no sense, however, of the cadence being thwarted or evaded; rather, the continuation simply dissolves and ends. Without a transcendent goal to redeem the dissolution of a (weakly formed) identity, the narrative is one of chaos rather than quest. Schoenberg, Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, No. 6. This piece offers a radical, challenging reinterpretation of the sentence. Its basic idea—​just two slightly contrasting chords—​offers a weakly defined identity. The continuation phase is radically compressed, leading to a cadence that fades into nothingness. We have all of the parts of the sentence, but as if in slow motion, perceived at a great distance, barely audible. The music gives more a sense of dissolution into chaos than of a successful attainment of a preordained goal. And the chaos narrative I find here ties into the putative program of the piece, in reference to the funeral of Mahler. Webern, Movements for String Quartet, Op.  5, No. 4. The rhetoric of a sentence is evoked, but the basic idea has a somewhat hazy character, lacking in melodic and rhythmic definition. In the liquidated continuation and cadential dying away that follow, there is not much sense of quest toward a transcendent goal. This sentence follows a chaos narrative. Bartók, String Quartet No. 5, second movement. The musical character is weakly formed, and the fragmentation and liquidation that follow do not quest toward a cadence. The cadence that does come is weak both on its own local terms and because it is not well foretold in what comes before; it is thus hard to hear it as the goal of a quest. Once again, we have a sentence that describes a chaos narrative.

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Immobilized Sentences as Acceptance Narratives

Even as his pitch language remains relatively traditional (compared to some of his modernist contemporaries), Stravinsky radically undermines the rhetoric of classical tonality. And yet in the presentation of his themes, Stravinsky often draws on a sentencelike arrangement I  call the immobilized sentence. In this sort of Stravinskyian sentence, the developmental character is stripped away. Instead, we get static, exact repetitions, and then sudden bursts of mobility, leading to cadences that simply stop the motion rather than culminating a quest toward a cadential goal. The presentation phase consists of not two but three statements of the basic idea, and the repetitions are usually exact, or very nearly so. The continuation phase is compressed and strangely motionless—​typically the same harmony that was sustained throughout the presentation remains in force throughout the continuation. Even the cadential chord, when it arrives, is likely to be the same harmony yet again, or possibly an entirely unexpected harmony. Either way, there is no sense of developmental drive toward an anticipated cadential goal. As a result, there is no quest narrative. Instead, the Stravinskyian immobilized sentence enacts an acceptance narrative. The Stravinskyian sentence operates under the same aesthetic imperative toward simplification that affects so much of his music. In its refusal of motivic development and its apparently excessive insistence on literal repetition, the Stravinskyian sentence evokes the world of idiocy (the subject of ­chapter 5). The disabled body represented in the Stravinskyian immobilized sentence is impaired in its mobility, both physically and mentally. But the rhetoric is one of emancipation, not horror or exoticization. The Stravinskyian sentence invites listeners to attend to a disabled body in a realistic mode, in acceptance of difference.

Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 1, “Russian Dance.” We begin with a clearly articulated two-​measure basic idea that is repeated literally. The exact nature of the repetition simultaneously evokes the traditional sentence, for which the immediate repetition of the basic idea is the most prominent defining element, and challenges it—​most repetitions are slightly modified or transposed. Then comes an even stronger challenge—​the basic idea is heard again without significant modification. These three statements of the basic idea in the presentation phase are followed by an extremely compressed continuation leading to an abrupt termination, scarcely a cadence. This termination cannot be the

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cadential goal of a quest, because the same harmony has been heard repeatedly throughout the passage. We’ve never left this harmony, so there can be no sense of culmination or arrival or even of delayed return at the end. In this immobilized sentence, there is no journey, no development, no goal, and no quest. Instead, the immobility is embraced as intrinsically beautiful and desirable. Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 2, “Petrushka’s Curses.” Petrushka’s curses, his mocking music that Stravinsky described as being “in two keys” (Stravinsky and Craft 1981, 136), involves a twofold repetition of a two-​measure basic idea and then a slightly elongated continuation, with melodic fragmentation, leading to a cadence. But the cadence is hard to accept as a goal attained—​there is no sense of harmonic motion directed toward it, and thus no sense of it as a desired point of arrival. The harmony that precedes it—​a polychord that combines triads on C and F♯—​is entirely static and immobilized, and thus contributes nothing to a traditional sense of quest. Indeed, the cadence, instead of representing a transcendent goal that validates a dissolution of identity, comes as something of a shock—​it terminates the phrase without acting as a goal. There is no journey because we never leave the initial harmony. That harmony is neither the goal of a quest nor an obstacle to be overcome; rather, it is just itself, accepted on its own terms, without any narrative pressure to change. Stravinsky, Serenade in A, first movement. The beginning of Serenade in A is more traditional in some respects: mostly diatonic, mostly centered on A, and uses lots of triads. But rhetorically, we have another radical immobilization of the classical sentence, including a threefold repetition of a static basic idea followed by a compressed continuation and a cadence that is hardly felt as an achievement—​harmonically and melodically, we’ve hardly moved at all. The melody has dissolved and liquidated, but there is little sense of compensating arrival. This sentence is an acceptance narrative, not a quest narrative. The classical sentence is a quest narrative: an identity is formed and then dissolved (weakened, fragmented, liquidated) to permit the attainment of a higher cadential goal. The modernist sentence is a chaos or an acceptance narrative: either an identity is formed weakly and dissolved without any redeeming attainment (chaos) or an identity is formed rigidly and prevented from developing or moving in any way (acceptance). These modernist chaos and acceptance narratives simultaneously deform the conventional sentence and create new types of sentences. By downplaying the sense of directed motion toward a cadential goal, these new types of

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sentences permit and require us to attend to the harmonies on their own terms, without regard to any higher purpose. The musical disabilities—​the deformations of the traditional form—​are not overcome and do not require redemption.

  NARRATIVES OF THE MUSICAL SENTENCE In traditional, tonal music In modernist music

Quest/​conversion. Identity is dissolved to achieve a higher goal (cadence). Chaos/​acceptance. Cadential goal is stripped away; a termination rather than a transcendent goal. New sentencelike forms emerge.

SONATA FORMS

The traditional sonata embodies an overcoming narrative, as the harmonic Other of the second theme is normalized to the global tonic key. In modernist music, however, the sonata form is either immobilized through symmetries of pitch and form or deformed by a denial of ultimate closure, leading in both cases to a chaos or acceptance narrative. Traditional Sonata Forms as Overcoming Narratives

Sonata form is originally and traditionally an overcoming narrative: the harmonic Other of the second theme area is assimilated to the normative global tonic. The telos of the form is toward the cure of tonal wounds, the normalization of abnormal elements, the solution of tonal problems, and the recuperation of the tonic harmony, leaving it ultimately unimpaired by dissonance or chromaticism. Deviations from that narrative trajectory are evocatively classified as “deformations” in the now-​standard treatment of the topic by Hepokoski and Darcy (2011). Although the traditional sonata form is oriented toward the normalization of deformation, modernist sonata forms often embrace deformation and supplant the form’s trajectory toward cure with narratives of chaos and acceptance. Symmetrical Sonata Forms as Acceptance Narratives

Modernist composers made surprisingly frequent reference to sonata form—​surprising in light of their reputation as destroyers of musical

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traditions—​and modernist sonatas are often either symmetrical or open-​ ended.7 In symmetrical sonata forms, the form is balanced around its midpoint. Compared to the traditional sonata form, which is a goal-​oriented, directed, developmental form that strives to overcome and eventually does overcome some musical obstacle, a symmetrical sonata form is static and impaired in its mobility. That disabled musical body, however, is valorized rather than stigmatized. Amid a rhetoric of emancipation and celebration, the symmetrical sonata form embodies disability aesthetics. Stravinsky, Octet, first movement. This movement strongly evokes the traditional sonata form, including an exposition with two contrasting themes, each with its own harmonic area, a development, and a recapitulation, where both themes are restated. But even as it evokes the traditional form, it immobilizes the form by rendering it symmetrical. In the exposition, the first theme is centered on E♭, while the second theme is a semitone lower, on D. In the recapitulation, the second theme comes first, on E, while the first theme is heard later, back on E♭. The form is thus retrograde-​symmetrical and the succession of harmonic centers is retrograde-​inversionally symmetrical. Symmetries like this are antithetical to the dynamic of the traditional form, imposing a static sense of formal deadlock. The form is circular—​its ends are its beginnings—​ rather than propulsive and forward-​moving. The symmetry immobilizes the form. What is more, in this symmetrical scheme, the music of the second theme is never normalized to the global tonic (it never occurs on E♭). Rather, it occurs off the tonic in both exposition and recapitulation. The essential drama of the traditional sonata form involves the normalization of the second theme:  it is heard off-​tonic in the exposition and normalized to the tonic in the recapitulation. Its harmonic otherness is overcome. In Stravinsky’s sonata form, in contrast, there is no overcoming, no cure, no normalization; the movement traverses a narrative of acceptance. Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 3, first movement. This music is immobilized by symmetries of both pitch and form. The order of first and second themes is reversed in the recapitulation, creating a large-​ scale retrograde symmetry, balanced around the central development section. What is more, each theme in the recapitulation is effectively the pitch-​class inversion of its counterpart in the exposition. These

7. I discuss Stravinsky’s Octet and Symphony in C and Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3 in Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (1990).

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symmetries of form and pitch create an overall sense of balance: every event in the exposition has its inversional partner in the recapitulation. There is no sense that one thematic or harmonic area has subsumed or overcome the other. Rather, the themes are balanced against their own inversions. The larger aesthetic sense is one of immobility, but an immobility that has been destigmatized within an acceptance narrative.

Open-​E nded Sonata Forms as Chaos Narratives

In open-​ended sonata forms, the triumph of the first theme and its associated harmony is either undermined or dramatically shattered. When the thematic and harmonic content of the second theme (the traditional Other) refuses to yield, no overcoming narrative is possible. The traditional form is left in ruins, without the possibility of reassembly. Bartok, String Quartet No. 2, first movement. This movement involves a traditional polarity of themes (the first is active and striving, the second passive and static) and of harmonies (the first theme harmonies are mostly octatonic without any distinct tonal center; the second theme harmonies are mostly hexatonic and mostly centered on A). But the dramatic narrative is not at all traditional, for in the end, the movement is dominated by the second theme and its harmonies. Rather than being overcome or normalized, they permeate the end of the movement. One might think of this as the triumph of the second theme, but that the rhetoric of the ending is so decidedly untriumphant. Rather, it is equivocal, somewhat aimless, and unsettlingly open-​ended. Stravinsky, Symphony in C, first movement. This sonata form is engendered by a conflict between C and E (and between C major and E minor). As the movement nears its close, the conflict appears to have been definitively resolved in favor of the C: the problem is solved; the abnormal is normalized. But the peace is shattered by the violent chords of the ending, the last of which is C-​E-​G-​B, with E in the bass—​an evenly balanced crystallization of the generating conflict. The door that had seemed to shut gently is suddenly kicked back open, and narrative closure is shockingly denied at the last moment.

The traditional sonata form is inherently an overcoming narrative, turning on the normalization of the harmony of the second theme. Modernist

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sonata forms, in contrast, are usually chaos or acceptance narratives. They deform the traditional form either by symmetricizing it and thus immobilizing it or by shattering the normative conventions of narrative closure, denying the expected triumph of the first theme.   NARRATIVES OF SONATA FORM In traditional tonal music

Overcoming/​cure. The harmony of the second theme is assimilated

Deformation and mobility impairment are overcome.

to the global tonic. In modernist music

Chaos or acceptance. The traditional

Deformation, disfigurement,

form is immobilized (via

and immobility are incurable,

symmetry) and denied the

and may be accepted as a

possibility of narrative closure.

desirable way of being in the musical world.

INVERSIONAL SYMMETRY

Modernist music often relies on inversional symmetry as a normative standard of pitch organization, in relation to which anomalous tones may be understood as problematic deviations, thus creating the conditions for narratives of overcoming. Such narratives tend to unfold only over brief spans of time, however, while chaos narratives (or an immobilization of narrative altogether) prevail at the higher levels. Occasionally these chaos narratives shade over into acceptance narratives: immobility is embraced as a desirable way of being in the world musically.

The passing tone, the sentence, and the sonata form take their characteristic shapes in conventional, tonal music. Modernist passing tones, sentences, and sonata forms are revisions, transformations, and misreadings of these. We turn now, however, to a musical phenomenon and associated narratives  that originate with musical modernism, namely, those based on inversional symmetry. For a great deal of modernist, atonal music, inversional symmetry operates as a normative, regulating state, with musical motion directed toward or away from it.8 8. I discuss inversional symmetry as a normative principle in some modernist music in “Inversional Balance and the ‘Normal’ Body in the Music of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern” (2006b). Inversional symmetry in post-tonal music is a long-​standing theme among music theorists. See, for example, David Lewin, “Inversional Balance as an Organizing Force in Schoenberg’s Music and Thought” (1968) and Stephen Peles, “ ‘Ist Alles Eins’: Schoenberg and Symmetry” (2004).

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At the local level, we find a profusion of micro-​narratives of overcoming, as tones move from a state of imbalance to a state of balance. As a single unbalanced tone finds its inversional partner, there is a sense of normality restored. In this way, inversional balance in post-tonal music can impart a sense of directionality to the music, leading it along a path to a normative goal. But the paradoxical effect of these small balance-​affirming motions is often to inscribe a larger sense of stasis and immobility. With each local motion to establish or restore balance, a larger sense of stasis is reinforced. Locally, then, we will find narratives of overcoming. At a slightly higher level, however, we find narratives of chaos, in which the larger symmetry is enforced so rigidly as to preclude any narrative movement. In other works that engage inversional symmetry, the narrative trajectory may be directed toward acceptance of asymmetricality. Pieces of this type may move in and out of symmetrical balance, without any overriding desire for symmetry, or sense of loss in its absence. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Introduction to Part  1. The passage is based on a single axis of inversional symmetry with respect to which individual tones either create imbalance or attempt to restore balance. The inversional symmetry is defined with respect to a sustained dyad in the bass. A melodic tone disrupts the balance; a subsequent tone restores it. The same normalization narrative unfolds twice within the passage. The cumulative effect, however, is of stasis. In the drama of the ballet, this music is the prelude, before the action begins. Musically, it is appropriately poised, but immobile. Webern, Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9, No. 4. The first section of this short piece is organized symmetrically around D. Each note that enters either does so in the immediate presence of its D-​inversional partner, thus confirming the underlying symmetry, or moves to its D-​inversional partner, thus enacting a very brief narrative of overcoming. A  (relatively) high and loud note intrudes in measure 5, suggesting rhetorically a marked, stigmatic, problematic tone:  its D-​inversional partner is nowhere near. Its partner finally arrives, at the bottom of the final chord of the piece, but by the time it does, the sense of symmetry around D has long since dissipated. While a dynamic of inversional symmetry disrupted and restored shapes this piece in significant ways, it is hard to imagine the piece as a whole as enacting an overcoming narrative. Rather, the piece moves in and out of balance, with little corresponding sense of either desire or loss. The work narrates an acceptance of asymmetricality.

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Webern, Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, No. 2. This short piece projects a complicated narrative in which a problematic tone in the opening of the piece becomes the solution to a different problem at the end. There’s a rhetorically charged C♯ near the beginning, which is apparently a stigmatic mark on the prevailing inversional symmetry of the opening (Lewin 1982). That C♯ seeks, but fails to find, an appropriate inversional partner. By the end of the piece, the inversional balance has shifted, and the C♯ reappears, not as a problematic tone, but as the solution to the problem posed by a different inversion. The final phrase is a local overcoming narrative, culminating on C♯. What we had thought originally was an overcoming narrative destined to recuperate a deviant C♯ has meanwhile dissolved. Asymmetrically is accepted as a natural and desirable way of being in the world. Bartók, String Quartet No. 3, Prima Parte. This passage consists of a melody and an accompanying chord that, together, project the complete aggregate of twelve notes. The chord is inversionally symmetrical, and its symmetrical balance shapes the melody. In the melody, an A♮ intrudes, searches for its partner, and finds it at the end of the phrase. Within that larger drama—​in many ways a compressed overcoming narrative—​a series of smaller inversional stories plays out in the melody. But despite the local sense of overcoming, the larger impression is of stasis and immobility. We experience a single balanced entity, extending across the entire phrase. Webern, Piano Variations, Op. 27, ii. This piece maintains a strict inversion around A from start to finish. There is a lot of activity—​from the performer’s point of view, an almost manic display of sudden, wide leaps and hand crossings—​but the piece never goes anywhere. The inversional symmetry is never challenged; rather, it is affirmed at every instant, as each tone is provided with its inversional partner without fail and without delay. In a situation like this, where the inversional symmetry is maintained throughout and affirmed at every instant, it is very hard to talk about a narrative, other than a chaos narrative of a pretty extreme type: the piece is utterly static; it is agitated, but goes nowhere.

  NARRATIVES OF INVERSIONAL SYMMETRY In modernist music

Overcoming (but only over

Mobility impairment. The desire for

very short musical spans).

symmetry drives the motion. The motions

Instability/​fragility of the

ironically have the cumulative effect of

axes.

enforcing an immobilizing symmetry. In some cases, asymmetricality is embraced via an acceptance narrative.

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CONCLUSION

We began this chapter by discussing four common narratives of disability, each associated with a particular rhetoric:  overcoming (triumph), quest (spiritual compensation), chaos (horror), and acceptance (emancipation). Overcoming and quest narratives are the principal ways in which disability was conceived and represented artistically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In modernism, however, overcoming or transcendence of disability seems increasingly elusive and problematic, while narratives that devolve into chaos or in which disability is accepted as an inescapable and ultimately desirable state become increasingly prevalent. Indeed, this shift of disability narrative—​from overcoming and quest to chaos and acceptance—​is one of the hallmarks of artistic modernism, including musical modernism. In tonal music, the marked single tone is overcome. In modernist music, the marked tone takes over the structure, dissolving the distinction between a normative frame and a stigmatized Other. As a result, modernist narratives of a single tone are usually either chaos narratives, with no happy ending, and usually with no real ending of any kind, or acceptance narratives, in which the deviant tone is destigmatized and celebrated for the new sonic combinations it creates. In tonal music, passing tones are parts of linear progressions that are directed toward a goal, as part of the prolongation of a harmony. In modernist music, the passing tones move aimlessly within the spans, in conflict with the underlying harmony. As a result, there is no sense of achievement or arrival, and the typical modernist narratives of passing tones are chaos or acceptance narratives. The classical sentence is a quest narrative:  an identity is formed and then dissolved (weakened, fragmented, liquidated) to permit arrival on a cadence. The modernist sentence is a chaos or acceptance narrative: identity is weakly formed and then dissolved without any redeeming attainment, but with the possibility of a new, simplified form emerging from the emancipation from the old one. The classical sonata form is an overcoming narrative, with the normative global tonic asserting control over the deviant harmony of the second theme. The modernist sonata is a chaos or acceptance narrative in which the form is immobilized through excessive symmetry or otherwise radically deformed, but sometimes with the possibility of reveling in the mobility impairment that results. Narratives arising from inversional symmetry are locally overcoming narratives, but these paradoxically tend to contribute either to a larger chaos narrative in which harmonic immobility is enforced by symmetry or to an acceptance narrative in which asymmetricality is celebrated.

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To some extent, chaos narratives bespeak destruction of musical conventions and pose a threat to narrative itself. But as we’ve seen, they often veer over into acceptance narratives with their emancipatory rhetoric of liberation from stultifying conventions. Musical elements formerly understood as abnormal, and thus in need of correction or cure, are now appreciated on their own terms. This is a process of destigmatization, and by stripping away any normalizing constraints, it is something that chaos and acceptance narratives do quite naturally. Especially in acceptance narratives, elements traditionally understood as disabling become the central actors in the drama, and the disabled state persists until the end of the story, never cured or normalized. As a consequence, acceptance narratives participate in the aesthetics of disability, providing a narrative shape for the appreciation of disability on its own terms, neither overcome nor in need of overcoming.

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CHAPTER 3

Stravinsky’s Aesthetics of Disability The central features of Stravinsky’s musical style, including its formal splinteredness, its harmonic immobility, its stratification into contrasting textural layers, and its radical simplification of musical materials, can be understood as ways of representing and narrating disability, including deformity/​ disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, and idiocy. These representations sometimes perpetuate pernicious eugenic-​era stereotypes and sometimes are more accepting, even celebratory, of extraordinary bodies. Music and Disabled Bodies   70 Deformity/​Disfigurement   71 Fragmentation  71 Deformation  72 Mobility Impairment   72 Paralysis  72 Stuttering  74 Stasis (Inversional Symmetry)   75 Madness  76 Schizophrenia and Divided Consciousness   76 Stratification of Textural Layers   77 Idiocy  78 Dramatic Programs   81 Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2, and the “Spastic Movements” of Little Tich   82 Petrushka and the Extraordinary Bodies of Puppets   84 The Rite and the Dancers   85 Stravinsky’s Disability Aesthetics   85

07

MUSIC AND DISABLED BODIES

Stravinsky’s music is centrally concerned with representing the disabled body, with specific reference to four of the disability categories discussed in ­chapter 1: deformity/​disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, and idiocy.

In this chapter, I offer a close look at three musical works from Stravinsky’s early “Russian” period, with particular attention to a few selected passages:  the “Russian Dance” from Petrushka (1911), the “Dance of the Young Girls” from the Rite of Spring (1913), and the second of the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914). I  will argue that all three works are centrally concerned with the representation of culturally stigmatized, nonnormative bodies. More specifically, these works represent disabilities of form and appearance (deformation and disfigurement), disabilities of motion (including paralysis and stuttering, a form of vocal disfluency), disabilities of affect (madness), and cognitive or intellectual disabilities (idiocy). All three works have strong programmatic links to disabled bodies, as will be discussed later, and all three epitomize salient aspects of Stravinsky’s musical style at this time, including its formal articulation into discrete textural blocks or fragments; its interest in asymmetry in rhythm, phrase, and form; its commitment to symmetry in harmony; its immobilizing resistance to the teleological, developmental processes of traditional tonal music; its static harmony; its preference for two or more simultaneous, competing pitch centers; its extraordinarily high level of exact or near-​exact repetition; and its deliberate simplification of musical materials. All of these distinctively modernist musical features can be productively understood metaphorically as attributes of human bodies, especially bodies that are extraordinary in shape or function, that is, disabled. Stravinsky’s musical representations of disability share the general modernist ambivalence toward disabled bodies. On one side, we find traditional stigmatizing tropes (Obsessive Avengers, Holy Fools) apprehended in eugenic or exotic modes. Stravinsky’s music sometimes enfreaks disabled bodies, positioning them as exotic Others, or as intellectually defective and possibly dangerous “primitives.” At the same time, his music draws upon disability as a valuable artistic resource—​a way of shattering stultifying conventions and creating new kinds of beauty. Amid associated rhetorics of emancipation and narratives of acceptance, Stravinsky’s music embraces a disability aesthetics.

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DEFORMITY/​D ISFIGUREMENT

The Stravinskian musical body is disabled in form and appearance (deformed, disfigured, fractured, splintered, disjointed, broken). Fragmentation

Stravinsky’s music is often formally fragmented. Richard Taruskin (1996b, 1677)  has defined what he calls drobnost (splinteredness) as “the quality of being formally disunified, a sum-​of-​parts” and claims it as an essential feature of Stravinsky’s style. There is an obvious physical quality to the notion of “splinteredness,” suggesting a fractured body, one that is broken into pieces. The normally abled musical body (i.e., the classic-​romantic musical body) is organically whole, its form naturally continuous, seamless, and smooth. The Stravinskian musical body, in contrast, is fractured, fragmented, shattered, and splintered. The same musical feature has been widely described in the Stravinsky literature. Pieter van den Toorn (1983, 454), for example, calls it “block juxtaposition,” and identifies it as a “peculiarly Stravinskian conception of form.” While the cultivation of the fragment is an artistic and musical phenomenon with its roots in Romanticism, fragmentation especially of the human body appears to be a particular concern of art after 1900. As Linda Nochlin (1994, 53)  notes, “The body fragment and the fragmentation of the body occupy a central if polyvalent place in the art of our period.” Many critical accounts of artistic modernism identify fragmentation as one of its central, defining characteristics (Kern 1983; Butler 1994; Everdell 1997). In that sense, the fragmentation of the Stravinskian musical body is typical of the modernist body more generally.

Stravinsky, Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2. Perhaps the most obvious feature of the second of the Pieces for String Quartet is its radical discontinuity. Distinctive musical fragments are presented without introduction and abandoned without cadence. There are no transitions to connect the isolated textural blocks; rather, they are simply juxtaposed. Each block has a distinctive musical character, one that presents maximal contrast with the blocks that come before and after it. Its form is fractured. The musical body in question might be understood as a Demonic Cripple, inspiring fear and horror, but the musical rhetoric is too blackly and ponderously humorous for that. The narrative trajectory of the passage is poised between chaos and acceptance.

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Deformation

The pervasive fragmentation of form is related to a frequent sense of deformation, a feeling that traditional formal models are twisted, distorted, bent out of shape.

Stravinsky, Petrushka, “Russian Dance.” In the “Russian Dance” from Petrushka, each discrete block can be heard as a deformation of a traditional musical sentence. The traditional sentence is developmental and goal oriented: the weakening, fragmentation, and liquidation of its continuation phase create a sense of urgency toward a cadence. These Stravinskian sentences, however, are static, mechanical, harmonically immobile, and directionless. In this way, the classical phrase type is deformed. In the process, a quest narrative becomes a chaos or acceptance narrative.

In classical aesthetics, symmetry is considered a crucial feature of beauty. Stravinsky’s music asserts a different sort of aesthetic, one that revels and finds new sorts of attractiveness and appeal in a vigorously asserted formal asymmetry, one that subverts and destabilizes traditional notions of beauty. The result is music of startling, engaging contrasts, alternately light-​hearted and heavy-​handed, full of the delight and appeal of a quick-​ change artist. Its formal fragmentation and deformation create an unbalanced feeling that keeps listeners pleasurably off-​balance.

MOBILITY IMPAIRMENT

The Stravinskian musical body is disabled in functioning and mobility (static, immobile, paralyzed, limping, stuttering).

Paralysis

Within each formal block, there is a notable lack of musical movement; rather, each block is internally static, with a single idea stated and repeated without alteration. Each formal block uses only one single elaborated harmony or two harmonies in aimless alternation. The blocks often lack obvious beginnings, middles, and ends. Instead of being developed, musical ideas are simply asserted. In classic-​romantic music, musical ideas evolve, unfold, and blossom amid flexible, contrapuntal interplay among the

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individual voices. In Stravinsky’s music, however, the evolutionary rhetoric of traditional tonality is abandoned in favor of nondevelopmental fixity and stasis. As with the fracturing of the musical form into fragments, the immobile quality of each fragment has long been observed as a defining feature of Stravinsky’s style. Indeed, Taruskin (1996b, 1678)  defines what he calls nepodvizhnost’ (immobility), “the quality of being nonteleological, nondevelopmental,” as one of Stravinsky’s defining style characteristics (as we’ve already seen, splinteredness is another). As Taruskin explains: [Beginning with the Rite of Spring], Stravinsky’s music would no longer meet the normative criteria traditionally deemed essential to coherent musical discourse. There would be no harmonic progression, no thematic or motivic development, no smoothly executed transitions. His would be music not of process but of state, deriving its coherence and its momentum from the calculated interplay of “immobile” uniformities and abrupt discontinuities. (1996b, 956–​57)

Taruskin’s “immobility” suggests a crippled body whose mobility is impaired. The normally abled musical body moves forward purposefully toward a goal; the Stravinskian musical body is paralyzed. Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 1. The opening of Petrushka involves a single four-​note harmony, presented in tremolos. The melody is nothing but an elaborate arpeggiation of the harmony. There is no sense of progression toward a future goal; instead, we hear a shimmering present, beautiful and motionless. The immobility is a source of pleasurable fascination. Stravinsky, Petrushka, “Russian Dance,” first block. This musical phrase consists of a single harmony, very slightly decorated and elaborated. It is active and energetic, but motionless—​a bright, shimmering, but static object. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, “Dance of the Young Girls.” Harmonic stasis is enforced by simple, brute repetition of a single chord. The rudimentary melody, when it arises, simply repeats three of the notes of the chord. The pounding, irregular rhythms endow this disabled body with an aura of menace; it is a sort of Demonic Cripple.

Paralysis is precisely the term that Heinrich Schenker uses for this immobilized musical quality. For Schenker, music is supposed to flow organically along pathways he calls “linear progressions” (as discussed

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in ­chapter  2). It is narratively necessary for the linear progressions to meet with obstacles, because the resulting detours can motivate and add interest to the journey. But if the obstacles become too great, the linear progressions cease to function, and the music becomes paralyzed. “Paralysis” (the German word is Erstarrung) is Schenker’s own term, and his best-​known use of it is in the title of his essay, “Rameau or Beethoven? Creeping Paralysis or Spiritual Potency in Music?” (Schenker 1997). The rather conservative Schenker believed that musical paralysis results when modernist composers like Stravinsky impede the natural flow of the linear progressions by piling up dissonant harmonies. Schenker rarely bothered to talk about composers of his own period—​ he considered them beneath his contempt—​but he made an exception for Stravinsky. In an analysis of a passage from Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto, Schenker (1996) criticized Stravinsky for contradicting, thwarting, and neglecting the linear progressions, thus immobilizing the music. Stravinsky’s dissonances, instead of creating motion under the control of a linear progression, impede the motion—​they create a fatally disabling obstacle along the path traversed by the musical body. Schenker’s analysis represents his heroic attempt to recover the normal body that lies beneath Stravinsky’s distortions. In this sense, Schenker is engaged in what is historically the most familiar response to disability, namely, to cure or normalize it (the recuperative impulse in music theory will be the subject of ­chapter  7). But his attempt at normalization only casts into sharper relief Stravinsky’s willful use of displacement, misalignment, unconstrained dissonance, fragmentation, and immobilization to disable the normative musical body.

Stuttering

The harmonic immobility (paralysis) of Stravinsky’s textural blocks is often enforced by another disability-​related quality, something Stravinsky himself referred to as a “stutter.” Stravinsky’s melodic lines frequently alternate two adjacent pitches. Stravinsky described this as “a melodic-​rhythmic stutter characteristic of my speech from Les Noces to the Concerto in D, and earlier and later as well—​a lifelong affliction, in fact” (Stravinsky and Craft 1966, 58). Stuttering is vocal disfluency, a series of repetitions and pauses that disrupt the usual smooth flow of speech. Stuttering is to vocal fluency what limping is to physical movement—​an impairment of mobility. Stravinsky’s melodic stutters are often accompanied by the accordion-​ like oscillation between two harmonies—​these oscillations are harmonic

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stutters. Van den Toorn (1983, 440)  claims that these melodic and harmonic stutters “reach into every crevice of melodic, rhythmic, formal, or pitch-​relational matter.”1 Stravinsky, Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2, first block. The first block involves a melodic stutter (alternation of two tones) supported by a harmonic oscillation (alternation of two chords). The stutter and oscillation preclude forward motion and trap the music in one place. Stravinsky, Petrushka, “Russian Dance,” second block. In the second block of the “Russian Dance,” two chords are heard in alternation. Like melodic stutters, such a harmonic oscillation has the effect of fixing the harmony in one narrow place, rather than letting it develop and move toward some goal.

Stasis (Inversional Symmetry)

The sense of harmonic fixity and stasis is further reinforced by Stravinsky’s predilection for harmonies that are inversionally symmetrical. Tonal harmonies, like the consonant triad, are typically asymmetrical, and their lack of balance is related to their propensity for forward motion. Stravinsky’s harmonies are often balanced around an inversional axis, and their symmetry makes them self-​contained and self-​sufficient, with no implied continuation. From the standpoint of classical aesthetics, Stravinsky’s forms suffer from a deficiency of symmetry and his harmonies from an excess of symmetry.

Stravinsky, Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2. The first three blocks maintain an upright, balanced posture, through a (sometimes precarious) inversional symmetry. The final block disrupts the balance and brings the music crashing to the ground. Inversional symmetry thus serves to enclose each block as a static, self-​referential entity, and to

1. For more on Stravinsky’s musical stutters, see Jers, Strawinskys späte Zwölftonwerke (1976), Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music (2001), and Horlacher, Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in the Music of Stravinsky (2011). For discussions of stuttering as a disability in a musical context, see three essays in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (2006): Daniel Goldmark, “Stuttering in American Popular Song, 1890–​1930”; Andrew Oster, “Melisma as Malady:  Cavalli’s Il Giasone (1649) and Opera’s Earliest Stuttering Role”; and Laurie Stras, “The Organ of the Soul: Voice, Damage, and Affect.”

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enable a larger narrative of balance established and then overthrown—​a chaos narrative. Stravinsky, Petrushka, “Russian Dance,” first block. This block uses just the white notes (a diatonic collection with no sharps or flats). Theoretical discussions of this collection in a tonal context emphasize its asymmetry, with the perfect fifth situated just beyond the octave midpoint. But the collection is also inversionally symmetrical, and Stravinsky’s harmonies reflect this. The symmetry of the harmony neutralizes any propensity to progress. The music is immobilized. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Introduction to Part  1. The famous opening melody of the ballet is symmetrically positioned with respect to the shockingly odd harmonization Stravinsky provides. The melody might have been harmonized with a goal-​oriented normal tonal progression. Instead, it becomes enmeshed in a symmetrical structure that enforces a sense of fixity and stasis. The musical body of Stravinsky’s music is thus disabled not only in appearance (fragmented, fractured, deformed) but also in behavior and functionality (immobile, paralyzed, limping, stuttering). Its dramatic trajectories refuse traditional overcoming and quest narratives in favor of chaos narratives, or a refusal of narrative altogether. Its halting, disfluent qualities defy traditional canons of beauty and yet have their own distinct aesthetic appeal: we learn to appreciate the individual moment rather than worry too much about where it might lead. Immobility, paralysis, limping, and stuttering can be felt as positive aesthetic values in this context, a resource to be enjoyed rather than an impediment to be overcome. These narratives thus at least hint at the possibility of acceptance of these disability conditions.

MADNESS

The Stravinskian musical body involves the sorts of disturbances and abnormalities of affect that are traditionally understood as madness, lunacy, or insanity, especially divided consciousness and hearing voices. Schizophrenia and Divided Consciousness

Modernist artists and writers are interested in the splitting of consciousness and the exploration of multiple points of view. In this way, they challenge Romantic ideas of organic wholeness and unity of personal identity. In the process, they develop a variety of technical innovations to

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express their fragmented vision. (Modernist musical representations of madness are the subject of ­chapter 4.) At precisely the same historical moment, psychiatry explores the same territory. Schizophrenia emerges as a new diagnostic category designed to encompass individuals whose personalities are divided in some way. In many cases, the personality divisions are associated with the phenomenon of “hearing voices.” It is not that modernist art is schizophrenic or that people classified as schizophrenic are, in some sense, modernist artists. Rather, both modernist art and schizophrenia are cultural formations that manifest a broader cultural modernism. With respect to both modernist art and schizophrenia, Louis Sass (1992, 31) refers to a pervasive “fragmentation from within that effaces reality and renders the self a mere occasion for the swarming of independent subjective events—​sensations, perceptions, memories, and the like. The overwhelming vividness, diversity, and independence of this experiential swarm fragment the self, obliterating its distinctive features—​the sense of unity and control.”

Stratif ication of Textural Layers

In Stravinsky’s music, this division of consciousness is expressed in the stratification of the music into distinct layers. The layers are relatively independent of each other—​indeed, are deliberately uncoordinated. Each has its own distinctive musical material, its own harmonic orientation. The layers relate to each other not as figure and ground, or as stable norm and unstable interference, but rather as equal forces in an unresolved conflict. The separation of the textural strata is often reinforced by the quotation of preexisting music in one of the layers, usually a folk tune (or an invented tune in a folk style). For Stravinsky and other modernist composers, this is the musical equivalent of “hearing voices.”

Stravinsky, Petrushka, first scene, opening. Stravinsky’s music is often conceived in two distinct layers: a melodic layer (often folklike or an actual quotation from a folk source) and a harmonic layer (usually a single sustained harmony or a stuttering oscillation of two harmonies). Characteristically these two layers are in conflict with each other. In the opening of Petrushka, a sustained harmony is combined with melodies that are either a step too high or a step too low compared to their normative position in relation to the harmony. The melodic and harmonic

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layers fail to harmonize with each other, and thus divide the consciousness of the work. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Introduction to Part  1. This passage involves two distinct musical layers. In the melodic layer, we hear an embellished version of an actual folk tune, one that Stravinsky took from a collection of tunes edited by his teacher, Rimsky-​Korsakov. The tune is more or less traditionally tonal, seeming to invite an understanding and harmonization in A  minor. Instead, Stravinsky provides a harmonization that insists on a single pair of notes tonally unrelated to the melody. Against this harmony, the melody is heard as something distant, conflicted, set apart. Instead of providing mutual comfort and support, the melodic and harmonic layers project an irreducible duality that bifurcates the consciousness of the work. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, “Dance of the Young Girls.” Most commonly in Stravinsky’s music, there are two distinct layers, but in some works, most conspicuously the Rite of Spring, there may be three or four layers unfolding simultaneously, each with its own melodic design and tonal center. In this passage, there are four different layers, and each contains both melodic and harmonic activity. Both the melodies and the chords are quite simple—​triads and seventh chords, and simple melodic fragments that move mostly stepwise within the compass of a perfect fourth. But the passage as a whole seems almost bewilderingly complicated, as the different materials compete for attention and priority. The musical consciousness is sharply divided. Stravinsky, Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 1. The melody that runs through this short piece is a typically Stravinskian formation: four scalar notes within the compass of a perfect fourth. What is unusual is the degree to which the other musical lines refuse to cooperate and the extent to which they go their own way rhythmically, melodically, and harmonically. The work insists on projecting multiple, discordant points of view simultaneously, with no single privileged vantage point. IDIOCY

The Stravinskian musical body involves mental states that have traditionally been associated with idiocy (simplification, lack of development, association with children, animals, the natural world, and the “primitive,” including racialized Others).

For many of Stravinsky’s critics, his music has seemed somewhat simpleminded. Compared with the contrapuntal complexity of classic-​romantic

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music, the immobilized content of each Stravinskian formal fragment is radically simplified, often containing a single harmony or an alternation of two harmonies. There is little in the way of voice leading, virtually no counterpoint, and absolutely no contrapuntal imitation between the parts. Taruskin (1996b, 1456) has identified what he calls uproshchéniye (simplification)—​a “radical simplification of means”—​as an essential characteristic of Stravinsky’s musical style in which everything inessential is stripped away; the music is thin-​textured and laconic. Uproshchéniye may suggest an intellectual or cognitive disability, a mind understood as simple and childlike. (The relevant medical category of the period was idiocy or feeblemindedness—​the subject of c­ hapter 5.) The normally abled musical body maintains a reasonably high level of intellectual complexity (especially contrapuntal complexity). As with fragmentation and immobilization, simplicity is not simply an attribute of the music but a strategy of revision applied to implicit musical norms:  Stravinsky strips traditional music of its contrapuntal complexity. As a result, the Stravinskian musical body may seem comparatively simpleminded. This was certainly Arnold Schoenberg’s view, at least during the 1920s.2 After an early period of wary mutual admiration, Schoenberg had been stung by some comments Stravinsky made in a newspaper interview in 1925. In that interview, Stravinsky had claimed that in Les Noces he had used a “counterpoint chorus.” In his handwritten marginal comments on the interview, Schoenberg wrote caustically, “A counterpoint chorus: what the little Modernsky imagines to be counterpoint.” In response to what he perceived as Stravinsky’s illegitimate appropriation of the mantle of J. S. Bach, Schoenberg wrote his Three Satires, Op. 28, the second of which openly mocks Stravinsky as “little Modernsky.” As the music of the second Satire makes clear, the main defect of Stravinsky’s music, for Schoenberg, is its lack of counterpoint. As a corrective, Schoenberg offers a short, sharp lesson in Bachian counterpoint, including all sorts of elaborate contrapuntal devices that unfold mostly within a twelve-​tone framework. Schoenberg’s joke appears to be that he can toss off something unimaginably complex contrapuntally, while Stravinsky, with all of his effort and boasting, can get no deeper than the simplest surface. In comparison with Bach (and Schoenberg), Stravinsky is made to appear a simpleton. Disability is often understood as a deficit or excess with respect to some normally desirable state (think of anorexia or obesity with respect to “normal” body weight). If Stravinsky’s music has been understood as 2.  The conflicted relationship between Schoenberg and Stravinsky is explored and documented in Leonard Stein, “Schoenberg and ‘Kleine Modernsky’ ” (1986).

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mentally deficient because of its apparent simplemindedness, Schoenberg’s music has been understood as excessive in the same domain: overly cerebral and excessively complex. (I will discuss Schoenberg’s complexity in relation to the so-​called savant qualities of autism in ­chapter 6.) Schoenberg’s student, Theodor Adorno, offers a critique along similar lines (Adorno 2003). Adorno uses a range of highly charged and fully embodied metaphors to implicitly liken the splinteredness, stasis, and simplification of Stravinsky’s music to physical and mental disabilities. Its splinteredness is manifested in “a disintegration of the organic progress” (150) producing “faults which permeate its structure” (187). Stravinsky’s motives are “thwarted in their development” (151); his music “replaces progress with repetition” (164) and is “incapable of any kind of forward motion” (178). Its simplification is experienced as repetitive, infantile, childlike, primeval, primitive, and regressive (these epithets permeate Adorno’s critique). It is striking how physical Adorno’s language is. It sounds as though he is talking about a human body, and moreover a body with serious defects of appearance and function, a body that is fractured and deformed, that has difficulty moving, and that is animated by a cognitively defective, infantile, childish mind. Pierre Boulez criticizes Stravinsky in a similar fashion. His essay, “Stravinsky Remains” (1968), is ostensibly an encomium, but is shot through with contemptuous judgments, mostly along the lines of Adorno’s critique. To Boulez, Stravinsky’s music is simpleminded and primitive, with simplistic superimpositions instead of counterpoint. It is rigid and repetitive, refusing to develop or progress. And its refusal to develop is a disabling fault that is both internal and historical. That is, just as Stravinsky’s music rejects the internal, goal-​oriented development of motives in the classical manner, his whole style represents a refusal to progress historically, to evolve. What Taruskin praises as splinteredness, stasis, and simplification, Boulez stigmatizes as rigidity, mindless repetition, immobility, fixity, obstinacy, and simplemindedness.

Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 1. Each of the four distinct bits of musical material found in this movement is shockingly simple—​just a few notes of a major or minor scale. There is no counterpoint at all, just literal repetition in apparent ignorance of what the other lines are doing, and no sense of development, just the same thing over and over again. Stravinskian simplification is pushed to an extreme that is redolent of simpleminded idiocy.

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Petrushka, “Russian Dance.” This music uses only the simplest possible melodic material:  four-​note or five-​note segments of a major or minor scale. The melodies involve no motivic development—​just simple repetition of basic patterns. The chords just track the melodies up and down in the most rudimentary sort of parallel motion. The simplemindedness of the dancing puppets is reflected in the radical simplification of the music. Rite of Spring, “Dance of the Young Girls.” The apparent complexity of the Rite of Spring results from the simultaneous combination of two, three, or four disparate elements. It is almost always the case, however, that these elements are themselves extremely simple, often a simple scale segment within the span of a perfect fourth or fifth. In representing the young girls of an ancient, preliterate tribe, Stravinsky uses three simple melodic fragments that all lie within the same span. In this way, his music evokes widely circulated cultural tropes around idiocy, in association with the primitive, the childlike, the intellectually limited.

  DISABILITY CONDITIONS AFFECTING THE STRAVINSKIAN MUSICAL BODY Deformity/​disfigurement

Fragmentation of the form into discrete blocks. Deformation of traditional forms (imbalance, asymmetry).

Mobility impairment

Paralysis (harmonic immobility, aimlessness). Stuttering (alternation of melodic tones, oscillation of harmony). Stasis (harmony rendered motionless through inversional symmetry).

Madness

Divided consciousness, via a stratified texture of discrete layers (related to schizophrenia).

Idiocy

Simplification of the musical materials (in association with children, animals, puppets, the prerational, the primitive).

DRAMATIC PROGRAMS

All three works involve the explicit representation of disabled bodies as part of their dramatic programs and performance realizations.

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Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2, and the “Spastic Movements” of Little Tich

Stravinsky composed this string quartet movement as a musical representation of “the jerky, spastic movements” of a famous British music hall performer known as Little Tich. Stravinsky made this connection in response to a question from Robert Craft: [Question from Robert Craft]: Has music ever been suggested to you by, or has a musical idea ever occurred to you from, a purely visual experience of movement, line, or pattern? [Response from Stravinsky]:  Countless times, I  suppose, though I  remember only one instance in which I was aware of such a thing. This was during the composition of the second of my Three Pieces for string quartet. I had been fascinated by the movements of Little Tich whom I had seen in London in 1914, and the jerky, spastic movement, the ups and downs, the rhythm—​even the mood or joke of the music—​which I later called Eccentric, was suggested by the art of this great clown. (Stravinsky and Craft 1959, 95)

For roughly thirty years, from 1895 to 1925, Little Tich (the stage name for Harry Relph) was a headliner in the British music hall, where he danced and sang, told jokes, and did impersonations.3 An essential ingredient of Little Tich’s distinctive persona and his success was his extraordinary body. Little Tich was a person of short stature—​he was four feet, six inches in height—​and that profoundly inflected his critical reception. Contemporary and reminiscent accounts, of which there are a great number, reflecting his fame, refer to him as a gnome, a dwarf, a gargoyle, and a grotesque. They praise his comic genius, but all of them are inescapably concerned with his nonnormative body. As is so often the case with disabled artists, the disability seems to engulf critical response.4 For some observers today, it might be the case that Little Tich’s body would not be considered disabled at all,

3.  Basic information about Little Tich may be found in Mary Tich and Richard Findlater, Little Tich: Giant of the Music Hall (1979). I survey contemporary critical response to Little Tich in “Representing the Extraordinary Body: Musical Modernism’s Aesthetics of Disability” (2016). Little Tich has been mischaracterized in the musicological literature, where he is referred to as a “talented dwarf” (Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky:  A Creative Spring [1999]) and as a “circus clown” and “famous juggler” (Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically [1997]). 4.  The concept of “engulfment,” that critical and personal response to a disabled body often focuses primarily on the disability, is from Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies (1997).

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but for most of his contemporaries, his body was considered deformed, freakish, and grotesque; his rapid movements were “queer,” “droll,” “absurd,” and “demonic.” To a modern, sympathetic eye, the surviving video of Little Tich shows him as quite graceful in his movements, energetic and dexterous, a fine dancer, and a superb mimic.

Little Tich in performance. Remarkably, we still have video evidence of Little Tich from around the time that Stravinsky saw him perform. Because of the lack of any comparative scale, it is difficult to perceive Little Tich’s diminutive stature. But his signature “Big Boots Dance” calls attention to his small size by having him perch and balance on long wooden clogs. The nonnormative nature of his body looms large in all contemporary accounts.

Stravinsky’s music, however, seems to depict a body that is broken, halting, mad, and seemingly feebleminded. It is possible that Stravinsky is using Little Tich’s body as a point of departure for a more generalized portrayal of the disabled body. One might go even further and suggest that Stravinsky’s music disables Little Tich in a particular way, indeed, enfreaks him musically by exaggerating and imposing on him an extreme vision of an abnormal embodiment. In this way, Stravinsky participates in a long tradition of often ambivalent artistic, dramatic, and musical representations of dwarves.5 In opera, for example, hunchbacks and dwarves have been very much overrepresented, compared to their instance in the general population. Traditionally, these are secondary characters in the drama, deployed as foils to the normative or heroic protagonists (e.g., Mime in relation to Siegfried). Their personalities are reduced to and fully engulfed by their stigmatic traits, which usually signify evil (e.g., Rigoletto). They may evoke fear or pity (as in the many operatic representations of Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame), but either way, the dramatic narrative usually requires their normalization or death. In modernist operas, however, deformed characters may be protagonists whose personalities are only partially shaped by or reflected in their deformity. In Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten and Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg, for example, we find sympathetically treated protagonists who 5. The history of artistic representations of dwarves is surveyed to some extent in Ann Millett-​Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (2010). On disabled bodies in modernist opera, see Sherry Lee, “Modernist Opera’s Stigmatized Subjects” (2016).

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are hunchbacked dwarves, and narrative trajectories that do not require the normalization or death of the disabled character. Pity and horror continue to play a role in modernist representations of dwarves—​as Michael Davidson observes: “In numerous modernist works, the figure of the dwarf has been especially prominent in raising the question of scale and recognition, fueled in many cases by eugenic ideas of sexuality” (2015b, 621). However, in some cases, modernist artistic dwarves may come to claim their disability as a fundamental and even desirable aspect of their identity. While Stravinsky’s portrayal of Little Tich may still have some aspects of horror and enfreakment, it strikes me as generally sympathetic, somewhat along the lines of these roughly contemporary operatic representations. Whether or not Stravinsky’s own relatively short stature (he was 5 feet, 3 inches in height) may have played a role in his interest in or response to Little Tich is an entirely speculative question.

Petrushka and the Extraordinary Bodies of Puppets

In Petrushka, much of the music is designed to accompany and represent the movements of the three puppets who are its central characters: Petrushka, the Moor, and the Ballerina. In contrast to the human characters in the ballet, these three inhabit bodies that are abnormal in both appearance and function. These puppet bodies move in odd, constrained ways. Compared to the normative body, and especially to the normative balletic body, these bodies are impaired in their mobility. As characters, these puppets are childlike, quick to weep and strike each other, limited in their intellectual capacity. Consistent with a broad range of cultural representations of disabled bodies, and with feeblemindedness or idiocy, they are represented as children in the fully sexualized but deformed bodies of adults.

The “Russian Dance” from Petrushka, Scene 1, performed by Paris Opera Ballet with Rudolf Nureyev in the title role (staging by Nijinska and Golovine). In this scene of the ballet, the three puppets (Petrushka, the Ballerina, and the Moor) come to life and dance. Their movements are awkward and mechanical, far removed from the sinuous, long lines of classical ballet.

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The Rite and the Dancers

The famous riot at the premiere of the Rite of Spring was provoked more by the seemingly bizarre choreography than by Stravinsky’s music, which the audience outbursts made largely inaudible in any case. In Fokine’s choreography, the dancing bodies on stage are physically deformed and contorted, moving in a stilted, halting manner. By the canons of traditional ballet, with its emphasis on smooth, flowing motion, these bodies are impaired in their mobility. Their physical disabilities (deformity, mobility impairment) are associated with their intellectual limitations: these are primitive, prerational figures.

The “Dance of the Young Girls” from the Rite of Spring, performed by the Joffrey Ballet. In this modern re-​creation of Nijinsky’s original choreography, the dancers project a distinctly nonnormative appearance and movement. Their bodies are hunched and constrained; their movements are jerky and rigidly, repetitively rhythmic.

STRAVINSKY’S DISABILITY AESTHETICS

In this more general sense, Stravinsky’s music is to classic-​romantic music what these extraordinary bodies are to normal bodies. Its most striking and characteristic features—​ fragmentation, immobility, stratification, simplification—​may be understood as disabilities in relation to the normative musical embodiment of canonical works in the classic-​romantic mainstream (what Stravinsky referred to as the “German stem”).6 Stravinsky’s music takes the normal, natural-​seeming works and procedures of classical tonality and then disables them by splintering, immobilizing, stratifying, and simplifying them. In this way, Stravinsky practices an aesthetics of disability in which his music habitually represents the disabled body. As we have seen, the linkage of Stravinsky’s musical style with bodily and mental disability is made explicitly and implicitly throughout a wide range of the secondary literature on Stravinsky, from both his detractors (Schenker, Schoenberg, Adorno, Boulez) and his defenders (Taruskin).

6. Stravinsky described his tense relationship (“at an angle”) to the canonic, Germanic musical mainstream in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (1961).

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In a horrible historical irony, the German National Socialists, whose mass “euthanasia” of people with disabilities set the stage for the Holocaust, were probably the first to understand the centrality of disability for modernism in the arts.7 As Siebers observes: The Nazis were the first to recognize the aesthetic centrality of disability to modern art.  .  .  . The Nazis waged war against modern art because they interpreted the modern in art as disability, and they were essentially right in their interpretation, for modern art might indeed be named as the movement that finds its greatest aesthetic resource in bodies previously considered to be broken, diseased, wounded, or disabled. (2010, 34–​35)

For the Nazis, artworks were condemned as degenerate precisely because of their inherently unhealthy, diseased, and disabled qualities. For both disabled artworks and people with disabilities, the Nazis pursued an extreme version of what Garland-​Thomson (2004b) calls “the cultural logic of euthanasia,” that is, the imperative either to normalize disabled bodies (through medical intervention) or to eliminate them (either by sequestration in homes or institutions or in more direct ways). Under most circumstances, disabilities are understood as nonnormative bodily conditions that are culturally stigmatized (Goffman 1963). In most musical works before the modernist period, a related sort of stigma attaches to anomalous musical events, like formal disruptions and chromatic intrusions. In the classic-​romantic music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, events like these are often treated compositionally as “problems,” which it is the central task of the music to overcome (as discussed in c­ hapter 2). In modernist music, however, we find frequent suggestion of the liberatory potential of music to rewrite conventional cultural scripts of disability. Here, the nonnormative bodily conditions of splinteredness, immobility, stratification, and simplification may be heard to be valorized. In Stravinsky’s music, we find a musical body that is disabled in appearance (fragmented, splintered, distorted, deformed), in functionality (paralyzed, limping, stuttering), and in affect (with a divided consciousness, hearing voices, simpleminded). And yet in their musical context, these qualities are

7.  On the central role of disability in the Nazi condemnation of “degenerate art,” see Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (2010) and Linett, Bodies of Modernism (2017). On the relationship between disability, National Socialism, and music, see Joan Evans, “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany” (2003) and Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (1995).

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felt as attractive and desirable, within a radically expanded understanding of what might constitute the aesthetically beautiful. Modernist composers like Stravinsky bring disability into the picture as a part of their ongoing critique of traditional canons of beauty. Disabled bodies become a space where old aesthetic norms are disrupted—​a visceral aesthetic statement in the most intimate and powerful terms. At the same time, of course, eugenic-​era attitudes toward disability are fully in evidence in Stravinsky’s music, most conspicuously in the implicit enfreakment of Little Tich and exoticization of racialized Others stigmatized as primitive in the Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s music, like modernist music in general, embodies complex and conflicting modes of apprehending extraordinary bodies. But whether in eugenic, exotic, or emancipatory mode, Stravinsky’s music is deeply and fundamentally engaged with the representation and narration of disability, and to that extent, it claims disability and affirms its disability aesthetics.

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CHAPTER 4

Madness Musical modernism represents madness in its divided consciousness (stratification into conflicting layers) and its hearing of voices (quotation of stylistically incongruous music). Madness and Culture   88 Religious, Medical, and Cultural Models of Madness   88 Schizophrenia as a Diagnostic Category   90 Madness and Cultural Modernism   92 Hearing Voices   93 In Human Experience   93 In Modernist Music   94 Division of Musical Consciousness (Stratification, Layering)   100 Madness as an Artistic Resource   102

MADNESS AND CULTURE

Like all forms of madness (“mental illness”), schizophrenia—​the exemplary madness of the twentieth century—​is a social and cultural formation. Religious, Medical, and Cultural Models of Madness

The sorts of mental or affective states that are understood as madness (or medicalized as “mental illness”) vary with time and place. Madness is not a fixed biochemical truth, but an endlessly negotiated sociocultural formation.1 Madness has a history, one that like all human histories is intertwined 1. There is a substantial recent literature that considers madness a historically contingent sociocultural formation rather than a medical illness. This literature has its

with gender, race, class, and nationality. As Roy Porter observes in his suggestively titled Social History of Madness: All societies make arrangements for coping with peculiar people whose behavior is weird, disruptive, or dangerous: to that degree madness forms a universal fact of life. But the ways such peculiarities are described, judged and handled differ quite profoundly from society to society, from era to era, and from symptom to symptom. Here we encounter an element of irreducible relativism. (1988, 9)

As with other culturally stigmatized bodily differences (i.e., disabilities), madness has been understood in three ways. First, madness has been understood in religious terms, as a mark of divine punishment or transcendent vision. The association of certain forms of madness with divine inspiration is an ancient one. Second, there is the medical model, which constitutes madness as “mental illness.” Under the medical model, madness is partitioned into (endlessly shifting) diagnostic categories, and normalizing cures are sought for these apparent diseases. Third, in line with the sociocultural model of disability, madness is seen as a (potentially valuable) human difference rather than a deficit, pathology, or disease. Present-​ day advocacy groups like Mad Pride manifest this third attitude, but it has much earlier historical roots. While the medical model of madness is dominant from the late nineteenth century to the present moment, it has always been under challenge from the religious and sociocultural models.   MODELS OF MADNESS Religious

Madness is a result and sign either of divine condemnation (usually a

Medical

Madness is a disease (“mental illness”), located in the nerves or in the brain.

Sociocultural

Madness is a sociocultural, historically contingent construction on the

punishment for sinful behavior) or religious transcendence (an exalted state).

naturally occurring variation in human behavior and mental functioning.

historical roots in the work of Michel Foucault (see his History of Madness [2006]) and in the so-​called antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s (see, e.g., Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness [1961] and R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness [1965]). A recent outpouring of studies that share this point of departure includes Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness (1988) and Madness: A Brief History (2002); Margaret Price, “Defining Mental Disability” (2013); Bradley Lewis, Moving Beyond Prozac:  DSM, and the New Psychiatry (2010); Sander Gilman, “Madness” (2015) and “Madness as Disability” (2014); Mary de Young, Madness: An American History of Mental Illness and Its Treatment (2010); Robert Whitaker, Mad in America:  Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2010); Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness:  Insane Asylums & Nineteenth-​Century American Culture (2008); and Ian Hacking, “Making Up People” (1986).

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Schizophrenia as a Diagnostic Category

The constitution of schizophrenia as a diagnostic category in 1908 marks a significant moment in the history of madness.2 For Eugen Bleuler, the Swiss psychiatrist who coined the term, the central feature of schizophrenia was “the breaking up or splitting of psychic functioning,” resulting in a loss of unity of the personality: In every case we are confronted with a more or less clear-​cut splitting of the psychic functions. If the disease is marked, the personality loses its unity; at different times different psychic complexes seem to represent the personality. Integration of different complexes and strivings appear insufficient or even lacking. The psychic complexes do not combine in a conglomeration of strivings with a unified resultant as they do in a healthy person; rather, one set of complexes dominates the personality for a time, while other groups of ideas or drives are “split off” and seem either partly or completely impotent. (1911/​ 1950, 9)

Hallucinations, including especially the hearing of voices, are central to schizophrenia, as Bleuler constitutes it: In hospitalized schizophrenics it is mainly the delusions and particularly the hallucinations which stand in the forefront of the picture. Characteristic of schizophrenic hallucinations is the preference for the auditory sphere and for the sphere of the body sensations. Almost every schizophrenic who is hospitalized hears “voices,” occasionally or continually. . . . The most common auditory hallucination is that of speech. The “voices” of our patients embody all their strivings and fears, and their entire transformed relationship to the external world. (1911/​1950, 95, 97)

As a diagnostic category, schizophrenia has had an extraordinarily checkered history. It emerged as what Bleuler imagined as a corrective to an earlier diagnostic category, Kraepelin’s dementia praecox. Kraepelin used that label to refer to people whose permanent loss of rationality (dementia) originated early in life (praecox), and was thus distinguished from senile

2.  Bleuler introduced the term “schizophrenia” in a lecture in Berlin on April 24, 1908, and elaborated on it in his highly influential 1911 treatise, Dementia Praecox, oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien, translated by Joseph Zinkin as Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (Bleuler 1911/​1950).

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dementia on the one hand and manic depression on the other. Bleuler argued that there were people with the same constellation of symptoms but whose madness began later in life (i.e., not praecox) and was not necessarily permanent (i.e., not dementia). Bleuler states: The older form is a product of a time when not only the very concept of dementia, but also that of precocity, was applicable to all cases at hand. But it hardly fits our contemporary ideas of the scope of this disease-​entity. Today we include patients whom we would neither call “demented” nor exclusively victims of deterioration early in life. . . . I call dementia praecox “schizophrenia” because the “splitting” of the different psychic functions is one of its most important characteristics. (1911/​1950, 7–​8)

While most histories of psychiatry follow Bleuler in imagining schizophrenia as a successor to dementia praecox, in fact they are rival ways of sorting the mad population, and dementia praecox remained a viable psychiatric category until well into the twentieth century, sharing the stage with schizophrenia, its supposed successor. To observers skeptical about the medical credibility of psychiatric diagnoses, this confused history confirms the contingent historicity of these categories. The subsequent history of schizophrenia confirms its historical contingency. Since its coinage in 1908, it has embraced wildly different sorts of mental and affective states, and wildly different populations have been lumped into (or excluded from) the category. In the United States, for example, in the period between the world wars, schizophrenia was understood to affect mostly middle-​class white women, as in part their failure to adapt to the normative expectations for their gender, race, and class. With the rise of the civil rights movement, however, schizophrenia was increasingly understood as a disease that affected poor black men, whose anger and perceived threat of violence were taken as symptoms of their mental illness (Metzl 2009). While Bleuler’s central notion of “splitting” (German: Spaltung) has retained some degree of currency throughout, and while hallucinations, including verbal hallucinations, have generally been part of the picture, one should not imagine that schizophrenia, or any psychiatric category, can function as a reliable medical diagnosis on the order of, say, cholera or tuberculosis. Bleuler’s schizophrenia marks just one moment in the endless splitting and combining of categories that define modern psychiatry. Psychiatric diagnoses, untethered as they usually are to any dependable biological cause or marker, are culturally malleable.

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Madness and Cultural Modernism

In what follows, I  will think of schizophrenia in a historically authentic and relevant Bleulerian way, as fundamentally about splitting and hallucinations. (An additional central feature of Bleulerian schizophrenia is “autism,” the subject of c­ hapter 6.) I am not interested in diagnosing modernist art as schizophrenic (although many conservative critics of modernism, including Fascists and Nazis, have made that connection), and I am not interested in seeing people diagnosed as schizophrenic as sorts of modernist artists (the somewhat quixotic project of Louis Sass [1992]). Rather, I will think of Bleulerian schizophrenia and modernist art as similar and mutually reinforcing responses to certain conditions of modernity (Thiher 1999). Both are concerned with the splitting of consciousness (sometimes manifested in hallucinations) and the resultant loss of unity. And both evince a characteristically modernist desperation to hold things together in the face of radical challenges to coherence and unity. Both schizophrenia and modernist art try to forge unity out of disparate materials, but always with a nagging sense of the futility and impossibility of doing so. The extensive critical literature on cultural and artistic modernism identifies “multiple perspectives” as a central, defining characteristic. In cubism, for example, objects are often perceived simultaneously from various vantage points, none of which is privileged. Modernist literature often supplants the traditional omniscient narrator with a multitude of points of view, all of which are partial and flawed. The univocality of traditional writing is shattered in modernism, and many different voices contend within a single work. As a manifestation and epitome of this modernist interest in multiple perspectives, many modernist authors (like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce) employ extreme and extensive practices of allusion and quotation:  the work as a whole consists of a near babble of competing voices.3 In such works, as in schizophrenia, the central feature is a split in consciousness, with the presence of competing voices as a concrete manifestation of the split.   MEDICAL AND CULTURAL MANIFESTATIONS OF MADNESS (SCHIZOPHRENIA) In psychiatry post-​Bleuler, schizophrenia is a

Modernist art explores an irreducible diversity

major mental illness with two prominent

of perspectives, often associated with

symptoms: divided consciousness (Spaltung)

extreme practices of allusion and quotation,

and aural or verbal hallucination.

in which multiple voices contend.

3.  Literary quotation practices, including the distinction between modernist and postmodernist practices, have been an important theme in literary criticism. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1981).

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HEARING VOICES

Modernist musical works represent heard voices in their extreme quotation practices, in which stylistically distinct utterances are heard as originating from outside the frame of the work.

In Human Experience

Throughout human history, in all times and places, some people have had the experience of hearing verbal utterances that seem to them to originate from an external source, not from within, despite the absence of a visible speaker (Socrates and Joan of Arc are probably the best-​known voice hearers). The number of voices, their frequency, the content of their utterances, and the emotional impact of their utterances all vary, but “hearing voices” appears to be a permanent feature of human neurodiversity. Traditionally, such voices were understood within a religious framework, as something either divine or demonic, and associated with madness in either case. In the mid-​nineteenth century, however, in tandem with other disabilities, this experience falls increasingly under the control of medical science. Under the medical model, the experience of hearing voices was pathologized as “aural hallucination” and understood as a symptom of mental illness. Which mental illness? Since the end of the nineteenth century, there has been an ongoing contest for control of this experience and for categorization of the people who share it. Beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, the diagnostic home for hearing voices has been schizophrenia. The linkage is far from absolute, but in general, if you hear voices and you receive a psychiatric classification, that classification has been schizophrenia: schizophrenics frequently hear voices, and voice hearers are generally classified as schizophrenic. In recent years, voice hearers, like many disability groups, have pushed back hard against the hegemony of the medical model. As part of the postpsychiatry movement, groups like the Hearing Voices Network have worked to redefine voice hearing: not a medical pathology or a symptom of mental illness, but a natural and often valuable aspect of human neurodiversity.4

4. There is a growing recent literature on “hearing voices,” much of it from an explicitly nonpsychiatric, disability studies point of view. The most comprehensive single source is Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within (2016). See also Ivan Leudar and Philip

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  MODELS OF HEARING VOICES

Medical Model of Hearing Voices

Sociocultural Model of Hearing Voices

Voices are a symptom of mental illness.

Voices are a common feature of human neurodiversity.

Voices are meaningless; their content should be ignored.

Voices should be taken seriously and attended to, especially for their communicative and spiritual content.

Voices are undesirable and disturbing.

Voices may be valuable and consoling.

Voices are the product of a biochemical

Voices may be a response to trauma,

disorder in the brain. Voices are a manifestation of a pervasive and lifelong illness. Voices should be eliminated as part of a treatment and cure of the underlying

including traumatic loss. Voices are one (usually transient) aspect of a life. Voices should be accepted and accommodated.

mental illness.

In Modernist Music

As an epitome of its pervasive polyvocality, a lot of modernist music seems to hear voices, often in the form of the quotation of other pieces that are stylistically and structurally incongruous with the main body of the music. A piece might speak mostly in its own voice, but at some point, or at multiple points, its discourse is interrupted and another voice is heard as though from outside the frame of the piece. Of course, every piece hears voices in a sense—​that is simply an aspect of intertextuality: every piece incorporates and references other pieces. But some pieces, modernist pieces, do it more insistently and pervasively than earlier works. What is more, the voices have a distinctive, intrusive quality; they may seem to impair the normal functioning of the piece they come to inhabit. By analogy, everyone is always hearing voices (right now, I hear my mother telling me to sit up straight), but only when the voices are particularly insistent, and when they seem real to the hearer, and when they interfere with daily activities, do they get pathologized as mental illness. So there’s a normal, Thomas, Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity:  Studies of Verbal Hallucinations (2000); Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (2012); John Watkins, Hearing Voices: A Common Human Experience (1998); Daniel Smith, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity (2007); Simon McCarthy-​Jones, Hearing Voices: The Histories, Causes, and Meanings of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (2012); and Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, Accepting Voices (1993). The Hearing Voices Network, a support and advocacy group, may be found here: http://​www.hearing-​voices.org/​.

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ambient amount and intensity of aural hallucination and an excessive, pathological amount and intensity. Like all disability, it’s too much of something or too little of something else with respect to some undefined, shifting, contingent standard of normality. Modernist music engages in an extreme form of quotation, in which the quoted material is stylistically and structurally dissimilar in egregious ways to the ambient music. Modernist quotation of earlier music is highly marked by its incongruity. Of course, Western classical music is and always has been permeated by musical borrowings of all kinds (Burkholder 2001; Burkholder, Giger, and Birchler 1994). But something distinctive happens in modernist music: the borrowed material is now often stylistically at odds with the prevailing musical environment. The stylistic divergence poses severe problems for musical unity, as the composer, the critics, and the music itself often seek to reassure themselves that the musical self remains coherent and autonomous. Indeed, one might define modernist music in terms of its furious tension between the centripetal forces of musical coherence and the centrifugal forces of stylistic difference. The center holds, but in many cases, only barely. In later, postmodernist music, in contrast, the quotation practices become even more extreme, with voices arising from many different sources, amid a general indifference to the possibility of unifying them. Modernist music struggles toward coherence; postmodern music is indifferent to it. Where do these outside voices come from? In a literal sense, of course, the voices come from the mind and pen of the composer, just like the rest of the music, and they are played by the musical performers, just like the rest of the music. At the same time, their distinctiveness makes them seem as though they come from some other source, outside the frame of the piece. They thus mark a moment of radical disruption and disjunction, just the sort of divided consciousness that is characteristic of a great deal of modernist art, and of the psychiatric diagnostic category of schizophrenia. Who hears these voices? When people talk about music as drama or narrative, they frequently imagine that there are various sorts of actors or agents. When we say, “Ives quotes Dixie in measure 60,” we are imagining a sort of fictive composer in the piece as an actor in the musical drama. When we say, “The piece takes a strange turn and finds its progress disrupted by the quotations,” we are imagining the work persona, the work itself, as an actor in the musical drama. And when we say, “In hearing this piece, we experience a unified consciousness suddenly shattered by the intrusion of outside voices,” we are imagining ourselves, whether listeners or analysts, as actors in the musical drama. All three of these dramatic agents—​the

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fictive composer in the piece, the work persona, and the listener/​analyst—​ are hearing these voices, and all three of these dramatic agents respond to what they hear (Monahan 2013). The medical model says that such voices are not worth attending to, except as manifestations of an underlying pathology. Psychiatrists generally respond by attempting a cure that silences the voices. And many musical analysts have responded to extreme modernist quotation practices in a similar therapeutic vein, attempting to rationalize and normalize these seemingly extraneous utterances. (I will have more to say about this sort of “therapeutic music theory” in ­chapter 7.) But in what follows, I will listen to them closely. There are various types of voices heard in modernist music, corresponding to the diversity of heard voices in the real world: some are scary and menacing; some are consoling. Some are from known, some from unknown sources. As in the real world, some of the voices seem to be those of the beloved dead, speaking from beyond the grave, in the manner of a seance. Are the voices felt as supernatural? Are they the consequence of a trauma? Are they intermittent, or pervasive? The heard voices vary in their apparent source, in their content, and in their impact on the music and its listeners. But in every case, their presence suggests that modernist music and schizophrenia are similar, mutually reinforcing responses to modernity. Both involve splitting of consciousness, manifested most obviously in the hearing of voices.5 I am particularly interested in instrumental works that quote music with a text (a popular song or other texted music). In such cases, an actual verbal text erupts into the instrumental ambience, disrupting its status as “absolute music.” The heard voices in such works include fully articulate speech.

Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 2. In a densely chromatic and largely atonal piece, the blackly humorous folk tune “Ach, du lieber, Augustin” intrudes with a simple oom-​pah-​pah accompaniment.6 Some critics have interpreted the intrusion in nearly apocalyptic terms, as the symptom of

5. The relationship between madness (understood in Freudian terms) and modernist quotation practices, especially Schoenberg’s Erwartung, is probed in Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning (2003). 6. On the quotation of “Ach, du lieber, Augustin,” in Schoenberg’s String Quartet, see Arnold Whittall, Schoenberg Chamber Music (1972); Walter Frisch, The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg: 1893–​1908 (1993); and Ethan Haimo, Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language (2006). For Schoenberg’s own comments, see “How One Becomes Lonely” (1975).

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a profound trauma. In Arnold Whittall’s words, “Schoenberg was having a psychological crisis around the end of tonality: he felt as if ‘all was lost’ as far as tonality was concerned, and that he was therefore also lost as a composer” (1972, 22). Schoenberg himself apparently thought of it more as a humorous digression: “A scherzo is the kind of music which should provoke gaiety. And so I could have understood a kind of smile when . . . I combined my themes in a tragicomic manner with a popular Viennese song, the words of which may be translated as follows: ‘Alas, poor boy, everything is lost’ ” (Schoenberg 1975, 46–​48). The response of the piece itself seems to point a bit in both directions. Musically, the Augustin tune and bass line are both dissolved (“liquidated” is Schoenberg’s term) and then reconstituted as the principal themes of the movement, leading to a recapitulation of the opening of the movement. In that sense, the music seems to embody a narrative of cure: it creates a problem—​a voice from outside the frame of the piece—​and then proceeds to solve it. At the same time, the heard voice does not seem to provoke any sort of strong reaction from the piece, which subsumes its themes and moves on. The heard voice and the bifurcated consciousness it entails are accepted as unremarkable and possibly desirable ways of being in the musical world. Analysts, however, have had a very strongly anxious response to this apparent splitting of consciousness. They have generally seen it as a grave threat to the organic wholeness and integrity of this musical mind and body, and have tried to offer an analytical cure. Virtually all of the analytical commentaries on this passage have tried to show that, although the tune may at first seem out of place, it is actually both prepared and above all subsumed into the unified fabric of the piece. In this way, analysts have generally responded in therapeutic mode:  they have seen the voice as a pathological disruption, a threatening anomaly, and have done their best to rationalize and thus repair it. Charles Ives, String Quartet No. 2. Ives’s compositional style is based on borrowing, especially direct quotation of traditional American folk tunes.7 The consensus among Ives scholars is that his quotations are motivated mainly by nostalgia:  they represent his warm embrace of the world of his father in opposition to the undesirable features of

7.  There is an extensive literature on Ives’s borrowings. See especially Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (2004). See also Clayton Henderson, Quotation as a Style Element in the Music of Charles Ives (1969) and The Charles Ives Tunebook (2008).

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modern life. In short, his quotations mark him as an antimodern modernist. That interpretation is in line with the contemporary diagnosis of Ives as neurasthenic (Magee 2008). Neurasthenia was the most widely diagnosed psychiatric condition in Ives’s time, and it was understood to result from an excess of modernity: too much activity, too much expenditure of nervous energy, too much rapid change, and too much urban life might produce a nervous collapse. From this point of view, Ives’s quotations are an attempt at self-​healing: they are his refuge and principal defense against the discontents of modern life. The voices he hears in the music have a restorative, therapeutic function. But the idea of self-​healing through quotation does not capture the narrative unfolding as experienced within the piece itself. There, the piece initially establishes a unified consciousness, based on dissonant, modernist, atonal relationships and rhetoric. Then, at a certain point, the music starts suddenly, abruptly, to hear voices that come apparently from outside. The voices are not prepared, and they are not subsumed back into the fabric. Rather, they are disruptive and cacophonous, in relation both to the principal voice of the piece and to each other. In some pieces by Ives, one senses a furious attempt on the part of the piece to cling to a unified consciousness in the face of multiple voices that threaten to overwhelm it. And the explicit agenda of many theorists has been precisely to insist on the unity beneath the apparent multiplicity, by finding motivic, harmonic, or programmatic links among the multiple voices.8 In the Second Quartet, however, the dramatic program appears unconcerned with integration, and fully comfortable with the sort of divided consciousness that voice hearing suggests. No cure is possible or desirable, because the voices are not experienced as symptoms of mental illness in the first place. Berg, Lyric Suite, sixth movement (“Largo desolato”). This work is expressive of a no-​ longer-​ secret program associated with the composer’s love affair with Hanna Fuchs.9 The last movement represents the end of the affair and the emotional desolation it brings.

8. Peter Burkholder, “Stylistic Heterogeneity and Topics in the Music of Charles Ives” (2012), exemplifies a therapeutic, recuperative approach to Ives’s borrowings. This approach is criticized by John McGinness in “Has Modernist Criticism Failed Charles Ives?” (2006). 9. On the secret program of Berg’s Lyric Suite, see George Perle, Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg (2001). On Berg’s borrowings generally, including those in the Lyric Suite, see Ulrich Krämer, “Quotation and Self-​Borrowing in the Music of Alban Berg” (1992).

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Two external voices intrude on this movement, one hidden and unheard, the other explicit but fleeting. The first external voice is that of the poet Baudelaire: Berg imagined a melodic line shared by the four instruments as a vocal setting of a poetic text that speaks of a cold, dark, dead, barren land, devoid of water, trees, fields, and life—​in his compositional sketches, Berg writes the words of Baudelaire’s poem beneath the notes. The second external voice is a brief quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which emerges from and gives voice to the trauma and grief of loss. According to Wagner, this music speaks of unrequited longing and death: “henceforth no end to the yearning, longing, rapture, and misery of love: world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship, scattered like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living:  longing, longing unquenchable, desire forever renewing itself, craving and languishing; one sole redemption: death, surcease of being, the sleep that knows no waking!” (quoted in Bailey 1985, 47). In the context of Berg’s string quartet, one might imagine the Wagner quotation as a response to the trauma of loss (a common source for hearing voices). But this voice is not threatening or undesirable; rather, it crystallizes and mythologizes Berg’s feelings of loss. Indeed, many heard voices are those of the beloved dead. If the eruption of the voice into the musical discourse creates a splitting of consciousness, it is not one that the piece makes any move to heal or cure. Rather, the splitting that the voice both reflects and induces is never bound back together. For Berg, then, the heard voice is understood in a nonmedical way, as a source of spiritual value, even as it is a source of psychic pain, and the residue of emotional trauma. For analysts of the piece, however, the heard voice is understood as a symptom of a serious musical disorder, one requiring therapeutic intervention.10 The musical disorder is a close analog of Bleuler’s split consciousness: it is the apparent incoherence and disunity of a work that is based partly on twelve-​tone principles and partly (within the quotation) on tonal principles. If the work cannot reconcile these opposing forces in some way, it is permanently disabled. In response, analysts have shown that the materials of the Wagner quotation, including the Tristan chord itself, are embedded in the work’s twelve-​tone rows. In that sense, the quotation is foreseen within unitary structures of the music, which

10. I discuss Berg’s Tristan quotation in therapeutic mode in Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (1990).

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its emergence confirms rather than disrupts. This analytical view is corroborated by Berg’s own compositional sketches, which show the derivation of the Wagner quotation from the rows. On this view, the quotation emerges from within the consciousness of the piece. In this way, theorists/​therapists take what might have been a pathologically disruptive heard voice and render it a harmless reminiscence.

DIVISION OF MUSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS (STRATIFICATION, LAYERING)

Modernist music’s quotation practices—​its hearing of voices—​are an extreme version of a prevalent stylistic feature, namely, the stratification of the musical texture into distinct and conflicting layers.

Typically, the distinct layers of modernist musical textures are individuated by their melody, harmony, centricity, collection, rhythm, register, and instrumentation. As in the medicalized category of schizophrenia, the consciousness of such works is divided. Often, the relationship between the layers is not so much one of a stable ground and an intruding figure, but rather competing realities, as each layer asserts itself as the ground for the other. It is often the case that one of the layers has a more traditional, tonal feel than the other, even where no specific quotation is involved. Debussy, “Feux d’Artifice.” This piano prelude is stratified into two conflicting layers (Lewin 1993). One layer uses mostly the black keys of the piano and is centered on D♭. The other uses mostly the white keys of the piano and is centered on C. There is an obvious symbolic association of black keys with night and darkness and of white keys with light, especially the bursts of light associated with the exploding fireworks of the work’s title. At the very end of the piece, we hear a snatch of the Marseillaise, as though from a distance. The tune is quoted in C major, using only white notes, and, in the context of the D♭ layer heard far below, affirms the irreducible duality of the work. It comes right after the climactic explosion of fireworks, and might be thought of as a response to the explosion, as heard voices are often a response to trauma. Stravinsky, Petrushka. The puppet-​ character Petrushka is represented musically by certain distinctive combinations of triads. The principal such combination involves two major triads related by

[ 100 ] Broken Beauty

tritone, but there are other combinations in use, creating a complicated network of relationships among simple constituents. Petrushka is thus represented as a character who is in some ways almost a simpleton (repetition of triads with no sense of progression), but whose mental state involves deep, irreconcilable conflicts. His triadic complexes provide multiple perspectives and divide the consciousness of the music that represents him. His mind is thus as abnormal as his body, and his disordered mental state resonates with the divided consciousness of schizophrenia, the pre-​eminent madness condition of the early twentieth century. Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, “In a Foolish Dream.” The final scene of The Rake’s Progress takes place in Bedlam—​the madhouse. The libretto frames Tom’s madness mostly in religious terms—​as a punishment for his moral transgressions and as a mark of divinely inspired wisdom, attained in redemption of his suffering. Tom’s madness takes the form of delusion—​he thinks he is Adonis and that Ann, his one-​ time fiancée, is Venus. In his loss of contact with reality, Tom’s madness would conform to the contemporary diagnostic category of schizophrenia. Stravinsky’s musical representation of Tom’s madness involves obsessive fixity (the music is trapped in place, seemingly incapable of progress) and stratification into opposing and irreconcilable musical layers. Berg, Wozzeck, Act II, tavern scene. In this scene, Wozzeck’s madness comes to a boil and takes a murderous turn.11 A clash of different musical styles represents the splitting of his consciousness, as parodistically tonal dance music is layered over more idiomatically atonal music. Crawford Seeger, String Quartet, first movement. Crawford Seeger’s music often juxtaposes two or more distinct contrapuntal lines in a sort of polyphony on steroids she calls “heterophony.”12 Generally, such juxtapositions have been interpreted as the conflicted relationship between two distinct characters or agents. But I  think they can also be understood as representing the sort of intrapsychic conflict that has been pathologized as schizophrenia. In this movement, four contrasting melodies compete for priority and attention, each with its

11. For a discussion of Wozzeck that explores its affiliation with schizophrenia, see Jeremy Tambling, “Listening to Schizophrenia: The Wozzeck Case” (2004). 12. On the first movement of Crawford’s String Quartet, including the composer’s own analysis, see Judith Tick, “Dissonant Counterpoint Revisited: The First Movement of Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet 1931” (1990). See also Straus, The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1995) and Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger (2000).

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own distinctive character. There are subtle points of agreement between the melodies, but the overall impression is one of an extreme stratification of the musical texture into opposed layers. There is no privileged vantage point from which to grasp the whole and no evident coherence in the consciousness of the work. Bartok, String Quartet No. 5 ii. This movement is characterized by persistent fragmentation and layering.13 A  slow-​moving chorale of major and minor triads in the lower three parts is radically disengaged from a fragmentary series of chromatic utterances in the first violin. The cumulative effect is of a deranged mental state with a consciousness that is irrevocably split between irreconcilable elements. Schoenberg, Erwartung, conclusion. The text for this monodrama is the interior monologue of a woman, evidently deranged, who searches in the woods for her lover, who may be dead, and whom she may have killed in a jealous rage.14 She experiences delusions and hallucinations, and the traditional boundary between reality and illusion entirely breaks down. Schoenberg’s music represents the woman’s madness in at least three related ways. First, the music is chaotic, apparently formless, and highly fragmentary. Second, the expressive moods of the music are in constant flux—​like the mental state of the woman, the music is emotionally labile. Third, the musical textures are frequently stratified into discrete and deliberately uncoordinated layers. Schoenberg’s music is always highly contrapuntal, but in Erwartung, the independence of the lines is pushed to an extreme. The conclusion of the work is particularly stratified in its texture, and the stratification is reinforced by a direct quotation from an earlier song by Schoenberg. The quotation defines one layer of the texture, in the manner of a heard voice, while other layers are piled on top of it. Like the deranged consciousness it represents, this music is composed of distorted memories and a painful present, of delusions and an elusive reality, amid rapidly shifting moods and incommensurable layers of consciousness.

MADNESS AS AN ARTISTIC RESOURCE

Hearing voices and the sort of division of consciousness it epitomizes are common and persistent features of human neurodiversity. They are 13.  On stylistic heterogeneity in Bartók’s music, see Malcolm Gillies, “Stylistic Integrity and Influence in Bartok’s Works” (1992). 14.  Valuable recent discussions of Erwartung include Michael Cherlin, Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination (2007) and Bryan Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg: 1908–​1923 (2000).

[ 102 ] Broken Beauty

also common, defining features of musical modernism. In musical works that hear voices, the piece-​persona experiences the voices as real—​not hallucinations—​ and as originating outside its otherwise unified consciousness. Sometimes, the piece responds in therapeutic mode: the voices are perceived as problematic, and the piece attempts to cure the problem. Other times, the piece responds mildly or in welcoming fashion: the disruption is experienced as a valuable component of a new modernist aesthetic of fractured forms. And we as listeners can similarly choose between two ways of responding to these heard voices. Listeners, especially those specialized sorts of listeners known as theorists and analysts, have generally listened in therapeutic mode (this is the subject of ­chapter 7). In these recuperative, medicalized hearings, the voices are understood as hallucinations—​ they originate within the piece and only a false perception suggests that the unified, singular consciousness of the piece has been fundamentally disrupted. The analytical task then becomes one of restoring the wholeness of the piece by demonstrating that the seemingly extraneous voice really belongs there, is really organically one with the rest of the piece. But there is an alternative, a nontherapeutic, nonmedicalized way of hearing these voices. We can hear them the way the piece sometimes seems to hear them, as originating from outside the frame of the piece, but as nonetheless welcome and desirable. The consciousness of the piece is irrevocably split, its unity fragmented beyond the hope of repair, and that’s okay. The voices signal a radical divergence from the hegemony of a unified Romantic organicism, and can be heard as a modernist celebration of neurodiversity. For modern psychiatry and for listeners operating in therapeutic mode, hearing voices is a symptom that requires diagnosis and treatment. But the presence of heard voices in music has the potential to help us rewrite familiar scripts of mental disorder. We can learn to understand these divided musical consciousnesses as the sorts of bodily and mental disabilities that can be celebrated as welcome and enriching differences. In short, these heard voices permit us to understand at least this aspect of musical modernism in light of Siebers’s disability aesthetics—​the creation of new forms of beauty in celebration of formerly stigmatized bodies.

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CHAPTER 5

Idiocy Representations of idiocy are fundamental to modernist music, including its propensity toward radical simplification of musical materials; toward nondevelopmental, literal repetition; and toward the inarticulate and the “primitive.” Social and Institutional History of Idiocy   105 Preindustrial World   105 Enlightenment and After   105 Eugenic Age   107 Postmodern Postlude   108 Regimes of Representation   109 The Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot   109 The Wild Child and the Natural Man   111 The Village Idiot (Strictly for Laughs)   111 The Eugenic Idiot   112 Some Recurring Iconography   114 Musical Representations   116 Simplification  116 Stasis  117 Inarticulateness  117 Incongruity  118 Children and Animals   118 Folk  118 Primitive  119 Idiocy as Artistic Resource   124

SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF IDIOCY

Idiocy, once understood as a mark of divine disfavor, is later medicalized under a variety of seemingly scientific classifications, culminating in a eugenic-​era fear of the “menace of the feebleminded” and the widespread institutionalization to which it gave rise.

Preindustrial World

For most of human history, a condition that later gets called by a variety of shifting, imprecise, and decidedly nonequivalent names—​idiocy, mental deficiency, imbecility, feeblemindedness, mental retardation, intellectual disability—​was not differentiated from other forms of madness, understood as a lack of reason.1 People who might in a later time have been classified in one of these ways may have found themselves incarcerated within a lunatic asylum (institutions for the insane started to arise as early as the late fourteenth century), but were much more likely to live their lives within their families and communities. The preindustrial age was also a preinstitutional age and a premedical age for idiocy. Like other forms of disability, idiocy was generally understood, and deeply stigmatized, within a religious model, as a form of demonic possession and/​or a punishment for (parental) sin. Not until a later period did idiocy begin to take on some of the redemptive, visionary qualities associated with some other forms of madness.

Enlightenment and Af ter

In the late eighteenth century, idiocy began to be severed from madness and constituted as a distinct category. Madness came to be seen as

1. On the historical relationship of madness and idiocy, see Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (2002). On the history and culture of idiocy, see James Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind:  A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (1994); Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr., eds., Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader (2004); Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History (2008a); Mark Rapley, The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability (2004); C. F. Goodey, A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe (2011); Licia Carlson, The Faces of Intellectual Disability (2010); and Licia Carlson, “Docile Bodies, Docile Minds: Foucauldian Reflections on Mental Retardation” (2015). For a valuable brief history of intellectual disability, see the introduction to Jack Levinson, Making Life Work: Freedom and Disability in a Community Group Home (2010).

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something acquired after childhood and usually temporary, while idiocy began at birth and was permanent. Institutions arose, initially with the hope of curing what was understood as a disease, but later for the main purposes of segregation from the general population and incarceration. Amid the medical model’s mania for schemes of classification, this new category was endlessly parsed and partitioned, as institutions provided physicians and (later) psychiatrists with an increasingly large and captive population to study. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the medical professionals who attempted to describe idiocy in precise, scientific language navigated among and often invented terms and categories, including cretinism, imbecility, and insanity (Séguin 1886/​1994); fools and simpletons (Howe 1848/​1972); hydrocephalic idiocy, epileptic idiocy, traumatic idiocy, congenital idiocy, and idiocy by deprivation (Duncan 1861, Ireland 1872); feeblemindedness, imbecility, and dementia (Down 1887/​ 1990); and Negroid idiots, Malay idiots, North American Indian idiots, and Mongoloid idiots (Down 1887/​1990). Writing in 1875, Grabham tells us that idiocy may be defined as an absence or arrest of development of the intellectual and moral faculties, either congenital, or occurring in new-​born children. Imbecility is generally taken to signify a milder form of idiocy, not necessarily congenital, but supervening in infancy. Cretinism may be termed an endemic form of idiocy or imbecility, in which there is, moreover, characteristic arrest of development, malformation, and deformity of the whole organism. Dementia differs from imbecility in being a loss, more or less complete, through disease or injury, of faculties formerly possessed. (73–​74)

Tredgold’s standard textbook, which was first published in 1908 with subsequent editions as recent as 1979, is preoccupied with defining the different degrees and grades of “amentia,” namely (in descending order), feeblemindedness, imbecility, and idiocy, and in distinguishing these from related categories like dementia, moron, and mental defective. Tredgold asserts: The mildest degree of mental defect is that known as high-​ grade feeble-​ mindedness, and while the majority of the members of this class resemble those of the preceding [i.e., the lowest members of the feebleminded grade] in the fact that their intelligence does not come up to that possessed by primitive social man, they stand above them in that they have a relatively greater development of the capacities for thought and feeling. (1914, 153)

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The racial classifications offered by Down, and Tredgold’s reference to “primitive social man,” hint at the profound role of race and other social structures like class in supporting these seemingly scientific taxonomies of mental deficiency. Despite the linguistic trappings of scientific knowledge, idiocy and similar terms cannot be taken seriously as reliable, technically secure, medical categories. With no substantial basis in biology, idiocy must be understood as a cultural, not scientific or medical, category. (This same instability is inherited by more recent terminology like “mental retardation,” which similarly seeks to borrow the trappings of scientific language.) In fact, idiocy is not a category given to us by nature or biology, science or medicine; rather, it is a historically and culturally contingent way of grouping people.

Eugenic Age

By the end of the nineteenth century, societal and medical attention shifted from the “idiot child,” for whom the hope of cure had been lost, to the “feebleminded adult,” who was increasingly seen as a burden on and a potential menace to society.2 Intelligence testing made the category more rigid and gave it the imprimatur of apparently scientific enumeration. Institutions for the feebleminded grew rapidly in population and were unapologetically oriented toward segregation and incarceration, not for the benefit of the residents but for that of the outside community, to protect it from taint and potential danger. Under the influence of eugenic thought, people classified as feebleminded or mentally deficient were understood as potential criminals, who were likely to pass their degeneracy to their children, if they were permitted to reproduce. As Karen Keely observes, “Americans worried that the so-​called 2.  On idiocy in the eugenic age of the early twentieth century, including its literary representations during this and earlier periods, see Karen Keely, “Sexuality and Storytelling: Literary Representation of the ‘Feebleminded’ in the Age of Sterilization” (2004); Deborah Metzel, “Historical Social Geography” (2004); Gerald Schmidt, “Fictional Voices and Viewpoints for the Mentally Deficient, 1929–​1939” (2004); James Berger, The Disarticulate:  Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity (2014); Martin Halliwell, Images of Idiocy:  The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film (2004); Zosha Stuckey, A Rhetoric of Remnants:  Idiots, Half-​Wits, and Other State-​ Sponsored Inventions (2014); Patricia Puccinelli, Yardsticks: Retarded Characters and Their Roles in Fiction (1995); and Alice Hall, Literature and Disability (2016). On cinematic representations of disability, see Martin Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (1994). For an important recent intellectual history of eugenics, see Thomas Leonard, Illiberal Reformers:  Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016).

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feebleminded, apparently unconstrained by reason and traditional mores, would succumb to lives of crime, indiscriminate sexual activity, and careless reproduction” (2004, 207). The walls of the institution, and the increasing use of forced sterilization, were intended to protect the outer world against such a danger.

Postmodern Postlude

During the first half of the twentieth century in America, the population housed in institutions for the feebleminded continued to grow, reaching a peak of 194,650 in 1967. At that point, a gradual process of deinstitutionalization began, and people classified as “mentally retarded,” like their brethren in “insane asylums,” were increasingly returned to or left in their families and communities. Deinstitutionalization has had a very dark side, amid a relative scarcity of resources, but it has marked the end of the eugenic era in relation to idiocy. During this period, people who would at one time have found themselves in the profoundly stigmatized categories of feebleminded or mentally retarded were parceled out into new classifications, including intellectual disability and autism, which, like their predecessors, are evolving, contingent social and cultural groupings, which continue to bear the effects of race and class. In an era of disability advocacy, and amid the emergence of the social model of disability, idiocy has continued to bear perhaps the heaviest weight of stigma among disabilities, the disability that activists have been most reluctant to claim.

  HISTORY OF IDIOCY Preindustrial

Religious model

Under general category

(demonic possession,

of madness (insanity,

divine punishment).

lunacy). Constituted separately

In family and community.

Enlightenment

Emerging dominance

and after

of medical model

from madness,

Emergence of “schools” for the

(heavily inflected by

under a variety of

feebleminded.

race and class).

labels. Increasingly understood as congenital and permanent. (continued )

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Eugenic age

Hegemony of medical understanding.

Fear of the threat

institutions with

degeneracy, and the

little pretense of

downgrading of the

remediation or

human genetic stock. Postmodern age

Emergence of social

Mass incarceration in

posed by criminality,

Continued reparsing

education. Deinstitutionalization.

model, which

of the population

Significant political

nonetheless finds

into a variety of new

and social gains.

idiocy nearly

categories, including

intractable—​the

intellectual disability,

most stigmatized

developmental

of disabilities.

disability, learning

Continued dominance

disability, and autistic

of medical model.

spectrum disorder.

REGIMES OF REPRESENTATION

In literature, representations of idiocy have generally fallen into a small number of types:  the Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot; the Wild Child and the Natural Man; the Village Idiot (often played for laughs); and the Eugenic Idiot (simultaneously pitiable and a feared source of violence, possibly sexual in nature).

The Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot

The idiot has been a familiar character in literature and opera libretti at least since the late eighteenth century, and the representations have both reflected and helped to shape the lives of people classified or understood as idiots. The most common literary representation of the idiot is as a Sacred or Holy Fool. This is someone whose apparent intellectual and linguistic deficiencies are accompanied by a particular sort of moral, ethical, and spiritual knowledge. Deficits in rationality are compensated by deeper and more authentic sorts of wisdom. The Holy Fool is sincere, unsophisticated, and authentic, uncorrupted by civilization, and maintaining strong ties to the natural world; his gifts are moral, not intellectual. This is an extraordinarily persistent trope. Among a profusion of representations in literature and opera, I note the following as conspicuous examples: Mr. Dick in Dickens’s David Copperfield (possessed of a special wisdom, grounded in his childlike innocence and innate goodness, he serves as a moral barometer for the conduct of the central characters of the novel); Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (naïve and childlike in his innocence of social conventions, he thus possesses a quality of understanding that

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transcends that of the more worldly characters of the novel); Yurodivïy in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (an unnamed secondary character identified as the Holy Fool, he has access to religious wisdom and compassion, honesty and sincerity, which shine forth in a corrupt world); Billy Budd in Melville’s Billy Budd (characterized by a lack of intellectual capacity and an inability to articulate his thoughts and feelings, he lacks the capacity for growth, evolution, and change; he is trapped forever in a state of childlike innocence, and the violence he commits is understood as accidental and forgivable). Parsifal in Wagner’s opera, Parsifal, is the best-​known idiot in the musical literature. Wagner’s own etymology for the name Parsifal was “pure (or innocent) fool,” derived, as he believed, from two Arabic words. Although Wagner’s etymology is likely false, the character of Parsifal is closely aligned with the traditional Holy Fool. He is something of a simpleton—​he knows very little beyond the ability to hunt. He is sincere, guileless, and closely associated with the natural world. Raised in the woods, his character has links with another type of idiot, namely, the Wild Child. He is asexual: the mind of a child in the body of a powerful man. His ignorance and innocence are wellsprings for a deep and transformative compassion and wisdom. A less discussed near variant of the Holy Fool is what we might call the Sentimental Idiot. While Holy Fools are usually adults (and almost always men), Sentimental Idiots are usually children, and may be male or female (the cinematic stereotype of the Sweet Innocent described in Norden [1994] is a more recent descendent). Sentimental Idiots are innocent, pure, and incorruptible. They represent an idealized view of childhood as composed solely of gentleness and sweetness. Like Holy Fools, they are utterly unsexual, and never show any development of character. Unlike Holy Fools, they are never central characters in a narrative. Rather, they serve as a static foil and moral test for the normative characters: good characters respond with an impulse of care; bad characters respond with a desire to dupe and exploit. Like Holy Fools, in their innocence, simplicity, authenticity, and lack of sophistication, Sentimental Idiots may be privy to knowl­ edge deeper than that attainable by rational inquiry. A list of prominent idiots in English literature would include Johnny Foy, the “Idiot Boy” in Wordsworth’s poem by that title (virtually inarticulate, but possessed of an inner wisdom that makes him seem almost a visionary poet, Johnny is associated with familiar tropes of idiocy, including childhood, nature, and animals); Smike in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickelby and Jo in Dickens’s Bleak House (cognitively limited minor characters, who serve as moral touchstones for the major characters in the novel, they are innocent victims of cruelty and abuse, and end up dead, as sweet, sentimental idiots in literature often do); Barnaby Rudge in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (nominally the title character,

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he functions in the novel as a fool, one with the mind of a child in the body of a man, closely associated with the natural world and with animals—​ he participates in a violent plot, but only because he is a dupe); Stevie in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (a credulous innocent, a dupe, and a stooge, he is tricked into participating in a terrorist attack in which he is accidentally killed).

The Wild Child and the Natural Man

Starting in the eighteenth century, the figure of the Wild Child (Kaspar Hauser and Victor of Averyon are the best known) became a source of fascination to the enlightenment imagination. These children had somehow grown up in the wild (they were “feral”), without language and without human socialization. And they generally remained without language, despite heroic attempts to educate and civilize them. Their association with the natural and animal worlds, however, did not appear to confer any special wisdom. They appeared more brutish than holy. In the literary imagination, a Wild Child might grow up to be a Natural Man, a prerational man in a state of nature. Such a man might appear as a brutish primitive, conveying a sense of menace and a threat of violence. Literary prototypes include Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (a savage and a monster of limited intellect and rapacious desire, although not entirely without traces of nobility) and Friday in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Crusoe’s native servant, a former cannibal and a racial Other, only partially civilizable). In opera, Siegfried in Wagner’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung is the most conspicuous Natural Man. He is something of a brute, as well as a credulous dupe. He is repeatedly depicted as unwise, but unlike Parsifal, his idiocy has nothing holy about it. He is a fool and a simpleton, a product of the natural world. He is prerational in many ways—​the mind of a child in the body of a man—​and is closely associated with the animal world. He is virtuous in some ways, but menacing and violent in others.

The Village Idiot (Strictly for Laughs)

Certain sorts of disabilities, including blindness, deafness, and mobility impairment, have long been sources of crude humor. The Village Idiot is a rustic bumpkin whose limited understanding makes him (it’s always a man) the butt of jokes and a dupe for the schemes of the normative characters. These characters embody no spiritual wisdom (there is nothing holy about

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them), nor do they seem feral or menacing. Rather, their intellectual incapacity is played strictly for laughs. Musical examples include Vašek in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (he stutters, is understood as feebleminded, and is rejected by a potential lover for someone more appropriately able-​ bodied) and Papageno in Mozart/​Schikaneder’s The Magic Flute (an inarticulate and foolish comic character and a credulous dupe, he is a rustic primitive, closely associated with the natural and animal worlds). The Commedia dell’Arte character, Pierrot, the focus of many musical and literary representations, was depicted as a dolt, a buffoon, a fool, and a comic idiot before he evolved into the pale, tragic clown of late romanticism and early modernism (Brinkmann 1997).

The Eugenic Idiot

In modernist literature and opera, these familiar types continue to be portrayed. In Schreker’s Der Schatzgräber, for example, there is a fool who is wise, if not notably holy. He’s mostly a secondary character, as these sorts of idiots always are, but in an odd twist, he actually marries the female lead. There’s also a virtually forgotten opera by Holst titled The Perfect Fool. This fool speaks instead of sings (a theme to which we will return), but like Schreker’s fool, this one succeeds in marrying a princess. These characters are more central to their dramas than their nineteenth-​century predecessors, but otherwise the standard tropes still seem to apply. For the most part, however, these sorts of standard representations of idiocy are colored and darkened by eugenics, resulting in frequent depictions of what we might call the Eugenic Idiot. Cultural modernism coincides with and is intertwined with the science of eugenics, which sees aberrancies of appearance, behavior, and ability as potential threats to the health of the body politic. Confronted by the “menace of the feebleminded,” societies respond with regimes of sequestration and sterilization. Modernist literature reflects a radical change in attitudes toward idiocy and treatment of people understood as idiots. Gerald Schmidt, for example, refers to “the radical shift from Dickens’s morally gifted fools to the amoral defectives found in twentieth-​century American writing” (2004, 186)  and Berger sees modernist literature as a space where “descendants of the sacred fool contended with ideologies of degeneration and eugenics” (2014, 10). The Eugenic Idiot, cultural modernism’s principal way of representing idiocy, is a fully and threateningly sexualized adult man (always a man), very much in contrast to the desexualized idiots of the nineteenth century. He is simultaneously innocent and childlike in some ways and criminally dangerous in others. The

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incongruity he embodies—​the mind of a child in the body of a man—​is the essence of his idiocy and of the threat it is now seen to pose. Because of the menace embodied in the Eugenic Idiot, compared to the sentimentalized idiots of nineteenth-​century literature, new sorts of narratives emerge. In nineteenth-​century literature, idiots are usually peripheral to the drama, rarely protagonists. Because they typically serve as moral touchstones, the narrative does not require their expulsion or death, only that the normative characters grow through contact with them. They often do die, but their deaths are usually incidental to the large unfolding of the narrative. In modernist literature, however, with its much darker view of idiocy, characters understood as idiots always end up dead by the end of the story, and the narrative is directed toward their death. For other sorts of disabilities, I have argued that modernism moves them from a stigmatized periphery to a valorized center of representation and narrative. For idiocy, however, I have to revise my formulation and say that modernism moves idiocy from a valorized periphery to a stigmatized center. In that way, modernist representations and narrations of idiocy embody the eugenic-​era ambivalence toward disability generally, with impulses toward care and cure in conflict with impulses to segregate and incarcerate. And as we will see, some modernist works suggest at least the possibility of a way out of that familiar cultural logic of euthanasia, seeing in idiocy a rich artistic resource, something fascinating, and perhaps something worth valorizing and even celebrating. Lenny in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a prototypical Eugenic Idiot. He has the mind of a child in the body of a dangerously sexual man. His affinity with animals is clear throughout, and the narrative ends with his death. Benjy Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is another. Like Lenny, he has the mind of a child in the body of a dangerously sexual man. His affinity is not with animals but with the African American servants who sustain the Compson family, and thus with the primitive, prerationality they are presumed to represent. In keeping with eugenic-​era practices, he is castrated and incarcerated in Jackson State, a mental hospital. For Faulkner, Benjy’s idiocy enables many of his distinctively modernist experiments with language and narration. As Berger observes: The language of Benjy’s section is not at all some supposed inner language of a cognitively impaired person. It is the language of literary modernism. As such, it is a language that calls the conventions of language into question, and more than that, calls into question the representational or epistemological function of language altogether. (2014, 82–​83)

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In Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, the title character shares many features of the Eugenic Idiot. He is intellectually limited and relatively inarticulate—​a sort of primitive being, living close to the forces of nature. He is an easily manipulated dupe. Although there are hints of the Holy Fool tradition—​ that his intellectual incapacity, his lack of sophistication and cleverness, makes possible a naïve, pure, wisdom and spirituality—​Wozzeck is more closely aligned with the modernist trope of the Eugenic Idiot, whose limitations make him a threat to the health of the community. From this point of view, Wozzeck is a degenerate figure, whose intellectual limitations make him not only easily manipulated but also a dangerous and violent menace and criminal. The narrative closes with his death.   LITERARY TYPOLOGY OF IDIOCY The Holy Fool and the

Cognitive limitations signal a deeper

Sentimental Idiot

wisdom. Gifts are emotional and

Evokes awe or pity.

moral, not rational. The Wild Child and the Natural Man

Prerational man in a state of nature. Primitive and uncivilized.

Evokes fascination or fear.

Uneducated and uneducable. The Village Idiot

Rustic bumpkin.

Evokes laughter.

The Eugenic Idiot

Degenerate, amoral menace to

Evokes fear and horror.

society.

Some Recurring Iconography

Modernist literary and operatic representations of idiocy share certain features. Some of these are inherited from more traditional representations and some are newly distinctive of modernist representations. No representation touches all of these bases, but all involve many of them. First, modernist literature depicts idiots as adults (almost always men) who are childlike, and thus essentially prerational creatures. Among their childlike attributes are simplicity and innocence of social conventions. They may be sexually innocent as well, but their very ignorance of conventions governing sexuality may make them dangerous. There is a disturbing incongruity between their childlike minds and their adult bodies. In that sense, adult male idiots are understood as menacing monsters. Second, modernist representations connect the idiot character closely with the natural world. They are simple, direct, unaffected, and unurbane. In particular, they are associated with the world of animals and are themselves

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animal-​like (but only certain animals: sheep and cows and oxen, not eagles or foxes). If children are prerational, animals are subrational creatures. Sometimes, in an echo of the Holy Fool trope, animals and animalistic idiots may appear to be endowed with an unusual wisdom, precisely rooted in their animality. Third, and more ominously, modernist literature often depicts idiots as primitive and uncivilized. The feebleminded are uncivilized brutes, unenlightened, and prone to savage acts and sexual excess. There is often a strongly racial element here, with idiots affiliated with or identified with racial Others. There is a conflation of idiot with racial primitives (as in “mongoloid idiots”). Primitivism as a modernist style points in all three of these directions: mental deficiency, childhood, and racial Others. Fourth, modernist idiots are trapped in a permanent condition of idiocy, with no possibility of development, growth, or change. In literary representations, most idiots are fully engulfed by their idiocy: their idiocy accounts for all of their behavior, and they have no significant thoughts or traits that do not derive from and express idiocy. However, one of the significant contributions of literary modernism to the construction of idiocy is that, at least occasionally, characters may exceed their idiocy and have full emotional and even mental lives. Their idiocy is not overcome or transcended, but incorporated as one aspect of a personality and a life. Finally, modernist idiots are inarticulate. Their lack of linguistic fluency is sometimes represented by stuttering or muteness. Their language tends to be semantically limited and syntactically incompetent. Their inability to meet normative conventions for communicative language, however, may impel them to new sorts of eloquence, and may offer an opportunity for the sorts of linguistic experimentation that are characteristic of literary modernism. This last point merits amplification because it goes right to the nexus of idiocy and cultural modernism. In short, the voice of the idiot becomes the voice of modernism, with its linguistic innovations. As Berger (2014, 67)  notes, “Linguistically and cognitively impaired characters are indeed central to major modernist texts,” and their presence enables the “extravagant linguistic innovation and experimentation” and “novel uses of language” that are “one of the most critical features of literary modernism.” Similarly, Schmidt (2004) points out that the representation of idiocy gives modernist authors a pretext and opportunity for linguistic exploration and innovation, and supports their search “for a language that has not been spoilt by civilization” (198). The representation of idiocy enables not only new language but also new sorts of narratives. In place of traditional narratives of growth and

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overcoming, narratives of idiocy tend to be static—​not goal oriented or developmental. The idiot’s voice, as understood by modernist authors, is unencumbered by memory or futurity and unmediated by culture. Narratives by and about idiots thus tend to be chaos narratives, with all of the characteristic features discussed in ­chapter 2.

  ICONOGRAPHY OF IDIOCY Mind of a child in the (often fully sexualized) body of a man. Close association with the natural world, especially the world of animals. Close association with racialized Others (the primitive, the folk, the uncivilized). The condition is permanent and inclusive; it cannot be overcome or cured. Mute or inarticulate.

MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Modernist music represents idiocy in its tendency toward simplification in all domains; its static, nondevelopmental character; its deliberate cultivation of disfluency and inarticulateness; its interest in generic incongruity; its pleasure in low humor; and above all its deep interest in the childlike, the folk, and the primitive (including the racial primitive). As in modernist literature, musical representations of idiocy enable the sorts of compositional innovations that are widely understood as defining musical modernism.

Simplif ication

Some modernist musical works tend toward a radical simplification in every musical domain, especially melody, harmony, and texture. They eschew counterpoint and imitative polyphony. Instead of the high level of dissonance and the search for new harmonic combinations that prevail in other branches of modernist music, they rely on consonant harmonies, including the usual major and minor triads, and familiar diatonic scales (although deployed and combined in new ways). Instead of contrapuntal complexity and density, they rely on simple melodies with chordal accompaniment. They deliberately dial down the level of sophistication of the musical language. In contrast to the traditional “learned style,” such works cultivate what we might think of as the “idiocy style.”

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Stasis

Traditional tonal music is endlessly developmental—​its basic shapes grow, evolve, and transform over the course of a work. It is similar in that way to the traditional novel where characters change and develop, learn and grow. Some modernist music, however, eschews development in favor of literal repetition, including multiple repetitions of short, simple patterns (ostinato). Tonal motives change and adapt to their surroundings; they learn, grow, change, evolve, and develop. In some modernist music, its simplified motives never learn anything and never change. Their surroundings may change, but they are always the same. In a related way, traditional tonal harmony is varied and progressive—​it takes complex paths toward desired goals. Some modernist harmony, in contrast, is static and nondirectional; its mobility is deeply impaired. In both its nondevelopmental motives and its static harmony, modernist music resonates with contemporary representations of idiocy.

Inarticulateness

Many modernist works, both musical and literary, are deliberately inarticulate, and their lack of meaningful, fluent, skillful language may be taken as a representation of idiocy. In some more extreme cases, the musical or literary language may approach incoherence and may give the impression of authorial incompetence. Language may be broken up in ways that apparently defy or ignore reason, or the work (or a character in it) may fall altogether silent. In some cases, speech is impeded by stuttering or other vocal disfluency; in other cases, the speech is fluent, but nonsensical. If articulate, spoken language is the traditional gauge of rationality, many modernist musical voices are prerational: they speak nonsense. Modernist opera and other music with text are replete with characters whose voice is inarticulate in one of these ways, and these characters are often explicitly identified as cognitively impaired. For example, in Gustav Holst’s The Perfect Fool (1922), the title character speaks rather than sings, and speaks only one word. Similarly, in Carlisle Floyd’s operatic version of Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men (1971), Lenny speaks instead of sings. In Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium (1946), the character Toby is silent. He is apparently a “deaf-​mute,” following a traditional and false conflation of hearing impairment and lack of language, and is often characterized as cognitively impaired. Finally, in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau Ohne Schatten (1917), the three brothers are cognitively limited and animalistic; they communicate with inarticulate howling.

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Incongruity

An incongruity of mental and physical capacity is central to cultural representations of idiocy:  the mind of an innocent, prerational child in a fully (and perhaps dangerously) sexualized adult body. In modernist music, this incongruity often plays out as generic mismatch. In a symphony, an opera, or a string quartet, a certain level of intellectual sophistication and complexity is expected—​these are generic norms. If, instead, we get radically simplified materials, the generic space may make them appear simpleminded, foolish, and idiotic. The simplified materials are not inherently associated with idiocy; rather, the generic context creates that association. A generic mismatch may have the effect of grotesquerie within an atmosphere of low humor. In the history of cultural representations of idiocy, the fool, buffoon, country bumpkin, and village idiot have long had a central place, and these roles have often been essentially comic. In modernist music, as in cultural representations more generally, idiocy is often played for laughs, and the humor centers on grotesque incongruities.

Children and Animals

Cultural representations of idiocy have often positioned the idiot character within a world of children and/​or animals. Idiots are presumed to embody childlike or animalistic qualities, as variously prerational or irrational, innocent and unsophisticated or brutal and bestial, capable of surprising emotional knowledge or sunken in subhuman degradation. Modernist music is surprisingly rich in works centered on the worlds of children and animals (e.g., Ravel, L’enfant et les sortilèges; Stravinsky, Renard; Debussy, La Boite à Joujoux; Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf). Not all of these representations create an association with idiocy, but they all have that potential affinity.

Folk

A significant number of modernist musical works are closely engaged with folk traditions. In many cases, folk music is valued for its lack of sophistication, its uncivilized and prerational qualities, its innocence and expressive directness. All of these qualities may be associated with cultural representations of idiocy.

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Primitive

Cultural modernism was deeply fascinated by the “primitive,” and often cultivated an uncultivated style. In modernist music, the primitive often manifested itself as repetitive, pounding harmonies; insistent ostinato patterns; and irregular meters or accentual patterns. These were understood as forms of musical savagery, shattering the civilizing constraints of tonal harmony and counterpoint. Often, the music was deliberately associated with uncivilized racial Others. In many cases, there was an explicit analogy of a historical, racial, or evolutionary primitive (e.g., from prehistoric Asia or Africa) and a developmental primitive (such as a degenerate or an idiot). These general themes are evident, in various combinations and with various emphases, in a variety of modernist music.

  MODERNIST MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF IDIOCY Simplification. Modernist music is often deliberately unstudied, unsophisticated, stripped down to its simplest elements. It may give the impression of simplemindedness and even incompetence. Stasis. Modernist music is often nondevelopmental in its motives and static in its harmonies. It may appear incapable of growth and change. Inarticulateness. Modernist music often appears impaired in its expressive fluency and prone to nonsense. It apparently lacks the capacity for sophisticated language; its utterances are often halting or incomprehensible. Incongruity. Modernist music often cultivates grotesque incongruities, especially its juxtaposition of high genres (opera, symphony, string quartet) with simple, unsophisticated content. It may suggest the mind of a child in the body of an adult. Children. A surprising number of modernist works are either written for children or situated within the world of children. Being childlike is often a feature of cultural representations of idiocy. Animals. A surprising number of modernist works speak in the voices of animals, or are otherwise situated in the world of animals. Being animalistic, in either desirable ways (the cuteness of a rabbit, the wisdom of a fox or owl) or undesirable ways (the brutish violence of an animal of prey), is often a feature of cultural representations of idiocy. Folk. Modernist music often draws upon folk traditions because of their apparently authentic, unsophisticated, uncivilized qualities. Folk melodies and rhythms may be understood as prerational and, in contrast to the complexities of learned contrapuntal styles, deliberately simpleminded. Primitive. Some modernist music cultivates an uncultivated style to evoke primitive racial Others and, in the process, may evoke primitive developmental Others.

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Satie, Parade. Parade is a mostly plotless ballet in which three circus performers (a Chinese magician, a young American girl, and an acrobat) perform briefly outside the circus tent in an effort to lure patrons inside. The music is radically simplified in all domains. The harmonies are mostly triads and seventh chords with little sense of purposeful direction. There is no counterpoint, no voice leading, no harmonic variety, novelty, or interest. This is music of childlike simplicity, the opposite of the “learned style.” One aspect of its simplification is its static, nondevelopmental quality. This sense of living in a timeless present, with no memory and no future plans, is one of the hallmarks of idiocy. The inarticulate quality of this music is another hallmark of idiocy. It eschews traditional rhetoric and narrative, presenting instead an expressive blank wall, a hard, bright surface with apparently nothing underneath. The music wanders and stumbles, but never gets anywhere. It comes very close to a sort of musical nonsense or babbling, like an inexperienced and incompetent person noodling at the piano keyboard. There is no sense of an expressive or narrative trajectory, just a bright, cheery, expressionless blank. The larger generic context amplifies and reinforces these hallmarks of idiocy. In reference to the genre of the grand ballet, there is a shocking incongruity of genre and content, analogous to a child’s mind in an adult body. Berg, Wozzeck (Der Narr). I  discussed earlier the senses in which the title character of Berg’s Wozzeck can be usefully situated within the history and culture of idiocy. In addition to Wozzeck, however, there is another character in both Berg’s opera and Büchner’s play on which it is based for whom idiocy does not have to be inferred from external signs and symbols. In Büchner’s drama, there is a cast member known simply as The Idiot (Der Narr). Also known by his given name, Karl, he helps Marie take care of her child (the familiar association of idiocy and childhood). Near the end of the drama, as Woyzeck (Büchner’s spelling) prepares to drown himself, Karl runs off with the child (at Woyzeck’s request), chanting “Giddyup, horsie” (the familiar association of idiocy and animals). Büchner's Idiot is of the Romantic type—​associated with nature, children, and animals, and both inspiring and manifesting an impulse of care. Berg’s Idiot has only a single line in the opera, and his reference to blood (“joyful, joyful, but it reeks. . . . I smell, I smell blood”) sends Wozzeck into a paroxysm of murderous rage. The music Berg composes for these few words provides a concise and vivid modernist representation of idiocy, with a radical simplification of the musical materials.

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Stravinsky, Tilimbom. In a period when lots of composers wrote children’s music, music about animals, music involving nonsense verse, or some combination of these three, Stravinsky still stands out for the number and interest of works that fall into one or more of these categories. Although simplification is a distinguishing factor in music throughout his career, including major instrumental and dramatic works, it is distilled in a special way in songs like Tilimbom. The text involves a fire in the nannygoat’s house that the cat, hen, and rooster attempt to extinguish. The language is simple and repetitive, bordering on the nonsensical, with an onomatopoetic refrain, “Tilim-​Bom,” to suggest the ringing of the fire bell. Stravinsky’s melody consists of only five different notes and involves a melodic stutter (alternation of two tones) that is reinforced by a harmonic stutter (alternation of two harmonies). These stutters bespeak a sort of musical ineloquence and inability to speak freely. The melody is trapped within a small compass, moving aimlessly there without a clear sense of direction or goal. Ives, “The Seer.” As discussed in ­chapter  1, this song describes an old man who sits all day with a straw in his mouth outside the village grocery store watching things go by. He is simultaneously a country bumpkin with limited intellectual capacity and the “seer” of the song’s title—​someone who has a prophetic gift, and sees more deeply than others. He thus combines elements of the Village Idiot and the Holy (or Wise) Fool. Ives’s musical setting invokes several standard musical tropes for the representation of idiocy:  simplification (the melodic line is gradually pared down to a single note); stasis (the music gets stuck in one place and ends with an almost incantatory amount of literal repetition); inarticulateness (the melody, especially toward the end of the song, seems increasingly incapable of meaningful utterance); and incongruity (as the song progresses, the gulf between the unsophisticated, simple, static, and inarticulate melody and the relatively intricate accompaniment widens to an almost grotesque extreme). Stravinsky, Rite of Spring (Sacrificial Dance). The Rite of Spring has a reputation of being fantastically complicated, but its materials are actually quite simple—​the apparent complexity arises from the juxtapositions of the simple materials. In this passage, there are only two things going on: a repeated chord and a three-​note melodic fragment. In the first part of the passage, the chord is stated without variation forty times, while the melody intrudes twice. As the passage continues, the chord establishes new plateaus in its transpositional level, where it again

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repeats, while the melody shifts its level and increases in frequency and intensity. Some of the familiar hallmarks of musical representations of idiocy are present, including the radical simplification of materials, the static repetitive harmony, and the general sense of inarticulateness. But here the familiar adjuncts of children and animals are missing and we find instead a world of primitive racialized Others. If the music, especially the repeated chords, may be taken to represent the mental state of the crowd of people bent on the murder of their sacrificial victim, then that mental state is intellectually limited and brutish. Bartók, String Quartet No. 3, Seconda parte. A recurring device in a variety of modernist music, especially music by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartók, involves what is called planing, that is, the use of triads in strict parallel motion—​the notes of the triads follow each other in mindless lockstep. The basis of counterpoint and voice leading in traditional tonal music is contrary, rather than parallel motion, and indeed there are strict prohibitions on parallel motion of certain intervals, namely, octaves and fifths. If contrary motion and the avoidance of forbidden parallels are the basis of the learned style of counterpoint, then the triadic planing of modernist music represents the unlearned style, the idiocy style. In this passage, the triads wander up and down, seemingly brainlessly, without purpose or direction, and with all the notes moving in parallel (including the once-​forbidden parallel fifths). In this context, these parallel triads evoke a traditional association of idiocy with the rustic, rural, or folk. The music represents a benevolent simplemindedness. Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (Vision of the Holy Ghost). Virgil Thomson’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, represents and narrates idiocy, engaging all of the associated literary and musical tropes. The text, by Gertrude Stein, disassembles language to the point of incoherence, and breaks it up to the point of unreason. With its endlessly repeated, seemingly nonsensical arrangements of words, it celebrates the inarticulate. It gives a deliberate impression of a lack of verbal or linguistic sophistication—​it is semantically limited, with a simple, unsophisticated vocabulary, and syntactically clumsy, in a manner that suggests actual linguistic incompetence. In all of these ways, Stein employs idiocy as a way of generating stylistic novelty. Beyond its stylistic affinities with idiocy, Stein’s text engages some of the familiar tropes of idiocy, especially its invocation of the natural world (“in the grass”) and certain sorts of animals—​pigeons and magpies (not eagles or whales). The ostensible subject matter of the text is the lives of Catholic saints, and much of the language is designed to evoke a simple, unsophisticated religiosity. In that way, the text is a sort of Holy Fool, its apparent prerational

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nonsense pointing toward divine knowledge and insight. Like Stein’s text, Thomson’s music is deeply bound up with the representation of idiocy. Most obviously, it presents a music that is radically simplified in all domains. The harmony often involves the simple alternation of consonant triads. The texture is correspondingly simple: exclusively diatonic melodies (mostly simple stepwise movements or triadic arpeggiations) with chordal accompaniment—​no imitation, no counterpoint, and voice leading of the simplest type, like what one might find in a church hymn or a harmony textbook for beginners. The music gives the impression of a childlike, innocent simplicity, as unsophisticated, as uncomplicated, as uncultivated as one might imagine. As with literary representations of idiocy, there is also a sense of incongruity between an apparently feeble mind and a fully capable body. In this case, we find a music of astonishing, radical simplicity in the context of opera, a genre traditionally associated with elaborate musical realizations. Just as there is no sense of growth or development, there is no sense of direction:  the music just sways back and forth between its two harmonies. In all of these respects, the music is suggestive of the familiar understanding of the idiot as someone who is forever stuck in the present, without memory or plans, unable to grow and change. The music is not quite nonsensical, but it is semantically limited and syntactically simpleminded. In its lack of sophistication, it seems to evoke a sort of inarticulate primitive. With its deliberate evocation of hymnlike textures, amid its religious text, the music positions itself as a sort of Holy Fool, conveying religious insight in an inarticulate, seemingly prerational way. The desire to convey a sense of simple, unsophisticated religiosity was Thomson’s principal motivation in having the opera performed by an all-​black cast. His idea, rooted in familiar and pernicious racial stereotypes, was that blacks were inherently childlike, and thus well suited to conveying Stein’s nonsense verses with their atmosphere of innocent religiosity. In Thomson’s words, “Whites could never in the world have sung that opera. The very essence of the work demands primal ignorance and native awkwardness of which only the Negroes are capable” (quoted in Watson 1998, 288). As Steven Watson observes, “To the press [Thomson] observed that black performers were ideal performers for his opera because they had no intellectual barriers to break down—​they were satisfied with the beauty of sounds, he explained, and unconcerned with meaning. ‘Negroes objectify themselves very easily,’ he said. ‘They live on the surface of their consciousness’ ” (1998, 202). In Barbara Webb’s interpretation, the onstage blackness allowed the audience “to become ‘ignorant’ themselves and vicariously experience a comforting, simple faith” (2000, 453).

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In all of this we find a familiar conflation of intellectual disability and racial inferiority. The all-​black casting of the opera makes explicit the relationships, familiar from the entire cultural history of idiocy, between inarticulate language and intellectual defect (both verbal and musical) and racist notions of primitive, if occasionally noble, savages.

IDIOCY AS ARTISTIC RESOURCE

For many modernist composers, idiocy—​manifested musically as simplification, stasis, inarticulateness, and incongruity, often in association with the childlike, the animalistic, and the primitive—​was a rich artistic resource. In representing idiocy, they were enabled to discover new musical means, including many that seem virtually characteristic of modernist music. Idiocy also provided composers with a way of profoundly challenging and undermining conventions of traditional tonal music, especially those that involve the learned, contrapuntal style. What I am calling idiocy style makes the learned style seem stultifying and pedantic in contrast. In many cases, it is in representations of idiocy that modernist music seems most modern.

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CHAPTER 6

Autism Autism and twelve-​tone serial music are related, mutually reinforcing forms of cultural modernism. Both have been understood as excessively isolated or alone, with each entity self-​contained and self-​enclosed; as uncommunicative, or communicating in atypical ways, with an excess of private meanings and self-​ references; as demonstrating an unproductive preference for routines and rituals; as incongruously hypertrophied in certain respects (often hyperrational) and atrophied in others (often emotionally or expressively defective). They have also been understood as inaccessible fortresses; as incomprehensible aliens; as cold, unfeeling machines (especially computational machines); and as idiot savants (with isolated islands of excellence in a sea of cognitive deficiency). Autism as Culture   126 History of Autism   127 As Part of Bleulerian Schizophrenia   127 Aloneness and Sameness (Kanner and Asperger)   128 Triad of Impairments (Social Interaction, Communication, Repetition)  129 Special Interests   129 Medical and Sociocultural Models of Autism   130 Autism and Musical Modernism   131 Autism and Cultural Modernism   131 Critical Reception of Twelve-​Tone Music as Autistic   132 Aloneness  135 Sameness  139 Communication  141 Metaphors of Autism and Musical Modernism   143 Inaccessible Fortresses   144 Incomprehensible Aliens   147 Cold, Unfeeling Machines   148 Idiot Savants   149 Compulsory Sociality and Neurodiversity   152

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AUTISM AS CULTURE

Autism is generally understood within the medical model of disability as a form of mental illness, but it may also be understood within a sociocultural model of disability as a social and cultural construction and as a form of cultural modernism.

Autism is generally understood as a psychiatric disorder that involves deficits in social relatedness, an inability to communicate normally, an abnormal preference for repetition, and a tendency toward obsessive and narrow special interests. Within disability studies and the associated movement toward “neurodiversity,” autism is thought of instead as a culture and as an aspect of culture.1 The idea is to understand autism as a way of being in the world rather than a disease, a neurological difference rather than a pathological deficit, a cultural identity to be celebrated rather than a disease to be cured. Autism, in this view, is not a mental illness with a determinate biological or neurological source; rather, it is a cultural category, constructed and lived by people in a particular historic and social context. It is possible that autism will prove to be what Ian Hacking (1998) calls a “transient mental illness,” that is, one that “shows up only at some times and some places, for reasons which we can only suppose are connected with the culture of those times and places” (100) and “an illness that appears at a time, in a place, and later fades away” (1). This is not to say that autism is a fiction, constructed out of the whole cloth by psychologists and other observers. Hacking makes a valuable distinction between “natural kinds” (categories, like quarks, whose members are unaffected by the categorization) and “interactive kinds” (categories, like autism, for whose members the categorization may have significant consequences). As Hacking explains: One of the defects of social construction talk is that it suggests a one-​way street: society (or some fragment of it) constructs the disorder (and that is a bad thing, because the disorder does not really exist as described, or would not 1. There is a large recent body of literature that describes autism in cultural rather than medical terms. See Douglas Biklen, Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone (2005); Gil Eyal, Brendan Hart, Emine Oncluer, Neta Oren, and Natasha Rossi, The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic (2010); Stuart Murray, Representing Autism:  Culture, Narrative, Fascination (2008); Stuart Murray, Autism (2012); Majia Holmer Nadeson, Constructing Autism:  Unraveling the “Truth” and Understanding the Social (2005); Mark Osteen, ed., Autism and Representation (2008); Joseph Straus, “Autism as Culture” (2013); and Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (2016). See also Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes:  The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (2015), and John Donvan and Caren Zucker, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (2016).

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really exist unless so described). By introducing the idea of an interactive kind, I  want to make plain that we have a two-​way street, or rather a labyrinth of interlocking alleys. (1999, 116)

But whether or not autism fades away as a diagnostic category, its origins at a particular time and place, and its subsequent emergence, transformation, and staggering growth, mark it as a significant cultural phenomenon, one worth studying as a manifestation of culture rather than exclusively as a mental illness. Mental illnesses and musical styles are similar in that they come and go, emerging and then subsiding. I  wouldn’t propose that every musical style has an analog in a contemporaneous mental illness, or vice versa, but people classified as autistic and musical works identified as serial or twelve-​tone have often been described and stigmatized in strikingly similar ways. Both have been understood as excessively isolated and alone, self-​ contained and self-​enclosed. Both are understood as uncommunicative, or communicating in atypical ways, with an excess of private meanings and self-​references. Both are understood as demonstrating an unproductive preference for routines and rituals. Both are thought of as incongruously hypertrophied in certain respects (often hyperrational) and atrophied in others (often emotionally or expressively defective). Furthermore, similar metaphors have accreted around them:  people with autism and serial or twelve-​tone compositions are often described as inaccessible fortresses, incomprehensible aliens, cold and unfeeling machines (especially computational machines), and idiot savants. Autism and twelve-​tone music thus give the appearance of being related forms of cultural modernism; certainly they have been stigmatized and pathologized in similar ways.

HISTORY OF AUTISM

Autism was constituted in 1908 as an aspect of schizophrenia, a madness category that remained the conceptual home for autism until the 1970s. In recent decades, the diagnostic category of autism and the associated population have dramatically expanded and diversified.

As Part of Bleulerian Schizophrenia

In c­hapter  4, we discussed Eugen Bleuler’s constitution of the diagnostic category of schizophrenia in 1908, as part of the endless process

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of configuring human behaviors, attitudes, and abilities. We noted that the splitting of psychic functions was the essential feature of this newly described disorder. Among the other core components of schizophrenia, as Bleuler imagined it, was what he called “autism”: The most severe schizophrenics, who have no more contact with the outside world, live in a world of their own. They have encased themselves with their desires and wishes (which they consider fulfilled) or occupy themselves with the trials and tribulations of their persecutory ideas; they have cut themselves off as much as possible from any contact with the external world. This detachment from reality, together with the relative and absolute predominance of the inner life, we term autism. (1911/​1950, 63)

Autism thus involves immersion in a fantasy life in isolation from the external world and its normal forms of sociability. In the world of psychiatric diagnosis, autism remained a component of schizophrenia until 1978, when the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (the standard reference for medical practitioners and insurers in defining mental illness) officially severed them into distinct categories.

Aloneness and Sameness (Kanner and Asperger)

Still operating under the general rubric of schizophrenia, Leo Kanner in 1943 used the term “autistic” to refer to a group of children whose behavior and affect were abnormal in two principal ways. First, there was an unusual degree of social isolation, which Kanner refers to as “an extreme autistic aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside” (Kanner 1943, 245, italics in original). In a striking coincidence of thought and language, an Austrian psychologist named Hans Asperger was making similar observations in similar language at exactly the same moment on the other side of the world. Asperger observed, “Human beings normally live in constant interaction with their environment, and react to it continually. However, ‘autists’ have severely disturbed and considerably limited interaction. The autist is only himself and is not an active member of a greater organism” (Asperger 1944/​1991, 38). The second shared characteristic of these children was an unusual rigidity and aversion to any change in habit or routine, what Kanner referred to as “autistic sameness”: “All of the children’s activities and utterances are governed rigidly and consistently by the powerful desire for aloneness and

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sameness. . . . [The children shared an] inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations [and an] anxiously excessive desire for the maintenance of sameness” (Kanner 1943, 242, italics in original).

Triad of Impairments (Social Interaction, Communication, Repetition)

Since Kanner’s original description of autism, its official psychiatric definition has evolved and loosened, but it nonetheless retains a central concern with aloneness and sameness. The definition of autism in the fourth edition of the DSM (published in 1994) identifies what is often referred to as a “triad of impairments”: 1. “Qualitative impairment in social interaction” 2. “Qualitative impairments in communication,” which may include “­abnormal functioning” in “symbolic and imaginative play” 3. “Restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities” In the most recent edition (DSM-​V, published in 2013), the first two members of the older diagnostic triad (impairment in social interaction and communication) are conflated into one of two core areas (fixed or repetitive behavior is the other). The DSM-​V thus moves closer to Kanner’s original dyad of impairments: aloneness and sameness.

Special Interests

In addition to this “triad of impairments,” it has long been recognized that one prominent manifestation of “restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities” is that autistic people often have special skills and interests that they pursue in a systematic and focused manner. The most common autistic special interests are music, art, calendar calculation, arithmetic calculation, and mnemonic activities of all kinds. Often, these activities are oriented toward the making of lists, the amassing of collections, and the creation of inventories. Special interests of this kind are a defining feature of autism—​pretty much every autistic person has at least one and the existence of special interests is virtually diagnostic for autism (you don’t have to be autistic to have one, but autistic people generally do). Although special interests of this sort are only implied

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by the DSM’s diagnostic criteria for autism, within the informal autistic community, they are widely recognized as a central feature (Straus 2014).

Medical and Sociocultural Models of Autism

Bleuler, Kanner, Asperger, and the DSM are operating within a medical model of disability, which understands disability as a pathological excess or deficit with respect to some (typically undefined) normative standard. Disability is understood as being located within an individual mind or body—​it is an internal rather than a social, economic, cultural, or historical condition. As such, disability is susceptible to the traditional medical regime of clinical diagnosis, with an eye toward normalization or cure. Within the medical model, autism is now understood as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), affecting a large and extremely diverse population, now estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2014) to number as many as one in sixty-​eight children (including one in forty-​ two boys). This represents a remarkable twenty-​to thirtyfold increase since the first epidemiologic studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The increase in size and diversity of the autism population is driven largely by the loosening of diagnostic criteria, and has been accompanied by a corresponding shrinkage in other diagnostic categories, like “mental retardation.” In short, we are witnessing another stage in the endlessly shifting categories of intellectual or cognitive disability. Autism today means something quite different from what it meant to Bleuler in 1908 or to Kanner in 1943 or to psychiatric researchers in the 1960s and after. And one may confidently predict that its meaning will continue to change, if indeed it retains any meaning at all—​I wouldn’t be surprised if autism eventually went the way of neurasthenia and hysteria, categories that once seemed solidly medical and scientific but now appear to be entirely cultural artifacts. In the contrasting social/​cultural model of disability, autism may be understood as a cultural identity rather than a medical condition or mental illness: a distinctive and valuable way of being in the world. We might imagine autistic aloneness as a form of personal autonomy and self-​reliance, generally considered desirable traits. Autistic people socialize in distinctive ways, refusing normative sociability. We might imagine autistic sameness as a desirable concentration of focus and a preference for orderliness, system, and ritual. Autistic people often have an affinity for the quantitative, for calculation, for lists and list making, and these reveal a deeper preference for systematic regularity. We might imagine autistic communication issues as a preference for private meanings within locally coherent

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networks of signification. Autistic people often think associatively rather than hierarchically, engaging idiosyncratic combinations of elements and images and using language as much for its sonic value as for its communicative power. In this way, autistic aloneness and sameness, the associated “triad of impairments,” and autistic special interests are recast as aspects of a distinctive and valuable autistic cognitive style. These affinities among autistic people have formed the basis for an emerging, politically conscious and socially aware autism culture.

  HISTORY OF AUTISM Bleuler (1908)

A central, defining aspect of schizophrenia. “Detachment from reality

Kanner (1943)

Aloneness: “disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the

with the relative and absolute predominance of the inner life.” child from the outside.” Sameness: “an inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations [and an] anxiously excessive desire for the maintenance of sameness.” Still under the rubric of schizophrenia. DSM-​IV (1994)

Triad of impairments: social interaction; communication; restricted, repetitive, stereotyped patterns. Informal acknowledgment of autistic special interests.

DSM-​V (2013)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A broad spectrum, with a very large

Sociocultural model

Autism as culture, as a way of being in the world, a constellation of

and diverse population, still centered on aloneness and sameness. abilities, behaviors, and attitudes.

AUTISM AND MUSICAL MODERNISM

Autism and twelve-​tone or serial music have been stigmatized in strikingly similar ways: as isolated, socially defective, rigid and mechanistic, inexpressive, and uncommunicative. Setting the stigma aside, autism and twelve-​tone or serial music may be understood as similar and interconnected forms of cultural modernism.

Autism and Cultural Modernism

Theorists of autism have begun to acknowledge its affinities with aspects of cultural modernism. Patrick McDonagh suggests a connection between autism and modernist ideas of the self, especially as manifested in forms of artistic modernism:

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There are strong parallels between modernist notions of identity and those emerging in Kanner’s and Asperger’s descriptions of autism, suggesting that the capacity to perceive autism in the 1940s may be connected to the proliferation of modern, and modernist, notions of the self, which were given shape in the literary works of the era. (2008b, 101–​2)

Autism is bound up with a modern concern with an increasingly fragmented, hyperindividualistic culture. Psychiatric disorders are often a pathologically excessive version of some trait that, in its cultural context, is considered socially desirable (anorexia is excessive thinness, depression is excessive female passivity, fugue is excessive travel, attention-​deficit hyperactivity disorder is excessive energy and activity, obsession is excessive focus and concentration). In this sense, autism might be understood as excessive individuality, autonomy, and self-​reliance, normally understood as highly desirable traits. Autism might be understood to represent a pathological excess of what the Western world most prizes (autonomous individuality, with its promise of liberty and freedom) reconfigured as what it most fears (painful solitude, isolation, and loss of community). Autism has thus become an emblematic psychiatric condition of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, simultaneously a medical diagnosis and a cultural presence.

Critical Reception of Twelve-​Tone Music as Autistic

Theorists of autism have begun to understand it as a manifestation of late twentieth-​century concerns that simultaneously underpin a variety of other sorts of cultural expressions, but they have generally not made a connection specifically to modernist music. From the other side of the fence, however, musicologists have frequently invoked the language and images of autism to describe (and usually to denigrate) modernist music, especially twelve-​tone music (by Schoenberg, Webern, and others), and even more especially the postwar twelve-​tone music of Babbitt and other American composers.2 For many musicologists, this music has appeared as

2.  Musicological antimodernist polemics include Susan McClary, “Terminal Prestige:  The Case of Avant-​ Garde Music Composition” (1989); Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Individualism in Western Art Music and Its Cultural Costs” (1991); Richard Taruskin, “How Talented Composers Become Useless” (1996); Diana Raffman, “Is Twelve-​Tone Music Artistically Defective?” (2003); and Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (2004).

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a pathological condition with autistic symptoms, including the full triad of autistic impairments. Invoking the first leg of the triad of impairments, for some musicologists, the problem with twelve-​tone music is its aloneness, its isolation, its lack of social relatedness. Susan McClary, for example, associates musical modernism with a renunciation of conventional sociability: “Perhaps only with the twentieth-​century avant-​garde, however, has there been a music that has sought to secure prestige precisely by claiming to renounce all possible social functions and values” (1989, 60). Similarly, Rose Subotnik accuses composers of deliberately erecting barriers to social interaction with listeners and performers: Ideally, today, the best composers write totally for themselves, without significant regard for audience or even performer. . . . Some composers are very explicit about trying to control every variable in their works (for example, replacing the performer with a computer), thereby turning their works into fixed, hermetically self-​contained worlds, impervious to the vagaries of performance or the structuring forces of socially recognized conventions. (1991, 250)

For another group of musicologists, modernist music (especially its twelve-​tone variety) suffers from a disorder of communication, the second leg of the triad of autistic impairments. Richard Taruskin (1996a) criticizes twelve-​tone music for its severely impaired ability to express itself: “Because there is no structural connection between the expressive gestures and the twelve-​tone harmonic language, the gestures are not supported by the musical content.  .  .  . The expressive gestures, unsupported by the music’s syntax or semantics, are primitive and simplistic in the extreme.” Taruskin’s comment evokes the specter of the idiot savant: a hypertrophied, overly cerebral, narrow skill within an expressive context that is “primitive and simplistic.” Diana Raffman goes quite a bit further and asserts that twelve-​tone music’s communicative skills are so lacking that this music is not really music: If twelve-​tone pitch structure is not perceptually real, if twelve-​tone music cannot carry the pitch-​related meaning it purports to carry, then it cannot be a vehicle for the communication of such meaning. Therefore I claim, in virtue of human psychological design, a composer cannot intend to communicate pitch-​related musical meaning by writing twelve-​tone music. . . . To that extent, twelve-​tone music is fraudulent, and so not art. (2003, 85–​86)

The third leg of the triad of autistic impairments—​a propensity for sameness and for mechanistic, ritualistic, rigid repetition—​also figures

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into musicological critiques of musical modernism in the postwar period. Michael Broyles imagines that a postwar interest in mathematical determinism represents a retreat from a previous period of social awareness, a sort of autistic withdrawal from social contact into a hermetic world of cold, cerebral calculation: “Serious composers, experimental in the 1920s, socially aware in the 1930s, and quieted by war in the 1940s, suddenly diverged in two totally different but equally radical paths. Some, extending ideas of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, sought total determination of every nuance of a piece through mathematical calculations” (2004, 154). These musicologists, representing a long-​standing antimodernist trend within the field, approach musical modernism (especially in its twelve-​ tone or serial manifestations) in much the way that modern psychiatry, operating within the medical model of disability, approaches autism: as a pathological deficit or excess in comparison to a norm, as a debilitating impairment that resides within an individual body (or musical work), and as an undesirable condition that should be normalized or cured. More darkly, both autism and twelve-​tone serialism have confronted what Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson (2004b) calls “the cultural logic of euthanasia”:  that is, the imperative either to normalize disabled bodies (through medical intervention) or to eliminate them (either by sequestration or in more direct ways)—​“cure or kill” in a common, blunt phrase. In the case of autism, a variety of cures and normalizing interventions have been proposed and implemented with, at best, modest success. In a previous generation, most people diagnosed as autistic ended their days in institutions for the mentally ill or impaired. In the case of twelve-​tone serial music, the attempt at normalization involves an effort to demonstrate that this music is really, after all, not so very different from more conventional kinds of music, employing the same notes and the same intervals and, in some cases, the same sorts of musical gestures. If that rhetorical attempt to demonstrate the underlying normality of the music is deemed a failure, the response is often to condemn and dismiss the music outright, walling it off as something alien and inhuman, a wrong turn or an error in the history of music. I take a different tack here. While I accept the autism–​serialism analogy proposed by antimodernist musicologists, I  argue that the relationship ennobles rather than pathologizes both members. This chapter is a defense of twelve-​tone music and of autism, both singly and in relation to each other. So let us revisit the triad of autistic impairments as it bears on twelve-​tone music, and imagine ways that each of them might be understood to mark a valued difference rather than a stigmatized deficit.

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Aloneness

Autistic aloneness manifests itself in modernist music in what Babbitt calls “contextuality.”3 That term refers to the isolation of a musical work from the community of other works. Musical works that are relatively contextual in Babbitt’s sense have a wealth (some would even say a surplus) of internal relations but relatively few external ones. Works like that are comparatively self-​referential and autonomous. I focus on Babbitt here because his music and thinking are so central to the development of twelve-​tone or serial music in postwar America, but he is far from the only commentator to draw attention to this feature of modern music. More broadly, many critical accounts of modernism in literature and the other arts identify “self-​referentiality” or “autonomy” as one of its central, defining features.4 Babbitt’s contrasting term is “communal,” referring to works that share a relatively large amount of material with each other. All musical works have both contextual and communal elements in some degree, but the balance varies from work to work and repertoire to repertoire. The canonical works of the Western tradition, from Bach to Brahms, are relatively communal. They share ways of handling harmony, voice leading, phrase, form, rhythm, and many other musical elements. Indeed, this period of musical history is often referred to as “the common practice period,” and the shared practices are enshrined in standard textbooks for students. Each common-​practice period work has contextual elements that distinguish it from other works and make it unique, but they share a good deal also with other members of a community of works. Communal works are those that behave in normal, conventional ways. They socialize properly with other works and mind their musical manners. A good deal of modernist music is comparatively contextual. Babbitt uses the term to refer especially to the middle-​period music of Schoenberg, after he had abandoned traditional, common-​practice tonality but before he started writing twelve-​tone music. Here is how Babbitt describes this music: “[Schoenberg] referred to his composition in those middle periods as ‘composing with the tones of a motive.’ Now, you see, that already defines a high degree of self-​reference and contextuality. . . which means that, as 3. Babbitt discusses musical “contextuality” in a number of his writings, most extensively in Words about Music (1987). 4.  The numerous commentaries on modernism in literature and the arts to identify autonomy and self-​referentiality as defining characteristics include Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–​1916 (1994), and William Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-​Century Thought (1997).

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much as possible, you make a work self-​enclosed. You define its principles within itself” (Babbitt 1987, 8–​9).

Schoenberg, Piano Pieces, Op. 23, No. 3. Babbitt (1987, 62) says of this piece, “If you want contextuality, you can’t go much farther than that.”5 He is referring to the complex web of internal relationships within the piece. Rather than conforming to, or even overtly resisting, external constraints, this work establishes its own conditions of progression and association. It creates the musical world in which it moves. It is relatively alone—​set apart from other musical works.

The twelve-​tone system, which Schoenberg created in the early 1920s and used thereafter, restores some degree of communality to music, and that was undoubtedly one of Schoenberg’s motivations in creating it. But twelve-​ tone works, very much including the postwar serial music of Babbitt and others, remain much more self-​contained, self-​referential, and structurally autonomous than common-​practice works. As Babbitt observes: Twelve-​tone music is much more contextual and much less communal than what anyone would call tonal music. . . . The contingencies and dependencies of the twelve-​tone work are determined, in the very nature of its being a twelve-​tone work, by the particular ordering of the twelve pitch classes in the particular work; and therefore, of course, to that extent a twelve-​tone work is much more contextual than a tonal work, whose dependencies and contingencies remain the same in some respects not only within a work but also from work to work. (1987, 16–​17)

Contextual works are inherently difficult to approach and understand. They require more effort because the listener cannot draw on normal listening experiences, that is, from the experience of listening to traditional, tonal music or, indeed, to any other music. These works, by definition, share relatively little in common with their peers and therefore knowledge of how one piece functions will not necessarily be of great help in approaching another piece. “Normal listeners,” those attuned to the commonalities of traditional tonal works, often find atonal and twelve-​tone music inaccessible, because this music refuses the shared sociability of common-​ practice tonality.6 Like autistic individuals, then, contextual musical works

5. Babbitt analyzes the opening of the piece in detail in “Since Schoenberg” (2003a). 6. I discuss “normal listeners” and “normal hearing” in relation to nontonal music in Extraordinary Measures (2011).

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are relatively isolated from each other and detached from the communal norm—​they share a quality of aloneness. Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. Schoenberg described his method as “composing with the twelve tones related only to each other.” That is, rather than relating to a central, tonic triad (or to the traditional tonal way of relating harmonies), the tones would forge relationships only within the context of a particular piece. More specifically, the tones are organized into a row or series, and its intervallic and harmonic features shape the music at every level. Works written in this way have a profusion of internal relationships and relatively few external ones.7 Webern, Piano Variations, Op. 27, second movement. Webern was very fond of traditional contrapuntal devices, and this short movement is a sort of inversional canon between two lines, although the leadership of the canon is constantly changing from line to line, and the lines themselves jump around amazingly. Both lines are based on the same twelve-​ note series, and they are always related by inversion. By maintaining the same center of inversional balance throughout, the piece turns in on itself. Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles, “Exaudi.” During the 1950s and 1960s, during the last twenty years of his compositional life, Stravinsky wrote music in an individual and evolving style of twelve-​tone music (Straus 2001). In the latter part of that period (his late, late style), Stravinsky’s music draws its materials from a set of charts called “rotational arrays.” In these charts, six lines of six notes each are derived from the six-​note melody in the first line, which constitutes one-​half of a twelve-​tone series. The notes of the music are related to each other, and to the serial charts that constrain their relationships, rather than to any external reference. The music is radically autonomous and self-​referential. Babbitt, Danci. Babbitt’s music is intensively contrapuntal, usually composed of as many as twelve distinct polyphonic lines.8 These lines refer to each other, in a dense imitative web, and take their shared source in a precompositional design (array). The musical tones are thus related

7.  Babbitt provides trenchant analyses of Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 4, and Webern, Piano Variations, Op. 27, in Words about Music (1987) and in a number of the essays in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt (2003). 8. On Babbitt’s music generally, see Andrew Mead, An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt (1994); a trio of articles by Joseph Dubiel, “Three Essays on Milton

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to each other within these dense networks, but with very little reference to other music, even other music by Babbitt himself. To paraphrase the composer, if you want contextuality (autonomy, self-​reference), you can’t go much farther than that.9 Twelve-​tone music is extremely varied, and twelve-​tone works often don’t sound very much like each other. This is a heterogeneous diagnostic category, with permeable boundaries and lots of local variation (Straus 2009). What this population does share, however, is a very high degree of autonomy and aloneness, with dense webs of internal relationships and relatively few external ones. Excessive autonomy and aloneness have generally been seen as highly problematic conditions, both for musical works and for individuals. In an effort to destigmatize these conditions, one might first point out that the extent of both modernist and autistic aloneness has been greatly exaggerated (even in my description earlier). Modernist musical works, even those that may initially seem most hermetic, maintain rich ties to earlier, traditional music (Drott 2013). Indeed, one might productively understand musical modernism as a series of attempts to remake earlier music (Straus 1990). The relationships between old and new may be elaborately concealed, but they are generative nonetheless. Modernist musical works, including the high modernist works of the postwar period, are like all musical works in their endless process of dialogue with other works, and the compulsion toward intertextuality applies to them no less than to earlier musical styles. For autistic individuals, it is now widely understood that the desire for social contact and intimacy is common, even if the means for achieving it often deviate from prevailing norms of sociability. Furthermore, autism itself is a condition that is socially and culturally negotiated—​it does not reside inside an individual, but rather is something that happens among individuals, and between individuals and the ambient culture. But even if one accepts that modernist, twelve-​tone musical works of the postwar period and autistic individuals are more “alone” in some sense

Babbitt” (1990, 1991, 1992); and an important recent dissertation by Zachary Bernstein, “Reconsidering Organicism in Milton Babbitt’s Music and Thought” (2015), which contains the array for Danci. 9. Maggart, “Referential Play in ‘Serious’ Music” (2017) calls into question the degree of self-​referentiality in Babbitt’s music. She shows that Babbitt’s music engages a variety of external references, and is thus less “alone” than has been widely supposed.

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than more traditional, conventional, or typical works or individuals, it does not follow that this condition must be understood as destructive or pathological. The relatively high degree of contextuality of modernist musical works might be seen as a defining strength. Often, these works are designed anew from the ground up, with generative structures (like rows, charts, and arrays) designed for each individual work rather than given by convention. To create a self-​contained musical world is inherently difficult, and places unprecedented burdens on interpreters (listeners and performers), but many people find their efforts richly rewarded. The high degree of contextuality guarantees that there will never be a mass audience for this music—​it is inherently too unconventional, too difficult—​but its challenges may bring corresponding rewards. One might make similar observations about autistic people. Rather than seeing their distinctive “aloneness” as a pathology, we might imagine it as a form of resistance to compulsory sociality (Rodas 2008), an insistence on the integrity of the individual in defiance of social norms. Autistic people are often perceived as difficult or inaccessible by neurotypical people, but the challenges they pose may bring corresponding rewards. People who live or work on intimate terms with autistic people frequently report the special delights of their autistic sensibility, including their forthrightness, their attention to detail, and their fascination with lists and patterns (to say nothing of the delight people with autism may take in their own neuroatypicality).

Sameness

Autistic sameness—​what the DSM refers to as “restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns”—​manifests itself in the systematic features of twelve-​tone composition. Twelve-​tone music is often motivated by what Babbitt refers to as a “spirit of maximum variety” (Babbitt 1987). That might seem to suggest the opposite of restriction, repetition, and stereotype, but what it means in practice is that every musical domain is systematically and thoroughly explored. Babbitt’s own music has been described as “the animation of lists” (Dubiel 1992), and the same description applies (although with different sorts of lists and, perhaps, with a lesser degree of intensity) to a wide range of twelve-​tone music. A list might enumerate a series of musical possibilities, and the music might run through such a list until it is completed. Of course, these lists are not presented in some simplistic or mechanistic way—​rather, they are “animated.” The lists (usually identified in the

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literature as charts or arrays) operate at varying degrees of conceptual distance from the sounding music. They are sometimes thought to generate the music, or perhaps to constrain the music, or perhaps to provide a series of problems or challenges to which the music responds. They seem to provide a framework within which twelve-​tone music freely plays. The lists paradoxically open up a significant zone of compositional improvisation and freedom. The lists are not intrinsically good or bad, but if we value the music that results, we must also give credit to the lists that enable it to take the particular form it does. The list functions as a map of a new and distinctive and self-​contained musical world that the composer both designs and inhabits. Schoenberg, Piano Concerto. Before composing a twelve-​tone work, Schoenberg typically created a list of all forty-​eight forms of the twelve-​ tone series he intended to work with: twelve primes, twelve inversions, twelve retrogrades, and twelve retrograde-​ inversions. He typically creates a distinctive harmonic area from a prime, a particular inversion, and their retrogrades. These four series form a harmonic area, and there are twelve such areas. Most of Schoenberg’s pieces do not in fact use all forty-​eight series forms and all twelve areas, but the Piano Concerto does, and in a special way: the sequence of harmonic areas reflects, at this higher structural level, the sequence of notes in the series itself (Rothstein 1980; Mead 1989; Alegant and McLean 2001). The large-​scale harmonic organization of the piece thus represents the animation of a list of series forms. Stravinsky, A Sermon, A Narrative, and A Prayer. Stravinsky’s rotational arrays, with their six rows and six columns, can be thought of as a list in need of animation. Stravinsky’s music often moves through them systematically from left to right or from top to bottom (Straus 2001). As a result, the music maintains a high degree of sameness throughout—​ every single note is part of a statement of the same (or transposed and rotated) six-​note melody. Crawford Seeger, Diaphonic Suite No. 1, iii. In this work, which the composer described as “a triple passacaglia,” a scheme of serial rotations governs the pitch succession at three levels: from note to note within each measure; from measure to measure within each section; and from section to section within the piece as a whole (Straus 1995). The music observes and animates the same list at all three levels. There is a high level of fixity and focus—​basically the same sequence of intervals is heard in every single measure of the piece, because every measure of the piece contains a form of the same seven-​note series.

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Babbitt, My Ends Are My Beginnings. Like many of Babbitt’s middle-​ period works, this piece for solo clarinet uses a particularly fancy sort of chart called an “all-​partition array” (Mead 1994). It deploys four registral lines and the clarinet’s melody jumps among them, drawing them through the texture, and thus animating the list.

Something similar might be said of autistic sameness in people. While it is often seen as a destructive pathology—​an obsessive and rigid dependence on repetition and routine—​it can also be understood as a quality that enables particular sorts of achievements. People with autism often have a preference for certain narrow areas of interest (including music, art, calendar calculation, and arithmetic calculation), which they pursue with intense focus and concentration. People with autism are often accomplished list-​ makers, working systematically with names, dates, words, and numbers. This propensity for the systematic pursuit of a specialized interest is often pathologized as a symptom of idiot savantism or “savant syndrome” (Straus 2014). Autistic sameness underlies the development of these skills, which are typically pursued in a systematic and repetitive way. Twelve-​tone music and autistic special skills thus share a quality of autistic sameness. The underlying lists and the systematic ways in which they are pursued simultaneously constrain and enable the distinctive behaviors. Communication

Autistic communication, like autistic cognition more generally, is often based on locally coherent networks of private associations.10 Like poetry, especially modernist poetry, autistic language often involves unusual, idiosyncratic combinations of elements and images, with as much pleasure associated with the sounds of the words as with their meaning. In Kristina Chew’s words, “Autistic language is a fractionated idiom, its vocabulary created from contextual and seemingly arbitrary associations of word and thing, and peculiar to its sole speaker alone.  .  .  . Autistic language users think metonymically, connecting and ordering concepts according to seemingly chance and arbitrary occurrences in an ‘autistic idiolect’ ” (2008, 142). Autistic expression is often introverted, directed inward rather

10.  On autistic modes of communication and a distinctive autistic idiolect, see Kristina Chew, “Fractioned Idiom: Metonymy and the Language of Autism” (2008).

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than outward. Instead of a chain of logical inference, one often finds rich networks of associations, often private in nature. Autistic language often involves an insistence on private meanings and associations, and thus a refusal to communicate in socially normative ways. Preference for a somewhat hermetic language, rich in private meanings and associations, is evident in a great deal of modernist literature (Joyce, Faulkner, and Proust would be among the most obvious examples). This has been widely recognized as a distinguishing feature of literary modernism. Indeed, Christopher Butler (1994) identifies “withdrawal from consensual languages” as one of the distinguishing features of artistic modernism. Twelve-​tone music sometimes incorporates and reanimates traditional sorts of musical rhetoric, including its expressive gestures. But more commonly it entirely eschews traditional rhetoric in favor of its own distinct idiolect. It communicates emotion and meaning, but in ways that may initially seem off-​putting to “normal listeners” listening normally. Webern, “Wie bin ich froh!” from Three Songs, Op. 25. The text for this song conveys an intense and radiant joy: “How happy I am! Once more all grows green around me And shines so!” Webern’s music, with its angular melodic leaps, its sudden bursts of activity (and sudden silences), and its richly imitative pitch structure, might seem initially a strange way of communicating joy. But the joyfulness is there for a sensitive listener willing to hear beyond conventional modes of expression. Dallapiccola, Goethe Lieder, No. 2, “Die Sonne kommt!” The text for this song suggests a whimsical paradox, a surprising and seemingly inexplicable and amorous embrace between the sun and the moon. The music is a strict canon, full of internal symmetries, both inversional and retrograde, and with a widely leaping melody. This is a restrained embrace, its mystery more apparent than its amorousness.11 Babbitt, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime.” This song is a lament, an expression of grief and bereavement:  “Sorrow is my own yard, Where the new grass Flames as it has flamed often before.” But instead of communicating these emotions in a conventional way, the music only hints at them. It proceeds by indirection, its meanings nearly concealed.

11.  On Dallapiccola, see Brian Alegant, The Twelve-​Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola (2010).

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Susan McClary explicitly identifies resistance to normative modes of communication in modernist music as “a kind of deliberate autism”: In order to break entirely free of discourse, which was seen as hopelessly compromised by its associations with a bureaucratized, commodified world, many German writers studied and imitated the utterances of psychiatric patients.  .  .  . Schoenberg too drew on images of madness as means of severing  all those tenuous links with conventional communication. Artists developed a kind of deliberate autism in order to maintain at all cost that image of the ­uncontaminated self that had become the only acceptable stance. (2000, 135)

And, indeed, I think it is right to imagine that an “autistic idiolect” can be heard in modernist music, especially postwar twelve-​tone music. Like autistic speech, twelve-​tone music is not necessarily or primarily communicative; rather, it is self-​stimulatory and self-​expressive. Its refusal to communicate in the normal, conventional way has led some critics to infer that it is meaningless and inexpressive, and for a “normal listener,” that is inevitably how it must appear. But for those willing to listen associatively rather than hierarchically, attentive to chains of private meanings (i.e., those created contextually, within the single work), the music may come to seem deeply meaningful and expressive.

  AUTISM’S “ TRIAD OF IMPAIRMENTS ” AND TWELVE-​T ONE MUSIC Aloneness

Twelve-​tone music is highly self-​referential, with relatively many

Sameness

Twelve-​tone music often involves the systematic animation of

internal relationships, and relatively few external ones. musical lists (charts, arrays), guaranteeing a high degree of repetition and uniformity. Communication

Twelve-​tone music communicates meaning and expresses emotion in unconventional ways; it speaks a distinctive idiolect.

METAPHORS OF AUTISM AND MUSICAL MODERNISM

Autism and twelve-​tone music have been widely understood in relation to four shared tropes: the inaccessible fortress, the incomprehensible alien, the unfeeling machine, and the idiot savant.

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As discussed in ­chapter 2, the sorts of physical or neurological differences that are commonly identified as disabilities always seem to require explanation and interpretation, and this compulsion to explain disability underlies the most common and pervasive disability narratives, both literary and medical. This notion is commonplace in the disability studies literature, and receives probably its pithiest statement from Mitchell and Snyder:  “Disability inaugurates the act of interpretation” (2000, 6). The apparent need for interpretation and explanation is particularly pressing when the disabled person either is nonverbal or speaks in an unusual way, as in the “autistic idiolect.” If people are incapable of telling their own stories, or of telling them in a way that is readily comprehensible to outsiders, the experts often step in to speak for them. In the case of autistic individuals, the experts are often medical professionals. In the case of twelve-​tone works, the experts are often musicologists or music theorists. For both autistic individuals and twelve-​tone works, this outsider’s language has often involved four shared tropes: the inaccessible fortress, the incomprehensible alien, the unfeeling machine, and the idiot savant.

Inaccessible Fortresses

In the world of autism, the trope of the inaccessible fortress is widespread, and is evident in the titles of two important, influential early accounts:  Bruno Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress (1967) and Clara Park’s The Siege (1982). Bettelheim’s punishing theory of autism, now utterly discredited, is that a child, fearing murderous assault from a hostile mother, erects psychic barriers and retreats behind them. Park’s deeply sympathetic account of life with her autistic daughter describes her efforts to establish a loving connection despite difficulties of communication and mutual understanding. What these two very different accounts share is the notion that the “real” child is somehow trapped behind a barrier, and that outsiders must batter down the separating wall to gain access to the child within. Twelve-​tone music is often described in similar terms, as though it were a form of architecture to which physical access were barred. The critical commonplace is that such music is “inaccessible,” suggesting that whatever meanings it might have are walled off behind an impenetrable barrier. Some critical accounts (in the style of Bettelheim) imagine this music as an empty fortress, whose walls conceal a void within. Other accounts (more in the style of Park) imagine that there is something of value within the architecture, and if the siege is successful, there might be compensating rewards.

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For both autism and modernist music, the idea behind the trope of the fortress is that something of potential value is buried, encased, enclosed, and lodged deep within, and can only be reached with effort. In both cases, professional intervention may be required. Child psychology/​psychiatry and musicology justify themselves, in part, with their promise of providing access to interior spaces that would be inaccessible to laypersons without the proper training and credentials.12 For both autism and modernist music, the trope of the inaccessible fortress is used primarily by outsiders. In the world of autism, it is the professionals and the parents who invoke the metaphor to describe their difficulties in gaining access to a person they perceive as remote and unavailable. In the world of modernist music, it is used by critics and musicians who have no visceral attraction to or emotional engagement with the music, and thus describe it as inaccessible. It is ironic that the notion of accessibility should be used in this way. Its standard usage refers to the accessibility of public spaces to people with disabilities. The architecture of the built environment is typically welcoming to people of normal ability but creates barriers to people with disabilities. As the trope is used for autism and modernist music, however, the meaning is turned around. Now it is the people of normal ability who are incapable of entering a walled fortress. Modernist music is a built environment, a space, to which what I call normal hearing (i.e., a series of listening strategies based on traditional, tonal music) is denied access. Normal listening, so well adapted to normal musical circumstances, becomes a liability, a disability, with reference to extraordinary music. Modernist music thus disables normal listeners (Straus 2011). The same irony obtains for autistic people. Their qualities—​aloneness, sameness, autistic idiolect—​ pose a problem for cognitively normal (neurotypical) observers. Normal observers are denied access to a disabled space; they are rendered incapable by disability. It is their very normality that limits them and problematizes their access to the world view and culture of autism. The intense pathologization of both autism and modernist music may be related to the frustration people experience when they feel they are being denied access, or when they feel insufficiently capable of gaining access.

12.  The relationship between professional knowledge and power—​that the people who define deviance often set themselves up as the paid professionals who can normalize, cure, or control it—​is a persistent theme of Michel Foucault (see especially his History of Madness [2009]).

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To enter these spaces, it helps to learn an insider’s perspective. In some cases, insiders also invoke the metaphor of an architectural space protected by walls, but the space is described from the inside. Babbitt, for example, describes the university as a safe refuge, a protected private space, and a bulwark against a hostile world: The composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual serv­ ice by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. . . . [In the university], the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism. (2003c, 53)

Here, Babbitt imagines himself inside the walls and looking out, safe from the “social aspects” of music. Similarly, people with autism are more likely to see barriers in the built and cultural environments as preventing them from entering mainstream institutions than to imagine themselves as inaccessible. Here is a position statement from the Autism Self-​Advocacy Network (ASAN) that engages the metaphor of the wall or barrier, but seen from the inside rather than the outside: In accordance with the social model of disability, we recognize that disability need not be a tragedy or a misfortune and that barriers to full participation in society often arise not from physical or mental differences, but from cultural attitudes that stigmatize certain types of people as less worthy of inclusion than others. . . . Such barriers to inclusion can and should be dealt with through the political process, in the same way that civil rights advocates have worked to break down prejudiced assumptions and exclusionary practices that harm other minority groups.13

So the metaphor of the wall or barrier is there, but rather than preventing an outsider from entering, it prevents someone on the inside from moving outward. In a slightly different way, some people with autism use the image of a protected space not to sequester and isolate themselves but rather to build a shared culture of autism free from the “tyranny of the normal” 13. http://​autisticadvocacy.org/​about-​asan/​position-​statements/​

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and “compulsory sociality.” As an emblematic example, the annual conference/​retreat known as “Autreat,” sponsored by an autistic self-​advocacy organization called Autism Network International, is described on the organization’s website in the following way: “Autreat is a retreat-​style conference run by autistic people, for autistic people and our friends. Autreat focuses on positive living with autism, NOT on causes, cures, or ways to make us more normal. Autreat is designed to be ‘autistic space.’ ”14 Spaces like Autreat thus function in the same way that the university functions for Babbitt and his music—​a place to pursue and enjoy a nonconforming subculture.

Incomprehensible Aliens

A second common trope shared by the cultures of autism and twelve-​ tone music involves incomprehensible aliens. Aliens from outer space are the literal subjects of another prominent manifestation of postwar culture in the United States, namely, science fiction films. In films like The Thing from Another World and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the aliens are frighteningly Other because they appear to lack something essentially human, namely, an emotional life—​they appear as pure intellect. The resonance with autism, with its purported deficits in social communication and its affiliation with machines (especially calculating machines), is unmistakable. The atypical individual or musical work either is from another world (the outsider’s perspective) or perceives the common world as alien and incomprehensible (the insider’s perspective). As Hacking summarizes: A persistent trope in some autism communities is that autistic people are aliens, or, symmetrically, that non-​autistic people seem like aliens to autists. Some autists are attracted to the metaphor of the alien to describe their own condition, or to say that they find other people alien. Conversely, people who are not autistic may in desperation describe a severely autistic family member as alien. (2004, 44)

From the outside, composer-​theorist Dmitri Tymoczko (2011, 393) imagines the nontonal music written by modernist composers as a lifeless foreign planet: “Tonality is not one among an infinitude of habitable planets, all easily accessible by short rocket flight; instead, it is much closer to being 14. http://​www.autismnetworkinternational.org/​autreat.html

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the only habitable planet.” In a similar spirit, medical professionals who study autism often refer to the “otherworldly” quality of autistic people. Asperger (1944/​1991, 60)  describes one of the children he studied as looking like he had “just fallen from the sky,” and Uta Frith (2003, 1) refers to their “haunting and somehow otherworldly beauty.” From the inside, Temple Grandin has famously described herself as “an anthropologist on Mars.”15 Note the preposition she uses—​ she’s not the alien (“from” Mars); rather, the normal world is a foreign planet that she must work to understand, in the manner of an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. Similarly, a recent compilation of memoirs and conversations by autistic women answers its title question, “Women from Another Planet?” with a resounding no:  “We are not from another planet. . . . We are right from here, Planet Earth. We are an integral part of this earth’s ecosystems, its intricately inter-​dependent network of niches and potentialities” (Miller 2003, xii). Shifting back to modernist music, Babbitt (2003b, 53)  refers to “the problems of a special music in an alien and inapposite world.” Like Grandin, he sees the apparently normal world as “alien,” a hostile environment in which his music is obliged to make its way.

Cold, Unfeeling Machines

A third persistent trope, shared by responses to autism and to modernist music, involves machines, especially computers. Majia Nadesan refers to “the symbolic equation between high-​functioning autism and technical/​ scientific prowess” (2005, 129) and goes on to observe: The inadvertent effect of these linkages across autism and scientific/​technical proclivities is that autism, in its high-​functioning variants, has become symbolically equated with an affinity toward, and/​or resemblance to artificial intelligence. That is, the assumption that there exists a distinct computational model of cognition that often co-​occurs with autistic symptoms and/​or is engendered by the underlying form of autistic cognition enables the semiotic equation across autism, technology/​science, and social awkwardness. (131)

15. Temple Grandin’s self-​description is quoted in, and serves as the title of, Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (1995). Grandin has written several memoirs, including Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1995).

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The equation of autism and computers is made explicit in a range of recent films and other fictional representations.16 People with autism are represented as all brain and no heart, a hypertrophy of calculation, and a corresponding deficit of emotion and empathy. The same constellation of metaphors—​machines, mechanistic calculating devices, computers—​has frequently been applied to postwar twelve-​ tone music. Critics refer to “pseudo-​mathematical processes” (Bolcom 2004, 47) and the “total determination of every nuance of a piece through mathematical calculation” (Broyles 2004, 154). The New York Times’s obituary of Milton Babbitt describes him as someone who “wrote music that was intensely rational and for many listeners impenetrably abstruse.” Both the fortress and computational metaphors are evident here—​it is the overly rational style of the music that creates an impenetrable barrier to entering it. The metaphorical conflation of autism (and twelve-​tone music) with unfeeling machines and computers is often accompanied by an additional ascription of internal temperature: they are cold (cerebral) rather than warm (emotional, empathetic). In the world of autism, coldness has often been ascribed to the mothers of autistic children—​these “refrigerator mothers” allegedly caused autism by freezing their child emotionally.17 But even as that punishing calumny against mothers of autistic children has been discredited, the sense of autists themselves as emotionally cold, distant, and disengaged has remained. And the related sense that twelve-​tone compositions are coldly cerebral rather than warmly emotional has long been a staple of critical accounts. Idiot Savants

The trope of the autist as a cold, unfeeling computational machine is closely related to a fourth metaphor: the autist as idiot savant (Straus 2014). Since it was constituted as a medical category by Edouard Séguin in 1870, the idiot savant has been characterized by an inherent asymmetry: a high level of skill in one isolated activity in a larger context of perceived mental deficiency. Séguin’s evocative description—​“the useless protrusion of a single

16.  On the link between autism and computers, in addition to Nadeson 2005, see Stuart Murray, Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (2008), which also has a valuable account of the prevalent figure of the autistic savant. 17. The punishing and false “refrigerator mother” theory of autism is associated with Bettelheim and Kanner.

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faculty, accompanied by a woeful general impotence” (519)—​defines a diagnostic category that has remained largely intact until the present day. The professional psychological and psychiatric literature on idiot savants (nowadays more likely to be called savant syndrome) has been slow to make a connection to autism. Similarly, the professional literature on autism has largely ignored idiot savants. But in the popular imagination and in the literature and film of the period since 1990, the two terms are increasingly conflated: savants are assumed to be autistic; autistic people are generally represented as savants. The most recent nonmedical literature on autism identifies an autistic cognitive style that values local coherence and concrete details (at the expense of global, abstract meanings) and prefers orderliness and systematic repetition. Furthermore, autistic people often direct their fixity of focus toward special interests, which may include music, art, calendars, puzzles, train timetables, TV shows and movies, and list-​making activities of all kinds. In many cases, the autistic special interests that constitute the perceived savant quality—​Séguin’s “useless protrusion of a single faculty”—​involve prodigious memories and/​or calculating ability. Autistic memory is often presumed to operate purely by rote, in the manner of a tape recorder, a photograph, or some other mechanical device. Michael Howe states bluntly: The limitations of the concrete memorizing achievements of some idiots savants are not totally unlike the restrictions that exist when sounds are retained on magnetic tape. Compared with normal human memory, there is the advantage of greater surface accuracy, but this occurs at the expense of all the abilities that depend upon meaningful understanding; for example, being able to find and use particular items of information. (1989, 14)

Similarly, for Oliver Sacks, savant memory is fundamentally different from normal memory: It is characteristic of the savant memory (in whatever sphere—​visual, musical, lexical) that it is prodigiously retentive of particulars. The large and small, the trivial and momentous, may be indifferently mixed, without any sense of salience, of foreground versus background. . . . Such a memory structure is profoundly different from the normal. (1995, 200)

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An extensive body of research, as well as a moment or two of sympathetic reflection, will confirm that in fact people with autism have memories and intelligences not so very unlike those of “normal” people. Nonetheless, the metaphorical equation of autism with hyperrational calculation and mechanical computation devoid of normal human emotion is persistent in our culture. And, of course, the same constellation of metaphors permeates critical responses to twelve-​tone music. It is cerebral rather than emotional, inward rather than sociable, and incapable of normal communication. It is an inaccessible fortress, an incomprehensible alien, and coldly machinelike. Finally, it is pathologically overdeveloped in some narrow respects, amid a general inability to do what music is normally expected to do, namely, to engage and move listeners.   REPRESENTATION OF AUTISM IN MUSICAL MODERNISM Inaccessible fortresses

The autistic self (if there is one)

The music is inaccessible,

is trapped inside a bristling

forbidding, bristling with

armature, inaccessible to

repellent dissonance.

anyone, with the possible exception of skilled medical professionals. Incomprehensible aliens

Cold, unfeeling machines

The autistic individual is like

The music disobeys natural laws

a foreigner in our midst,

and normative conventions.

incapable of observing

As a result, it positions itself

the laws and conventions

apart from the mainstream

that guide normal social

and remains always

interaction and conduct.

incomprehensible.

The autistic mind operates in

The music is shaped by

the manner of a calculating

mechanistic processes.

machine, with a rote,

It is overly cerebral and

photographic memory.

insufficiently expressive, cold where it should be warm.

Idiot savants

The autistic individual often

The music has narrow areas in

has a special skill (typically

which it is hypertrophied

involving calculation or

(often involving

memory) that stands in sharp

precompositional systems)

contrast to a general cognitive

that stand in sharp contrast to

and mental deficiency.

its general inability to function as normal music does, to entertain, enlighten, engage, communicate meanings, and express feelings.

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COMPULSORY SOCIALITY AND NEURODIVERSITY

Susan McClary has suggested an important historical and ethical dimension to the apparent hyperrationality of twelve-​tone music, especially in its postwar incarnation: it represents a principled resistance to the central control and conformity of Nazism and Communism, with their attendant horrors and suffering: It is no great wonder then that serious artists reacted by writing music that refused the heated rhetoric that made so much of the traditional canon vulnerable to totalitarian abuses. They preferred to withdraw their work to a place where music would appeal to the cool intellect rather than to the emotions, which had been all too easily swayed by propaganda machines. The nationalist fervor that had fueled so much art in the previous hundred years had also led to unspeakably inhumane atrocities. In the face of this unprecedented level of catastrophe, the very notion of conveying meanings seemed tantamount to manipulation. Better then to operate within the cerebral sphere of electronic experimentation or high degrees of abstraction or even chance. In retrospect, this ethical position appears not only understandable but laudable. (2015, 24)18

McClary’s idea of a willed withdrawal into “contextuality” from the horrors of excessive “communality” (to recall Babbitt’s terms) has an obvious echo in Bettelheim’s description of autism (Bettelheim 1967). Bettelheim argued that “the precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent’s wish that his child should not exist” (125). Explicitly analogizing the autistic child to a concentration camp inmate, Bettelheim maintained that both withdraw into a psychic shell to protect themselves against murderous caretakers. Bettelheim’s theory is deeply offensive to parents, and his characterization of the origins of autism has been utterly discredited and repudiated. Furthermore, his account denies any agency or selfhood to the autistic person—​for Bettelheim, the fortress is empty. But it can be valuable to think that some of the behaviors associated with autism are the result of an individual’s effort to cope with an environment that is perceived as challenging and possibly hostile. I’m not speaking here of any putative failure in parental caregiving, but rather of the difficulty of functioning socially in a world where social interactions are governed by the sorts of elaborate norms that autistic people often find hard to grasp. 18. Similarly, see Maggart, “Referential Play in ‘Serious’ Music” (2017), which argues that the political significance of autonomous, self-​referential, hermetic, difficult works of art lies in their resistance to appropriation as propaganda for political ends.

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Instead of seeing autistic sociability as a deficiency, we might imagine it as a form of resistance to normative, compulsory, conformist sociability (Rodas 2008). By pretty much any definition, autistic people are socially nonconforming. Their personal integrity and individuality are aspects of their autistic aloneness. McClary offers a historical reason for the flowering of twelve-​ tone music in America after World War II and much the same logic applies also to the interwar period in Europe, in the shadow of the trauma of the Great War. Some composers found in twelve-​tone music a way of isolating themselves from the broad political and nationalistic movements that had resulted in such widespread death and destruction. Perhaps similar historical forces are at work in the constitution of autism as a diagnostic category and of autistic people as a distinctive social group. What was it about the modern world that permitted this group of people, previously lost among populations identified as insane or idiotic or perhaps merely eccentric, to be identified as a distinctive group first by Bleuler and later by Kanner, Asperger, and other observers? Perhaps these observers had been sensitized by current and recent historical events to the existence of individuals whose apparent aloneness secured them against the horrors of excessive conformity. The cognitive style, world view, and culture of autism place autistic people in resistance to social homogeneity, compulsory sociality, and the tyranny of the normal. Modernist music positions itself in resistance to the conventional tonality of the common-​practice period. Twelve-​tone music, with its extraordinarily high degree of structural self-​referentiality, insists on its individualized autonomy with respect to normative ways of composing and apprehending music. In that sense, the emergence of modernist musical styles and the emergence of autism might be seen to have common historical roots. In this chapter I have discussed and compared two distinct populations, one of people with particular neurological and cognitive traits and the other of musical works with a particular compositional style. These populations have certain shared features, including aloneness (contextuality), sameness, and a way of communicating that emphasizes associations and private meanings. Furthermore, these populations have elicited a similar response from observers, including their stigmatization as inaccessible fortresses, incomprehensible aliens, unfeeling machines, and idiot savants. Finally, these populations achieve their distinctive identities in response to the same historical forces, namely, a resistance to excessive social control (the dark side of communality). What is the benefit of thinking about autism in relation to musical modernism—​what can we learn about autism from the comparison? One

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thing we can learn, I think, is to understand autism as a cultural practice that one might embrace rather than a stigmatized medical pathology or a mental illness to be avoided or cured. Of course, one cannot literally choose to be autistic. One may, however, choose to claim autism, that is, to embrace and affirm it as a valued cultural and political identity. And that process of claiming autism may occur more readily when people, both autists and neurotypicals, learn to think of autism as a cultural movement, somewhat analogous to developments in music (and in other arts). Insofar as we think of modernist music, and other manifestations of cultural modernism, favorably, or at least accept their legitimacy within the larger culture, we can learn to destigmatize autism, seeing it as a difference, not a deficit, as a world view rather than a medical pathology. And what is the benefit of seeing musical modernism, especially twelve-​ tone music, in relation to autism—​what can we learn about music from the comparison? First, it solidifies our sense of the broader culture from which this music emerges, a culture comprising not only other kinds of music and other kinds of art but also political, economic, historical, and even psychological cross-​currents of all kinds. Second, it encourages us to appreciate rather than stigmatize its distinctive qualities, including its resistance to normal music-​making (composition and hearing) and its distinctive style of self-​expression (including a lack of interest in normative socialization and communication). Fred Maus (2004) has suggested that twelve-​tone music is a “queer” in the concert hall. I  find that characterization richly suggestive, and I  would augment it by saying that twelve-​tone music is also an autist in a neurotypical musical world: doubly an outsider. In the case of both autism and twelve-​tone music, we find ourselves in the presence of cognitive difference, and that poses a challenge to the normate, neurotypical world.19 One common response, shaped by the medical model of disability, is to pathologize the deviant Other. That response engages “the cultural logic of euthanasia,” which confronts disability with only two choices: cure (normalize) or kill (either through sequestration or actual, physical elimination). Instead, the neurotypical world might do better to look for ways of providing personal and institutional support for these somewhat fragile, marginal populations of people and musical works. In this, we would be acting not out of pity, but out of a belief that neurodiversity, among people and artworks, enriches us all. 19. “Normate” is a coinage of Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson in Extraordinary Bodies (1997). It calls attention to the cultural construction of bodily normality:  like disability, normality is a social fiction.

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CHAPTER 7

Therapeutic Music Theory and the Tyranny of the Normal Traditional music theory is a normalizing discourse, designed to rationalize abnormal musical elements (like formal anomalies or dissonant harmonies) with respect to normal ones, and it has thus implicitly allied itself with the medical model of disability. A countertradition within music theory is a disablist discourse that embraces elements traditionally understood as strange, odd, eccentric, and idiosyncratic, without making any effort to position them within a normative context, and is thus aligned with the sociocultural model of disability. Disablist music theory crips music. Discourses of Disability, Discourses of Music Theory   156 The Tyranny of the Normal   157 The Normalizing (and Disabling) Discourses of Traditional Music Theory  158 Medical Model of Disability   160 Toward a Disablist Discourse for Music Theory   162 Theorizing Modernist Music: Some (Mostly) Normalizing Theories   164 Schenker and Salzer (Normalization and Correction)   164 Schoenberg and Boss (Tonal Problems and Solutions)   167 Forte (Sets and Nonsets)   168 Lewin (Inversional Symmetry as a Regulating Principle)   169 Other Normalizing Theories   170 Theorizing Modernist Music: Some (Mostly) Disablist Theories   173 Schoenberg (Nonharmonic Tones)   173 Princeton School   175 Transformation Theory (Lewin Again)   177 Reflections on Disablist Music Theory and Therapeutic Music Theory   180

561

DISCOURSES OF DISABILITY, DISCOURSES OF MUSIC THEORY

The stories people tell about human bodies and musical works are usually narratives of overcoming, where features understood as anomalous or defective with respect to some set of conventions are normalized. A contrasting counternarrative—​one that subverts, destabilizes, disrupts, and ultimately does away with norms—​is evident in the sociocultural model of disability and in a variety of music-​theoretical initiatives.

In this chapter I weave together two stories that are usually told separately. The first is the story of disability, especially how people have talked about bodies perceived as defective, deviant, or deformed. The second is the story of music, especially how music theorists have talked about musical features perceived as in some sense abnormal. As we will see, people talk about anomalous bodies and anomalous musical events in similar ways. Discussions of disability and of music are mutually influential discourses about bodies (human or musical) perceived as defective, deformed, deviant, or abnormal with respect to an underlying set of norms, rules, or conventions. In making this argument about the interweaving of discourses about bodies understood as disabled and musical features understood as anomalous, I  will make four interrelated points. First, the concept of the normal shapes our understanding of bodies and music in similar, mutually reinforcing ways. Second, as discussed in ­ chapter  2, the most common narratives around disabled bodies and anomalous musical events are narratives of overcoming and cure, where the defect is repaired, the blemish is removed, and the abnormal is normalized. Most music theory has enacted an overcoming narrative with respect to musical events understood as deviant, and is thus a normalizing discourse. Third, these narratives of overcoming and cure are an aspect of the medical model of disability. In this model, disability is understood as a deficit or defect requiring medical intervention with the goal of remediation and cure. More broadly, the medical model of disability implicates Garland-​Thomson’s “cultural logic of euthanasia,” that is, the imperative in all spheres of human activity to repair deviance or, failing that, to eliminate it: “cure or kill,” in the pithiest formulation (Garland-​Thomson 1997). Fourth, while the medical model of disability has long dominated discourse, it has been increasingly contested in recent years by a sociocultural model that sees disability as difference, not deficit, something to be claimed, not cured or eliminated. In music theory, this sociocultural model of disability resonates with music-​theoretical discourse that is not concerned with norms or conventions, schemas or patterns, prototypes or models. The resulting disablist music theories are

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more likely to enact chaos or acceptance narratives and to celebrate musical events, especially those traditionally perceived as deviant, that individuate and particularize musical works. Therapeutic music theory normalizes deviance. Disablist music theory celebrates difference. By foregrounding disability, disablist theory “crips” music.

The Tyranny of the Normal

Prior to roughly 1840, terms and concepts like “normal,” “normality,” “norm,” and “abnormal” in their modern senses had not existed in any European language. From the very beginning, these terms and concepts emerged in relation to human bodies, especially in relation to sorting normal, able bodies from deviant, disabled bodies. As disability historian Douglas Baynton says: By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the concept of the natural was to a great extent displaced or subsumed by the concept of normality. . . . The natural and the normal are constituted in large part by being set in opposition to culturally variable notions of disability—​just as the natural was meaningful in relation to the monstrous and the deformed, so are the cultural meanings of the normal produced in tandem with disability. (2001, 35)

The concept of the normal emerges alongside the science of statistics and the practice of studying populations in relation to particular traits, such as intelligence. Here is Lennard Davis’s summary: If the concept of the norm enters European culture only in the nineteenth century, one has to ask:  what is the cause of this conceptualization? One of the logical places to turn is that branch of knowledge known as statistics. The norm pins down the majority of the population that falls under the arch of the standard bell-​shaped curve, which became a symbol of the tyranny of the norm. When we think of bodies in a society where the concept of the norm is operative, then people with disabilities will be thought of as deviants. (1997, 11)

From the beginning, the practice of statistical norming was associated with eugenics, a desire to purge society of people defined as abnormal or deviant. Here is Davis again: The rather amazing fact is that almost all the early statisticians had one thing in common: they were eugenicists. Statistics is bound up with eugenics because the

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central insight of statistics is the idea that a population can be normed. An important consequence of the idea of the norm is that it divides the total population into standard and nonstandard subpopulations. The next step in conceiving of the population as norm and non-​norm is for the state to attempt to norm the nonstandard—​the aim of eugenics. (1997, 14)

The concept of the normal thus has had a coercive element from the very beginning, and its coercive effect has intensified over time, as standards for normality of appearance, attitude, and behavior have continued to narrow. It becomes harder and harder to be normal, and the social and economic penalties for deviance become correspondingly severe. One of the insidious effects of the concept of the normal is that it has become so fully naturalized in the way most people think about bodies as to become a sort of invisible, uninterrogated “common sense.” It exercises tyranny over much thinking about human bodies, a tyranny that is largely hidden in plain sight. The tyranny of the normal operates in music theory as well, and all of our standard music theories are based on norms. We are deeply habituated to situating musical events in relation to schemas, formal types, standard harmonic progression, and rules of voice leading—​to models, patterns, and prototypes of all kinds. As a general matter, music theory is designed to rationalize abnormal elements with respect to the normal ones. So deep are these habits of thought about music, as about bodies, that they can come to seem natural and permanent. But in fact, they emerged in a particular time and place—​Western Europe in the nineteenth century—​and they are subject to challenge and change.

The Normalizing (and Disabling) Discourses of Traditional Music Theory

Norm-​based conceptualizations of human bodies and music give rise to a standard narrative, which involves overcoming or cure (as discussed in ­chapter  2). Narratives of disability have traditionally involved the repair of deviance. Disability generates narrative, as Mitchell and Snyder argue: A narrative issues to resolve or correct a deviance marked as improper to a social context. A  simple schematic of narrative structure might run thus:  first, a deviance or marked difference is exposed to a reader; second, a narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences; third, the deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the center of the story to come; and fourth,

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the remainder of the story rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some manner. Disability has functioned throughout history as one of the most marked and remarked upon differences that originates the act of storytelling. (2000, 53–​54)

In short, disability causes a commotion (Sandahl and Auslander 2005) and a narrative emerges to contain, quell, and resolve it. Standard music theories follow this conventional narrative of overcoming. The narrative commotion might be created by a chromatic note, a modulation to a strange key, or the absence of a proper tonic recapitulation—​in each case, a music-​theoretical narrative arises to normalize the abnormal element, to rationalize it with respect to some conventional norm (Straus 2006 and 2011). In this sense, music theory has largely been a normalizing discourse. As a corequisite for normalization, however, a music theory has to define some element as abnormal:  the normal and abnormal emerge simultaneously and in a mutually constituting relationship. In this sense, traditional music theory is both a normalizing discourse and a disabling discourse (one that creates disability). Following a medical model of disability, music theorists constitute certain musical features as deviant and anomalous precisely to justify a professional role for themselves as the curers of the thus-​created disabilities. This is essentially Foucault’s argument about the intersection of knowl­ edge and power:  an emerging cadre of professionals creates disability to get paid to cure it. They create knowledge to confer power on themselves, including the power to interpret and otherwise control their subjects.1 As Joseph Rouse explains: Practices of surveillance, elicitation, and documentation constrain behavior precisely by making it more thoroughly knowable or known. But these new forms of knowledge also presuppose new kinds of constraint, which make people’s actions visible and constrain them to speak. It is in this sense primarily that Foucault spoke of “power/​knowledge.” A  more extensive and finer-​grained knowledge enables a more continuous and pervasive control of what people do, which in turn offers further possibilities of more intrusive inquiry and disclosure. (2003, 99)

1. Foucault pursues his idea of the relationship between power and knowledge, including especially with reference to nonnormative bodies and minds, in History of Madness (2009). See also the essays in Foucault and the Government of Disability (2015), ed. Shelley Tremain.

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Normalization is one of the ways in which this sort of “biopower” is exerted. From this point of view, music-​theoretical knowledge is directed toward the exertion of power over musical works, especially the power to sort musical events into the categories of normal and abnormal, and to rationalize the latter with respect to the former.

Medical Model of Disability

Normalizing (disabling) discourses, with their narratives of overcoming, emerge from a medical model of disability. The medical model treats disability as pathology, either a deficit or an excess with respect to some normative standard. Tobin Siebers offers this concise definition: “The medical model defines disability as an individual defect lodged in the person, a defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being” (2008, 3). As Jackie Scully says: The key feature of a medicalized view is that disability is a nominative pathology: a defect or deficit located in an individual. What counts as defect or deficit is determined by reference to a norm of physical or mental structure and function. The parameters of the norm are given by biomedical science, which since the eighteenth century has increasingly been concerned with quantifying deviation. So from a medicalized perspective, disability is an abnormality of form or function. (2008, 23)

The goals of the enterprise are diagnosis and cure, and these are engineered by medical professionals—​the people in the white coats who define human differences as disabilities, then propose to diagnose and cure them. As Richard Scotch notes, “The medical model conceptualizes disability as a long-​term or permanent illness or injury, and proposes to ‘fix’ it, or at least to ameliorate its effects. Physicians and other clinicians become the gatekeepers for adjudicating disability status and the primary experts on disability” (2009, 602). Operating within a medical model of disability, music theorists traditionally position themselves as therapists, with musical works as the patients. We diagnose and classify nonnormative musical features with the goal of curing (rationalizing) them. Music theory has frequently been likened to scientific inquiry and has often aspired to scientific status. Usually, in such discussions, the sciences in question have been assumed to be biology or physics. I would argue, however, that music theory has often operated as a sort of medical science, with its closest kinship to psychiatry. Music theory

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is like medical research and music analysis is like medical practice: we restore wholeness to fractured works, identify and heal their wounds, and normalize their anomalies. We explain surface turbulence in relation to underlying regularities and reveal structural similarities beneath (concealed by) surface diversity, just as a medical doctor is trained to discover disease entities amid a welter of superficial symptoms. The traditional goal of our music-​theoretical systems is the health of the musical body. We want to assure ourselves that the parts of a musical work are functioning properly in themselves and are in a harmonious relationship with each other, and with the whole that they mutually constitute. In that sense, we assume an analogy between musical coherence and bodily health, and see ourselves as its guarantors. The relationship between music theorist and musical work is thus modeled on the relationship between doctor (or psychiatrist) and patient, with the same imbalance of power. Following the medical model, the theorist is given authority by virtue of specialized, technical knowledge. That is what empowers the doctor to speak to and for the patient, who is rendered mute in the encounter. The objects of music-​theoretical study are obviously not silent—​music is made of sounds—​but they are by their very nature inarticulate when it comes to their verbal interpretation. This is where the professionals step in, to give voice to their mute subjects, to speak for them, and with all of the ethical dangers attendant on such an imbalance of power. Music theorists are like medical professionals:  we diagnose and cure; we normalize abnormalities; we concern ourselves with the integrity and health of our patients. In all of these ways, we participate in the “cultural logic of euthanasia,” as previously described. As Garland-​Thomson explains: This logic has produced conflicting, yet complementary, sets of practices and ideologies that American culture directs at what we think of broadly as disability. Such thinking draws a sharp distinction between disabled bodies imagined as redeemable and others considered disposable. One approach would rehabilitate disabled bodies; the other would eliminate them. Our culture encodes the logic of euthanasia in its celebration of curing, repairing, or improving disabled bodies. At the same time, this logic supports eradicating disabled bodies through practices directed at individuals, and those directed at certain groups deemed inferior. (2004b, 779)

I have no wish to denigrate the undeniable and extraordinarily valuable achievements of modern medical science. But the medical model of

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disability has proven oppressive and confining, and has been subjected to a withering critique from disability studies, as discussed throughout this book. In the new sociocultural conceptualization, disability is seen as part of the naturally occurring variation in human embodiment: a difference, not a deficit. In Scully’s memorable phrase, disability has “migrated from pathology to ontology” (2008, 4). As Garland-​Thomson summarizes: The expansion beyond health science perspectives on disability to consider it as a civil and human rights issue, a minority identity, a sociological formation, a historic community, a diversity group, and a category of critical analysis in culture and the arts, constitutes the signature move of critical disability studies. Critical disability studies attends to how the discrepancies between actual bodies and expected bodies are characterized within particular cultural contexts. (2013a, 917)

Toward a Disablist Discourse for Music Theory

Similarly, while I do not wish to condemn a therapeutically oriented music theory, which has immeasurably deepened our understanding of music, like the medical model of disability it has proven limited and oppressive in certain ways. What might the new sociocultural conceptualization of disability mean for music theory? The conventional, common-​sense view of music analysis is that its goals are to clarify, to better express things we already know to be true, to demonstrate unity and coherence, to affirm the autonomy of musical works, and to elucidate piece-​spanning structures of pitch and rhythm. As I’ve suggested, this view is aligned with the cultural logic of euthanasia in seeking to contain and rationalize musical features understood as divergent, anomalous, or problematic. Instead, we might look to theoretical systems and analytical practices that make familiar things strange (rather than making strange things familiar), that abnormalize the normal, that seek to disable rather than cure, that celebrate extraordinary musical bodies on their own terms, without reference to normative standards. In short, we might look to a music theory that is a disablist rather than a normalizing discourse. No music theory can be exclusively therapeutic or exclusively disablist—​in the world of music theory, as in the world at large, there is no purity, only varying combinations of opposing elements. Disablist musical theories have long existed as a sort of shadow tradition, lurking within and destabilizing the predominantly therapeutic enterprise.

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In what follows, I  will attempt to tease out this music-​ theoretical counternarrative. More dramatically, there has been a flowering of disablist music theory in recent years, in parallel with the new sociocultural conceptualization of disability. In the history of music theory, disablist theory, like disability itself, creates an inner commotion, with the potential to disrupt the dominant normalizing frame. In some cases, the normalizing frame is strong, and although we may learn to value the weird elements, they have to be expunged by the end:  the therapeutic imperative is too strong. But in some theoretical traditions, the norms weaken and the contextual elements grow in strength, and we begin to approach what I am calling disablist music theory. Normal, standard, traditional music theory is a normalizing discourse that is also a disabling discourse: it creates disability as a pretext and precondition for curing or eliminating it. It takes the blooming, buzzing confusion of music and sorts it into normal and abnormal components to normalize the abnormal. Linguistically, normalizing music theories are distinguished by verbal formulations like “merely” and “just” and “simply,” as challenging musical moments are subsumed within a normalizing frame (Lewin 1986). A disablist theory, in contrast, embraces rather than dismisses features that are difficult to assimilate; it subverts, destabilizes, disrupts, and ultimately does away with norms and thus with the distinction between normal and abnormal. A disablist theory is one that “crips” the music.2 “Crip” is an ironic and deliberately provocative term used by disability advocates to refer to people with disabilities; like the term “queer,” it represents an attempt by an oppressed minority group to reclaim a stigmatized term. And, also like the term “queer,” it can be used as a verb—​something can be queered or cripped. As Victoria Ann Lewis observes, “Both ‘cripping’ and ‘queering,’ as interpretive strategies, spin mainstream representations or practices to reveal dominant assumptions and exclusionary effects” (2015, 47). To crip music would mean to foreground its representation and narration of disability, as this book has done, and to crip music theory would be to theorize music in a way that celebrates rather than stigmatizes anomalous events and, ultimately, that eradicates the distinction between the normal and the abnormal. I will offer some specific examples of disablist, crip music theory in a later section of this chapter.

2. On “cripping” as a subversive interpretive practice, see Victoria Ann Lewis, “Crip” (2015); Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006); and Alice Hall, Literature and Disability (2016).

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  NORMALIZING (THERAPEUTIC) AND DISABLIST MUSIC THEORY (PRELIMINARY CHART)

Normalizing Music Theory

Disablist Music Theory

Affiliated with the medical model of disability.

Affiliated with the sociocultural model of

Creates disability in music (identifying

Creates disability in normal listeners

disability. elements as abnormal).

(prevents them from hearing in conventional ways).

Cultural logic of euthanasia (cure or kill). Normalize the abnormal. Solve problems, rationalize anomalies.

Abnormalize the normal. Seek to disable (defamiliarize) rather than cure. Celebrate extraordinary musical bodies on their own terms, without reference to normative standards.

To confirm what we already know by creating

To shock rather than comfort. To crip the

a model that comfortably fits the music.

music. Interpretations that feel forced,

A sense of naturalness. Common sense.

unnatural, against the grain.

THEORIZING MODERNIST MUSIC: SOME (MOSTLY) NORMALIZING THEORIES

Most theoretical approaches to modernist music have a strongly normalizing orientation.

No music theory can be exclusively normalizing (it will always admit ad hoc, contextual elements) or exclusively disablist in orientation (it is impossible to evade norms of all kinds at all levels). But most music-​theoretical approaches to modernist music are based on norms and deviations, enact a narrative of overcoming, and seek a solution of perceived problems, a cure of wounds and other threats to the normal, healthy appearance and behavior of the musical body.

Schenker and Salzer (Normalization and Correction)

Heinrich Schenker, although his theoretical activity coincided chronologically with the modernist music under discussion in this book, was hardly a modernist. Rather, in both his politics and his aesthetics, he was an arch-​ conservative, determined to perpetuate traditions of thought and music that he saw as being under mortal threat from modernism and modernity. Virtually all of this theoretical activity was devoted to the masterworks

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of the tonal tradition, especially music by a small number of German/​ Austrian composers (J. S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms). With respect to this canonic music, Schenker presents himself as a diagnostician and therapist whose task is to normalize abnormal musical elements. Indeed, “normalization” is a widely used technical term in Schenkerian analysis (Rothstein 1990). Potentially disruptive elements at the levels closer to the musical surface have to be neutralized, absorbed, and normalized; they have to be rationalized in relationship to the normative prototypes they transform. A related Schenkerian concept is “correction” or “rectification” (German: Richtigstellung). It refers to a procedure whereby a chromatic note at one level is transformed into a diatonic note at a higher/​deeper/​earlier level (Schenker 1979, 71). The idea is that anomalies closer to the surface are normalized at the deeper levels. Schenker thus imagines musical works as self-​healing organisms, able to cure their own wounds, provided that the wounds are not too deep. Schenker is thus essentially a normalizer, who diagnoses musical elements as potentially disabling, and then offers the deep middle ground and Ursatz (fundamental structure) as a cure. At the same time, there resides within Schenkerian theory a shadowy but distinct countertrend toward disablist theorizing. I’m thinking of motivic associations that are somewhat independent of the tonal frame (Cohn 1992). I’m thinking also of Schenker’s evident pleasure in treating seemingly familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, like tonic chords that are only apparently tonic chords (they’re really passing chords embellishing some other harmony). In some circumstances, Schenker seems to be interested in defamiliarizing conventional musical elements, in making seemingly simple things complex and strange. But despite these interesting countertrends, Schenker is essentially a normalizer. When Schenker speaks of modernist music, not only the tendency toward normalization but also the full cultural logic of euthanasia come starkly into view: if the disabled (musical) body cannot be cured, it must be destroyed. For Schenker, the modernist musical body is so defective, so deficient, as to be beyond hope of recuperation. The only solution is to deny that it is music at all and thus eliminate it from consideration. As discussed in ­chapter  3, for Schenker, modernist music’s most seriously incapacitating disability is its immobility:  it is paralyzed. That’s because modern composers pile up the dissonances into thick, clotted blockages, preventing the linear progressions from moving in their normal way. Their dissonances, instead of impelling motion, impede motion, and arrest the progress of the musical body. Here is what Schenker says about a passage from Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto:

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A setting like Stravinsky’s is insufficient even for certifying dissonances, because the only surety even for dissonances—​and this is the crux of the matter—​is the cohesiveness of a well-​organized linear progression:  without cohesiveness, dissonances do not even exist! Thus it is completely futile when Stravinsky imagines that he can make the dissonance still more dissonant by piling up dissonances. It is futile to masquerade all the inability to create tension by means of appropriate linear progressions as freedom, and to proclaim that nothing bad exists in music at all. (1996, 18)



Schenker’s analysis of Stravinsky, Piano Concerto. Schenker intends this analysis as a demonstration of Stravinsky’s compositional incompetence and, by extension, the intrinsic incapacity of modernist music. Schenker teases out the sorts of harmonic and linear progressions that might provide coherence and meaning, but insists that Stravinsky’s music thwarts these progressions at every turn. In this music, for Schenker, the obstacles can never be overcome and the wounds can never heal.

Schenker rarely talked about modernist music, other than to condemn it in sweeping terms—​as he warns in the first sentence of the author’s preface to his counterpoint treatise, “We stand before a Herculaneum and Pompeii of music” (1910/​1987, xvii). For him, the immobilization of the linear progression renders the corpus of modern music permanently and incurably paralyzed. Here is the cultural logic of euthanasia with a vengeance: modernist music cannot be cured, so it should be eliminated. Later theorists working in the Schenkerian tradition, especially Felix Salzer (a student of Schenker’s), were more sympathetic to modernist music, because they were more confident in the ability of their analytical theory to rationalize its anomalies.3

Salzer’s analysis of Bartók, String Quartet No. 5. This is a notoriously fragmented passage. Initially, each of the four instruments contributes only little blips of sound, separated by silences. Later, slow-​moving triads in the lower parts contrast radically with a chromatic figure in the first violin. The cumulative effect is one of emotional despair, of hopeless attempts to emerge from a crushing sense of oppression. Salzer’s analytical efforts are directed toward binding

3. Felix Salzer’s analyses of Bartók and other modernist composers may be found in Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (1962).

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together the disparate musical elements, showing that despite their apparent mutual repulsion, they actually support and harmonize with each other. The analysis attempts to overcome the disabilities of the music. But despite Salzer’s heroic efforts, these prove incurable.

Schoenberg and Boss (Tonal Problems and Solutions)

For Arnold Schoenberg, disability affects the musical body in the form of what he calls a “tonal problem.” As discussed in c­ hapter 2, a tonal problem is a musical event, often a chromatic note that threatens to destabilize the prevailing tonality: the music contrasts its normative content with a disruptive, deviant intrusion whose behavior threatens the integrity and normal functioning of the musical body. The intrusive elements create imbalance and unrest. It is the job of the piece, as it unfolds in time, to restore balance and rest, and their attainment marks the close of the tonal narrative. We thus find ourselves in the presence of the standard narrative of disability overcome. As Schoenberg says, “Every succession of tones produces unrest, conflict, problems.  .  .  . Every musical form can be considered as an attempt to treat this unrest either by halting or limiting it, or by solving the problem” (1970, 102). Like Schenker, Schoenberg attributes agency to musical works. Both theorists imagine that musical works essentially have the power to cure themselves through their own efforts. But this familiar rhetorical move only slightly masks the active role of the theorist in both creating and resolving musical problems. That’s the sense in which I refer to much music theory as a normalizing discourse. For the most part, Schoenberg’s own discussions of tonal problems are directed at works from the canonical tonal tradition, and the same is mostly true of more recent theoretical attempts to elaborate the concept. A notable exception is Jack Boss, whose recent study of Schoenberg’s twelve-​tone music is oriented toward the presentation, elaboration, and solution of problems. According to Boss, Schoenberg’s music follows a three-​part narrative in which “some sort of opposition or conflict between musical elements is presented at the beginning, elaborated and deepened through the course of the piece, and resolved at or near the end” (2014, 1). This exactly follows what we have been calling an overcoming narrative. For Boss, the “opposition or conflict,” that is, the “tonal problem,” involves symmetry, especially inversional symmetry. Symmetry defines an ideal musical state. At the beginning of a piece, symmetry is contested or obscured. At the end of a piece, symmetry is revealed or restored, and the tonal problem is thus solved:

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A twelve-​tone piece can give rise to problems regarding the relationship of its opening gestures to a symmetrical ideal or questions pertaining to intervals or configurations seemingly foreign to the source row; these lead in turn to an intensification of the original problem or to related problems, or both; and at or near the end, the non-​symmetrical configurations or foreign intervals or sets are shown definitively to have arisen from the ideal or from the source row or both. (2014, 33)

As Boss suggests, Schoenberg’s idea of a tonal problem, and of music as directed toward the solution of tonal problems, is an aspect of his normalizing approach to music theory. Music theory in this view is centrally concerned with distinguishing between normal and abnormal elements, and with overcoming or rationalizing the latter with respect to the former.

Boss’s analysis of Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. For Boss, Schoenberg’s twelve-​ tone music enacts a narrative of overcoming: a problem created at the beginning of the piece is elaborated, intensified, and eventually solved. In this movement, salient motives are held apart at the beginning and climactically conjoined at the end.

Forte (Sets and Nonsets)

Allen Forte is the music theorist most closely identified with “atonal set theory,” an analytical approach to modernist music that focuses on relations among collections (sets) of notes (Forte 1973). Classical, Fortean atonal set theory has an idea of recuperation at its very core. Atonal music appeared formless and chaotic to many observers, not only Schenker. Forte’s idea was to insist on its coherence, to make it conform to traditional standards of wholeness and health. Central to the recuperative process was distinguishing the normative from the nonnormative elements. In Forte’s terms, this meant distinguishing sets (legitimate constructive units) from nonsets (fortuitous groupings, without structural significance) (Forte 1972). And once you’ve distinguished between sets and nonsets, the analytical task is to rationalize the nonsets and thus to neutralize the problem they seem to pose for the unity, coherence, and health of the musical body. In traditional tonal music, triads are the normative units, and traditional tonal theories are designed to explain nontriadic notes (as nonharmonic tones, added dissonances, linear embellishments, etc.). In atonal music,

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according to Forte, it is the triads that pose the threat of musical incoherence and thus require theoretical rationalization.

Forte’s analysis of Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire, No. 21, “O alter Duft.” The nostalgic final song from Pierrot Lunaire contains a prominent E-​major triad in its third measure. Consonant triads are rare occurrences in this music, and Forte feels obliged to explain this one away as a nonset. He normalizes it with respect to the predominantly atonal harmonies of the music by understanding it as merely a portion of a properly atonal larger harmony. From a traditional triadic point of view, like Schenker’s, the atonal harmonies of Pierrot Lunaire appear defective. From the vantage point of Forte’s atonal theory, the musical body can be recuperated as whole and healthy, but only if any triads are marginalized as discordant, anomalous events—​“nonsets” in Forte’s term. They are rationalized, subsumed, cured of their infectious potential, within the now-​normative atonal frame.

Lewin (Inversional Symmetry as a Regulating Principle)

An important strain within post-tonal theory has taken inversional symmetry as a normative standard against which deviations are measured. The idea is that inversional symmetry bespeaks a sort of harmonious, bodily balance—​a desirable and restful state. If the symmetry is disrupted, there may be pressure to restore it, and we have an updated version of the traditional cure narrative (as discussed in c­ hapter  2). This “therapeutic imperative” may motivate individual tones to seek their inversional partners, thus creating or restoring inversional symmetry. Inversional symmetry is a normative condition, and deviations require repair. This way of thinking is particularly associated with David Lewin.4

Lewin’s analysis of Webern, Orchestra Pieces, Op. 10, Nos. 3 and 4. Lewin observes that a high C♯ at the beginning of the third piece “maximally discombobulates the symmetric structure” (1993, 87). Much of Lewin’s analysis is a description of the music’s attempts to re-​establish the symmetrical balance. In his description, a state of imbalance is experienced as a defect, which the musical body may seek to recuperate.

4.  A  concern with inversional symmetry and balance permeates much of Lewin’s work, beginning with “Inversional Balance as an Organizing Force in Schoenberg’s Music and Thought” (1968).

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Indeed, the musical discourse of the piece is understood as a series of efforts to re-​establish, or to create, a sense of inversional balance and symmetry. The recuperative impulse is ascribed to the music, but is also a deep attribute of the theoretical enterprise, which is directed toward the normalization of “discombobulating” elements. There is certainly a normalizing element here: inversional symmetry is a regulating standard against which deviance is measured, and the music bespeaks an urge to repair deviance. However, there are some important differences with other theories we have discussed. Above all, the norm in question is entirely local, created within the context of a few measures of some piece; it is not repertoire-​wide, or even in force for an entire work. Lewin is not concerned about what most pieces do and is not at all fearful (as Schenker is) about any negative consequence the deviations might have. Nonetheless, I still think it is fair to say that inversional symmetry functions here as a norm, and that this aspect of Lewin’s theorizing is a normalizing discourse. Later, we will see Lewin operating in a decidedly disablist mode.

Other Normalizing Theories

A variety of other theoretical approaches to the analysis of modernist music are similarly normalizing in their orientation, and thus exemplify therapeutic music theory, whose goal is the recuperation of perceived defects. Neo-​Riemannian theory was designed for the analysis of nineteenth-​century chromatic tonal music, but has often been applied to modernist music (with some necessary extensions along the way).5 It is also norm based, but the norms are no longer those of traditional tonal theory. Elements that seem remote and strange and structurally peripheral in traditional tonal theory move to the normalized center of neo-​Riemannian theory, and vice versa. The norms governing the relations among triads are now no longer those of traditional harmonic function but rather those of “parsimonious voice leading,” with special status accorded to triadic progressions that involve minimal voice-​leading distances. For neo-​Riemannian theory, these parsimonious voice-​leading

5. The neo-​Riemannian literature is vast. As a starting point, see The Oxford Handbook of Neo-​Riemannian Music Theories, ed. Gollin and Rehding (2011), and Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad’s Second Nature (2011), where it is renamed “pan-​triadic theory.”

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relationships form the basis for an alternative musical syntax, that is, “norms for the ordering of chords,” in Richard Cohn’s words (2011, x). In that sense, Schenkerian theory and neo-​Riemannian theory are in some respects mirror images of each other:  two normalizing discourses with complementary sets of norms. Analytical approaches to modernist music are often scale based. That is, they treat a small handful of traditional scale types as normative structures, with nonscale tones understood as anomalies requiring rationalization. In the music of Stravinsky and Bartók in particular, theorists have often imagined that the traditional diatonic scales (major, minor, or modal) and the octatonic scale (a scale of alternating half and whole steps) are basic referential structures. Nonconforming tones, which may suggest alternative collections or scales, are identified as “contaminants,” intrusions, or impurities that need to be rationalized with reference to the normative structures if the music is to make consistent sense.6 Scale-​based theories of modernist music are normalizing discourses. Theorists working more directly in the tradition of Fortean atonal set theory have been interested in measurable deviations from normative structures and procedures. Modernist music has many harmonic progressions that involve simple contrary or parallel motion, or simple transposition or inversion. But it has many more progressions in which those processes deviate in measurable ways from the normative standard. This literature is rich in suggestive language: harmonies or progressions are offset, deformed, mutilated, or perturbed. They diverge; they are displaced; they are skewed. As a result, they are not normal, but pseudo, quasi, or fuzzy.7 These metaphors strongly suggest the working of a medicalized idea of the purpose of music theory—​to heal wounds and solve problems. Approaches to modernist music grounded in the cognitive sciences have been even more prone than Schenker to diagnosing it as unnatural, alien, inhuman. In the view of many cognitively oriented music theorists, modernist music violates not only musical conventions but also the laws of nature and of the (normal, healthy) human body. Fred Lerdahl, for 6.  For a scale-​based approach to Stravinsky’s music, see Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (1983) and Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (1996b). 7. For theoretical literature that measures deviations from normative or prototypical sonorities or procedures, see Ian Quinn, “General Equal-​Tempered Harmony” (2006 and 2007); Anton Vishio, Asymmetries in Post-​Tonal Counterpoint (2008); and Straus, “Uniformity, Balance, and Smoothness in Atonal Voice Leading” (2003).

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example, argues that modernist music (especially twelve-​tone music) fails to conform to the “unchanging cognitive foundations of the musical mind” (2001, vii), which are “determined by the human genetic inheritance” (1983, 281) and are thus “cognitively opaque” (1992, 97). As a result of this attitude, cognitively oriented music theorists have usually either condemned modernist music or simply ignored it, dismissing it from consideration as music. The cultural logic of euthanasia seems to be operating here. A  body of music is identified as having a serious defect:  it is unnatural and abnormal. For cognition theorists, there is no desire to cure modernist music, which is judged to be beyond recuperation. As a result, it must be either condemned in its entirety or simply ignored, written out of the world of music. Theoretical approaches to modernist music rooted in the cognitive sciences have represented an extreme form of normalizing discourse.

  SOME NORMALIZING THEORIES OF MODERNIST MUSIC Schenker and Salzer

Normalization and correction of anomalous tones (dissonance, chromaticism). The Ursatz as cure, with modernist music beyond the hope of recuperation.

Schoenberg and Boss

Musical problems and their solution. The problems often involve the

Forte

Anomalous harmonies like tonal triads must be subsumed (often as

Lewin

Inversional symmetry is a normative, regulating force. Tones that

disruption of symmetry, and the solutions involve its restoration. subsets) in the normative framework of atonal harmony. disrupt symmetry are pressured toward their inversional partners, whose arrival signals the close of an overcoming narrative. Neo-​Riemannian theory

The succession of harmonies (usually triads) involves minimal movements of the voices. This defines a new normative syntax for harmonic progression against which deviations are measured and rationalized.

Scale-​based theory

Tones that do not belong to locally referential scales (usually diatonic or octatonic) are anomalies requiring rationalization and thus recuperation with respect to the normative structures.

Recent post-tonal theory

Harmonies and progressions may be understood as deviations, deformations, or perturbations with respect to normative harmonies and progressions, which they measurably fuzzify.

Cognition-​based theories

Modernist music, because it fails to conform to the “unchanging cognitive foundations of the musical mind,” has defects that are beyond recuperation.

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THEORIZING MODERNIST MUSIC: SOME (MOSTLY) DISABLIST THEORIES

Within older theoretical traditions, and with a more recent flowering in the work of the Princeton School and Lewin’s transformation theory, we find instances of disablist theories of modernist music.

Is music theory necessarily a normalizing discourse? Is it possible to talk about music systematically without invoking norms, rules, schemas, genera, standards, and prototypes, and therefore without also invoking anomalies, deviations, and problematic disruptions? I can think of three theoretical initiatives that seem to me to come close to doing away with norms altogether. As a result, they resist what I  have been calling the medical model of disability and align themselves instead with a sociocultural model of disability: instead of narratives of overcoming and cure, we get the music-​theoretical equivalent of an embrace of neurodiversity and biodiversity.8

Schoenberg (Nonharmonic Tones)

I previously categorized Schoenberg as a normalizer, and certainly his idea of problem requiring solution is closely allied with traditional disability narratives of overcoming. At the same time, there are strongly disablist elements within Schoenberg’s theorizing. I  am referring in particular to his view of “nonharmonic tones.”9 The conventional way of dealing with nonharmonic tones is to rationalize them with respect to surrounding chord tones—​they are understood as merely passing or neighboring notes. The disability-​related logic is clear in the term itself:  nonnormative, deviant elements are understood in relation to normative elements, and 8. For studies of disability in relation to biodiversity—​the impulse to conserve diverse ways of inhabiting the world—​see three recent essays by Rosemarie Garland-​ Thomson:  “The Case for Conserving Disability” (2012); “Human Biodiversity Conservation” (2015); and “Eugenic World Building and Disability” (2017). 9. Schoenberg discusses nonharmonic tones in Theory of Harmony (1978). Stephen Peles provides a valuable gloss in “ ‘Was Gleichzeitig Klingt’: The Schoenberg-​Schenker Dispute and the Incompleteness of Music Theory” (2010). Schenker criticizes Schoenberg’s ideas about nonharmonic tones in the same essay in which he condemns Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto:  “Further Consideration of the Urlinie:  II” (1926/​1996). On the implications of Schoenberg’s views for his own music, with its wide range of nontriadic harmonies and its propensity to express those harmonies in highly varied ways, see Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (1990).

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the analytical process consists of normalizing the abnormal. Schoenberg, however, resists this normalizing frame by insisting on the structural integrity and generative power of these tones: “Before anything else, then, let us affirm that the non-​harmonic tones do form chords, hence are not non-​harmonic; the musical phenomena they help to create are harmonies, as is everything that sounds simultaneously” (Schoenberg 1978, 309). Schoenberg illustrates his view with analyses of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor and a motet by Bach in which he identifies harmonies that traditional tonal theory would explain away as incidental linear events, composed of dissonant nonharmonic tones.

Schoenberg’s analysis of Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G minor. Schoenberg focuses on a chord that traditional tonal theory would consider a dissonant neighboring harmony that embellishes the dominant seventh chord (Schoenberg 1978, 324). The notes in this harmony would traditionally be considered nonharmonic tones. But Schoenberg treats this harmony with consideration and care, as a significant event in its own right.

Schoenberg concludes his discussion with a ringing assertion, all in italics: “There are no non-​harmonic tones, for harmony means tones sounding together [Zusammenklang]” (1978, 318). Schoenberg’s attitude toward nonharmonic tones—​his denial that there is any such thing—​is rich in implications for Schoenberg’s own harmonic explorations as a modernist composer. It also clearly represents what I think of as disablist (as opposed to normalizing) music theory. In Schoenberg’s formulation, musical tones that were previously stigmatized as abnormal and relegated to the musical periphery are transformed into central, generative elements. Conventional music theory medicalizes music by dividing its elements into those that are independent, healthy, and strong and those that are dependent, ill, and weak. Schoenberg upends that binary by demolishing the distinction between harmonic and nonharmonic tones: for him, all tones participate in the creation of harmony. More broadly, Schoenberg’s attempt to liberate the tones from the harmonic/​nonharmonic binary is part of his interest in the associative and contextual features of an individual composition. A  composition has its own Grundgestalt (basic shape), which it elaborates through developing variation. The path of the variation will depend on the basic shape of that particular piece, rather than repertoire-​ wide conventions and norms. Schoenberg’s conception emphasizes the internal integrity of a work—​it unfolds in accordance with its own internal imperatives and spins a dense

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web of motivic and harmonic associations. To the extent that Schoenberg emphasizes associative and contextual elements at the expense of normative, syntactic, and communal ones, he engages in what I am thinking of as disabilist theorizing, and his radical reconception of what normalizing music theory thinks of as nonharmonic tones is the epitome of that.

Princeton School

Within the world of North American postwar music theory, the approach that resonates most with what I am calling disablist music theory is that of the so-​called Princeton School, including Milton Babbitt, Benjamin Boretz, J. K. Randall, John Rahn, and Joseph Dubiel.10 We are not speaking of a theoretical system here, but more of a shared attitude toward music and the analysis of music. Allowing for variation among (and sometimes within the work of) the individuals involved, one might refer to a shared aversion to norms and a shared preference for contextuality and individuation of musical works.11 I will allow some strongly worded comments by Boretz to represent this shared point of view, with italics added: Each work could be observed to create its own system, rather than merely instantiating it, that is, that from any work, the particular lexical and grammatical background for that work could be inferred from the theoretically interpreted perceptual characteristics of the data alone, without the intervention of assumed conventions. . . . Chronology becomes an aspect of identity within a musical structure. A datum sounds a certain way at its moment of assertion, by virtue of its predecessors, then becomes a progressively distinct entity by virtue of its successors. The sound of a musical work is then the cumulative sound of the

10. The best sources on the philosophical underpinnings of the Princeton School and the Princeton Theory practiced there are Scott Gleason, Princeton Theory’s Problematics (2013) and “Princeton Theory’s Problematics of Solipsism” (2015). As he notes, Princeton Theory is mostly meta-​theory, that is, speculation about the proper ways of thinking about music, with relatively little actual analysis of music. 11. Two additional recent theoretical traditions also resonate with a disablist orientation that rejects the tyranny of norms. First, I would point to a significant tradition of feminist music theory, embodied in important work by Marion Guck, Marianne Kielien-​Gilbert, Ellie Hisama, Fred Maus, Rachel Lumsden, and others. Second, a number of music theorists have adopted an explicitly postmodern orientation that similarly eschews normative standards, although for different reasons. See, for example, Judy Lochhead, Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music (2016) and the essays in Lochhead and Auner, eds., Postmodern Music/​Postmodern Thought (2002) and Dell’Antonio, ed., Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (2004).

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cumulative chronology of its components. . . . For it seems that the principal desideratum of all musical activity is the multiplication of ways for entities to be distinct. (1977, 128–​30) Creative interaction with one’s own musical experience is a radically different kind of theorizing, trading in authoritative prescription for imaginative re-​c­­­reation, recognizing the musical in music by leaving it normatively uninvaded. (2000–​2001, 67)

Babbitt’s analysis of Schoenberg, Piano Pieces, Op.  23, No. 3. Babbitt is interested here, as in all of his analytical work, in a rich network of associations among the tones, where combinations of tones (“associative harmonies”) emerge from a small number of generative sources, and where the tones are multiply determined, participating simultaneously in a variety of musical processes and structures (Babbitt 2003a and 1987). Babbitt’s analysis is not at all concerned with repertoire-​wide norms or conventions. Boretz’s analysis of Schoenberg, Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15, No. 1. Boretz confines his attention to the piano introduction to this song, identifying recurrences of notes, intervals, and enchaining operations that bind these few measures into a phrase (Boretz 1995). The analysis is entirely context specific—​these particular notes in this particular order—​without reference to external norms or prototypes. Dubiel’s analysis of Babbitt, Partitions, mm. 1–​3. The twelve-​tone array for this passage creates a compositional problem: a single high E positioned in seeming isolation from the other notes. Babbitt’s music binds that note to the rest of the music through textural and harmonic means. For Dubiel, the notable achievement of the passage is not its systematic organization but its astonishingly refined individuality in response to a difficult situation of its own making (Dubiel 1990–​1992).

These analyses proceed largely without reference to norms. While they are interested in the systematic and patterned use of musical material within usually very narrow local boundaries, there is no discussion at all of schemas or procedures even in other parts of the same piece, much less of other works by the composer, other works from the same time period, or putative musical universals. All of the effort is directed toward the individuation and particularization of musical entities within a richly characterized local context. Instead of simplifying and clarifying, these analyses are directed toward complex and proliferating networks of musical relationships. Both the analytical observations and the language used to express them

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are elaborate and virtuosic. Instead of offering common-​sense, common-​ language accounts, these analyses are significant creative efforts in their own right—​as idiosyncratic, eccentric, and highly individualized as the music they describe.

Transformation Theory (Lewin Again)

By biography and theoretical orientation, Lewin’s transformational theory is allied with Princeton Theory, including in its disablist orientation.12 Instead of solving problems, it multiplies them. Instead of simplifying, it makes things harder and more complicated. Instead of a normalizing cure, it offers a proliferation of incommensurable challenges. Instead of comfortably confirming common-​sense ideas about how music goes, it makes familiar things feel strange. Analyses that emerge from transformational theory often have a forced, willed quality—​they feel unnatural—​and this is precisely why I think of transformational theory as a disablist rather than a normalizing discourse. Lewin’s analysis of Webern, Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, No. 2. Lewin tracks the behavior of a harmony he calls X from an initial statement, along various possible transpositional and inversional pathways, and back to X (Lewin 1982). Only a small amount of music is under scrutiny—​just one thread through one short passage. There is no reference to musical norms or, indeed, anything outside the passage or anything within the passage that is not X-​like. The analysis particularizes the passage with respect to X. Lewin’s analysis of Stockhausen, Klavierstück III. Lewin parses the entire short piece exhaustively into overlapping forms of a five-​note idea he calls P and an inversional partner he calls p (Lewin 1993). He binds these into a network, with all the P-​and p-​forms connected either by transposition or inversion. The analysis is entirely contextual and associative with reference to P—​no normalization of deviations, no overcoming of obstacles, no solving of problems.

In the sorts of analyses that emerge from Lewin’s transformational theory, there are possible narratives, but not of overcoming or cure.

12.  The definitive source for Lewin’s transformational theory is his treatise, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (1987/​2007).

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Instead, there is an implicit narrative of self-​actualization, as X and P learn to be more and more themselves. Lewin is doing what Boretz urged, namely, multiplying the ways for these entities to be distinct. Instead of offering us the comfort of the familiar, Lewin makes familiar things strange and difficult.13 Lewin appears at the work’s bedside, but instead of comforting us with promises of cure—​“there, there: these dissonances will all resolve and we’ll get back to the tonic and everything will be okay”—​he takes a look and says, “This is going to be a lot more complicated than you thought, and we’re going to be here a very long time, and there will be no end to the proliferation of difficulties and to the individuation of entities.” This is the sense in which I describe transformation theory as a disablist rather than a normalizing discourse. It upends our familiar, comfortable, natural-​seeming ways of doing things, and offers analyses that seek to disable rather than cure. In an uncharacteristic diatribe against an analysis by Nicholas Cook of the same Stockhausen piece, Lewin (1993) uses language that resonates closely with the distinction I am trying to make here. Lewin expresses dissatisfaction with Cook’s attitude that we can afford to bypass any special effort to focus our ears on things about the piece that might not lie at hand from our previous musical training and experiences. . . . I get the message that I can be perfectly at home with my listening if only I listen in a common-​sense fashion for contours and registers and densities, and apply to those experiences some casual inferences from received notions about arch shapes, upbeats, etc. In this way, I will hear that (and how) Stockhausen’s piece, except for quirks in its notation, is quite traditional and comfortable; it will not challenge me, or provoke me, or in some ways infuriate me. (1993, 62)

In the terms of the present study, Cook’s analysis offers comfort by normalizing the music; Lewin’s analysis makes the music harder, more complicated and thus makes our relationship to it harder and more complicated. In a virtuoso display of the analyst’s art, Lewin violates our intuitions (habits) and blasts us out of our complacency. If Cook normalizes the music, Lewin crips it. Standard, normalizing music theory (like modern medicine) has achieved wonderful things, but in a particular way and at a cost. One of 13.  For related discussions of these untraditional features of Lewin’s approach to analysis, see Klumpenhouwer, “In Order to Stay Asleep as Observers”(2006) and “Reconsidering Klumpenhouwer Networks”(2007).

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the costs is that we come to think of the medical model as somehow permanent and natural. We may thus come to assume that our only proper task as music theorists is that of clarifying and simplifying, of solving problems, of normalizing abnormalities. An alternate vision of disability and of music theory opens up a different possibility—​that we will learn to celebrate difference rather than pathologizing deficit, that we will come to place a higher value on bodies and minds, and on musical works and music theories, that are difficult, strange, irreconcilable, irreparable, uncurable.

  TWO WAYS OF DOING MUSIC THEORY (COMPREHENSIVE CHART)

Normalizing (Therapeutic) Music Theory

Disablist Music Theory

Standard, received, traditional, normal music

A subversive countertradition.

theory. To understand music in relation to norms, prototypes, schemas, and standard forms. To normalize abnormalities and solve problems.

To accept music on its own contextual terms, without reference to norms. To create problems by defamiliarizing musical elements.

Affiliated with medical model of disability. Cultural logic of euthanasia. Cure or kill.

Affiliated with sociocultural model of disability. Difference, not deficit.

Music theory as an overcoming narrative.

Music theory as a chaos narrative.

To place a musical work in relation to (in

To individuate a musical work (making it be the

dialogue with) others in its cohort. Associated with normal hearing (the way

most like itself). Associated with disablist hearing (the way

normal people hear normal music under

extraordinary people hear challenging music

normal conditions).

against the grain of intuition, habit, and convention).

To simplify and clarify.

To complicate and multiply difficulty.

Make strange things normal. Normalization.

Make normal things strange. Defamiliarization.

The comfort of having intuitions (habits)

The discomfort of having intuitions (habits)

confirmed.

blown up.

Natural. A feeling of fit.

Unnatural. A feeling of contrariety.

Grounded in music theory and modes of

Anachronistic, discordant, artificial,

thought contemporaneous with the works

inauthentic.

under study. Common sense.

Idiosyncratic, eccentric, individual.

Communality.

Contextuality.

Synoptic overview. Single unifying point of

Fragmentation of point of view. Multiplicity of

view. Omniscient narrator (the analyst).

angles. (continued )

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Normalizing (Therapeutic) Music Theory

Disablist Music Theory

To subsume musical events within a

To associate musical events nonhierarchically.

hierarchy. Syntactic. Global coherence. The overall health of the organism. Look at big chunks of music and entire repertoires from one unifying point of

Associative. Local coherence. The fragmentation, deformity, and disfigurement of the organism. Look at small snippets of music from lots of different points of view.

view. Underlying regularities subsume surface turbulence. Interest in structural depths. Determinism: things have to be the way they are. Events are understood as inevitable. Nonharmonic tones are passing tones within a linear progression (Schenker).

Surface turbulence is excessive; escapes control. Interest in musical surface. The unexpected and unexplained anomaly. The unassimilatable event. There are no nonharmonic tones; all tones create harmony (Schoenberg).

Empirical. Statistical. Bell-​shaped curve.

Experiential. Population of one.

To express our musical intuitions.

To violate our sense of what is natural and

To capture a composer’s implicit intention.

To cultivate historical anomaly. Deliberate

intuitive. To reflect the hearing of a competent

anachronism.

contemporary listener (historical authenticity). To reflect the hearing of a normally competent listener. To efface itself in the service of the music. Sincerity.

To reflect the hearing of an extraordinary, unusual, possibly eccentric listener. To call attention to its own virtuosity. Playfulness.

REFLECTIONS ON DISABLIST MUSIC THEORY AND THERAPEUTIC MUSIC THEORY

In its resistance to the therapeutic imperative, disablist music theory resonates in complex ways with long-​standing debates about the proper function of music analysis, including concerns about unity, coherence, hierarchy, structure, and autonomy.

My critique of therapeutic music theory, and the contrast I draw between normalizing and disablist discourses of music theory, resonates in complicated ways with a number of long-​standing debates about the proper function of music analysis. Should it be directed toward the demonstration of unity? Of coherence (organic or otherwise)? Should it be hierarchical in organization? Should its goal be the elucidation of structure, especially in

[ 180 ] Broken Beauty

the domains of pitch and rhythm? Should it presume and demonstrate the autonomy of musical works? Of all of these long-​standing debates, my concerns in this chapter are most closely intertwined with the question of musical unity and with the role of music analysis in demonstrating it. To more traditionally oriented theorists, it has seemed self-​evident that the task of the analyst is to show how individual musical elements relate to each other and to the whole they jointly compose. In the process, events that might initially seem surprising or anomalous might be shown to fit in.14 Kevin Korsyn (2004) observes that our interest in the unity of artworks is to provide reassuring images of our own wholeness as individuals, to validate the unity of the human subject. To translate into the terms of this chapter, our interest in the unity of artworks is a way of reassuring ourselves about the health and ability of our bodies, as a way of warding off fears about stigmatized nonnormative bodily states. This conventional view has provoked a vigorous critical response.15 In place of an analytical practice oriented toward demonstrations of unity, Korsyn points out that “musical experience may include multiple forms of sense-​making, some of them incommensurable” (2004, 344). In this view, analysis is about making sense of music, or rather, of teasing out its multiple and possibly contradictory senses, not about imposing unity. In pursuit of the ideals of the Princeton School, discussed earlier, Dubiel seeks a type of analysis that has room for “bolts from the blue,” that is, for musical events that depart both from conventional norms and from contextual expectations. Instead of seeking to explain how one event is the necessary and logical consequence of another, we should try simply to describe events with depth and specificity. The goal of analysis is to particularize passages and to make (possibly multiple) senses of them, even if those senses do not necessarily include a sense of unity (Dubiel 1992). In language that very clearly engages the central concerns of this chapter, Dubiel argues: Under this conception we can count on no canonical model of music, such that to show a piece’s conformity to the model is adequately to analyze it. Making

14.  Morgan (2003) makes this argument explicitly, and has become the focus of a good deal of subsequent commentary. But the view is widespread if usually implicit. 15.  See, for example, Alan Street, “Superior Myths, Dogmatic Allegories:  The Resistance to Musical Unity” (1989); Daniel Chua, “Rethinking Unity” (2004); Joseph Dubiel, “What We Really Disagree About: A Reply to Robert P. Morgan” (2004); Kevin Korsyn, “The Death of Musical Analysis? The Concept of Unity Revisited” (2004); Jonathan Kramer, “The Concept of Disunity and Musical Analysis” (2004); and René Rusch, “Rethinking Conceptions of Unity” (2011).

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sense of a piece must mean, not showing it to instantiate something we all more or less know, but showing that it is what it is—​very much and very exactly what it is. (1992, 216)

The analytical practice Dubiel envisions here is very much what I have been calling a disablist theory, by which I mean primarily a theory without norms. The question of musical unity thus intersects with, but is not precisely aligned with, the question of musical conformity with normative standards. In principle, one might have a music-​analytical practice that is concerned with unity but not norms or (much harder to imagine) with norms but not unity. In practice, however, disablist music theories are not much concerned either with unity or with norms. Similarly, disablist music theories are not much interested in overall musical coherence, that reassuring sense that all musical events in a piece are harmoniously interconnected.16 In Joseph Kerman’s judgment, analysis is centrally about demonstrating coherence: “Analysis sets out to discern and demonstrate the functional coherence of individual works of art, their ‘organic unity,’ as it is often said” (1980, 312). In contrast, disablist theory aligns itself with what I  have elsewhere called “autistic hearing” (Straus 2011). In accordance with an autistic cognitive style, disablist theory is interested in “local coherence”: details are attended to on their own terms, not subsumed into a larger totality. It prioritizes the integrity of the discrete event, with an orientation to the part rather than the whole. One practical consequence is that analyses with a disablist orientation tend to focus on relatively short musical passages rather than entire movements. Most traditional music theories have a hierarchical aspect, and the hierarchy often underpins claims of musical unity and coherence. As Robert Fink argues: The surface-​depth metaphor, since it leads to the assumption of musical hierarchy and a theory of structural levels, underpins the most influential claims—​ Schenkerian analysis and set theory—​that all great music has hidden organic

16.  The debate about coherence (especially organic coherence) as an attribute of musical works, and a goal of musical analysis, is evident in Solie, “The Living Work:  Organicism and Musical Analysis” (1980) and Joseph Kerman, “How We Got Into Analysis, and How to Get Out” (1980), and in the many responses their work elicited, including Michael Cherlin, “Why We Got Into Analysis, and What to Get Out of It” (1986) and Kofi Agawu, “How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back In Again” (2004).

[ 182 ] Broken Beauty

unity, no matter how complex, chaotic, or incomplete the listener’s experience of its “surface” may be. (1999, 103)

Disablist theories may have a hierarchical aspect—​recursive networks in which musical ideas are projected simultaneously over different spans of time—​but usually they do not. Instead, disablist theory is again aligned with autistic hearing in its preference for freely ranging associations rather than controlling, centralized hierarchies (Headlam 2006). Traditionally, music analysis is oriented toward the elucidation of structure, which has usually meant patterns of organization of pitch and rhythm. As Judy Lochhead suggests in her recent critique of this view, analysis might well pursue alternative goals, including (1) interrogating a work as sound and taking account of various (possibly conflicting or incommensurable) ways of making sense of it; (2) generating new forms of musical behavior (including listening, performing, and creating); and (3) querying the relevant conceptual, cultural, and historical factors that shape our musical experience (Lochhead 2016, 7–​8). All of these alternative goals resonate with my notion of disablist theory, which is usually oriented toward in-​ time process and transformation rather than out-​of-​time structures. They also resonate with what I  have called “deaf hearing,” a listening strategy based on tactile and kinesthetic responses to music (Straus 2011; similarly Jones 2016). Traditional music theory has often presumed the autonomy of musical works. In certain respects, disablist theory does so also, especially when it draws upon autistic hearing, with its preference for richness of internal self-​reference and its relative indifference to external relationships. Music analysis in a disablist style emphasizes the contextual rather than communal features of a musical work—​that is an aspect of its indifference to musical norms. But that need not entail indifference to intertextuality. Musical works refer to other musical works, as both normalizing and disablist music theories are fully capable of recognizing, but they do so in different ways. For normalizing theories, the references have a coercive force; they create a standard against which deviance is measured. For disablist theories, the references are more likely to be understood as heard voices. Modernist music frequently hears voices, as discussed in ­chapter 4, and disablist theory listens to them sympathetically and valorizes them rather than explaining them away. Disablist theory thus positions itself in complex ways within ongoing debates about musical unity, coherence, structure, hierarchy, and autonomy. The core issue for disablist theory is finding a way to think about

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and make sense of music without reference to normative standards. It is a form of resistance to the tyranny of the normal. In its resistance to normalization, disablist theory is essentially antitherapeutic. Traditional, normalizing music theory is therapeutic in two senses. First, it provides therapy to musical works, offering to heal their wounds, solve their problems, and normalize their abnormalities. Second, it provides therapy to musical listeners:  it comforts them and confirms their sense of health and wholeness, offering a healing vision of harmonious unity—​qualities they can imagine their bodies share with musical works. Disablist theory offers no comfort. Rather, it is a provocation to contemplate disability in music in a realistic mode, in full appreciation of the ways in which it enriches music. In Garland-​Thomson’s ringing words, uttered in a somewhat different context but highly relevant here, “to embrace the supposedly flawed body of disability is to critique the normalizing, phallic fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness” (2013a, 351). This is precisely the way in which disablist theory crips music: it introduces the disabled body into the discussion, and revels in the commotion and discombobulation that inevitably result.

[ 184 ] Broken Beauty

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INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 33, 80, 85 Alkan, Charles-​Valentin, works of Recueil de Chants, Op. 38, No. 8 (“Fa”), 49 Anorexia, 79, 132 Apprehension, modes of eugenic mode, 12–​13, 15, 19–​20, 22–​23, 27–​30, 32, 35, 37, 44–​45, 48, 50 exotic mode, 12–​13, 15, 22, 29–​30, 35, 42, 45, 70 realistic mode, 10, 13–​15, 19–​21, 23, 27–​29, 35, 45, 46, 49, 59, 184 sentimental mode, 12–​13, 15, 20, 27, 32 wondrous mode, 12–​13, 15, 19, 43, 45 Asperger, Hans, 128, 130, 132, 148, 153 Atonal music, 6–​7, 27–​28, 51, 64, 96, 98, 101, 136, 168–​69, 171–​72 Auslander, Philip, 5n7, 159 Authorial incompetence, 117 Autism, 7, 17, 33–​38, 49–​50, 79, 92, 108, 125–​54 Autistic hearing, 183 Babbitt, Milton, 6–​7, 34, 43, 132, 135–​36, 138, 146–​49, 152, 175–​76 Babbitt, Milton, works of Composition for Four Instruments, 36 Danci, 137–​38 Minute Waltz, 23 My Ends Are My Beginnings, 141 partitions, 176 “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” 142 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 79, 135, 165, 174 Bartók, Béla, 6–​7, 55, 171 Bartók, Béla, works of

Forty-​Four Duos for Two Violins, No. 33, “Harvest Song,” 29 String Quartet No. 2, first movement, 63 String Quartet No. 3, Prima Parte, 66 String Quartet No. 3, Seconda parte, 122 String Quartet No. 4, first movement, 21 String Quartet No. 4, fifth movement, 54 String Quartet No. 5, 58, 102, 166 “Subject and Reflection,” No. 141 from Mikrokosmos, 25 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 74, 165 Beethoven, Ludwig van, works of Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, first movement, 56 Symphony No. 3 in E-​flat major (“Eroica”), 47 Berg, Alban, 6–​7 Berg, Alban, works of Lyric Suite, sixth movement, 28, 98 Wozzeck, 50–​51, 57–​58, 101, 114, 120 Bérubé, Michael, 10, 41 Biodiversity, 173 Bleuler, Eugen, 26, 33, 90–​92, 100, 127–​28, 130–​31, 153 Blind, blindness, 4, 7, 11, 43, 111 Boretz, Benjamin, 175–​76, 178 Boss, Jack, 44, 167–​68, 172 Boulez, Pierre, 80, 85 Brahms, Johannes, 135, 165 Brahms, Johannes, works of Symphony No. 3 in F major, first movement, 47–​48

02

Brontë, Charlotte, 43 Butler, Christopher, 71, 135n4, 142 Caplin, William, 56 Cherlin, Michael, 22 Chew, Kristina, 141 Chopin, Frédéric, 23 Chopin, Frédéric, works of Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4, 48–​49 Cook, Nicholas, 178 Craft, Robert, 29, 60, 74, 82, 85 Crawford Seeger, Ruth, 6–​7 Crawford Seeger, Ruth, works of Diaphonic Suite, No. 1, third movement, 36 String Quartet, first movement, 101 String Quartet, fourth movement, 30 Cultural scripts of disability, 86 Charity Cripple, 10–​15, 23, 37 Demonic Cripple, 11–​13, 15, 18–​21, 35, 37, 48, 71, 73 Natural Man; Natural Woman, 109, 111, 114 Obsessive Avenger, 10–​11, 14–​15, 18, 20, 23, 29, 37, 42, 50, 70 Saintly Sage, 11–​13, 15, 19–​20, 23, 25, 27, 32 Sweet Innocent, 11–​13, 15, 19–​20, 22, 27, 29, 32, 37, 110 Tragic Victim, 91, 110, 122 Dallapiccola, Luigi, works of Goethe Lieder, No. 2, “Die Sonne kommt!” 142 Darcy, Warren, 61 Davidson, Michael, 84 Davis, Lennard, 42, 157 Deaf, deafness, 4, 7, 48, 111, 117 Deaf hearing. See Disablist hearing Debussy, Claude, 118, 122 Debussy, Claude, works of “Feux d’Artifice,” 100 “Voiles” (from Préludes, Book 1), 24–​25 Deformity, 4, 7, 11, 17–​18, 23–​24, 37, 70–​71, 81, 83, 85, 106, 180 Degeneracy, degenerate, 11, 15, 22, 29, 37–​38, 86, 107, 109, 112, 114, 119 Dementia, 91, 106

[ 200 ] Index

Depression, 91, 132 Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM), 128–​31, 139 Dickens, Charles, 11, 31, 43, 109–​10, 112 Disability aesthetics, 2, 9–​10, 25–​27, 30, 33, 37–​38, 55, 62, 68, 70 Disability, models of divine affliction/​disfavor, 8, 10, 105 divine inspiration, 10, 12, 43, 89 medical; medicalized, 7–​15, 17–​18, 24, 26, 41, 43, 45, 79, 88–​94, 96, 100, 103, 105–​9, 126, 130, 134, 144, 148, 149, 151, 154, 156, 159–​62, 164, 173, 179 religious, 8, 10, 12–​13, 43, 45, 105, 108 sociocultural, 9–​10, 13, 15, 46, 88–​89, 94, 126, 130–​31, 156, 162–​64, 173, 179 Disability, narratives of acceptance, 41, 44–​46, 48–​50, 52–​56, 59–​68, 70–​72, 76, 157 chaos, 41, 44–​46, 48–​52, 54–​58, 60–​61, 63–​68, 71–​72, 75–​76, 116, 157, 179 overcoming/​restitution/​cure, 14, 41–​49, 51–​55, 61–​68, 76, 116, 156, 158–​60, 164, 167–​68, 172–​73, 177 quest/​conversion, 43–​46, 56–​61, 67, 72, 76 Disability, rehabilitation of, 8–​10, 12, 17–​18, 24, 27, 37 Disability Studies, 4, 93n4, 126, 144, 162 Disablist hearing, types of autistic hearing, 182–​83 deaf hearing, 183 Disablist music theory, 156–​57, 162–​65, 170, 173–​75, 177–​80, 182–​83 Dix, Otto, 2 Dubiel, Joseph, 139, 175–​76, 181–​82 Enfreakment, 12, 15, 29, 39, 84, 86 Engulfment, 82n4 Eugenics, 8–​10, 107, 112, 157–​58 Euthanasia, 8–​10, 12, 14, 17, 25, 85–​86, 113, 134, 154, 156, 161–​62, 164–​66, 172 Forte, Allen, 168–​69, 171–​72 Foucault, Michel, 145n12, 159

Fragmentation, 18–​21, 23, 56–​58, 60, 71–​72, 74, 77, 79, 81, 85, 102, 179 Freak shows, 12n14 Frith, Uta, 148 Garland-​Thomas, Rosemarie, 4, 8, 12–​13, 42–​43, 45–​46, 86, 134, 154n19, 156, 161–​62, 184 Grandin, Temple, 148 Grotesque, 13, 18–​23, 82, 118–​19, 121 Hacking, Ian, 126, 147 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 165 Headlam, Dave, 183 Hepokoski, James, 61 Howe, Blake, 48–​49 Hysteria, 130 Idiocy, 7, 17, 31–​33, 37, 59, 70, 78–​81, 84, 104–​24 Imitative counterpoint, 35 Inversional symmetry; inversional balance, 24–​25, 64–​67, 75, 81, 167, 169–​70, 172 Ives, Charles, 6–​7, 18 Ives, Charles, works of “The Seer,” 31, 121 String Quartet No. 2, 27, 97–​98 “The Things Our Fathers Loved,” 20 Kanner, Leo, 33–​34, 128–​32, 149n17, 153 Lerdahl, Fred, 171 Lewin, David, 66, 100, 163, 169–​70, 172–​73, 177–​78 Madness, 4, 7, 11, 17, 26, 29–​31, 33, 37, 48–​51, 70, 76, 81, 88–​103, 105, 108, 127, 143 Mania, 11, 106 Manic-​depressive disorder, 25, 91 Masquerade, disability as, 166 McClary, Susan, 47, 133, 143, 152–​53 Medical pathology, disability as. See Disability, models of: medical Mental illness, 88–​89, 91–​94, 98, 126–​28, 130, 154 Mitchell, David, 4, 42, 144, 158

Mobility impairment, 4, 7, 11, 17, 20–​21, 24, 26, 37, 47, 51, 54–​55, 64, 66–​67, 72, 81, 85, 111 Mobility impairment, types of paralysis, 17, 25, 43, 55, 70, 72–​74, 76, 81 stuttering, 70, 72, 74–​77, 81, 86, 112, 115, 117, 121 stasis, 25–​26, 43, 65–​66, 73, 75–​76, 80–​81, 117, 119, 121, 124 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 112, 165 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, works of Symphony No. 40 in G minor, 174 Music perception and cognition, 36, 172 Music therapy, 184 Neo-​Riemannian theory, 170–​72 Nerves, nervous, 89, 98 Neurasthenia, 98, 130 Neurodiversity, 93–​94, 102–​3, 126, 152, 154, 173 Norden, Martin, 11, 110 Normal hearing (normal listeners), 136, 142–​43, 145, 164, 179 Normate, 154 Nostalgia, 97 Novel, 14, 42–​43, 109–​11, 117 Obesity, 79 Obsession, 48–​52, 132 Obsessive Avenger. See Cultural scripts of disability Paralysis, 17, 25, 43, 55, 70, 72–​74, 76, 81 Primitivism, 29, 31–​33, 70, 78, 80–​81, 85, 87, 106–​7, 111–​16, 119, 122–​24, 133 Psychiatry, psychiatrists, 4, 8, 26–​27, 77, 89–​93, 95, 98, 103, 106, 126, 128–​30, 132, 134, 143, 145, 150, 160–​61 Ravel, Maurice, 118 Ravel, Maurice, works of “Le Gibet,” from Gaspard de la Nuit, 50 Relph, Harry (“Little Tich”), 81–​84, 86 Sacks, Oliver, 150 Saintly Sage. See Cultural scripts of disability Salzer, Felix, 164, 166–​67, 172

Index  [ 201 ]

0 2

Sandahl, Carrie, 5n7, 159 Satie, Erik, works of Parade, 31–​32, 120 Schenker, Heinrich, 25, 53, 73–​74, 85, 164–​72, 180, 182 Schizophrenia, 26–​27, 30, 33, 38, 50–​52, 76–​77, 81, 90–​93, 95, 100–​101, 127–​28, 131 Schoenberg, Arnold, 6–​7, 16, 22, 34, 43, 56, 79–​80, 85, 132, 134–​37, 143, 167–​68, 172–​76, 180 Schoenberg, Arnold, works of Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15, No. 1, 176 Erwartung, 102 Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, No. 6, 58 Piano Concerto, 140 Piano Pieces, Op. 23, No. 3, 136, 176 Piano Pieces, Op. 33a, 35–​36 Piano Pieces, Op. 33b, 57 Pierrot Lunaire, No. 21, “O alter Duft,” 169 String Quartet, No. 2, 22, 28, 96–​97 String Quartet, No. 3, first movement, 62 String Quartet No. 4, first movement, 137, 168 “Valse de Chopin” from Pierrot Lunaire, 23 Schubert, Franz, 165 Schubert, Franz, works of Piano Sonata in B-​flat Major, Op. Post., first movement, 47–​48 Scully, Jackie Leach, 160, 162 Sentence (musical), 21, 56–​61, 64, 67, 72 Shakespeare, William, 11, 111 Shock therapy, 15, 38 Siebers, Tobin, 2–​3, 8, 68, 85, 103, 160 Smetana, Bedrich, 112 Smetana, Bedrich, works of String Quartet No. 1 in E minor (“From my life”), fourth movement, 48 Snyder, Sharon, 4, 42, 144, 158 Sonata form, 61–​64, 67 Statistics, 157–​58 Steinbeck, John, 31, 113, 117 Stiker, Henri-​Jacques, 8, 18, 24 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, works of Klavierstück III, 177

[ 202 ] Index

Stravinsky, Igor, 6–​7, 18, 33, 55, 59, 70–​87, 118, 121, 165–​66, 171 Stravinsky, Igor, works of Double Canon, 36 Octet, first movement, 62 Orpheus, 54 Petrushka, 22, 25, 29, 53, 59–​60, 72–​73, 75–​77, 80, 84, 100, 101 Piano Concerto, 166 Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2, 75 Rake’s Progress, The, 25, 54, 101 Requiem Canticles, “Exaudi,” 20, 137 Rite of Spring, 29, 32, 65, 73, 76–​78, 81, 85, 121 Serenade in A, first movement, 19–​21, 60 A Sermon, A Narrative, and A Prayer, 140 Symphonies of Wind Instruments, 19 Symphony in C, first movement, 63 Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 1, 29, 78, 80 Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2, 19, 71, 75 “Tilimbom,” 32, 121 Stutter. See Mobility impairment, types of: stuttering Sweet Innocent. See Cultural scripts of disability Symmetry, 20, 22, 25, 37, 56, 62, 65, 67, 70, 72, 75–​76, 81, 167 Taruskin, Richard, 32n24, 71, 73, 79–​80, 85, 133 Thomson, Virgil, works of Four Saints in Three Acts, 32–​33, 122–​23 Tiresias, 11 Tonal problem, 16, 42, 45, 47, 51–​52, 61, 167–​68 Tuberculosis, 91 Twelve-​tone music, 20, 28, 35–​36, 43, 57, 79, 99, 127, 131–​44, 149, 151–​54, 167–​68, 172, 176 Varèse, Edgard, 7, 18 Varèse, Edgard, works of Octandre, first movement, 20–​21 Vocal disfluency, 70, 74, 117

Wagner, Richard, 28, 99–​100, 110–​11 Waltz, 21–​23, 28 Webern, Anton, 6–​7, 132, 134 Webern, Anton, works of Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9, No. 4, 65 Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, No. 2, 66, 177 Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, No. 3, 51 Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, No. 4, 58

Orchestra Pieces, Op. 10, Nos. 3 and 4, 169–​70 Piano Variations, Op. 27, second movement, 25, 66, 137 Quartet, Op. 22, 36 “Wie bin ich froh!” from Three Songs, Op. 25, 142 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 2n1, 83

Index  [ 203 ]