The Thought of Music 9780520963627

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface: The Thought of Music
Acknowledgments
1. Music and the Forms of Th ought
2. Speaking of Music: In Search of an Idiom
3. The Ineff able and How (Not) to Say It
4. Pleasure and Valuation
5. The Cultural Field: Beyond Context
6. Virtuosity, Reading, Authorship: A Genealogy
7. The Newer Musicology? Context, Performance, and the Musical Work
Postscript: Imagining the Score
Notes
Index of Names
Index of Concepts

Citation preview

The Thought of Music

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Kramer - 9780520288799.indd 2

28/05/16 7:51 PM

The Thought of Music Lawrence Kramer

university of califor nia pr ess

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kramer, Lawrence, 1946– author. The thought of music / Lawrence Kramer. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-520-28879-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-28880-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-96362-7 (ebook) 1. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Musicology—History and criticism. 3. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Title. ML3800.K73 2016 781.1—dc23 2015032322 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Nancy With whom “No note fails. These sounds are long in the living of the ear.”

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con t en ts

Preface: The Thought of Music ix Acknowledgments xix 1 2

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Music and the Forms of Thought 1

Speaking of Music: In Search of an Idiom 23

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The Ineffable and How (Not) to Say It 45

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4 5 6

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Pleasure and Valuation 65

The Cultural Field: Beyond Context 89

Virtuosity, Reading, Authorship: A Genealogy 113 •

The Newer Musicology? Context, Performance, and the Musical Work 141 Postscript: Imagining the Score 173 Notes 181 Index of Names 199 Index of Concepts 203

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pr eface the thought of music

What do we know when we know things about music and how do we know them? Until recently the modern answers to those questions were relatively stable, but it is generally acknowledged that they began to change dramatically toward the close of the 20th century. They have been changing ever since. This book is about those changes. For that very reason, it is also about something more. The chapters to follow deal with music in conversation with those who perform, make, study, or just enjoy it, but they also go through music to ask the wider question, what is knowledge of anything—music, for instance—that we human subjects make and do? To understand musical knowledge we need to ask that question, at the same time as we call on musical knowledge to help answer it.

Looking back over the broadening horizons of understanding music since the 1990s, what stands out most is the rise of this principle of reciprocity in each discrete area of concern: meaning, subjectivity, identity, society, culture, history, and so on. It has been necessary first to recognize, and then to reject, the possibility of music’s lapsing into a passive or dependent relationship on the concepts deployed around it. It is not enough, nor was it ever enough, to probe the bearing of such concerns in a chosen composer or work or style or repertoire. These musical embodiments can and should become a means of insight into general issues of meaning, subjectivity, identity, society, culture, and history. It is not enough to understand music in context (or the fiction of context: the text-context distinction looks increasingly irrelevant and the concept of context presents larger problems that will come up in chapter 5); context must also be understood through music. It is not enough to explore ix

subjectivity in music; subjectivity—the field of historically specific identity and desire—must also be explored through music. Each area of concern (and concern itself, another topic we will take up) finds in music not only a mirror but also a model of its own potentialities. Music is not alone in this respect, and that is just the point. It belongs to a general dynamic of knowledge as much as anything else does. Given the fullness and immediacy of its impact and its constant presence in our daily lives, we should perhaps say “as much or more.” This reciprocity of musical knowledge and general knowledge is subject to its own conditions; it does not stand still. For that reason any new account of it requires some consideration of several important trends that emerged in the wake of, and often in dissent from, the effort—call it the cultural turn, the new musicology, critical musicology, or whatever you like, roughly from 1990 on—to merge understanding music with interpreting music. These trends include the elevation of performance over the matter performed; an associated emphasis on music in “real time”; the return of ideas of ineffability; a corresponding caution or hesitancy about interpretation (reduced to “hermeneutic approaches,” as if any “approach” could be anything else) and a reluctance to let understanding exceed quasi-empirical limits; a shift of attention from the content of music to its contexts; the de-authorizing of the musical work and, as the term suggests, of the composer as author; a reduction of the work to the “work-concept” and thus the removal of the work from its practical, material existence;1 and the assumption that the work represents unwarranted authority, whereas a half-century or more of thinking on the topic (Blanchot, Derrida, Stewart, Agamben2) understands the work as a release from unwarranted authority. Each of these trends has had valuable (or at least stimulating) results, but each also raises questions that afford us the opportunity to rethink a series of primary concepts and assumptions, including musical understanding, the problem of music and language, music and the field of culture, context, authorship, the work, performance, collaboration, and even music itself. I have touched on most of these issues in an extended series of books and will briefly take the liberty of referring to the two most recent of them here.3 Interpreting Music sought to establish a set of heuristics for investigating both music through meaning and meaning through music; to illustrate the practice of interpretation as a cultural and conceptual agency in terms that can readily be emulated; and to project something of the inventive, undogmatic, and more than empirical worldview that a focus on meaning, and in x

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particular on meaning found through music, entails. The subsequent Expression and Truth added a defense of the cognitive value of expression and of the ethos of interpretation it makes available under the rubric of descriptive realism: not realistic description, but the descriptive production of the real. The Thought of Music can be regarded as the third part of a trilogy on musical understanding, concentrating, in turn, and with many inevitable overlaps, on the activities referred to in the three titles: interpretation, expression, and thought. All of these books are also about the experience of culture, and more specifically of modernity, through music, not about music narrowly conceived. It is precisely the conviction that modernity was formed as much by music as music was by a prior phenomenon called modernity that (alone) justifies a belief in the continued vitality of the music. For technological and institutional reasons, and not just cultural ones, music since at least the turn of the nineteenth century has played an enveloping, soundtrack-like role in the formation of subjectivity and a wide range of cultural practices. The music of this era (and perhaps of earlier ones, too, though on different terms that need to be addressed separately) is not just a secondary phenomenon, although it is often positioned as a kind of background against which experience emerges as figure. This music is often a sensory equivalent or realization of the horizon of inchoate understanding, the half presence of a promised or hoped-for knowledge, the weight of the not-yet-known, which forms the precondition of knowledge as discovery rather than knowledge as repetition, even when the knowledge is a retrieval of what has been known before. This is so for both good and ill. Music can acquire coercive force as idol, icon, or commodity, or music can supply, even become, a force of transformation. Basic to these possibilities, as Interpreting Music and Expression and Truth sought to show, is an emphasis on the knowledge-value of performativity and on the constructive power of description. Both performative and descriptive force should be understood as equally musical and critical, equally imaginative and interpretive. And both inevitably lead to the age-old but seemingly inexhaustible question of music and language. Classical instrumental music—the music addressed in this book—may be said to raise that question in its exemplary, paradigmatic form, and even, historically speaking, to have invented it. This music is my focus here in part because I value it highly but in part because of its particular qualities, which are as much exceptional as they are exemplary. By its emphasis on the formation of an event, by its insistence on the narrativity and the extrapolative Pr e fac e

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potential of expression, by its combination of expressive immediacy and the hermeneutic deferral of the immediate, this music offers opportunities to suspend language in a particular sense: to silence, for an extended period, or intermittently within an extended period, the voices in one’s head. This offer carries over via stylistic protocols even to short works and to vocal ones, especially as the latter tend towards vocalizing well in excess of intoning words on pitch. But no vocal work suspends language in the same way that instrumental music does, and the relationship of vocal music to language, which is hardly confined to classical genres, needs to be examined with an ear to those differences of genre and mode. The key word here, however, is suspend, which does not mean to annul or exclude; it means to defer knowingly, to make present as a potentiality rather than an actuality. Instrumental music suspends language much as literature, according to Derrida, suspends reference: “There is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference. Suspended means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality. In its suspended condition literature can only exceed itself.” 4 The effect of such suspension is not to solicit silence but to solicit an enriched return of language: more language, not less, and language refreshed by being reconnected to the primary dynamism—the universal impetus toward becoming intelligible that Walter Benjamin identified as the linguistic character of being, an idea developed more fully by Heidegger5—which language tends to conceal in the act of revealing itself. The relation of music and language is not an opposition, even when the two are, contingently, opposed.

This summons to language also serves as a model for humanistic knowledge broadly conceived. A powerful way to cast this argument (and the book might be said to proceed precisely by casting it in multiple ways) is to extend Derrida’s analysis of the as-if structure of humanistic knowledge. The as-if, like its complement, the neither/nor, is to be understood here not as a logical or verbal formula but as a general conceptual operation the force of which is performative. Derrida traces this operation to Kant’s recurrent use of the as-if (als ob) to suspend—here he says to “disconcert”—understanding and/or perception between the terms that for Kant determine what is proper to humanity, namely necessity and freedom. The work of art, for example, and it is not just any example, must be apprehended “as art and not nature; yet still the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all compulsion [Zwange] by arbitrary rules as if [als ob] it were a product of mere nature.” 6 xii

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The terms necessity and freedom place Kant’s thought in a world where harsh necessities of all sorts were much more a part of everyday life than they have become in the wealthier, technologically saturated societies of the present century. But the as-if, once it assumes what Derrida calls “the gravity, seriousness, and irreducible necessity”7 it has in Kant, becomes a form of thought that extends beyond its historical occasion. Expanding the frame of reference to accommodate other concerns is not difficult. In the strong sense of suspend identified earlier, the performative as-if suspends the activities of understanding and/or perception between their material/empirical and their imaginary/symbolic conditions of possibility. Derrida takes “a certain as if ” of this kind to mark “the structure and the mode of being of all objects belonging . . . to the Humanities,” including not only “what are called oeuvres, singularly oeuvres d’art, the fine arts (painting, sculpture, cinema, music, poetry, literature, and so forth), but also . . . all the symbolic and cultural productions” of the humanities and even “a certain structure” of knowledge in general.8 Humanistic knowledge has suspension at its core. How does this suspension operate? The immediate effect of the as-if is to block the issuing of a truth claim. The as-if makes us, of necessity, fall short of asserting that something is true, or, more strongly, it compels us to acknowledge that something in which we have an interest may not (yet? ever?) be known as true. But at the same time, the as-if allows us (its very compelling force enables us) to disregard this necessary default on truth even in the act of observing it. This is not a simple matter of supposition against the facts. The as-if allows us to take as true enough what we cannot verify; it allows us to extend our interest to that dimension of assessment in which the possibility of truth outweighs both the lack of certainty and the possibility of error; it enables us to find a terrain of understanding where what concerns us (concern being the measure of interest) may intimate something true and where that may, that possibility as such, what Derrida calls the perhaps,9 itself becomes the truth to which we can give our credit, our credibility, to which we can choose to be—true. The aesthetic is the mode in which this may, perhaps, happen. Whether or not it happens in an official work of art is unimportant. Put in its most robust form, the thesis would be this: that knowledge in the strong sense, knowledge in its most robust form, is never a matter of simply knowing what is true or false. Knowledge of the world, as opposed to knowledge of data, arises only in understandings that can neither be true nor false, that is, in understandings the epistemic form of which is the form of Pr e fac e

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the aesthetic. And to develop these understandings and give them credibility is to coax, draw out, summon, conjure—among other alternatives—the neither/nor (see Expression and Truth) in which robust knowledge begins to assume its positive form: the as-if. The central issue arises paradigmatically in the third essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, with its analysis of the academic form of ascetic ideals, that is, of the university faculty as a secularized form of ascetic priesthood: It is precisely in their faith in truth that [these so-called “free spirits”] are more rigid and unconditional than anyone. I know all this from too close up perhaps: that venerable philosopher’s abstinence to which such a faith commits one; that intellectual stoicism which ultimately refuses not only to affirm but also to deny; that desire to halt before the factual, the factum brutum; . . . that general renunciation of all interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpretation)—all this expresses, broadly speaking, as much ascetic virtue as any denial of sensuality (it is at bottom only a particular mode of this denial).10

The persistence of this attitude (to which no one is immune, as Nietzsche acknowledges) is discernable in a little maxim of Derrida’s that takes on an extra shade of différance with the addition of a Freudian element (the superego, not the phallus): “It is difficult, in the dominant philosophical tradition (to be deconstructed)[,] to separate rigor from rigidity.”11 This rigidity is a kind of armor against what Derrida calls “what remains to be thought,” and to be thought “without alibi”; rigid rigor always has an alibi, a plea on behalf of prudence and forensic probity against the claims of meaning as an emergent property irreducible to its apparent sources and supports. What remains to be thought, and always remains to be thought, is a livable venue for exuberant understanding—my translation of Nietzsche’s fröhliche Wissenschaft, less usefully known as “gay science” or “cheerful wisdom.” This orientation toward what remains to be said, which includes what must be said anew, often repeatedly, depends on an affirmation of genuinely open interpretation—an activity based not on a technique but on the embrace of exuberant understanding. Movement in that direction is incessantly confronted by a pull in one contrary or another, reflecting not only the difficulty of separating rigor from rigidity but also the temptation to turn resources into systems that end up doing one’s thinking for one. xiv

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The most recent instances have come from affect theory and cognitive science, each of which in its own way depends on the human body’s wiring to anchor understanding in empirically robust terms. Each is a conceptual field with its own measure for significant results and statements. But both, in much the same way, repeat the long-standing effort of other empirical disciplines to either dismiss or domesticate the form of knowledge on which the humanities depends, for which the movement of meaning is not merely a source of vitality and pleasure but the condition of possibility. This movement in turn depends on a refusal of the distinction between ideas and language (I do not say signifier and signified, though this famous duality is included, because, as I have argued elsewhere, meaning is not primarily a product of signification—meaning is not a signified). The movement of meaning, the movement that is meaning, therefore also depends implicitly on a refusal of a Cartesian mind-body distinction in any of the myriad and annoyingly persistent forms this distinction takes. (I do not say a solution; no one has a solution, and by now the possibility is real that no one ever will.) There is no reason why affect theory or cognitive science should not form collaborative means of producing humanistic knowledge, but there is every reason why they should not become complicit with its replacement. As Ruth Leys observed in a decisive critique, affect theory depends entirely on a disavowed Cartesian dualism.12 The logic involved is simple and inexorable; to Leys’s critique, which shows this dualism at work in the founding texts of affect theory, I would add only that the moment one conceives of affect as preconceptual and prelinguistic, the mind-body duality has already been fully installed. (Affect as thus understood occupies the place that music in its aesthetic dimension has often been assigned.) The same stricture applies if one draws the line between behavior and cognition, or neural processing and cognition. If the pre- (or even stronger non-) holds good, then mind and body, and accordingly language and life, already stand as different registers of the human subject with a gap between them that is constantly bridged in practice and constantly reopened in theory. Cognitive science can live with this problem because it is, after all, seeking empirical knowledge. Affect theory has a harder time because its core concept, affect itself, is speculative and anecdotal rather than empirical unless one identifies affect entirely with autonomic nervous-system response, and even to do that requires the intervention of a typology, that is, a regulative fiction. We can acknowledge that the aim of such arrangements is to make a certain kind of understanding possible within an independent conceptual Pr e fac e

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field. But the aim of such arrangements in the humanities can only be negative and cautionary, not to say suffocating. The aim is protection—but protection of whom? And why is it needed?—against the wandering of understanding. Nietzsche was quite right to identify the discipline involved as ascetic virtue, a form of self-denial with pleasures of its own. Music is a particularly seductive target for this habit of mind, partly because of the obvious pliancy of its meanings (so hard, we say, to say what they are, as if it were easy anywhere), and partly because music until very recently has required embodiment in order to exist; music has to be performed, or at least that’s how things used to be. (Computers can take care of that now for instrumental music. Voices are a bit harder—but just wait.) The body in performance, under the sway of “real time,” overrides the mind’s performance, which we call listening. So, at any rate, we have sometimes been told, and seem to take any opportunity to assume even without being told. But we can believe it only if we want to be abstracted subjects mysteriously bound to a world of objects, a condition we may then refuse to recognize but cannot escape. The only way out of this impasse is to cut the knot and retie it. In the humanistic sphere, presence of mind is potentiality of body, presence of body potentiality of mind, and both may exist at the same moment. “Recollection” may be substituted here for “potentiality,” also at the same moment. “Idea,” “apprehension,” “perception,” or “experience” may substitute for either “mind” or “body” and “language,” “gesture,” or “expression” for the counterterm, though with the proviso that language—discourse, speech act, even raw vocable or bare jotting—is preeminent. Its preeminence is important to emphasize partly because it is language that provokes the very movement of meaning it is then often asked to arrest, and partly because the resentment of language, the insistence not that words sometimes fail but that they must sometimes fail, opens up the question of the ineffable, the apophatic, for which music has so often been asked to play the poster child. Umberto Eco once made an over-confident distinction between firm and fanciful interpretations (we will revisit it in chapter 5),13 an action that demands the presupposition that he holds the sovereign position of knowing the difference, the most high judicial position of separating the sheep of historical truth from the goats of fiction. This ex cathedra claim is flawed not only because of its conceptual and institutional rigidity and not only because it is obviously an expression of the interpretive will to power described by Nietzsche. It is flawed because the interpretation that is supposedly out of xvi

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synch with the facts (ignoring for the moment that the “facts” are partly irrecoverable, always partly opaque, and partly established by the questions posed and interpretations proffered about them) is the interpretation connected with its object in a way that the guardian of interpretive probity does not like. The loft y claim is also flawed because it regards understanding, and a fortiori interpretation (which must belong to all acts of understanding), as a representation of the facts. Of course there is a crude sense in which correspondence to “facts on the ground” is necessary; Nietzsche did not like democracy; Wagner did not like Jews. But the arena of this kind of certainly is highly limited and very quickly exceeded. Representation has nothing to do with any knowledge beyond raw empiricism. The substance of knowledge is in part a creation of the aims of knowledge: one has to ask, in Austin’s manner, in what dimension of assessment one is operating.14 Understanding events and conditions, as opposed to compiling data, constitutes what Wittgenstein would call a form of life,15 a mode of concerned address in the sense both of action and speech. This last observation brings up a fundamental question that has so far not been addressed adequately by anyone. The question needs to be acknowledged even in default of an answer, because both critical knowledge of music and humanistic knowledge generally depend on the phenomenon of which the question is posed: the mysterious efficacy of expressive acts, the power of word and tone to make things be, to become themselves, to become other than what they have been. The reason why Austin’s concept of the performative speech act has been so consequential is that it calls attention to the working and the pervasiveness of this power while at the same time failing—and I mean productively failing, usefully failing—to account for it. In particular, the power of the performative does not come exclusively, or rest exclusively, with its social determinants, which are at a more fundamental level only a medium. The power of the performative is ontological, and it has to be theorized accordingly, in particular by an ontology based on immersion in the expressive language of descriptive realism. Any theory adequate to the task would be in the strange position of having to exemplify itself; it could “prove” itself (in the several senses of the term) only by being the thing it describes. Giorgio Agamben moves in that direction with his proposal, in The Sacrament of Language, that becoming human is continually reenacted in those moments when we give our word, when we promise or commit ourselves to our words, those moments in which we perform the gesture that “determinates the extraordinary implication of the subject in his word.”16 Pr e fac e

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To this understanding we need to add that the implication of the subject in the word is at the same time an implication in a world that the word helps to compose. And to this addition we need to add, further, that the word may be distilled to the tone of its utterance, and that musical utterance arises to repeat that concentration in reverse, as an expansion. In music, too, we give our word, even though we do not speak it.

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ack now l e dgm en ts

Most of chapters 1 and 2 and portions of chapters 3 and 5 were previously published as follows. My thanks to the publishers for permission to reprint this material here. Most of chapter 1 was published as “Philosophizing Musically: Reconsidering Music and Ideas,” in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139 (2014), 387–404. Most of chapter 2 was published as “Speaking of Music,” in Keith Chapin and Andrew Clark, eds., Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 19–38. Portions of chapter 3 were published as “A Grammar of Cultural Musicology (Which Has No Grammar),” in Embracing Restlessness: Cultural Musicology (Hildesheim: Ohms, 2015). A portion of chapter 5 was published as “Oracular Musicology; or, Faking the Ineffable,” in Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 69 (2012), 101–9.

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Music and the Forms of Thought

So: what do we know about music? What do we think we know? What kind of knowledge is that and what is its relationship to other kinds? As I write, thinking about music has passed through almost a quarter-century of intellectual ferment. Has anything been settled? What do we want to know? What should we be asking these days? Much recent work, both pro and con, suggests that one thing we should be asking—still—is this: What does music have to do with ideas? The form of the question implies that the ideas at issue are not ideas about music, at least not primarily, but ideas about anything and everything else. More importantly, the question assumes that music and such ideas are capable of separation in the first place, that they begin from a condition of independence, indifference, or antagonism. One way to describe the ferment of recent decades is to say that after around 1990, too many people to ignore had become unwilling to grant that assumption. Ideas from all over the compass seemed to invite, or even demand, not only a hearing with music, but also the recognition that music had never been heard, could never be heard, without ideas. (What music? Any music. Take your pick. What ideas? Any and all; the question is what to do with them.) One result of this push to ideation was a hermeneutic impulse that broke radically with the tradition of what, faute de mieux, I will call closed or weakly contextual hermeneutics—the essentially modernist practice of aesthetic paraphrase that, according to Gary Tomlinson, can be traced from Donald Tovey through Charles Rosen to Richard Taruskin.1 The turn from closed to open hermeneutics has had too many forms for easy summary, but most of them have seemed premised on the falsity of Kant’s claim that music pleases us acutely but does not leave us much to think about—that it is “more 1

pleasure than culture.”2 Another result, probably inevitable, was a backlash that has tried to think of music in performance as a means of extinguishing thought—or, failing that, to preserve a precinct of difference in which music could find shelter from the ideas raging all around it. This is not the place to expose—yet again—the emptiness of such claims. Suffice it to say, in passing, just two things in lieu of the fuller arguments that have been made elsewhere. On performance: even if performance did put the mind to sleep (but does it? Whose mind? And don’t vivid performances actually wake us up?), there is nothing to prevent us from reflecting afterward on what we’ve heard. On the dream of rediscovering what James Currie calls “music after all”3: that insubstantial pageant dissolves the moment we say anything about music. One sentence is all it takes to open the door to language and the symbolic order. (Whereof one speaks, thereof one cannot be silent.) Autonomy becomes contingency the moment it allows any act of interpretation, however small. One touch of meaning saturates its bearer with heterogeneity. If music were really the black hole (or rabbit hole) down which thought disappears, would we even be able to hear it? The persistent effort to situate music at some such vanishing point seems to suffer from a double dose of what W. J. T. Mitchell calls ekphrastic fear—the fear that representation will consume or hollow out what it represents.4 The dose is double because it involves both speaking about music and thinking about it—and if the words are bad enough (being metaphorical and such like), the ideas are worse. Words fail to capture music (or so we’re told; did anyone ever expect them to?) but concepts kill it. Well, no: not for me, anyway. Critical musicology, cultural musicology, New Musicology—call it what you will, and love or hate it—rose on the power of thinking precisely the contrary. That thought is its wager. This trend or temperament (it was never a doctrine) sees a rough but vital harmony among music, words, and ideas as they address, orbit, and collide with each other. Often this harmonia mundi happens in terms that should impel us to rethink not only the relationships among its elements but their very identities (for of course none has just one). Of course I would say so—I have a bet down, myself. My own work—call it what you will, and love it or hate it—has been an extended effort to share in and give further voice to that harmony, discords notably included. The wording here is important. Any notion that such an effort seeks to nail music down to some Aesopian signified is a caricature. Music is thinking in tones. Where have we heard that before? 2

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But the impulse to confine or suspend thought where (and wherever?) music goes obviously exists for a reason, and although it may have to give ground, it is not likely to give up or give out. So it is a good idea to give it a sympathetic hearing on occasion, so as to test the limits and reexamine the conditions of possibility of thinking about music as thinking (about everything, music included) in tones. The premise of—let’s call it the polyglot position—is that ideas saturate music, and music saturates ideas, and so does everything else (both ways). The ideas do not come with guarantees. Pursuing them often requires doing without the consolation or illusion of empirical or theoretical foundations, and it often demands some creative enterprise. (These requisites, of course, apply well beyond music.) But the contrary position—call it the monophonic—asks us, not unreasonably, to acknowledge that there are times when we want just music, to lose ourselves in music, and since it would be foolish to deny this (we are all monophonic sometimes), it would also be foolish not to ask about the kernel of truth in the monophonic position’s ekphrastic fear. Perhaps ideas can do damage to music, or more exactly, to our experience of music; perhaps in denying a reductionist impulse in the polyglot attitude I have already acknowledged as much. So it behooves even the most ardent of polyglot thinkers to ask about when and how such damage may occur, and how its possibility should alter our thinking about thinking about music.

getting stuck So just what is the thought of music, in all the ambiguity of that phrase? Working out answers to that question requires a series of test cases, single instances that can stand as paradigmatic “best examples.” (The need for single, singular instances is general. The reasons why will appear below.) This book is itself such a series. Its first instance is Paul Harper-Scott’s recent The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism, a book that raises the issue of music and ideas in a big way.5 The book is a sweeping indictment of musicology and a manifesto for its transformation. Its core thesis is that musicology today is mired in a neoliberal late-Capitalist swamp from which it blindly ignores “our most pressing present concern—to escape the horrors of the present by imagining the transformations of a coming society” (xiv). The argument draws, by its own account, and despite the book’s Lacanian title, primarily on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which it purports first to expound and M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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then to apply to questions of musicology and music, particularly with reference to modernism and the proposal that modernist music, rightly understood, can help advance the pressing concern of utopian hope. That last sentence is meant to be a neutral summary, but the innocentseeming word apply is a loaded one. Application is precisely what I think we should not be doing. Similarly, the innocent-seeming phrase “musicology and music” is actually anything but. Harper-Scott subsumes both the method and the object of study under the same umbrella opened by (his) Badiou without reflecting on whether the difference matters, and without questioning whether Badiou’s categories can be trusted to act as a universal conceptual solvent. Badiou’s philosophy of the Event, which, full disclosure, I have called on sympathetically in some of my own recent work, here takes on the mantle of dogma, or what Harper-Scott himself might identify as a quilting point—Lacan’s metaphor for a term that arrests the unruly motion of a body of signifiers to create a coherence at once potent and fictitious. Ideas endowed with that much power, if one adheres to them, can subsume music and musicology easily because they can subsume almost anything. But it is just this sort of power that I think we should deny to ideas by our ways of deploying them. This chapter will sketch the project of that deployment with primary reference to music, though doing so will obviously continue to have implications for musicology. The practice of the latter does, after all, depend on one’s conception of the former. Nonetheless, Harper-Scott’s quarrels with Taruskin (whom he pillories mercilessly) and others are not my present concern. Neither is his account of modernism. And I have no interest in criticizing him except insofar as he encounters difficulties to which none of us is immune. My aim, to put it in terms that acknowledge a certain underlying irony, is to work up some ideas on the problem of ideas and their potential bearing on music, for good and ill. But the problem of application instanced by The Quilting Points in relation to music may also, mutatis mutandis, be understood to bear on what we take to be a tenable program for understanding music, or, more broadly, for the pursuit of humanistic knowledge in general, to which both music and our ways of understanding music have something to contribute. For starters, then, let’s try pinning a few things down via Harper-Scott. The Quilting Points is a stimulating book to argue with. It is quite provocative—admirably so—but also quite provoking. The book strikes me as tyrannical in its quest for liberation. It invites a critique that turns its own stand4

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point against it. Nonetheless, the book’s ekphrastic fearlessness is bracing. To argue with it at all is to acknowledge that the kind of ideas it draws on are not the intrusions on music ab extra they are still sometimes thought to be. The Quilting Points can form a point of departure here (without becoming a quilting point itself) because of its exemplary insistence that ideas not specific to music are foundational to musical understanding. The trouble with that is not the appeal to ideas as such, something I am obviously glad to endorse. The problem is with the covert assumptions that the ideas are transparent and that they operate from the top down. Harper-Scott is refreshingly candid about this: Because the argument of this book depends on a fundamental critique of the forms of argument and the subject positions of scholars of modernism, it depends at every stage on an expansive philosophical interrogation of the ideas of truth, ideology, and the subject as they appear in the theory of Martin Heidegger, Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan, and Giorgio Agamben (to name the most important influences on my argument). These ideas, which I draw on freely and extensively throughout the book, are introduced as they arise, and often re-presented later. . . . They are given an exposition that presumes little familiarity with the theory (xiv).

The language of expansiveness, extensiveness, and freedom here shows a great deal of confidence in the ideas it recruits—whether misplaced or not readers will judge for themselves—but what does this language hide? Subject positions can be critiqued only from other subject positions, and this passage firmly stakes out an imaginary subject position of its own, that of the philosopher as first among tutors, the master who expounds philosophical truths for the disciple. In invoking this metaphor I have in mind not only the rhetorical form of medieval pedagogy but also Lacan’s “discourse of the master,” the attempt to organize a diversity of signifiers (here directed at understanding modernism) under a master signifier (here the compounded ideas of Heidegger, Badiou, etc.) while concealing the problem that every such effort produces a remainder that inevitably compromises its success and questions its possibility.6 Push that thought a step further and it leaves the master the first and last subject, in every sense of the term, of his own discourse. Just for this reason, however, the position formulated here makes The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism paradigmatic of the problem of application and therefore a paradigmatic text to depart from (in both senses of “depart”). In what follows, I will continue to let philosophical ideas M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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epitomize ideas in general, in part because the philosophical register helps bring out a key aspect of the problem—the aspect of otherness, of ideas about this applied to that—and in part because of the epistemic authority that philosophical ideas are still, often unreflectively, allowed to carry. That authority is the very reason they tempt us to “apply” them.

getting unstuck The metaphor of the quilting point provides an effective way to piece together the problem of application. As I use the term here, ideas are applied by becoming quilting points. The process presupposes the transparency and topdown authority I mentioned earlier, at least as a pretense. (This is a languagegame; that is the uncanny—or bare life, or the coming community, or a rhizome, or. . . . You get the idea.) If Lacan is right, we are all stuck with this process because otherwise we could not make our way through the swarm of signifiers among which we live. But that is not so certain. Signifiers and signifieds are capable of intricate and giddy dances, but ordinary life tends to proceed on the assumption that they have a good enough stability for most purposes. And meaning may not be a product of signification at all, a claim I have argued elsewhere; meaning uses signifiers in limited ways but it does not come from them.7 There is no imperative to pin ourselves down with ideas, and perhaps a strong imperative not to. The problem with the quilting point is that the concept allows for nothing in between a discourse that is all buttoned up and a discourse that is all mobile signifiers. The problem with application is that it turns the second into the first; its mode of understanding is to stick the buttons on. Application does not use ideas; it reproduces them; it transforms phenomena into allegories. If we want something more, we have to find a way into that intermediate space where our discourse (assuming for the moment that signifiers are at issue) can avoid playing fast or loose and instead can sway or channel or in every sense conduct the flow of signifiers. There is currently no standard name for doing this. My inclination is to think of it as an extension of the open hermeneutics I alluded to earlier, a practice of open interpretation that includes creative activity, performance, and the reuse or reiteration of cultural products as well as the production of discourse. Are there criteria for using ideas generatively in open interpretation, and, if so, what might they be? Clearly, they could not rely on any of the either/or 6

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distinctions that open interpretation puts in question. Divisions between history and criticism, or work and performance, or the empirical and the speculative, will be of no help because they, too, tend primarily to reproduce themselves; they seek application. In other words, we cannot set ratios between opposed terms to guide the desired practice. Instead of speaking of an intermediate space between fi xity and flux (which turns out to be only a first approximation) we need to try imagining a space of continuous transformation and self-paraphrase in which all boundary terms are dead ends. The issue is complicated by the fact that no one such space is possible; there will be more to say later about the problem of the one, with particular reference to music. Prior attempts to imagine such a space tend to represent it as the medium of a distinctively modern form of cognition. Walter Benjamin, for example, said of Kafka that his work “constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author at the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings.”8 In a later text, Benjamin went further, observing that Kafka’s writings were parables that had to become more than parables. Instead of assuming a truth that can never be fully transmitted, they preserve the fullness of transmission while sacrificing the determination of truth.9 The result is a discourse full of what we might, troping on (or against) a term first suggested by Suzanne Langer, call partly consummated symbols—symbols that give a meaning that they do not have.10 This discourse, in Benjamin’s reading, may help suggest one of the criteria for what to do with ideas. The point is not to write like Kafka (as if we could) but to emulate him: not to do the same thing, but to do many similar things. Kafka thus understood supplies a model not by specifying positive content, but by indicating conditions of possibility. One criterion, then, is that our practice or discourse should be amenable to the presence of partly consummated symbols, elements of untethered parable that guide but never determine the understandings they elicit. Another criterion, equally implicit in Benjamin’s account of Kafka (not “in Kafka,” and the point is significant; we will come back to it), is what we might think of as the criterion of vulnerability. Change and experiment presuppose uncertainty and open-endedness. The ideas put to those ends must retain the mobility of the material they engage with, which means that they must be open to change and experiment as they go along; they must be capable of being rewritten by the phenomenon they address. The generative use of an M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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idea only begins with the idea’s identification of some phenomenon as falling within its purview. If that identification is to be anything more than an appropriative paraphrase that merely reaffirms itself as a premise, the idea must show a reciprocal impact from its exposure to the single and singular instance it addresses. The change wrought by that impact is what the idea reveals, if it reveals anything. This capacity for metamorphosis belongs especially (if not exclusively) to modern forms of cognition because the confidence induced by the quilting points of yore is impossible to recover. The buttons have all come loose while other sorts of discourse have thrived like invasive species. Not to build this awareness into the space(s) of our practice would be to remain unaware of something basic about the conditions of our thought. The lost quilting points, moreover, include those of earlier moments of modernity. During the modernist era, the humanistic impulse often defined itself in opposition to machine models of knowledge and identity, but the machines in question lacked intelligence. Today’s emergent models are based on intelligent machines and on machine-human interfaces that run continuously from one term to another. So we need a new alternative, and not one that quixotically opposes other forms of practice and discourse but one that differs from them—differs in ways that attract both attention and desire. One of the paramount features of “posthuman” interfaces is the unprecedented volatility they offer by means of cutting and pasting, processes that not only make texts, images, and sounds easily transferable and transportable, but that also, in so doing, expose modern cognition to an unprecedented degree of heterogeneity. With that, too, comes a dispersal of agency, a circulation of actions in which the subject is more vehicle than origin. We might accordingly take a readiness to accommodate heterogeneity as another criterion for the use of ideas in open interpretation. The three criteria of partial consummation, vulnerability, and heterogeneity may usefully inform how we put ideas to work—on one condition. The criteria have to be so interpreted that they meet their own standards: that they guide but do not determine the direction of discourse, that they are open to change and experiment, and that they are amenable to multiplicity. But how do we get from these general ideational concerns to music in particular? We make music, among other reasons, in order not to accept being buttoned down, and we might now find it best to think, and write, and talk about music in ways that extend the enterprise. How do we go about it? 8

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understanding musically When it comes to music, to think without the buttons is to turn the noun into an adverb: it is to understand musically, to philosophize musically. It is to ask how the knowledge we derive from studying, teaching, performing and composing music can annex ideas from philosophy and elsewhere and bring them into a mutually informative relation with acoustic culture. To engage thus would change both the import of the ideas and the nature of the musical practice, and would do so, ideally speaking, without imposing either on the other as a constraint. The ideas we find most generative may often, perhaps most often, not be ideas about music at all. When figures like Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Žižek, or Stanley Cavell take musical excursions they are writing as philosophers, not musicians. For us to make good use of their philosophical ideas, the ideas have to become musical ideas, not just ideas that some music may illustrate. Andrew Bowie has argued compellingly that the best philosophy of music comes about when we recognize the power of music to raise and explore philosophical questions.11 The same principle applies to a philosophical hermeneutics of music. Ideas may tempt us to treat them as master signifiers, but we need to respond instead by treating them as points of departure. (The significance of that little word points will emerge shortly.) And we have to do this work for ourselves: we cannot let philosophy or philosophers do it for us. For what happens when we apply ideas or give readings based on them, usually associated with an authoritative name: “quilting point,” “Lacanian reading,” and so on? (Even Žižek is not exempt from this question, though his Lacan is for the most part a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy, and sometimes none the worse for it.) Such certified application only suppresses the interpretive possibilities it is supposed to open. That is often true even when we are wary of it. The idea turns us into its ventriloquist’s dummy. To put an idea to work rather than merely apply it to music—or, really, to anything else—it is imperative to recognize, first of all, that the idea has to be interpreted. Ideas have no fi xed form; they exist in a series of citations, repetitions, and paraphrases; they depend on language. (Hence the caution offered earlier, that the criterion of partial consummation is not “in” Kafka.) The burden of the contingent history that comprises any idea must be taken up knowingly and must affect the way in which the idea is understood both before and after it is put to work. Take “quilting point” again. The English term is not a good translation of point de capiton, which Lacan says refers to upholstery buttons. The suturing M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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here is not stitching but pinning, which implies a degree of force or violence and avoids the comforting image of a quilt, a.k.a. a comforter. So understood, the idea under whatever name forecloses the possibility that the subject might willingly or spontaneously or enthusiastically invest or absorb itself in symbolic forms. Harper-Scott, following Žižek, uses the identification of quilting points as a means of ideology critique, but Lacan regards the points de capiton as necessary even though the coherence they produce is illusory; quilting points form the subject’s line of defense against psychosis.12 Like anything with a sharp point, the concept has to be used with caution. In Écrits, Lacan sharpens the metaphor further—to a fishhook.13 But without the hook, there is no catch. And the metaphor dangles under a cluster of floating signifiers that it may or may not invoke but in any case cannot arrest: for starters, the fisherman is a traditional symbol of both the idler (“Gone Fishing”) and the seducer (as in Schubert and Schubart’s “Die Forelle”), the fish is a symbol of Christianity (based on an anagram formed by the Greek word ΙΧΘΥΣ [Ichthys]), and Jesus’s disciples are fishers of men. Lacan introduces the idea of the quilting point in a quasi-Biblical context, a reading of a scene in Racine’s Athalie to which, in retrospect, he gives a musical twist: “Were we to analyze this scene like a musical score, we should see that this is the point at which the signifier and signified are knotted together, between the still floating mass of meanings that are actually circulating. . . . Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier, similar to those little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retrospectively and prospectively.”14 Note, however, that Lacan omits the possibility entailed by his metaphor, that there is not just one quilting point on the surface, but many. His “everything” is myopic. The surface is covered with a whole network of points, from which the radiating lines overlap, combine, and clash with each other. The effect of meaning comes not from the points as such, but from the matrix that envelops them. The trouble with Harper-Scott’s quilting point—and it’s an exemplary problem, not something to lay at Harper-Scott’s doorstep alone—is that the idea remains stubbornly Lacanian throughout the text; it never finds its musical transpositions. For such transpositions to appear, for ideas to be put to work in musical terms responsible to our three criteria, the music must be granted enough semantic license for accounts of it to join, on equal terms, the 10

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succession of paraphrases, citations, and reiterations that constitute the ideas in question. The music has to be accorded a concrete, idiomatic, and hermeneutically active role in the project of thought.

This can be done only with music in particular. To philosophize musically requires a practical response to an obvious fact that has not often had its due: There is no such thing as music. There is no phenomenon that corresponds to a single concept of music. Music is a prolific acoustic field of family resemblances. Both the philosophy of music and musical aesthetics have faltered over this point. Musical understanding needs to be reconceived in light of the experience of musical singularity. Music in the abstract can exemplify ideas but not interrogate them. We can think generatively about “music” only by putting ideas to work on its instances. This breakdown of generality has serious consequences, but it is important to spell out what those consequences are—and are not. That music does not exist as the referent of a single unified concept does not imply that we cannot think about music in general terms. How else are we supposed to think about it? The point is not to avoid conceptualizing music but to conceptualize it flexibly and, since no conceptualization can cover the whole field of resemblances or be adequate to all circumstances, to conceptualize it repeatedly in changing frames of reference. The argument in favor of singularity is that individual instances of music (whether works or performances) cannot be understood adequately by the application of fi xed general ideas. Each instance must be allowed to transform the concept it instantiates. This is possible because singularity and generality are not opposites. Singularity (not to be confused with particularity) is a way of inhabiting generality, a consequence of the fraught and indirect passage from the general to the particular. To talk about singularity, in music or any other locus of humanistic knowledge, we have to work our way through generality toward something else. At this point the discussion needs such a singular instance, and HarperScott provides a good one: the famous CG in the opening theme of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (see Example 1.1). Th is dissonant note, we’re told, is an example of the void that, for Badiou, subtends any event. The idea of this void is a node in a network of ideas that Badiou stitches together to elaborate on a theory of truth as fidelity to an event by a “faithful” subject. There is some question here of being “faithful” to Badiou himself, whose account M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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Allegro con Brio 3

2nd violins

violas

cellos 1st violins 7

cresc.

example 1.1. Beethoven, “Eroica” Symphony, opening.

supposedly rests on a rigorous derivation from axiomatic set theory and whose articulation of the details is so complex and multiple that it may be meant to resist rather than facilitate application (that, in any case, is its effect). But the broad conceptual arc is reasonably clear. Here is Harper-Scott: Every situation . . . contains a void element, which is subtracted from a situation in order to create it. . . . In terms of the subject’s relation to truth, [this void,] Ø, is the truth as it appears in the situation—strictly external to the situation (since it cannot be expressed fully in terms of the situation), but nominated by the faithful subject, in faithful confidence, as an infinite possibility “to-come.” [ . . . ] The tense for truth-Events is therefore the future perfect, [that which] . . . “will have been” assigned a referent. . . . [Consider] the Eroica’s aberrant CG. On its initial presentation in b. 7, it is simply the void element in the set of the scale of E-flat major, expressed as the set {0,2,4,5,7,9,11, Ø}. Beethoven’s confidence in this Ø and his faithful nomination of it through the remainder of the movement means that, as a result of its final spectacular resolution in the coda, it “will have been” assigned a referent in b. 7 something like form-generating excrescence of the tonal architecture. (75–76, italics in original)

We might want to question here the use of set-theoretical notation (both musical and mathematical) simply to give an aura of rigor to the simple obser12

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vation that CG is dissonant in E-flat major. More substantively, we might also want to question the use of Badiou’s elaborate apparatus to tell us what we already know, or think we know—what the textbooks say, anyway—about the Eroica and its CG. Is there some way to put these ideas to work towards the uncovering of something we don’t know? Perhaps there is. This is not the place for anything like a full account, but it is at least possible to observe that the rubric “CG” in this instance takes in not just a note but a tangible sonorous thing, a manifold, or what Badiou might call a “multiple.” In addition to the pitch identity of the note, there is the crescendo that fi lls its extended duration, its color on cellos alone in the low tenor register without support from the double basses, the syncopated violin Gs that enter high above it, and the violins’ subsequent sforzando on AH—a “subtraction” no less jarring than the CG even if AH is nominally part of the E-flat major scale—once the bass has moved up to D. The subtraction audibly emerges from the foundation of the music, both formally and acoustically. It might be said to be the means by which the movement assumes its positive consistency, an act of assumption that may be what the famous opening chords are asking us to listen to. If so, the “void element” does create the situation of the movement, as Badiou would claim is necessary. But it does not do so exclusively by complying with later developments that determine what it will have been, no matter how often its long-term resolution (is there one? Perhaps we should not be so sure) has been celebrated. Instead, this “CG” becomes the kernel of the music’s immediately felt perceptual identity, the core of the music’s sensory character. Its status as texture rivals its role as architecture. This action, moreover, is independent of its consequences. The CG will, indeed, have become something by deferred action, but only in addition to, and possibly because of, what it has already been. Even more significant, this CG void is strangely palpable, as voids go. It is a fullness, even an over-fullness, far more than it is a blank. In Being and Event, Badiou denies that such palpability is possible. “What is at stake,” he says, is an unpresentable yet necessary figure . . . the non-term of any totality, the nothing particular to the situation, the unlocalizable void point in which it is manifest both that the situation is sutured to being and that the that-whichpresents-itself wanders in the presentation in the form of a subtraction. . . . It would already be inexact to speak of this nothing as a point [as Badiou has just done: LK] because it is neither local nor global, but scattered all over, M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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nowhere and everywhere: it is such that no encounter would authorize it to be held as presentable.15

The paradoxes and incessant self-paraphrase of this and other passages demonstrate what they cannot, in principle, exactly say; they cannot describe the void element so they have to adumbrate it. Badiou hammers the point home: the void element has no location. It is everywhere in the situation it precipitates precisely because it is nowhere. But the Eroica unapologetically reverses this logic. It insists that the void, or at least a void consistent with the values the music aims for—say of finding the best by facing the worst—must paradoxically be as local and concrete as possible, and as promising as it is enigmatic. The void is not a shell but a kernel. In this situation the void element can and must present itself, and present itself early. One name for such a void might be pure potentiality, which at this level of generative agency is not a necessary component of every situation, although it might be what, for Beethoven, qualifies a situation as what Badiou would call a truth-Event.16 Once treated as I have tried to treat the void element here, ideas can have extensive ripple effects. We might, for example, reconsider the notion of the “form-generating excrescence” by asking what happens when the CG manifold returns in the recapitulation. Is the most important thing about it that it “resolves”? Perhaps not, if we dwell on the fact that it resolves off the tonic to a C-major sonority, that is, to V/V/V (see Example 1.2). Perhaps the most important thing is that it returns at all, that the manifold does not efface itself but insists on its material presence and its ontological value. (Lacan or Žižek might say that it becomes an ethical affirmation by refusing to give way as to its desire. But we can’t pursue that thread here. Nor can we address the analytical question of whether the subsequent prominence of D-flat major in the coda represents a reinterpretation of the CG, except to say, again, that we should not be too sure. There is no clear place to stop this discourse, so it must simply be cut off.) Similar if less sweeping effects may often occur even when an idea seems to fit a piece of music perfectly well and therefore to apply in an unproblematic sense. (There should be an allowance made for this possibility, but it comes up less often than one might think, and the less so the more we hear music as singular—a topic to be considered shortly.) To illustrate, and to reach for a moment outside my comfort zone, consider Cole Porter’s mischievous song “Let’s Do it.” The song is a celebration of sexual anarchy. It reels off a potentially endless list of creatures (human and animal) who “do it” with-

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cresc.

example 1.2. Beethoven, “Eroica” Symphony, recapitulation of opening.

out regard for anything but pleasure, starting with the proverbial birds and bees. But its cadential refrain, “Let’s do it! Let’s fall in love,” is euphemistic to a fault—a flagrant evasion. From its first statement, the refrain mocks prudish conventionality. Verbally, it is less a coy invitation than a deliberate act of bathos; musically, it is a deployment of cadence not as a resolution or reward but as a curtailment. As the song continues, the attitude of the refrain becomes more radical. The vivaciousness of the music becomes an expression of animal drive, the social expression of which is effervescent wit and knowing insinuation. The cadence becomes a repressive device that exposes falling in love as a mere pretext, a displaced expression of “doing it.” Sex thus becomes subtracted from the song, whose situation is just that subtraction. And as Badiou would claim, this void element has no place; it is everywhere because it is nowhere. But at the same time, contrary to Badiou, this void element does localize itself in a specific absence, a little gasp heard in the line following each statement about which creatures “do it”; “educated fleas” (following those birds and bees) is the first example. The gasp is a vocal rest on the downbeat that recurs at this point. Sex, the void element, thus materializes its own absence, denies the promise of the “to-come,” and propels the song into an increasingly preposterous series of instances of who and what “do it.” The song itself thus becomes a replacement for the sex that the culture around it insists on subordinating to a false romantic impulse.17

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musical understanding “Musical understanding” is an ambiguous phrase. It can mean either understanding of music or understanding by music. The first meaning is the usual one, but the second is more than merely a grammatical double. I want to suggest that understanding of music and understanding by music are almost identical. The two are twins. They may sometimes get in each other’s way, but only in the process of each finding itself in the other’s place, in a classic instance of Derridean différance. Music both attracts and enacts understanding. As an aesthetic medium it does so through sensory, bodily events; as an imaginary or symbolic medium it does so through cultural tropes and hermeneutic windows. Music, of course, is not the only thing that acts this way—far from it. But in its semantic fluidity music might furnish the paradigm of such cognitive twinning, just as it furnishes the paradigm, or so I’ve argued, of interpretation and expression. Music is notorious for its power to give understanding and withhold it at the same time; like Achilles chasing the tortoise, we can never quite catch up to what we hear. But it is important not to misunderstand the withholding as an end term. There are always two actions, giving and withholding, enacting and attracting. Their joint effect is to show candidly the conjectural underpinning of all perception. With music, perception is conjecture. Music gives possibility and surmise the force but not the substance of observation. In other words, music offers to demonstrate that experience in the absence of assured knowledge is an entirely livable condition. Listening, enhanced through music, allows us to entertain the possibility of uncertainty and even bewilderment without regret. With music we know by not-knowing, or better, we know surely by not knowing for sure. Musical understanding just is this twinned condition, which, however, we need to understand better. Even Hegel said that philosophy begins in the ear. So what does musical understanding involve? Well, what does music involve? How does it involve us? The meaning of a musical act or occasion is the character of the experience it offers. Realizing as much shows the absurdity of the now exhausted question of whether music “has” meaning, which has been asked the wrong way throughout its history. The music-based experience may be described in terms of its kind (genre, recurrence, iteration) or of its instance (the particular, the event, the singular). The description forms part of the experience and vice versa. But to accomplish real understanding we have to go further. Our description must not only address the experience but also continue and transform the experience. To borrow an image from Lacan, these three actions—addressing, continuing, 16

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and transforming—make up a Borromean knot: they are all intertwined, and you cannot cut one without the whole assembly falling apart. Lacan speaks of a Borromean knot to emphasize the elusiveness of signification; a knot is an enigma. But it is more proper, topologically, to speak of Borromean rings, which suggest a complex harmony similar to Heidegger’s “round dance” of Being—our continual turning and returning amid the varied forms of proximity and distance. Heidegger develops this image with emphasis on the “radiance” and “mirror-play” that endow things with their place in the world—a richly provisioned place but also one that, Heidegger adds, is “unpretentious.”18 To this we might add further that such ringing, as the English word suggests, is also acoustic, perhaps essentially acoustic, and that dancing in the round is often an occasion for singing. Addressing, continuing, transforming. To think in the mode sketched here is to weave such rings together. Where such thinking ties itself in knots, its primary impulse is to tie them artistically rather than to attempt a denouement. When it comes to music, to think in this way is to exercise musical understanding, to philosophize musically, to think in tones. What do we think about when we do that? Anything you like. I tend to dwell on culture and the hermeneutics of the subject, but these choices—like the classical music I prefer—represent a necessarily limited and selective means of modeling the discourse I think we need for musical understanding. In a sense I have only one thing to say about that discourse, which is that one thing must always form its nucleus. To develop a point made earlier, thinking in tones can flourish only in the particular. Musical understanding depends on singularities, not on large generalities and above all not on a reified and rarefied ideal called Music, capital M. We have to address music with the same concreteness that it enhances to address us, the ones who play, compose, or listen. To say so is to bypass yet another sterile debate on whether to subordinate works and meanings to bodies and performances, or vice versa. Any of these alternatives is possible, none escapes mediation, and all are equally expendable and essential. What to make of them depends on how they address us, and we them, in the singularity of a musical event. Any such event will attract and enact musical understanding in its own way. As it does so, the music at hand, in whatever form it takes—performance, recording, memory, score; the list goes on—will both reach and escape us. Musical understanding will require the music to sacrifice a portion of its singularity while also wagering that part of what has been lost can sooner or later be regained in a new way. M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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The result is, or would or will be, a language of musical understanding far removed from the still-familiar ways of talking about musical form or style or genre or, worse, structure. It even runs ahead—though I would like to think that the distance is far less—of the hermeneutically inspired language I favor as an alternative. My recent work has tried to push that language further toward the nameless discourse I’m speculating on here.19 The received language should be demoted or abandoned. Let me repeat that: the received language should be demoted or abandoned. This process seems to require experiments of all sorts and to be quite unfinished; perhaps it is unfinished in principle. But whatever its morphing and metamorphoses, one thing remains at every phase, and that, as I said before, is just—one thing. Which means that one thing is still missing from these remarks, which can continue only if they settle on the one thing they need. What thing? Call it a reflection on the fact, and it’s no less, that music is not one thing. The consequence, only seemingly a paradox, is that musical understanding can extend to many things only if it grows out of some one thing, precisely one among many: one of the things that music, what we call music, can be. To speak in this way of music’s singularity is not to deny its participation in common discourses. On the contrary, that participation is necessary to the advent of singularity. The shared becomes a source of the singular when we understand musical traits to act like the verbal “shifters”—deictic terms like here, there, this, that, I, and you—that continually assume new import as they migrate from one situation to another.20 Otherwise we risk hearing not music, but a category. We can, of course, always choose to think generically, to deploy categories, to hypothesize norms and deviations. But all such discourses are limited by their tendency to reproduce themselves at the cost of the phenomena they seek to describe. Perhaps it is time to revive Alfred North Whitehead’s idea of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—not with the aim of absorption in pure process, but as a means of clearing the way for a discourse that preserves singularities without being confined to them. Music, I want to say, is both a model and an object of such a discourse, provided that we insist on it in the exemplary singular.21 How? We can start by acknowledging that there is no one way to do it, and that therefore it can be done only in an endless series of this way and this way: one way at a time. Musical understanding, thinking through music, means addressing, working through, extrapolating from attention to particular acts and events of music. Not to linger with the particular, not to prove the thought in sound, is fatal to the enterprise. We cannot work with a 18

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Platonic phantasm of music that floats free of circumstance, history, accident, moment, and différance. Too many philosophers, perhaps, have been enchanted by that phantasm even while clearing up multitudes of phantasms in other departments. To illustrate, consider—one thing. For Jean-Luc Nancy, the essential element in music and in listening generally is timbre: “Timbre . . . forms the first consistency of sonorous sense as such . . . [for] even if it remains possible and true to distinguish [timbre] from pitch, duration, intensity, there is, however, no pitch, and so on, without timbre (just as there is no line or surface without color). We are speaking, then, of the very resonance of the sonorous.”22 This statement is questionable on both logical and musical grounds. Logic first. What Nancy says about timbre can be said equally about the other sensory qualities he mentions. Yes, there is no pitch or duration or intensity without timbre, but there is no timbre without pitch and duration and intensity, not to mention rhythm, attack, tempo, texture, contour, and so on. It makes no sense to single timbre out for idealization, even in the name of sheer materiality or “sonorous sense.” The “very resonance of the sonorous” can be anything or nothing depending on what is sounding—a point basic to musical understanding. To music, then. As musicians we know very well that any sensory quality may emerge in a particular act of music as the “first consistency” of its “sonorous sense.” There is no the “very resonance of the sonorous”; there are only singular resonances that come to sound that way. Examples come quickly to mind. Pitch: the incessantly repeated AH in Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude, a pitch—a pitch, not a note—whose contradictory burden is that it can’t bear to stop and can’t bear not to. Duration: the multiplier of expression in the finale of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. Intensity: the extended fortissimo outburst in the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. And that’s just classical music. Old classical music. But let’s stick with timbre. Driving home from the train station one day while this chapter was in progress I had the misfortune to hear an arrangement of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings for wordless a capella chorus.23 It was a cringe-worthy moment, but it did get me thinking about the role of timbre in the history of this music. The Adagio originated as the slow (middle) movement of Barber’s only string quartet. In that guise the combination of solemnity and tenderness in its melodic line also has a certain countervailing astringency, so that the music invites both absorption and reflection and allows the balance between them to waver. In the more familiar string orchestra version, and with no flanking fast movements as context, the M us ic a n d t h e F or m s of T houg h t

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astringency disappears in favor of a fervid lushness. The music turns into a lamentation, suitable for tragic use in the Vietnam War fi lm Platoon, which gave the Adagio a new identity and established it as a popular favorite. The lament, though, cannot entirely disengage from the lushness, and the link adds a troubling note of aestheticized pain and sorrow. Change the instrumentation to wordless chorus and the trouble multiplies exponentially. The aestheticizing of pain and sorrow now becomes erotic, or perhaps I should say more erotic, more openly erotic, at the same time as the lamentation assumes a quasi-sacred character because of the vocal texture—so we have a witches’ brew of sanctity, sexuality, sensuousness, and sentiment. The result is confounding: it projects a kind of ethereal lushness, reveling in the materiality of the voice while at the same time denying it. The wordless chorus produces the willed illusion of disembodiment, as wordless choruses often do in fi lm. The logic is that of the fetish in its classical formulation: I know, but even so. . . . This double-sidedness takes advantage of a strange element of voice in the plural: that the sound of a chorus is never quite traceable to the bodies that produce it, but instead seems to hover about the performance space, not quite linked to its source, precisely because nobody—no (one) body—is producing it. For that reason this effect of disembodiment never occurs with solo singing, the sound of which can never escape the body that produces it, though it may try. Some listeners might decide they like this second-order vocalise; that’s a judgment of taste. (And that’s a fraught Kantian phrase.24) But the point here is that as timbre becomes the resonance of these resonances, it falls into an uncontrollable excess of signification, the very opposite of what Nancy postulates timbre to be. Postulates it because he isn’t thinking musically enough. And this fall raises questions that need to be addressed through musical understanding. Is the fall a contingency, a law, an accident, a fatality? What is its history, and what is its place in the history of perception? Is it a variant of Merleau-Ponty’s principle that the subtraction of any sense from the sensory manifold yields an uncanny effect?25 Is sound particularly susceptible to such subtraction? Is music?

philosophizing with the phenomena In the tradition running from Nietzsche through the later Heidegger through Derrida, the work of thinking often proceeds not with abstract con20

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cepts but with what might be called enhanced exemplars, particulars imbued with a paradigmatic value that enables us to ask what they have to tell us about being, knowing, sensing, and so on. The result for music would not be a conjunction of music and philosophy, but a practice of philosophizing through occasions of music. The procedure resembles Kantian reflective judgment, reasoning from the particular to the general, with the key difference that the particular is understood to be never wholly particular and the general never wholly general. Precisely the lack of such completion or closure is what makes the enterprise work. The understanding that results exceeds the scope of representation on one hand and metaphor and metonymy on the other, though it may incorporate all three and more. “The hat flew off my head,” say Müller and Schubert in “Der Lindenbaum”; “I did not turn back” (see Example 1.3). Th is detail becomes both an enigma and the means of resolving it (resolving, not “solving”; resolving into its elements, numinous particles, some clear, some not). The wanderer declines the most intimate and most minimal form of shelter, a hat in a snowstorm. The singer qua wanderer recalls (and in recalling repeats) this moment of abjection, which has been decisive without exactly being decided on; the vocal line for his speech act dwells on C, a void element, the first degree of the lowered submediant, but also a kind of momentary talisman, itself a surrogate shelter. The piano buffets this note with harmonically vacillating figuration until the note, too, blows away without a backward turn. The episode takes the state of mind it expresses as a means to interrogate the relationship of subjectivity and the signifier. Music specializes in this mode of being. Contrary to conventional wisdom, music—the network of musics—is not void of reference, not without referent, but instead without the order (rule, sequence) of reference, in place of which it puts the animation of referral. This action does not occur only in its own separate sphere. It continuously opens outward to model the possible sphere of livability that I referred to earlier and that in Expression and Truth I call relative transcendence or everyday enchantment.26 The importance of music as an epistemic and ontological model is not that the modeling elevates this one art or activity over others, but that it demonstrates the musical element inherent in all ideas and all philosophizing. It suggests not only that the absence of big transcendence, ultimate truth, affords pleasure and knowledge without the need of certainty; it shows how. All thinking is thinking in tones.

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(ge)sicht,

der

Hut

flog

mir

von

cresc.

Kop

-

fe,

ich

wen

-

de

decresc.

nicht.

example 1.3. Schubert, “Der Lindenbaum,” “My hat flew off my head.”

-

te

mich

t wo

Speaking of Music in search of an idiom

Thinking musically entails speaking musically, but what does speaking musically entail? The burden of this chapter is to say that, like thinking musically, speaking musically is something done both about music and by music. Speaking of music is also speaking for music, not in the sense of appropriation or ventriloquism, though neither can be entirely ruled out, but in the sense of acting with care or concern, of speaking on music’s behalf. With music, as with anything else, speech, language, may be deferred but it cannot be avoided. But that necessity settles nothing by itself. Speaking of music may be necessary, but what makes it possible? Is it possible? What can, what should, we say? Music and language both participate in the continual making and unmaking, framing and fragmenting of meaning. When I speak for music by speaking of it, I speak as if to say something—not everything, but something—that the music would tell you if only it could (but who says it can’t? The question will return). Such speech is part of the activity of re-expression that, as I argued in Expression and Truth, is the precondition of expression itself. Speaking of, speaking for, music is an act of transposition, which, as all musicians know, both preserves the identity of a melody and alters it. Music does the same thing when it transposes verbal meanings into its own idioms, as vocal music does all the time and instrumental music does more often than one might suppose. Music speaks of and for the discourse of concern no less than language does. These transpositions between expressive media are immanent in the general production and proliferation of meanings in which all such media participate. To speak for music in speaking of it entails finding the idioms of that immanence. The idioms in turn (but the sequence is reversible) establish the 23

listening posts at which we can hear music speak, though not with words. The questions of this chapter are how to speak and hear this way, and how to arrive conceptually at the point where doing so merges with, and changes, musical understanding. The starting point is a seeming contradiction that needs to be unraveled: Speaking of music is obviously no problem. We speak about music all the time; we speak about it incessantly. Speaking of music is a normal part of music-making and music-loving. We listen, we play, we hum, we sing, we talk. Speaking of music is obviously a problem. Otherwise there would not be centuries of debate about it, and a persistent suspicion that nothing one says can be just right, or really adequate, or really a measure of knowledge. Otherwise no one would be vexed by the persistent worry that speaking about music is lying about music. If speaking of music, speaking for music, were no problem, we would not be saddled with a tradition that tells us to enjoy communicating with music but to distrust communicating about it. All right, then: what’s the problem? And why is it no problem? Because that is what I want to claim: that speaking of music is no problem at all. It is no problem because the problem of speaking of music is the same problem as the problem of speaking of anything. It is the same problem as the problem of speaking at all, which is not a problem that has ever caused anyone in normal circumstances to stop speaking.

the shibboleths Speaking of music is beset by two shibboleths. These seem to be as old as speaking of music itself, but they are actually chimeras of more recent birth, specters of the antithesis between music and language, or more broadly between music and representation, that followed the anointing of music as a fine art in the mid eighteenth century. Shibboleth number one is the myth of ineffability. This is a myth strongly upheld by cliché and conventional wisdom, a seemingly obvious observation that is actually a prescription meant to reinforce the anti-representational, hence expressively full, hence transcendental status allocated to music in the modern West. Everyone knows the drill: musical expression begins where 24

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words leave off, music expresses what words can’t, no description can do justice to the way music affects us. It is of course possible to describe musical technique using a certain specialized vocabulary, but it is impossible to say what music expresses or what it means. Music eludes our description; what we can say about its content is not what matters most about it; and no two people will agree about the content, anyway, except at the level of crude terms like sad or cheerful, and not always then. So really, it would be better if we just said nothing. We should enjoy the music we like, give ourselves the scholarly pleasure of compiling its history, and be content. This position has had its scholarly champions of late, some more thoughtful than others.1 But it has needed the champions because it has been subject to serious critique for over twenty years. Agree with it or not, the myth of ineffability can no longer be trotted out as an obvious, irrefutable truth. For some of us, in any but the most trivial respect, it is obviously and irrefutably false.2 As the next chapter will seek to show, ineffability does have its place in musical understanding, but it is not the place that most of its advocates are thinking of. Meanwhile we will operate on the working assumption that music invites us to say quite a lot, really an abundance of things, though not, of course, everything, which it is pointless to ask for—as where is it not? The second shibboleth is the myth of a private language, or at any rate a coterie language that excludes most people from speaking of music, at least if they want to speak credibly. The nub of the matter was embedded in the account of shibboleth number one: the only indisputably valid way to speak of music is with the specialist vocabulary of musical technique, up to and including the various languages of music theory and analysis. Th is technical language is sometimes used to support claims about expressive content, but there is little comfort in that fact. Those who make the claims are hard put to explain how technique translates into expressive content, even of the limited sort usually allowed in this context, and those not conversant with the languages are barred from making expressive claims even if their own musical experience strongly impels them to. It’s a fine mess. It’s a mess, moreover, that no one can clean up fully in a single essay and that in all likelihood will keep reinventing itself as a kind of selective deafness. The twin shibboleths are no longer very effective in their bare forms, but their refined forms are ubiquitous, for understandable reasons. As Keith Chapin has observed to me, music, “at the very least, is a placeholder for issues of ineffability and private language.”3 Those issues “remain important enough to people that . . . if for no other reason than habit and adherence to S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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platitudes about music, they will probably still turn to music as a way to address [them].” There is a certain weight of history here that cannot be wished or whisked away. What can be wished, however, is a reflective awareness of when and why speaking of music is invoked to confound us, and what each of us may find to say when we venture to speak of music nonetheless. So I will not try here to do anything comprehensive.4 What I can try to do instead is, first, sketch the reasons why each shibboleth that vexes speaking of music is just that, a mere chimera, and, second, suggest how working through the conceptual difficulties of the two shibboleths can help clear the way for speaking of music without tears. The shibboleth of ineffability is really a worry about truth and interpretation; the shibboleth of technical language is a worry about competence. The first worries about being wrong, the second about looking foolish. To deal with them, and relieve ourselves of the worry, we first need to investigate the assumptions about music, language, and meaning that typically underlie both of these phantasms—the alligators under the bed of speaking of music.

interpreting in truth If music can be spoken of, music can be interpreted. Or, put more strongly: if music can be spoken of at all, all of music can be interpreted. Interpretation is a topic that literary theory, which once made a special province of it, has largely abandoned. Old debates over topics like authorial intention seem dated, even quaint, and nothing has taken their place; instead, a generalized hermeneutics of suspicion, perhaps more politically than theoretically motivated, has become the default position. The true area of advance in hermeneutics is music—thinking about it, writing about it, speaking of it—because, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, music exposes the position of the interpreter with ruthless clarity. Music refers to the world weakly or not at all; the same music may express a multitude of different things to different listeners, at different times, or in different circumstances; any safety net one brings to the interpretation of music has holes in it. What these things do not do is show that music cannot be interpreted credibly or deeply. What they do instead is render transparent both the conditions of possibility for interpretation and the character of interpretation as act and experience. One of these conditions is that interpretation is always a risk, a venture or adventure. Another is a venturesome claim of, or more properly a claim on, truth. 26

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The truth-claims of language are part of the linguistic medium. As Derrida observes, to speak to another is to promise the truth, a promise, then, that is part of the illocutionary force of every locution.5 Every utterance is accompanied by a tacit “Believe me”: believe what I’m saying, believe that I believe it, believe that what I say is a true speech act. All statements, even lies, call truth to witness; all speech acts gather force from unspoken truths.6 The relative force of the truth claim, the impression of veracity, is one of the qualities of the statement qua statement. For Kant, human society could not operate without a general grant of the claim of language on truth.7 But what Derrida calls the history of the lie compels the recognition that neither the claim nor the grant can be unequivocal except in a purely formal sense.8 There are many instances in which it is not clear what it would mean for a given utterance to be true and many others in which the truth of a statement depends on its recognition as a lie. Perhaps the most universal instance, which can fall into either category, or neither, is the statement “I love you.” We would usually like to believe that the meaning of this statement is perfectly transparent, even as we repeatedly find ourselves having to ask what it might mean. We try to get into the city and some sphinx blocks our way with a riddle we have to interpret—or else. Interpretations are statements that simultaneously emphasize the promise of truth and render it questionable. An interpretation promises to reveal something about what the object of interpretation means, but in order to make this revelation it has to leave the safe ground of verifiable description. Any hermeneutics that wants to disengage from the mystical underpinnings that run through the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics from Schleiermacher through Gadamer has to begin with the understanding that interpretations can be neither true nor false in a simple, unequivocal sense. Interpretation is the supplement of truth; it becomes both possible and mandatory (though perhaps not both at once) precisely where fact, however determined, must be incorporated into the sphere of choice, discourse, human significance, the arena of contending values. This is not to deny that fact is always already impregnated with value but to mark out a sphere of determination, priority, and authority. What interpretations can be, in place of simply true, is be true to their object, to have the verbal equivalent of verisimilitude—literally likeness to truth—in relation to what they represent. In taking verisimilitude as a model, one also takes over the understanding that it is not an either/or relationship. Dramatic or pictorial depictions are verisimilar, “lifelike” or “realistic,” in a S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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certain sense and not in others, and the judgment of verisimilitude must demonstrate (in order to validate itself) just what sense that is in the given instance. The same burden falls to interpretation, on which it is incumbent to demonstrate, implicitly or explicitly, the sense in which it forms and maintains truth to its object and may therefore claim to be credible: not unequivocally true, but imaginable as true were a truth available, and even, in the best of cases, indispensable to establishing the range of imaginable truths that come to surround anything we describe and re-describe, perceive and re-perceive, so that its interpretation becomes a part of our history and culture. If truth in its worldly sense is primarily virtual and promissory, and if truth in its metaphysical sense is for most of us, or many of us, anyway, a fiction, no longer credible in itself although eminently worthy of interpretation; if truth is now smaller and less rigid than we used to think, or than it used to be, then interpretation may be more important than truth. Should we interpret—not just music, of course, but anything; music just makes the stakes of interpretation abundantly clear—should we interpret when we cannot verify? Of course we should. That is exactly when we should interpret. And must interpret, unless we are to live in an impoverished world devoid of the richness that the lost fictions of truth used to provide in such ample measure. The moment we do commit ourselves to interpretation, we insert ourselves in a multi-media communications network involving continual movement through a continually evolving network of posts, relays, and positions, a movement that, again continually, changes its content as it moves. According to what Derrida called the postal principle—the principle that a letter may always fail to reach its destination9—the message that passes along this relay does not consist of an item that is neatly packaged and transmitted. Instead, the message is the precipitate of a complex communicative act that is constitutively subject to interpretation, transformation, and transposition in the course of its movement from post to post. Messages are instruments of performance. Of course in saying all this I might just as well be describing the internet. But the internet is only the latest technological realization of a historical series of networks including the telephonic, the telegraphic, and the postal. The only limit on a communications network is the requirement that it be answerable, at least in part, to a symbolic order. To constitute a communicative act, a performative relay must assume the agency of a symbolically constructed reality that as such lies outside the communicative circuit, but is at the same time recognized as enclosing, limiting, and shaping the circuit, 28

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which in turn threads through the reality it addresses. The communicative act proceeds from an intersection between the characteristic form of that effective reality (its role as world) and a contingent formation of it (its role as event). The outline of a mature critical hermeneutics emerges from a recognition of the complex nonlinearity of the communications network. Applying this recognition specifically to music enables us to take the restricted content of the musical message as a property, not a problem: part of a general mapping of the circulation of musical meaning, not a bar shutting off musical meaning (except as trivial or “subjective”) from discourse. But this is just a first step. The real implication of the network model is that music becomes the paradigmatic medium of communicative action itself: music—not words, not images, not the word-image nexus or imagetext that is the defining grid of representation in Western culture.10 Music, that is, becomes the medium in which the performative force of all meaning, the power of any message, utterance, text, or expression to do something in being transmitted, becomes most fully apparent. This is the point at which the specific difference between music and the imagetext becomes freshly pertinent to the problem of speaking about music. What raises the problem is not that music is uniquely ineffable. Music is ineffable in exactly the way everything else is—and isn’t. What raises the problem, rather, is music’s characteristic lack of the referential automatism of language and images, a lack that has traditionally been confused with the lack of meaning. But that very lack is also what raises the solution to the problem or, rather, dissolves the problem. It does so by making apparent that the source of meaning and participation in any circumstance is precisely the surplus over and above referential automatism. Music does not demand more of that surplus than anything else. But it makes the surplus explicit, and for some people disconcerting, by standing apart from the imagetext-derived illusion that meaning and participation are “covered” (in all senses of the term) by the referential umbrella. In standing apart from assured or extended reference while still “communicating” effectively to its listeners, music both embodies the independent performativity of meaning and accommodates itself, extends itself, to the performative force of utterance for those whose venture it is to be speaking of music. Just think of the short musical phrases that epitomize any number of famous pieces, from “Silent Night” to “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” “The Ride of the Valkyries” to “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Vesti la giubba” to “Send in the S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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Clowns,” not to mention the obvious archetype for this sort of synoptic compression, the motto of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The history of music is replete with such phrases; they are endemic to musical memory and musical pleasure; and they are the tiles of a semantic mosaic continually being reshuffled into new forms. If you hear one of these phrases without knowing what it is, you have not really heard it at all. The phrase may once have been just a handful of notes, but for a long time it has been something else, something inescapable within a certain cultural sphere and there as solid as a block of granite. On the other hand, if you do know what the phrase is, what the notes have become, you cannot hear it outside the web of allusion, citation, association, travesty, prestige, interpretation, and application that has been spun around the notes and is continually being re-spun. Each new use or recognition of this music, like each rehearing of the whole piece into which the music flows or radiates, adds a new thread to the shimmering ensemble. Peel away one set of meanings and all you get is another. No one has ever heard this music as mere sound. Every phrase, every piece, is a promise of the truth.

description and/as detour When we speak of music, we absorb that promise into the general promise of truth that is rooted in language as such. But just because we do that, we also commit ourselves to the famous motto of Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—/ Success in Circuit lies.”11 For language can keep its promise only by indirection. The moment language is involved at all its inevitably hermeneutic and tropological nature is involved as well. Language is always caught in a relay between one post and another. So is music. The aim of speaking of music is not to achieve a state of impossible fi xity but to show that, in the particular case at hand, music and language share some of the same detours. One of those detours, moreover, is language itself. As Peter Szendy has observed, the separation of music from words is itself the work of words— “other words,” as he calls them (always other words).12 This verbal ensnarement exemplifies the broader principle that all interpretation in words is an interpretation of words. When we address nonverbal forms in order to interpret them, we are obliged to describe them both before we start and as we go along; we interpret what we address by interpreting the descriptions. We only interpret music, as we only interpret dreams or the past, by interpreting the stories 30

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we tell about it. In so doing we do not distance ourselves from what we address, but involve ourselves with it. And although all the posts in this relay, including the verbal ones, withhold something from language, there is no post that language leaves wholly untouched. We can address the non-verbal forms, say the music, only “under a description,” that is, as potentially subject to a certain range of designations and classifications.13 In a sense, without speaking of music there is no music, and we are free to speak of music by seeking to share its detours because music has always already begun that process for us. Consider a simple example, which will also facilitate a transition to the second shibboleth. The example is from a classical piece, which is customary for me, but since the normative status of classical music can no longer be taken for granted, it is important to note two points in passing. First, the sorts of thematic and rhythmic relationship I will be talking about in Beethoven are found in virtually all genres of Western music, though the uses to which they are put vary widely. Second, the classical score normally presumes the relative independence of the musical “work” from its performance. This condition is not absolute even with classical music, and other kinds of music, especially popular song, commonly dispense with it. But the degree to which something called “the” music is identifiable with specific acts of performance does not change the fundamental suppositions that music, as such, is ineffable and, except in a technical sense, indescribable. Beethoven, accordingly, can plausibly be given license to represent “music” here—which should be no problem for him; he’s used to it. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 12 in A-flat, Op. 26, is unusual in several respects, two of which will concern us here: it opens not with the usual fast movement but with a slow theme-and-variations movement in 3/8 time, and the third of its four movements is a funeral march from which the sonata derives its familiar nickname. These two movements are connected by an easily perceptible device that nonetheless requires some effort to describe and that demands interpretation in both musical senses of the term: the performer must realize the device and the listener must understand it. The theme of the first movement opens with even eighth notes. The second measure, however, doubles the pace of the theme and breaks up the even flow with a pair of consecutive figures in dotted rhythm, little twinges of impulse that start on the same note (see Example 2.1). This rhythmic signature gives the theme much of its character; the double fi llip returns twice in full and echoes of it, isolated dotted figures, lightly punctuate the theme throughout. What is most notable about the dotted rhythm, however, is that S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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Andante con Variazione

G  Piano

example 2.1. Beethoven, “Funeral March” Sonata, first movement, mm. 1–4.

it virtually disappears during the five variations. Its presence recedes in Variation 1 and nothing is heard of it thereafter until it takes a fleeting curtain call near the end of Variation 5 (see Example 2.2). By that time, though, the figure is really the ghost of its former self, which Variation 5 has explicitly smoothed out into even sixteenth notes. But the dotted rhythm nonetheless turns out to have been a portent. It returns in force as the chief melodic signature of the funeral march, exactly as the genre of the march would dictate. Although the march is in common time, the two movements are close enough in pace and their figures in consecutive dotted rhythms are close enough in contour to underline the connection. The funeral march simply drags out the original rhythm a little and lets itself be permeated by it. The opening of the march even forms a minormode counterpart to the opening of the earlier theme: in both a pickup octave on EH, the fifth scale degree, leads quasi-cadentially to a downbeat on the root-position tonic chord, which leads in turn to a downbeat on the dominant seventh (see Example 2.3). In the second iteration of the variations theme the pickup, originally a lone eighth note, breaks into the dotted rhythm that its counterpart will have in the march, as if to secrete a warning, as yet barely audible, of what is to come. The registers are the same in both passages and in both the dominant seventh arrives with a major-second dissonance, DH-EH, in the same registral location. Mode aside, the main difference is that the march solemnizes its occasion by fi lling out the lower octave. So much we can say for sure; these are technical facts. But what do they have to do with the expressive quality of the music? How can we speak about their content? And my answer again will be: the same way we speak about the content of anything that confronts us: by mobilizing our language, accepting and crossing the gap between phenomenon and significance, choosing our tropes well rather than trying to avoid them. My technical description has 32

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cresc.

G 

example 2.2. Beethoven, “Funeral March” Sonata, fi rst movement, Variation 5, mm. 26–29, 34–37.

Andante con Variazione

Marcia Funebre

example 2.3. Beethoven, “Funeral March” Sonata, openings of first and third movements.

already started to do that; it is unapologetically and obviously full of metaphors at the same time as it is technically explicit. In that light consider the following three statements and the relations among them: 1. The variations of the first movement continually animate and transfigure the theme but avoid or suppress its dotted rhythms. Variations 1 through 4 revel in rhythmic displacements, consistently phrasing off the beat and pulsing with syncopated accents; variation V assimilates both features into a texture that quickens the theme with murmurous figuration above and below. Heard in relation to the third movement, the variation process suggests the vitality and open-endedness of life as opposed to the fi xity and finality of death. The march identifies death with the petrifaction of this transformational vitality in, and as, the repetition of the one element in the theme that the variation process neglects. 2. The cross-reference between movements threatens to extend a chain of negations back, retrospectively, to anchor in the variations: threatens, especially, because the only broad melodic motion in the march, a rising triadic bass figure, comes to grief—but cannot contain it—as the march comes to a close on both its iterations. The figure originates as an answer to the level footfalls that begin the march theme, whose dotted rhythms it echoes. It ends by splitting off as the theme returns to round off the march. Three successive statements carry the figure from the deep bass to the mid-treble on the heels of a thick chord, which climbs higher, and becomes shriller, with each statement. The first time we hear the march section, what follows is a blunt cadence. The second time the sequel is the coda, which fills the void that the flight of the rising figure has left in the bass. But the replacement is itself a kind of void. It is a reduced and simplified form of the funereal tread that begins the march theme: the pure oblique motion of a single note in dotted rhythm (see Example 2.4). The tread has so far failed to penetrate the bass as an independent figure, but once there it becomes insistent and, in the end, cavernous as it drops an octave for its last two statements. The dotted-rhythm profi le that the tread and the rising figure share gives the final turn of events an extra weight of gloom. It is as if the tread were undoing the figure in the act of replacing it, stripping the rising contour of its melodic expressiveness and reducing it to the bare, now almost meaningless rhythm for which, in the end, it was no more than a pretext. Once again dynamism gives way to fi xity—so to speak to a kind of rigor mortis. Emptied of its ceremonial character, which was in 34

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cresc.

cresc. cresc.

example 2.4. Beethoven, “Funeral March” Sonata, third movement, mm. 63–69.

any case already compromised by its dark echoes of the first-movement theme, the tread becomes at once visceral and disembodied, the pace of a haunting memory or of a shade in the underworld. The relationship between the march and the variations is exactly the reverse of its counterpart in the Eroica Symphony, composed in 1804, two years later than the sonata. The variations-finale of the symphony answers the work’s massive funeral march with a heroic transformative power identified as Promethean; the laconic march of the sonata marks the blockage of any such power by the death of the hero, the event identified by the subtitle appended to “Marcia Funebre”: “sulla morte d’un eroe.” The sonata movement does not attempt anything like the breadth and intensity of the symphonic dirge, but it also, unlike the latter, offers no hint of consolation even in passing.14 3. The ripple effect of the march’s entropic close is linked to anxieties over the state of war omnipresent in the Europe of 1802, when the paramount fact of life was already Napoleon’s long shadow. Austria was especially beset, having been spectacularly routed by Napoleon at the Battle of Marengo in 1800. The sonata’s funeral march is specifically military in character, as its central episode, an imitation trumpet-and-drum fanfare with firearms salute, makes explicit. The figures in consecutive dotted rhythms impel both the inexorable tread of the march and the free fantasy of the earlier variations, the one by inclusion, the other by exclusion. The dotted figures thus form an ambiguous and symbolically invested presence hovering uneasily between war and peace. Each figure S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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becomes a particle of sense that does not so much signify anything in particular as embody a certain irreducible vulnerability. What in a world of peace one has the luxury to spare, becomes what in the world of war binds one to unsparing loss. And please note that I haven’t said that the funeral march is sad.

I have, however, said that its technique is thus and so, and there is obviously much more of the kind I could have said. But should I have? And how should we think about the connection between musical technique and musical meaning? The short answer is that in many cases it is not necessary to speak of technique, at least not in any depth; speaking of musical experience in more intuitive terms is often not far removed from speaking of technique, or may readily be supplemented by it. To be sure, no one with an intimate working of knowledge of music is likely to want to forget the practical devices by which music works. But to speak of more than technique alone requires that we keep open the possibility of paraphrasing musical events in a vocabulary that music, if it could really speak, could understand. The depth of detail to which such a paraphrase should or might or sometimes must reach cannot be fixed in advance and may well require a degree of musical expertise to observe. But it is nonetheless the case, and not by accident, that the depth involved will in all likelihood fall far short of the deeper reaches of musical analysis. For if the analyst’s latterday credo is that analysis helps enhance the experience of music, one still has to ask whose experience. And the raw fact is that most who play or listen do not do so in full-bore analytical terms either during or after the event; even composers don’t, than whom no one could be more concerned with musical detail. The reason is not lack of interest or capacity, but lack of language. The vocabulary of significant experience and the vocabulary of musical analysis have very little in common; their familiar forms tend to be mutually exclusive. These vocabularies occupy different regions of the symbolic order; they promise divergent kinds of truth.15 To bring them together requires not a compromise but a fundamental realignment.

care It is a basic point of understanding human experience qua human that it is permeated by what Heidegger called care or concern (Sorge), a condition of 36

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involvement that organizes our experience of time and endows it with qualitatively distinct textures. Care arises from the inescapable condition of our being “thrown” into a historical world that we must come to inhabit meaningfully.16 For Paul Ricoeur, the articulation of this process is the basic principle of narrative. Regardless of its content, narrative in its form rises above the “abstraction” of clock time to embody the richness of “within-time-ness,” the experience of giving or having, taking or making “time for” or “time to” or “time with,” something that for Heidegger is the medium of an “authentic,” more than merely utilitarian, relation to care. Ricoeur’s observation applies even more readily to music than to narrative. For music palpably depends on, indeed consists of, the qualitative organization of time.17 Music is a flowing or unfolding in time that invites care at every moment, and in so doing gives time a palpable form in which care can flourish. But the technical vocabulary for analyzing music resists permeation by the language of care, except minimally. In that respect it impoverishes the perception of music itself as a vehicle of care. If in speaking about music we want to echo its general rather than a special interest, we need to avoid confusing musical understanding with the construction of a comprehensive analysis. Both analytically and otherwise, we need to let care for and care through music guide what we say. When needed, such care can reach a fine technical level; when needed, it may refrain from doing so with equal tact. The fundamental question is what is needed and when. Contrary to a claim often advanced in defense of musical analysis, it is not unproblematically the case that the pursuit of analytic detail brings one closer to the musical work, much less to the performance or event, unless one defines such closeness in circular terms as analytic awareness.18 As Nietzsche might have suggested, a certain creative forgetting may be involved when what is at stake is genuine experience, Erfahrung in German, experience that resonates beyond the moment in which it is lived.19 Both performance and composition are receptive to, even demanding of, such forgetting. What creative forgetting forgets is not knowledge or knowhow but an action, as one forgets an errand or an appointment because something of more importance has come up. Consider two ways of accounting for the tonal design of the funeral march in Beethoven’s Op. 26, one of them sparing of technical detail and one of them liberal with it (though still far short of the kind of analytic detail possible with this music). The preservation in the second account of the language of the first is part of the point: S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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1. As a tonic, AH minor, the key of the march, is bizarre. A key signature of seven flats is very far outside the realm of normal practice at the end of the eighteenth century. It is clearly chosen over the four flats of the relative F minor so as to refer back specifically to the AH-major variations, the minore of which goes, conventionally, to the parallel minor mode. The convention establishes the context in which the extra flats are tolerable. The key of the march is thus a peculiar echo or uncanny repetition of a normal move. Its weirdness will be confirmed when its simple beginning—itself a peculiar echo of the earlier movement—gives way to a tortured series of harmonies. The harmonic contortions lead to a passage of extended dissonance that, though excruciating, does finally find a way back to the tonic. But the strangeness of the key is if anything enhanced by the process. Against this bemusement the literalness of the military middle section sounds particularly rigid and inadequate; one hears the military ritual emptying itself of meaning. That the harmony in this section is all primitive tonic-and-dominant in AH major adds to the depreciation of its apparent normality and perhaps, retrospectively, to that of the variations movement as well. The normal/normative return of the march that follows thus becomes a confession of defeat, and one confirmed, it will turn out, by the coda. The March movement as a whole is a paradox. It begins with and reiterates an essentially cadential statement of the tonic but it defers a real cadence until the close of the second A section. The ensuing coda ends in AH major, but the change of mode is anything but comforting. It arrives mixed with pathos-laden harmonies from which it offers no escape. There is no sense at all of a turn back to the key of the life-affirming variations. 2. As a tonic, AH minor, the key of the march, is bizarre. A key signature of seven flats is very far outside the realm of normal practice at the end of the eighteenth century. Add the minor mode to the flats on every scale degree, and AH minor is the most remote of all keys from C major—the fi xed point of normative reference, the so-called key of nature. The almost unheard-of key is clearly chosen over the alternative, the relative F minor with its four flats, so as to refer back specifically to the AH-major variations, the minore of which goes, conventionally, to the parallel minor mode. The convention establishes the context in which the extra flats are tolerable. The key of the march is thus a peculiar echo or uncanny repetition of a normal move. The tonal weirdness will be confirmed when the simple beginning of the march— itself a peculiar echo of the earlier movement—gives way to a tortured series of harmonies. As if to extend its esoteric distance from C, the march empha38

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sizes the key furthest from C in point of tonal axis, FG major, here understood as the dominant of B, which is to say, of CH, the relative major. Once established, B rotates the wrong way through the cycle of fifths to E, A, and D, the enharmonic spellings of the strange, not to say chimerical, regions of FH, BHH, and EHH, the tritone of AH. All this happens quite quickly, as if the music were hurtling to a fatal destination despite its solemn tempo. After a faux-cadence on the tone D/EHH, the music dwells excruciatingly on the diminishedseventh chord built on that tone until, after a climax, the tone leads back to the tonic, already strange enough and now perhaps even stranger, by becoming the leading tone to the dominant, EH. The march thus dwells in a sphere of alienation and unreality, the latter not in a sense of fictitiousness but, on the one hand, in a willed sense of denial, a tonal encrypting of death itself, and, on the other hand, in a Greek-classical sense that the world of death is the world of shades, oddly resembling the world of the living but insubstantial. Against this bemusement the literalness of the military middle section sounds particularly rigid and inadequate; one hears the military ritual emptying itself of meaning. That the harmony in this section is all primitive tonic-and-dominant in AH major adds to the depreciation of its apparent normality and perhaps, retrospectively, to that of the variations movement as well. The normal/normative return of the march that follows thus becomes a confession of defeat, and one confirmed, it will turn out, by the coda. The March movement as a whole is a paradox. It begins with and reiterates an essentially cadential statement of the tonic but it defers a real cadence until the close of the second A section. The ensuing coda is an extended Picardy third but not at all a source of comfort or demystification. On the contrary, it is a demonstration of convention, or ceremony, under the aspect of its artifice and ineffectuality. The major mode is reached first through modal mixture with the minor subdominant and thereafter through the traditionally pathetic Neapolitan sixth, BHH. This AH major is a ghost. There is no sense at all of a turn back to the key of the life-affirming variations.

musical speech What is the relationship between these two descriptions, and of either to the music of which it speaks? And what does either one do when it speaks “of ” the music? Of “the” music? S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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The answer will be clearest if it starts in the negative. The description with less technical detail is not a watered-down version of the one with more, a kind of low-resolution image that conveys meaning only by diluting it. If anything the relation leans to the contrary; the less technical description acts as an implicit curb on its more technical sibling. It is mindful of a certain economy that scholarly speaking of music too often forgets: a surplus of detail fosters a deficit of meaning. The problem comes not when the resolution is too low but when it is too high. There is of course no formula to determine when the pursuit of technical refinement leaves care behind—becomes careless in a double sense. But the question should be kept in play. At least it should if our aim in speaking of music is to bring it more openly into the network of concerns that have drawn us to it in the first place. If that is indeed the aim, then the relation of either description to the music should be understood as a positioning: not as an approximation of some fi xed musical form or meaning, but as a proximation, a coming near, to a possible musical experience. What speaking of music does, understood in these terms, is to make available an informed framework in which realizations of the music may be heard as extensions of care. “The” music emerges as a sonorous image within that framework. The speech opens the music to possibilities of performance, listening, and recollection in which certain affective and conceptual values resonate. How long and how often they do so is up to those who enter the conversation. All speech about music works toward or against this outcome. One implication of this deceptively simple principle is that neither music nor speaking of music can be disengaged from the problem of care, even when the work of speech runs “against” it. Another is that the condition of possibility for speaking of music, again regardless of whether the speech is transparent or opaque to care, is the music’s participation in a more inclusive process in which speech is also implicated. Implicated: folded in; sharing responsibility for: the word is offered as exact. As Heidegger notes, language acts even when we are not speaking. Both of our descriptions, for example, understand Beethoven’s music as a refusal to maintain the validating link between artistic genre and social ritual. Both descriptions depend on animating the contrast between the pictorial or, as it were, auditory literalism of the middle section and the more generic topicality of the surrounding march sections. The ceremonial middle exerts a mimetic pull on the march, drawing its broadly funereal character into the depiction of a military funeral. But the bizarre harmony of the 40

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march pulls the other way. Completely out of bounds for any military band, the harmony not only estranges the march from the supposed funeral rites but even estranges it from its own generic identity. The music does its generic duty, but with a resolute withdrawal of credibility. It is heroic only because it proceeds to the end while proposing all along that the end is only emptiness and mortification. Both of our descriptions speak of this without exactly saying it, and because they do, it is possible to say it here. But speaking of this music cannot stop here. The only heroism in Beethoven’s march may be its going through to the end, but through to the end it goes. It even breaks through; its coda may be dark, but it is also a stay against nihilism, something that Beethoven was often willing to confront but never to accept. Unlike the famous funeral march from Chopin’s Sonata in BH Minor, a piece that almost surely alludes to it, Beethoven’s march does not just stop with a handful of grief. It goes on to achieve something like acquiescence, short of reconciliation but short, too, of despair. In an earlier account of this music, in the context of its link to Chopin’s, I observed that “in the coda (mm. 68–74) the melodic line elaborates on the [march] theme’s dotted rhythms to achieve an unwonted suppleness and also to find its registral peak, while the march rhythm gradually dissipates in the bass. Gloom gives way to the gravitas of sublimation.”20 This outcome may not be “redemptive” (as I called it then), but the contrast to Chopin might make the exaggeration pardonable. The preceding paragraph might form an appropriate coda to either of the two accounts it follows. It might even intimate an alternative to them. Which aspect to emphasize when speaking of Beethoven’s march depends on what one is speaking of. The focal points of the observation I quoted are melody and register; the focal points of the twin accounts in the present chapter are melody and harmony. At one level this difference suggests that grappling with the more esoteric dimension of harmony, however lightly, fosters a deeper understanding. But at another, more challenging level, the difference suggests that the alternative possibilities are inscribed in the music, which harbors a latent tension, even an antagonism, between its registral passage and its harmonic impasse. There is no question of “depth” here. From the point of view of music theory, my second account of the Op. 26 funeral march is relatively superficial, not much less so than the first. To those inclined to use such a vocabulary, my reply would be: No, it is just deep enough; I do this on purpose. Both descriptions are as deep as they need to be. Going “deeper” runs the risk of S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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quickly diminishing returns. The fact that one can elaborate analytical relationships within a particular theoretical protocol does not mean that the relationships are meaningful or useful. Speaking of music is not limited by higher-order formal elaborations but by the need to maintain the music spoken of as the object of care—not the analyst’s care, but the care of the wider community for whom care has languages of its own. What is “deepest,” if we must have that metaphor, is the chance, which is also the need, to decide how the music should be played or heard on a particular occasion. Even if neither the player nor the listener says a word, the decision acts as if to meet an obligation to speak. Take those diminishedseventh chords at the epicenter of the march. Given the haste with which they are approached, these chords form too much a goal, too little an obstruction. The march is a kind of pretext to get to them, and to be haunted by them in the effort to get away. Are they empty or full? Ceremonious or, because ceremony is a fading fiction, desperate? Should they be played with restraint or a pointed lack of restraint? Should we think of them as observing, or testing, the limits of the fortepiano they were written for? Or think again of how, according to both descriptions, the march moves and acts more or less the way a funeral march should, but in the wrong tonal place. As Hugh McDonald has shown, keys heavy on sharps or flats tend to be associated with sensuousness in the early nineteenth century, apparently on the basis of how it feels to negotiate the white and black keys on the piano keyboard.21 But there is nothing sensuous about this march; sense experience is, so to speak, the furthest thing from its mind. Should the music be played so as to curb its own sonority? Should it be played with a certain stiffness so that we hear the march stumble? Should it be played, or, better, how should it be played, so as to intimate the need for a wholesale reconceptualization of ritual, especially in relation to public mourning and remembrance? To show, for example, why one might feel compelled to write a symphony on an unprecedented scale, a symphony with an extended funeral march at its core. . . . And this is not the place to stop either. We can still go a step further in following this march that moves at a ceremonial pace to which no one ever paces. How metaphorical would it be to say that this music is speaking: speaking as music, of music? Do the descriptions I have offered of it have the first word (for certainly they don’t have the last)? No matter which description one prefers, does either of them do more than repeat, or, more exactly, speak as if it were repeating, something like a speech act, a disengagement 42

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from ceremony, that the music has already made, no matter when it is made? And isn’t this an act that the music can make good on only by making it again, and then again, insofar as this music, any music, can find a hearing only in being learned, practiced, rehearsed, recorded, repeated? How metaphorical would it be to say that the experience built up by and around this music is, whatever else it is, a circulation of something like speech acts? Perhaps these questions are themselves most “happy” when left to their interrogative form, as if to open but not force a decision. But one of them, formed only in passing, invites a more definite treatment. Asked which of my two descriptions should be preferred, I would say: neither. The second gets further hermeneutically but its claims are already implicit in the first, and the observations of the first can serve as the basis for the second. What the two descriptions have in common, as the use of the same language in both should help convey, is more significant than what distinguishes them from each other. Both pointedly decline to separate the language in which they speak technically about music from the language ordinarily used to form descriptions of matters felt to have a rich burden of concern. Both understand that understanding music is inevitably a verbal as well as an acoustic enterprise. Speaking of music may have a troubled history in part because music, at least in the classical genres, has regularly been asked both to bring us to the threshold of speech and to excuse us for holding our tongues. But the differences between the two descriptions still need to be accounted for constructively. The most demanding passage of the second, where enharmonic relationships come up, does enable the interpretation to elicit a more specific sense than the first can of the alienation that pervades the movement. There is something to be gained by paying close musical attention, if you can. Even the first description requires some musical language. But the gain made by the second description is relatively modest and the gap dividing it from the first is not necessarily unbridgeable. Knowing the enharmonic relations allows one to name and to some degree explain their effect, but if one does not know them, or does not bother to identify them except via an intuitive sense of strangeness, their effect is undiminished and perhaps even enhanced: the effect, that is, of being tilted out of focus, sundered from one’s own perceptions, dipped in perplexity. The second statement has its advantages, but the first is related to it not as a defective version but as a suggestive condensation. That fact is good news. Those who have a large analytical vocabulary need not worry; they are not being asked to abandon what they know, just to use their knowledge selectively. The hard thing about this selectivity is its implicit S p e a k i ng of M us ic

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acceptance of principles running counter to some deeply rooted assumptions. Nontechnical language about music has probative value. Analytic detail is not equivalent to “deep” insight and it does not constitute “evidence” of interpretation. Hermeneutic complexity and analytic complexity vary independently of each other. These principles, however, are not obstacles to inventive analysis but incentives to it. Meanwhile, those who have a limited analytical vocabulary need not worry, either. It is often quite sufficient to reach the point where technical paraphrase becomes possible without the paraphrase necessarily having to be carried out there and then. Like one of those musical phrases I alluded to earlier, the point is a threshold already laden with the meanings to which it leads. That threshold is the essential place for speaking about music, whether or not we cross it. And in reaching it, we find ourselves back at the original claim of this chapter, which can be compressed into a simple antiphony: How should we speak about music? The same way we speak about everything else.

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three

The Ineffable and How (Not) to Say It

Musicology is now well into its second revolution in as many decades. So it seems, at any rate, from a North American perspective. When the 1990s ushered in critical musicology, the so-called New Musicology, with its cultural and hermeneutic interests, the more introverted vocabularies that had long set the terms of musical understanding began to break down. Talk about music took on forms previously limited or prohibited; it made sense in terms that would formerly have been spurned as nonsense. The old vocabularies were sometimes put to new uses and sometimes put in the attic. Music thus entered the world, which of course it had never left. But it was a world now conceived as busier, messier, stranger, and more plural than once seemed comfortable. Some twenty years later, the concern of critical musicology with the meaning of musical works has itself come to seem too limited. To complete the first revolution a second now seems to be called for. The authority of the work has to yield—partly for some, wholly for others—to the contingency of performance. At the same time, the rise of performance entails the fall of meaning; we need to recognize anew—modestly for some, sweepingly for others—that music escapes all our conceptions of it. No matter how meaningful we find it, music is fundamentally ineffable. It is the very paradigm of that which, because we cannot (well, not really, right?) speak of it, we must (except in classrooms, conferences, and scholarly publications) keep silent. The point of this injunction is not for us literally to say nothing: what could be less likely? The point is to say least about what matters most. This second turn of events has its problems. Among them are reductionist, even willfully naïve conceptions of both work and meaning, and, for that matter, of performance (which certainly deserves the attention it is now 45

receiving). These are topics I have treated elsewhere.1 My topic here is the surprising force of the revived claims about ineffability and the question of why, despite repeated demonstrations that the idolizing of ineffability is untenable, and more, that it makes no sense, the specter of the ineffable will nonetheless not go away. For a specter is what ineffability is: a relic of a certain nineteenth-century vogue for sentimental metaphysics (not to be confused with the real thing). How is listening to music ineffable in any way that these are not: hearing the wind as it rustles in the trees, recognizing a voice and feeling the texture and play of its speech melody, contemplating the evening as it gathers (or reading the most eloquent of twilit descriptions, all full of sounds, like Keats’s: “Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft / The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies”2—do we hear what he heard (or didn’t), or see, or feel)? Or when I set a phrase to music (or for that matter read it aloud: how many ways can one intone those lines by Keats?), do the words borrow the ineffability of the music, which nonetheless expresses something in them, or does the music borrow what is ineffable in the words, which nonetheless speak memorably, in order to expand, not restrict, its own expressive sphere? No: the imputed ineffability, the vaunted ineffability, of music is not just a cultural fiction. It is obviously a cultural fiction. The sheer will to forgetting that is required to cloak this fiction in the mantle of truth is remarkable. The point, as my examples should make clear, is not that nothing escapes language, but that everything does. Language is not necessarily the antagonist of what it cannot say (it can become so but it is not); on the contrary, language is the medium of the unsayable itself. The apophatic is a product of discourse. So there must be something very fraught at stake in the maintenance of music as the avatar of the Unsayable. Probably more than one thing, but whatever the number, we need to grasp what is involved if we are to explain why the specter of ineffability has so often been music’s shadow, and to ask what we can, perhaps, say—yes, say—to return the specter to its proper place, like that of the “true world” in Nietzsche’s memorable account: the history of a fable.3 Let it also be said, then, in acknowledgment but without apology, that the text you are reading belongs to a certain literary genre and that its language courts the verbal music—my calling on Nietzsche is a telltale sign—associated with that genre. This is a polemic. Unlike the more or less contemporaneous publication in the Journal of the American Musicological Society of a 46

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forum by half a dozen scholars weighing, pro and con, Vladimir Jankélévitch’s claims about music’s ineffable Charm, this text does not take ineffability seriously. To take it seriously is to assure its persistence, and I would like to avoid contributing to that as much as possible (it is not entirely possible).4 I want to situate ineffability with narrow historicism and over-regulated hermeneutics as something that above all deserves to be neglected. (Which is not to say that music’s negotiations with the limits of utterance, both its own and that of language, should be neglected; quite the contrary. But they cannot be accounted for on the basis of ineffability.) This text, however, is not aimed at individuals. It is aimed at the seductions of an idea. Only the latter (at least after the next paragraph) will get rough treatment here.

fables of transcendence To some degree there is no mystery about either the origin of the fable of musical ineffability or the reasons for its relative longevity. The thesis of ineffability usually comes framed in universalizing terms as a statement about the essential nature of music; a good example, precisely because its source is usually hypervigilant about such things, is Theodor Adorno’s claim that “music suffers from its similarity to language and cannot escape it,” but that this very similarity is “fulfi lled as [music] distances itself from language.”5 The statement is complex, dialectical, seemingly far removed from cliché, and yet it ends up with music in the same old familiar place, ineffable as ever. But music has by no means always been ineffable. It became ineffable, borrowing from a traditionally religious field of understanding, as part of a familiar historical process, the idealizing and transcendentalizing of music in Europe that occupied much of the nineteenth century. Th is tendency came to grief early in the twentieth century, done in by ascendant modernism, but the fiction of ineffability survived. Modernist skepticism would have nothing overtly to do with the previous century’s metaphysics of music, but could not wholly relinquish it either; the case of Adorno is again exemplary. And to retain the trace of the metaphysical was easy enough, requiring only a slight displacement. It was no longer necessary to transcend the world, mortality, society, identity, or the like; all one had to do was transcend words. And words, as we’ll see shortly, had become newly vulnerable. The ineffability that was formerly the sign of a transcendental nimbus in which the modern thinker could no longer believe now became that very T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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nimbus. Music no longer delivered the metaphysical but replaced it, took or stood in its place. Music secularized the metaphysical impulse but sanctified the secular experience of—music. (Or more properly, of music as art, not entertainment; to every sacred form its profane double.) This still does not explain, however, why this surrogate transcendence is still going strong in a world as remote from the old modernity as the latter was from the grandeur and sufferings of the nineteenth century. The problem today is not words. It is information. Information not in the sense of things known, but in the purely quantitative sense of megabytes and gigabytes (and terabytes) delivered, often with little or no regard for quaint standards of measure like fairness, complexity, meaning, or, quaintest of all, truth. Why, in short, ineffability again? Why now? To seek an answer will require an itinerary with detours. Not until the nineteenth century does it become a commonplace, not to say a shibboleth, that music expresses what words cannot. No doubt there are many sources for the rise of this trope, and any number of anticipations of it, but for present purposes the trope matters not for where it comes from but for what it does. And what it does is limited. Limited, at least, at first. In particular the trope in its original forms does not grant music access to the ineffable in the strong sense of the term grounded in religious tradition. Instead it grants music a domain of expressiveness proper to music as such, in keeping with the eighteenth-century system of aesthetics that divided the arts by their media of expression. The point was not to discover a difference that had always been obvious, but to mark the difference and make a principle of it. Music expresses musically as words do verbally; of course, then, music expresses what words cannot and vice versa. The same holds good for visual representations. Pictures depict, words say, music sounds. Nonetheless, there was a steady pressure on the trope to become something grander. As music rose in status toward the heights of the sublime, it had to draw the trope in its wake. By the end of the century, the process had gone as far (that is, as high) as it ever would, although the strongest claims of ineffability would not come until much later, from figures such as Adorno and Jankélévitch and, later still, Jean-Luc Nancy.6 The sources for this change were also numerous, but perhaps the most urgent of them starts not with music at all but with language. As it would have to. The strong idea of the ineffable, coming out of the tradition of Christian mysticism and negative theology, does not unfold beyond words but in them. In the vocabulary of the early Wittgenstein, we could say 48

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that language can show the ineffable beyond it only by showing its own failure to say the divine. The ineffable is not the product of an intuition; it is the product of wreckage. Or, as Derrida says—actually recites, chants, as a leitmotif in quotation marks, to demonstrate the point—“ ‘What is called “negative theology” . . . is a language’ ”—but a self-abnegating language, language in the desert. Later, in one of the two voices (both his? or neither?) he adopts for the occasion: “The statement of negative theology empties itself by definition, by vocation, of all intuitive plenitude. Kenosis of discourse . . . Apophatic statements represent what Husserl identifies as the moment of crisis (forgetting of the full and originary intuition, empty functioning of symbolic language).”7 Because “emptiness is essential and necessary to them,” apophatic statements, statements addressed to the unsayable, run the risk of falling into a merely mechanical formalization, of becoming merely empty. To evade this chance and find its emptiness paradoxically full, apophatic discourse must establish a “relation” (Derrida’s emphasis) in which a positive plenitude or attribution is “negated [niée], let’s say denegated [deniée].” The self-correcting turn to “denegation” is pivotal: the relation is not one of simple denial, but of a denial that retains what it denies in the form of a lack.8 To voice the ineffable is thus to strip oneself of one’s language in the act of utterance. For music to voice the ineffable, and voice it in ways words cannot, the music would have to step in where the ineffable had managed to escape even the wreckage of language. And the music that did this would also have to fail in some sense; it would need its own mode of emptying-out, “kenosis of discourse.” Otherwise, all that the claim of music’s ineffability would amount to is a reiteration of the weak original form of the truism that music exceeds language: that music expresses itself—musically. Yes. We know.

the “crisis of language” As it happens, the failure of language did, itself, fail conspicuously for some thinkers in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This failure had no value as kenosis, no paradoxical fullness of emptiness; it merely turned words into inert matter, at best useless, at worst repellent. The exemplary scene was perhaps that legendary seedbed of modernity, Vienna at the fin-desiècle and some years thereafter. It is well known that the city was the home ground of a “crisis of language” memorably articulated by such figures as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. As it T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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happens, too—but it had to happen—this crisis of language was also a crisis of the ineffable. A key early text is Hofmannsthal’s “The Letter of Lord Chandos” (1902). Dated 1603, this fictitious letter is addressed to one of the founders of empiricism, Sir Francis Bacon. Its supposed author, Philip Lord Chandos, writes to explain why he will never write—never write anything—again. For Hofmannsthal, Bacon is probably a stand-in for Ernst Mach, whose Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, 1886) forms a latter-day version of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. For Mach (whose work also weighed heavily on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), human experience consisted of nothing but an unruly mass of sensations with no “beyond” to them: no abstract order, no metaphysics, and above all no “I”; the ego, Mach wrote, is “unsaveable” (Das Ich ist unrettbar).9 The role of language, especially poetic language, is to reduce this chaos to liveable fictions of self and world. “The Letter of Lord Chandos” asks what happens when, first, the fictions fail, and then, worse, when the failure leads not to a glimpse of the ineffable, the beyond of language, but only to an anarchy of sensations at once piercing and inert: Everything disintegrated for me into parts, the parts into parts again, and no longer let anything be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated around me; they congealed into eyes that stared at me and into which I had to stare back: they are whirlpools in which to gaze gives me vertigo, that swirl around incessantly and through which one comes into the void. (Es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder in Teile und nichts mehr ließ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muß: Wirbel sind sie, in die hinabzusehen mich schwindelt, die sich unaufhaltsam drehen und durch die hindurch man ins Leere kommt.)10

What is missing from this higher-order failure is exactly what Derrida identifies as the portal of the unsayable: a “relation [to] . . . a positivity denegated.” Instead of breaking through to a revelatory not that, not that, the victim of language stalls on a stammering that, that, that . . . Yet he cannot stop babbling; he is caught, mechanically, in a futile attempt to ward off the accusation in the staring eyes that his own words have become. This experience is the exact inverse of the aim of negative theology as a spiritual practice, that is, the experience of the abyss of unknowing as a tran50

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scendental intimation. Wittgenstein’s aim in the Tractatus can be thought of as an effort to recuperate and appropriate this abyss as the realm of everything that is shown, not said: “The Unsayable does exist. This shows itself, it is the Mystical” (6.552: Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist der Mystische).11 The two images with which the Tractatus ends, the ladder of understanding that one throws away after climbing it and the silence whose command one heeds where one cannot speak, are classical tropes of the apophatic. Mystical intuition rises to an emptiness on which, nonetheless, it stands; the transcendent silence speaks itself and thus is not quite mute. For Wittgenstein as for Hofmannsthal, the gulf between the intuition of “the infinite” and the capabilities of language is so wide that a short-circuit occurs in which the failure of language precedes the use of language. One gives up trying, even though, as Hofmannsthal’s morbidly introspective Chandos demonstrates, the very act of surrender may involve a self-consuming act of language to which the subject is (still) tempted. (“What was it that made me want to break into words which, I know, were I to find them, would force to their knees those cherubim in whom I do not believe?”) The ethic of silence to which Wittgenstein retreats expresses itself as an ethic of gesture, of showing or picturing in the default of speech. Hofmannsthal’s Chandos turns to silence too, but more as a fate than as a recourse. He measures the loss incurred through the (double) failure of language by his inability to experience the perfection of form. In classic Pythagorean fashion, he finds that perfection embodied outside language by mathematics (algebra in particular: the science of equations) and its double: music. The ego may be unsaveable, but music is its transcendental trace. The ancient trope of music as the echo of cosmic harmony returns, though only in passing (Chandos has no real hope), in the form of a remnant: almost the sole intact thing amid a cosmos splintered into rubble. The condition to which Hofmannsthal is responding is a recurrent one in cultural history. Before there was Mach there was Hume and before there was Hume there was Montaigne and before there was Montaigne there was Lucretius; sensations come in the wake of sense-impressions, the fallibility of perception, and the movement of atoms. And this concurrence of atomisms and reductionisms returns, with a giant step, in the twenty-first century in a digital version, much like a book downloaded onto an e-reader: what makes the ego unsaveable today is the speaking subject’s transformation into a fluctuation in the data stream, a faint image projected amid the endless T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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pixilation, or, as it were pixellation, of the remnants of self that survived modernism. But there is a difference, and it is a big one. The earlier condition of sensory anarchy was understood as a danger, whereas the later one is understood as a rescue. We now want not to be safe in the self but safe from it. For Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, the ineffable does not appear in the failure of language but in the absence of language. The self seeks its residence in an unsayable that mysteriously suspends the anarchy of sensation and momentarily turns perceptual “trifles”—a half-fi lled pitcher, a swimming beetle—into intimations of the infinite. These scattered epiphanies still do what language can do no longer. The ineffable thus becomes the only truth in a world of linguistic falsehoods; the more one experiences the former, the less one can live in the latter. The trouble is, one has no choice but to live in the latter; the world saturated by language just is the world. Music, with its Pythagorean twin, algebra, might offer a refuge, but only if the phantom “I” of Chandos were not too desiccated, too broken by the stare of empty words, to listen. A century later, the problem is no longer a sense that the dissolution of inner and outer reality has left us bereft, but its mirror image: a concern lest the stabilization of inner and outer reality burden us down. We no longer want to save the I; we want to save its fictitiousness. The I and its institutions are no longer a safety net but an entanglement, a trap. But what saves us is still the ineffable, particularly in its durable, accessible, and nowadays portable form: music. Forget for a moment that the everyday world is so saturated with music that the currency of music’s ineffability is debased at best, which is why, perhaps, some writers on the topic have worked so hard, rhetorically, to refurbish it. The idea matters more than the fact. The idea is that the ineffable, through music, keeps us untangled as it keeps us untrammeled. (Through music and not much else; in the administered world of everyday life, the apophatic, Wittgenstein’s “the Mystical,” is as remote from most of us as the foregone truths of words and concepts were for Mach or Lord Chandos.) Recent as it may feel, the current situation has classic Kantian roots: the aesthetic frees us by doing without concepts. But this is Kantianism with a boost. We need concepts, but concepts cannot be trusted. For Mach and company they were, like words, mere residues of sensation; for us they are so malleable, so susceptible to manipulation in a world without facts, that it does not even matter if they are “true.” So music, the art supposedly least susceptible to conceptual 52

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determination (for which Kant himself disparaged it), does more than just work without concepts. Music saves us from concepts. It is just what it is, whatever it is; it embodies what is left when we have taken Wittgenstein’s advice and thrown away our ladders. But that does not mean we are not trapped. The elevation of ineffability actually cuts us off from the one thing, the very thing, most capable of freeing us from that trap, if we want to be freed from it. Told that, yes, music is ineffable, and don’t you forget it, we are pressed to heed that other dictum of Wittgenstein’s and regard music as something, the something, whereof we cannot speak. (Of course this coercive scenario also plays out far beyond the borders of music—but indeed let’s not speak of that now, let’s let the instance of music show it.) The ineffable seduces us to impoverish our language under the illusion that we have discovered it to be impoverished. We lose both the will and the ability to draw on the condition of language that envelops us at every moment: the proliferation of discourse polyphonically, “stereographically,” in winding paths of association, substitution, collage, and metaphor that Roland Barthes celebrated fift y years ago as the musical playing of the Text.12

on not being struck dumb This observation returns us to the saying that “ ‘What is called “negative theology” is a language.’ ” Contrary to what is commonly supposed, words do not fail when they are poorly used. There are innumerable ways to counteract that sort of clumsiness or crudeness—practical failures that have nothing at all to say about the ineffable. Words fail properly only at their best. About the unsayable found by such singular failures there is much to say. This holds good even though the unsayable, as its very production shows, itself holds good in only a small portion of the world concerned with speech (otherwise known as: the world). Why should music be any different? Furthermore, in matters of humanistic knowledge language “succeeds” not by rigid denotation but (only: only) by suggestion, figuration, inflection, intonation, evocation, invocation, action. It succeeds, in sum, by acting musically: acting, that is, as music does. As Wittgenstein showed, and even tried to say, in the Tractatus, if we understand the world as “everything that is the case,” then once language has described the world it has accomplished very little. The language of humanistic knowledge is radically performative, even T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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(especially) in its fidelity to truth. It circles the matters it addresses, the matters of its concern, but not to contain or capture when it encircles. We call this activity “meaning” (even when we don’t know it). Why should music be any different? If anything, its power of circumnavigation even exceeds that of language. And perhaps that is part of the problem. Perhaps the fervor, or fever, on behalf of music’s ineffability should be again linked (as it was in chapter 1) to what W. J. T. Mitchell calls “ekphrastic fear”: the fear that language will destroy the immediacy of whatever it comes to describe.13 Ekphrastic fear is a focused instance of a more general panic that interpretation tends to produce because, try as one might, once interpretation has been let loose it cannot be regulated. The supposed danger of uncontrolled interpretation even made Roland Barthes nervous; it led him to quarantine interpretation as a representation seeking to close the process of signification on a fi xed signified. (As I’ve argued elsewhere, it does exactly the opposite.)14 Music qua the ineffable has the effect, and no doubt the cultural function, of setting ekphrastic fear to rest by giving the quelling of that fear a desired qualitative form, that is, an aesthetic form. Music in this role, this ritual, shelters the possibility of “full and originary intuition” by seeming to offer pleasure without the requirement to interpret, represent, or specify. The scholarly counterpart to this musical freedom is, in a paradox that is really no paradox at all, a retreat into an epistemic wonderland where knowledge is always possible as long as one doesn’t seek to know too much, where truths are discernable as long as they are small truths. To understand music, the counsel goes, simply withdraw your interest, your cathexis, your fullness of response, under the illusion that you are extending those very things. Write cautiously, even when expressing strong opinions; do not risk metaphor or difficulty; tame the wild beast whose track you pursue. Following this counsel may require enormous skill and learning—there is no doubt of that; the problem here is not one of talents, but of whether to hide them under a bushel. In a Nietzschean mood—and of course this paragraph is courting precisely that—one can find in this scholarly disposition, in this self-disciplined allegiance to what Nietzsche identified as the scholar’s ascetic ideal, a double default.15 The first is a timid restraint that masks itself as impartial devotion to evidence. The second is a naïve historicism that masks its own construction of fictions with the conspicuous apparatus of learning. The fantasy of musical apophasis is the mirror image of the self-imposed poverty of standard academic language. 54

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affect and ideology If things have obviously changed since Nietzsche started this sort of polemical analysis of the language of learning, a certain plus ça change still ripples over from the challenge he laid down to the scholar’s will to truth—the last refuge, as he saw it, of the ascetic ideal. Those who welcome the new-old news that Music is Ineffable show a resonant if indirect link with a strong recent trend in the humanities that seems to prove, yet again, Nietzsche’s point. This is the tendency to draw on cognitive neuroscience as a means of undoing the lingering humanist concept of mind. Many advocates of this emerging “anti-intentionalist” tradition focus on affects—bodily intensities triggered by the autonomic nervous system—as the primary drivers of experience. They assign human agency to non-rational and non-cognitive events in the brain and in so doing issue a determinist rebuke to the humanist mind and its self-flattering ideas of reason, reflection, and understanding. As Ruth Leys puts it, Affects [are said to be] prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs. . . . They are nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning. For the theorists in question, affects are “inhuman,” “pre-subjective,” “visceral” forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these. . . . What the new affect theorists and the neuroscientists share is a commitment to the idea that there is a gap between the subject’s affects and its cognition . . . such that cognition or thinking comes “too late” for reasons, beliefs, intentions, and meanings to play the role in action and behavior usually accorded to them.16

The ineffable, it seems, has its seat in the neural network; we carry around a kind of inner music, in the sense of music as indescribable intensity, and we march to its tune without question—or knowledge. Not that this claim is new, exactly, except for its empirical foundations; we are, in fact, right back with Mach, not to mention Schopenhauer. (The list could go on through the twentieth century, but the starting points say enough for now.) As I observed in the Preface, borrowing the point from Leys, most of the formulations depend on a classical mind-body distinction that would do Descartes proud. Behind the rigorous façade of anti-intentionalism there stands the same strain of academic irrationalism for which James Hepokoski has rightly faulted the school of musical ineffability:17 sentimental irrationalism, T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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I would call it, and one that uses crude interpretations of scientific data to avoid the genuine challenges involved in the work of confronting the thought with the unthought, conceptual thinking with the otherness that is not, except contingently, opposed to it, but lodged at its core, the otherness to itself of all thought. Music might plausibly be said to be one of our chief means of addressing this work. But it can do so only if we reserve the ineffable for those rare moments when music, just like language, willingly or not, and by dint of considerable effort, fails upward. And if we don’t? What would happen if we held onto the idea of general ineffability but also decided to think it through with a certain rigor? What would it be like if music were actually ineffable? Not what we suppose. Not what we would like to think. The ineffability would for one thing have to be a property of the music, not merely of my response to it or my sensation of it. The question is not whether sentience coincides with language. Obviously it doesn’t; whoever thought it did or could? What would it even mean to claim it did? No: the question is what music is like. It is not a question of what I cannot say, but a question of what cannot be said. Jean-Luc Nancy, for one, confuses these questions. Admittedly, he does so wittingly, as part of an effort to chasten the overweening subject. But there are consequences nonetheless. Consider once again his suggestion, discussed in chapter 1, that music is an extrapolation from its own timbre. The temporal expansion of music through the act of listening is a way for timbre to listen to itself. All this becomes possible because timbre as sensation, timbre as irreducible, lies beyond or before language. Only it doesn’t. Saying it does would make sense only if we had a genuine expectation that language, beyond its own tonal qualities, could or should capture the experience of timbre—or the color of a sunset or, to invoke an example from Wittgenstein discussed in my Expression and Truth, the aroma of coffee. But we don’t have that expectation or anything remotely like it. That’s not how we use language at all. In Wittgenstein’s parlance, that is not a part of our grammar. When Baudelaire, in his famous sonnet “Correspondences,” says that there are perfumes sweet as an oboe, we know (we can guess) what he means but we do not expect either to smell the perfume or to hear the oboe. The confusion of sensation with language, when it arises at all, typically takes the form of a trace, in language, of a mystical intuition in which mute forms affect us as if by speaking. “Correspondences” is exemplary: 56

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La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles. . . . Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, —Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.18

(Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes let slip indistinct words. . . . Vast as the night and as the light The perfumes, colors, and sounds all correspond. There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh, Sweet as oboes, green as meadows, —And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant, Having the breadth of infinite things, Like amber, musk, benjamin and incense, Which chant the transports of spirit and the senses.)

The poem is framed by the mystery of a speech sensed but not verbalized, a mystery, however, that can become known only through actual words able to evoke but not to recreate it. The space of the poem is the gap between evocation and recreation, which is the only place in which the ineffability of the experience can both be and be known. Ineffability is a language. Every ineffability must find its own language. Besides, we can no more take timbre as the essence of music than we can take phonetic sonority as the essence of language. When we hear music, we hear it express something, or do something, or become something. Hearing is understanding. Hearing is understanding even when the understanding is denied. It can’t be otherwise. The sweetness of the oboe always has its correspondences. The ineffability of music, then, as a quality of music rather than of musical sensation, would, if it exists, pertain to musical meaning—the very thing it is often summoned up to deny. That is how the language game of ineffability T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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(and what else is it but that?) is played. We invoke ineffability not to describe what we don’t understand about music but to describe what we do understand about it, or, more strongly, to delineate our mode of understanding it. That mode is not unknown. But it isn’t pretty. We know about it from a body of theorizing about the nexus of subject formation and the law—the latter taken not in the sense of any particular law or body of law but of law as such. As W. H. Auden put it in his poem “Law like Love”: Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose, Speaking clearly and most severely, Law is as I’ve told you before, Law is as you know I suppose, Law is but let me explain it once more, Law is The Law. (ll. 13–18)19

This line of reflection here extends, at a minimum, from Kant through Benjamin and thence to a long series of more recent thinkers. (Too many names are about to tumble forth—just so you know.) The central concept is a break between the signifier and the signified that exceeds the familiar excess of the former over the latter or the sliding of the latter under the former. Eric Santner, quoting Giorgio Agamben paraphrasing Gershom Scholem, himself commenting on Walter Benjamin interpreting Kafka, describes the condition of this break in a telling phrase: the signifier’s “being in force without significance.”20 The long chain of allusions behind this last sentence is neither a joke nor an exception, but a not-particularly-extreme illustration of the principle that ineffability is a language, or, more properly, that “what is called ineffability is a language”—a principle that might be put more crudely but not less accurately by saying that ineffability doesn’t come cheap. What, then, might happen if music simply presented itself, in its supposed ineffability, as the aesthetic form of the condition of being in force without significance? The form, that is, depending on how you look at it, of coercion as pleasure or negation as enjoyment? Truly ineffable music, music in, or more properly as, force without significance, music whose force is its without-significance, would belittle its listeners. It would turn their sentience against them as a prod; it would be an instance of law’s tautological force in an abundance of registers at once: a pincer movement of coercion coming from both within and without. For Freud this coercion is the famous compulsion to repeat, to act out blindly 58

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what cannot be acknowledged or mastered; for Jean Laplanche it comes in the form of cruelly seductive, enigmatic signs that stand at the root of subjectivity; for Derrida it takes the shape of a forced performativity, as it does for Judith Butler; for Žižek it is the false choice, the freedom to choose as long as one chooses correctly; for Eric Santner it is the lifeless animation of “undead” forms and forces. Music met in this spirit would be no source of pleasure, except insofar as it was a command to feel pleasure. At best it would impose a pleasure both falsified and reversed by the whip hand of the force of law.

undeath penalties One possible illustration (I’ve used it before; its fascinations are hard to exhaust) is Tolstoy’s ventriloquized account in The Kreutzer Sonata: “Music makes me forget myself, my real position: it transports me to a position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand.”21 The virtue of this infamous statement is its exactness; it not only pinpoints the effect of being in force without significance, but also exposes the social mechanism involved when what is thus in force is music qua the ineffable. Tolstoy identifies both the form and the technique of this mechanism: in form it is an interpellation, a call to assume a self not one’s own, but as one’s own (not just as if, though it is an as if ); in technique it is an instruction to put a positive sign where Tolstoy puts a negative sign, to welcome the unselving that he resists and to deny the potentially dispossessing effect of the empathetic mode of listening generally taken to be normal and natural. Santner calls such dispossession “undeadening,” and the term is anything but positive. It refers to the condition of one’s own sense of animation being in force without significance, the condition of being a puppet who pulls one’s own strings on behalf of the symbolic order.22 The implication of Tolstoy’s description is that real ineffability is a gag order, and that the subject truly gags on it. Music is certainly no stranger to the horror of being in force without significance. One can hear it in the brutal jollity of the march movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, the alienated dance music in the scherzo of Mahler’s Second, the distorted quotation of an iconic waltz (“Ach, du lieber Augustin”) in the scherzo of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, the battering dances-to-death in Strauss’s Elektra and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the violent curdling of the waltz as iconic genre in Ravel’s La Valse, the fauxT h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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sublime conclusion of Henze, Auden, and Kallman’s The Bassarids underpinning—and overwhelming—the chant of a whole city reduced to abjection: “We see not, we hear not; we kneel and adore”—a passage that Peter G. Davis aptly calls a “seductively beautiful celebration of irrationality, disorder, and mindless obedience, one of the scariest final curtains in all of opera.”23 And it is not just art music that succumbs. It is suggestive that in my string of examples all but the last were dance music. (Suggestive, too, that the timing of so many of the examples overlaps that of the modernist crisis of language.) Well, then, what about love song? Slavoj Žižek points to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1981 fi lm Lili Marleen in which the title melody, a favorite of the Nazis, “is played and replayed ad nauseam, until the endless repetition transforms the lovely melody into a disgusting parasite that will not release us, even for a moment.”24 Ineffability tends toward demand and compulsion, by no means least when it is “lovely.” The aesthetic of the ineffable, at least in one of its dimensions, simply yields to this interpellation and lies to itself about it. In a sense that may be all right, as Wittgenstein said ordinary language was all right. It’s a relatively harmless exercise: this mechanism of law-like signification has real social impact only in other venues. It only intersects with the arts in the area of mass entertainment and the production of fandom. But for anyone who wants to address music as a source of genuine rather than automatized animation, the refusal of false ineffability—false in every sense, and also falsifying—is the place to start. Similarly, if we want to articulate music with respect to the unsayable qua apophasis, that is, to understanding via negation, if we want to investigate the relation of music not (only) to the world but (also) to what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus called “the limits of my world,”25 we cannot do it by withholding or avoiding speech. That simply leaves us tongue-tied. To reach the negative of speech there is only one way, and it is, to steal another phrase, on the way to language: it journeys with speech, and works through speech, tirelessly, until it comes (always unexpectedly) on the point where speech silences itself. How is that done? How is it possible?

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fake). From this it follows that that the ineffable cannot be ritual, either, nor can it simply be found or be given. The ineffable has to be achieved—and achieved, to say (yes: say) it again, through language, through the sinuosities and reticulations of language. The not that, not that of negative theology must be rewritten, most of the time by indirection, as the as if and its twin, the neither/nor. Only in this way can the ineffable approach its proper or destined home, the condition of singularity without category or concept that, in one way or another, has been theorized as the to-be-sought by a line of thinkers stretching from Kant through Nietzsche through Wittgenstein through Levinas through Derrida through Cavell and beyond. The ineffable as destination does not occupy the beyond of the category or concept (where would we find that?) or for that matter any place, material or metaphorical, at all. The ineffable occurs as an event that arrays instances of categories and concepts so as to expose the singular core that the generalizing order presumes and sustains but also disguises and confines. As for language, there are many conditions in which we do not speak, or cease to speak, and there is a universal condition before we come to speech. (Do the remains of infancy form the anchor for our sense of the singular?) But without speech, as Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Lacan, each in his own way, declare, there is no world: not for us, anyway. There is no condition in which we are not speaking subjects. Speech is always near, however distant it may seem. No matter how often we abuse it by triviality and empty facility and mere verbal signaling, speech is always both recent and imminent. It may be suspended; it cannot be annulled. And if the singular appears, if the ineffable declares itself? How does this disclosure differ from a good old-fashioned epiphany in the familiar literary sense? The answer is that it is exactly that kind of epiphany, only entirely secularized, stripped of all transcendental language and imagery. (It is not a surrogate for revelation or divine love.) The moment of accession is fully occupied and preoccupied with the once-only event of its emergence and disappearance. Yet in this radical onceness, that is, the condition in which the onceness of everything manifests itself in strong and arresting form, the traces of other moments of accession always persist and project themselves onward. These moments are not the aesthete’s flashes of pure intensity (Pater’s “hard gemlike flame”), but phases of an ebb and flow, a rhythmic undulation, which may never be grasped as a whole yet is as present in each instance as the instant itself. This subauditory pulsation is the ontological basis of musical expression. It both impels music’s manifold correspondences and emerges from their T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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formation (the two processes are indistinguishable). Its disclosures, whether in moments of accession or in intervals of reflection, come when we hear music as something or as if it were being or doing something. A close look at Wittgenstein’s account of perceiving-as, to which any account of hearing-as must turn, suggests that perceiving music as something is characteristically subject to a delay that distinguishes it from visual perception. His account most often focuses on the moment in attempts at performance when the music jumps from an inchoate to a crystallized identity. The crystallization holds good for both the performer and the listener, but only in light of the delay that precedes it: “Tell yourself it’s a waltz, and you’ll play it correctly.”26 “I have a theme repeated to me and each time played in a slower tempo. Finally I say ‘Now it’s right,’ or ‘Now at last it’s a march’ or ‘Now at last it’s a dance.’ –In this tone, too, the lighting-up of the aspect expresses itself.”27 This delay becomes weightier, and far more powerful hermeneutically, when we hear the underlying process at work in more complex settings, open to the full density of language. What follows then, if we let it, can “light up” not only one or more aspects but also the process itself. Music is the threshold of the intelligible. It dissolves the possibility of meaning in order to re-create it. We can hear both halves of the process, but the power of the first has too often made us hard of hearing when the second arrives. We can, let’s say, hear Ravel’s La Valse as a series of waltzes, or something like them, or a residue of them, without telling ourselves anything but the title, if even that (Ravel’s audience is assumed to know all too well what a waltz sounds like). We can even react strongly to the grotesque distortions that come to overtake the waltzes without telling ourselves much more than that the distortions occur, if only by being prepared to say so if asked. But only if we tell ourselves something more, after listening for a time, can we hear the music as the posthumous echo of a glamorous but corrupt European civilization not yet aware of the paroxysmal violence inherent in it. Only then can we hear the refined sensuality of the waltz reveal itself as a pretext for dances of power and privilege that whip themselves into a sadomasochistic frenzy to disguise their own emptiness. (The salons in Proust are not far off.) Not to hear that, or something like it, is not to hear this music at all. Especially not this music, which asks in all but words to be heard, parablelike, as its own version of the crisis of language that beset Hofmannsthal and the younger Wittgenstein. La Valse begins in the murk, with a churning indefinite sonority cross-cut by glints of rhythm; Ravel described the effect as whirling clouds. It takes some time before the listener arrives at the Wittgensteinian 62

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position of being able to say “Now at last it’s a dance.” But to say so would be a mistake. If for some reason you did not know what a waltz sounds like before this point, you still don’t. The waltzes are already infected with the doom that has long since claimed them in history and awaits them with each repetition of the music. We can hear as much even though the waltzes do not yet sound that way. And we can say as much by intoning the music’s title with the irony it deserves, letting the tonal power of language supplement the word that cannot do quite enough on its own. (“–In this tone, too, the lighting-up of the aspect expresses itself.”) Ravel wanted to hear the same irony in performance and groused when he didn’t. La Valse is not about the waltz as a dance, but about The Waltz as a cultural institution and symptom. Samuel Taylor Coleridge associated a process similar to the one exemplified by La Valse with the activity of the poetic imagination, which he took to be an “echo” of “the living power and prime agent of all human perception.” The imagination, Coleridge writes, “dissolves, diff uses, dissipates in order to re-create.”28 But in language and imagery, that is, in the imagetext of Western representation, the imagination is discernible primarily through its results; it remains very much an echo. (The experiments of high modernism are the exception that proves the rule.) Music makes the process of dissolution and re-creation discernible in action, on the senses. The authentic moment of musical ineffability would thus occur as a slide back towards the time before the -as of hearing-as, something that recurs throughout many acts of listening. But the time before -as does not exist without the time of and the time after, and this interweaving of times once again leads us to the principle enunciated by Derrida: that the “ineffable” is a language. The moment this language speaks, the moment the singular declares itself, is a moment in which the -as lights up or flares out with unwonted intensity. Such moments may occur in the midst of the everyday or they may withhold themselves for months, years, even decades. They may linger in memory or recede into screen memories or fade into fragments or figments. They may be found in works of art or arise in what we say about works of art, and may do either without doing the other, or they may do now one and then the other. They follow no rule; they have no typical character; they yield to no rationalizations. They exist as if in the mode of truth but we can neither know they are true nor prove they are false. They may be blissful; they may be tormenting; they may be both at once. How, then, do we speak in the face of the ineffable as a language? The French poet Francis Ponge gave a great deal of thought to that question. T h e I n e f fa bl e a n d How (Not) to S ay I t

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Ponge took it upon himself to give a voice to what he called the “silent world” of things—things like carnations: “Accept the challenge things offer to language. These carnations, for instance, defy language. I won’t rest till I have drawn together a few words that will compel anyone reading or hearing them to say: this has to do with something like a carnation.”29 These sentences already do what they vow to do. Their carnations do not form just one example among many, but play, as it were musically, on the idea of incarnation, the word made flesh, and on the opening lines of Mallarmé’s “Après-midi d’un faune,” words that “incarnate” what may be illusion as what may be truth: Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer. Si clair, Leur incarnat léger, qu’il voltige dans l’air Assoupis de sommeils touff us. (I would perpetuate these nymphs. So clear, Their light flesh tone, that it darts through the air Heavy with tufts of sleep.)30

In marking these resonances we should note that an air is also a melody, and that the faun, with his flute in mind, later refers to himself as the one who seeks the la: the feminine principle, of course, but also the pitch, A, to which ensembles tune their instruments. Ponge and Mallarmé do not seek to translate or appropriate the ineffable; they let their language be invested by it, touched or brushed by it. There is no reason why language about music cannot tune itself to the same pitch.

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fou r

Pleasure and Valuation

The title The Thought of Music might seem to indicate a primarily conceptual orientation, something that has been strongly evident in the preceding chapters. Chapter 1 concerned itself with conceptual questions directly by focusing on ideas, and the succeeding two chapters continued that concern by focusing on language, which, insofar as it makes sense—and it doesn’t always—is permeated with conceptuality. But music is obviously also a sensory medium. Music thinks in feelings, and thinking about music and with music must take account of that. The sensory force of music—sensory knowledge, sensory memory—is also obviously a force of interior feeling or sensation: emotion, affect, mood, and so on.1 The richness of this sensory-emotive dimension points to what the affirmation of ideas and language and the critique of ineffability leave behind as open questions. Music, in many of its forms, and in many of its traits, suspends verbal and conceptual activity, and the suspension may be the common ground on which familiar claims of quasi-transcendental or inexpressible experience rest. Hovering behind this possibility is the larger and even more vexed question of language and thought, especially the question of whether human thought is possible without or outside of language. That is probably a question that is impossible to answer in general but important to ask in particular. Whatever the answer, suspension is not cancellation, and to pursue the thought of music it is always necessary to come back to concepts and language. That return is an implicit feature of the present chapter, which reexamines the sensory-emotive force of music in two of its primary venues, pleasure and valuation. Through most of the history of most music, music’s sensory-emotive richness has been sought as a source of pleasure and at the same time elicited ascriptions of value. Insofar as music suspends conceptual 65

and verbal activity it might be understood as enacting and valuing a transcendence toward pleasure. The subject of this chapter is the nexus of musical pleasure and valuation. The interplay of these terms will prove to need both theoretical and historical interpretation, and to turn primarily, not on the valuation that comes from pleasure, but on the pleasure that comes with valuation. The results of this investigation should help prepare the shift to culture in the following chapter. The focal point is melody, which is not only an obvious source of much musical pleasure but a kind of gateway: when melody pleases, we listen on; when it doesn’t, we may decide to stop. Beyond that role, melody as shibboleth, certain melodies or snatches of melody come to acquire a peculiar magnetism, allure, seductiveness: melody as touchstone. Melodies gain this power for no apparent reason and can hold on to it for a surprisingly long time. When that happens, the melodies become treasured things—and the use of the word thing here is no accident. The limit term of the treasured thing is the fetish, which assumes the height of value by granting a pleasure that would otherwise be withheld. It is worth considering the possibility that the sources of musical pleasure have more in common with the fetish than one might suppose. Admittedly, the idea of fetishism is deliberately provocative, since it implies eccentricity or perversion. I am not seeking to avoid those implications, but I don’t want to overstress them either. Eventually we will need to place some other terms in conjunction with this one in order to account for the effects of treasuring music. First, however, we need to dwell a little on two questions: the question of the fetish itself, and before that, the question of the thing. From the perspective of an age of virtuality, the traditional—which is to say, the post-Cartesian—notion of neutral, determinate objects seems unsustainable. As Bruno Latour has observed, objects are constantly becoming things, in what one might call the intimate sense of the term (“my things,” “a wonderful [terrible] thing,” “I have a thing for him, her, it, that”). Such things, he adds, with a nod to Heidegger, are gatherings, hubs of practice and care sustained by communities and generations, matters of concern rather than matters of fact (the terms are Latour’s).2 The idea of the object, and the world of objects, collapses on two sides, from two directions. On one hand, there is the spectral, animate, personality-bearing side of things, their simulation of life. This phantasmal character of objects counts as exceptional or delusional in its classic theorization via the Freudian fetish and Marxian 66

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commodity fetish, but it has now come to seem the norm: it is just the way things are, the very mode of being of things, among which and through which we live.3 The spirit of things, the spirit inherent in things, is in the process of overcoming the classical quarrel between materialism and idealism. On the other hand, there is still the blank neutrality in things that resists our uses and definitions, the stubbornness of each thing’s being, its mute insistence on a remainder beyond its symbolic status. This resistant core is what allows any thing—anything—to act on behalf of the unsymbolizable Thing (das Ding) which, according to Lacan and Žižek, is the nucleus around which desire, drive, and subjectivity rotate.4

prizing melody It seems plausible to suggest that the musical thing, the numinous object or Lacan’s objet petit a, the surrogate Thing, is above all the full, rounded, voicelike melody, at the top of a melodic hierarchy whose lower terms include figure, motive, phrase, and theme. People remember melodies, revisit them, appropriate them, identify with them, get them stuck in their heads, hum and whistle and sing them. Historically speaking, the melodic thing flourishes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it persists thereafter in the museum culture of “classical” music and in the media-driven proliferation of popular song. Modernist composition often makes such charmed melody harder to find or believe in, but rarely escapes it entirely and sometimes re-embraces it with surprising fervor. (The story is obviously too complex for easy summary. It continues—is continuing—as texture and rhythm, enhancing the role of touch and motion in listening, rival or replace melody as the prime locus of involvement in certain genres.) The history of the melodic thing runs in tandem with the epistemic changes sparked by the Enlightenment; its pre-history, if one may call it that, needs an examination I am not equipped to provide. But as always in these matters of aesthetic history, once a mode of experience has been invented, its historical reality testifies to its grounding in ontological possibility. Discourse about it necessarily oscillates between the two perspectives. The sense in which melody or music can become a thing stands in contrast to the thing in its ontological muteness, the force of its blank indifference to human uses and concerns. For Heidegger, this muteness arises only when we misconstrue things as “mere objects” and miss their genuine “thingness,” Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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which always pertains to human concern.5 But arise it does—even, as we will see, in music; it can neither be dismissed as a mistake nor confined to a realm of mere objects that has largely disappeared, if it ever appeared to begin with. English usage, moreover (with parallels elsewhere), sometimes treats thing and object as interchangeable and sometimes not. The confusion of terminology is at one level revealing, springing as it does from the fundamental ambiguity in our relation to things and “thingness.” But on practical grounds we need a plain terminology, so I will speak here of the numinous thing, the object of a desire for possession that we will later link to fetishism, as a prize, a something prized, a prized thing, almost a prize song, as in the German Preislied, which becomes the fetish object sought by all in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Melody wants to be a thing saturated with concern, but some melodies want more; they want to be prized. In most “classical” genres, the treatment of such prize melodies encapsulates the drama of the life of things in all the ambiguous senses of thing, which are suspended but not effaced when something is prized. This treatment depends, among other—things, on the degree of openness withheld or imposed on the melodic prizes, on their relationship to texture, instrumentation, and the other melodic materials they interact with or fail to interact with, and on their role in the series of events I have elsewhere described as tracing the fate of melody.6 At the same time this treatment provides a means for music to enact and reflect on the role of the lost numinous object in that perpetual drama. Such objects tend to be prized just insofar as they are heard as fleeting, elusive in the very vividness of their presence, perceptible only under the sign of their disappearance, behind which hovers a more radical emptiness. Some instances to ponder—familiar or readily accessible; it would be digressive to do more than describe them in passing—include the melody sung by the oboe instead of the solo violin early in the slow movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto; the “Venus” theme in Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture, very much on solo violin and floating in and out of the music like a fragment of dream; the opening off-key melody of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, soaring on the strings and backed by huge arpeggios on the piano; the love theme with horn accompaniment in Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, especially in comparison with the theme’s initial statement on muted violas and English horn; the gushing lyrical theme that has almost become the reason for listening to Rachmaninoff ’s Paganini Variations, as, in retrospect, has the slow 25th variation in Bach’s Goldberg set; the Bach chorale in Berg’s Violin Concerto; the sea chantey of offstage sailors in Britten’s 68

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Billy Budd; the chromatic scale as twelve-tone melody in Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX. One might imagine a continuum between root and branch: from the pure potentiality of motive to the closed realization of the melodic thing.

the sinthome All of these prized things are beautiful in the classic aesthetic sense, even Stockhausen’s, and all of them can take on an allure or glamor that leads in the direction of the classic fetish. But music can be prized for other reasons as well, on the root end rather than the branch end: prized for a different kind of pleasure, something giddy and thoughtless. To music of that kind the term that applies best is sinthome. According to Lacan, sinthome is an archaic spelling of the symptôme, the French word for “symptom,” of which sinthome is also a homonym. Lacan revives the older term to designate an alternative to a symptom in the usual sense. The symptom is an encrypted message, an enigma for the subject to solve. The sinthome is a meaningless signifier saturated with pleasure, to which the subject is inexplicably drawn. For the later Lacan, the great task for each of us as subjects is to embrace our own particular sinthome.7 For example: the term sinthome itself. The term embodies the thing it designates; Lacan makes absurd puns on it to demonstrate its identity as a senseless plaything that is nonetheless essential to the subject. Most of the puns are visual and bilingual, inspired by a reading of Joyce despite (or because of) Lacan’s admission that Joyce’s play with English is beyond his power to read. The second syllable of sinthome becomes the English home, as in home rule (“sint-home rule,” Lacan says, also playing on meanings of rule beyond the question of Irish self-government that concerned Joyce). The first syllable becomes both the English sin and, via homonym, the French sainte; both lead to St. Thomas Aquinas—sinthome becomes sainte homme becomes St. Thom—which in turn leads to Joyce’s famous adaptation of the religious term epiphany to designate a moment of literary revelation. Lacan’s twist on this twist is that the epiphany of the sinthome reveals precisely nothing; it is, as it were, sans tome (without book). But this is precisely the epiphany that the subject must come to recognize as the only essential one. The sinthome, Lacan writes, is “what there is of the singular for each person” (ce qu’il y a de singulier chez chaque individu). Joyce incarnates this Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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singularity by his way with language, which he takes as a source of pleasure apart from the sense of the words on the one hand and the unconscious on the other. By “knotting” the unconscious to language (only) as sinthome, Joyce identifies himself with “the very structure of man,” which Lacan identifies with “l’individual”—sinthomatically replacing the French individu with its English cognate. Joyce thus becomes what Lacan, again punning between languages, this time on the joy in Joyce, which is Freud in German and jouissance in French, calls “Joyce the sinthome.”8 This joy communicates only itself; it is, Lacan writes, “the only thing we’re able to get ahold of” in the texts of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. The result “leaves one literally dumfounded—in the sense that one is struck dumb.”9

collecting pleasure The musical sinthome is typically a melody or motive, although anyone’s favorite music, and even music itself, if it is regarded as beyond meaning, can become a sinthome.10 The most famous example is fictional, the “little theme” that haunts the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. But Proust’s imaginary theme is too beautiful; it means more than a sinthome really should. A more provocative example, and a real one, is the very little theme in the first movement of Mozart’s String Quintet in E-flat, K. 614. The prized matter is the two-measure phrase that opens the movement and quickly comes to dominate it. This magnetic little scrap of melody jams together a pair of incongruous figures: after a pickup it breaks down into three staccato attacks on a single note, followed by three statements of a trilled figure returning to the same note (see Example 4.1). For a little while it is not clear where these little figures are heading; then they start to proliferate in a riot of jabs and wriggles, one hammering, the other thrusting, each one a poke in the ribs, or somewhere a little lower; an imitation of babble or prattle; a triumph of greedy indulgence in what we quickly realize is the irrational pleasure of repeating and returning to these sounds, which the concept of the sinthome allows us to understand as prized without reference to meaning, form, or good taste—the latter a real consideration in the eighteenth century (see Example 4.2).11 This is not to say that meaning, form, and good taste don’t factor into the music. They do; we will see how. The sinthome may have no meaning but it cannot escape from meaning. (Not making sense is always possible; averting 70

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Allegro di Molto Violin I

Violin II

Viola I

Viola II

Cello

example 4.1. Mozart, String Quintet K. 614, first movement, opening.

meaning, almost never.) The music contradicts Lacan on this point, and it does so precisely on behalf of its sinthome, which assumes the force of a critique. This is music that quarrels with its own unspoken assumption that music, especially in the newly ambitious genres of pure instrumental music, depends for its legitimacy on its formal legibility. The trouble begins almost as soon as the music does. The incongruity within the opening motto echoes in the smoother descending phrase that answers it. The answering phrase ends by reversing the motto’s beginning, though with a different articulation. But the two phrases are entirely different as gestures; the forced symmetry that marks their boundary is potentially rich in implication, but it—and any technical detail—is not necessarily a mark of relationship, far less of structure or unity. In this case the reversal seems to mark an effort to curb the proliferation of the motto and its components. If so, as we will see, it fails spectacularly. Why? This movement by Mozart is very “unclassical” but very much a work of the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century may be said to have witnessed an epochal transition in which the formerly suspect pleasures of the material world become thinkable and available as ends in themselves. The result is a system of rational hedonism, a project in which the world becomes the place where, as Wordsworth put it, “we find our happiness, or not at all” and where the consumption of pleasurable things becomes a validated part Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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Vln. I

Vln. II

Vla. I

Vla. II

Vc.

example 4.2. Mozart, String Quintet K. 614, first movement, first proliferation of opening figure, mm. 19–30.

of ordinary life.12 The era framed the issue as a defense of luxury, which migrated increasingly from the spheres of ostentation, privilege, and immorality to permeate, or even define, everyday experience. As one writer put it, “The category of Luxury encompasses the useful, the convenient, the agreeable, an infinity of everyday things.”13 David Hume celebrated “innocent” luxury, defined as “great refinement in the gratification of the senses,” as basic not only to individual happiness but also to civic virtue and the progress of civilization.14 The Enlightenment was as much the age of Enjoyment as it was the age of Reason.

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Vln. I

Vln. II

Vla. I

Vla. II

Vc.

Vln. I

Vln. II

Vla. I

Vla. II

Vc.

example 4.2. Continued

The first movement of Mozart’s Quintet might be heard as a way of asking what may be gained and lost by making hedonism rational. The movement vacillates between two modes of enjoyment. On the one hand, there is the raw vitality of unrationalized pleasure, which thrives on the excessive repetition of the opening motto’s component figures, which sound both together and apart. On the other hand, there is the incorporation of the same pleasure in a rational order, which occurs when the motto is assimilated into the smooth lyricism of the movement’s second (and only actual) theme. The

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listener has to decide, or let the pleasure of listening decide, whether the second theme sublimates the first or dilutes it. As we will see, this is not just one question. But these observations should be taken further, in terms that allow full scope to the mindless pleasures of the sinthome. The kind of repetition on display here has its pathological side, but the opening movement of K. 614 is too full of high spirits, just too full of fun, to suggest pathology. There is, one might suggest, a hedonism of the sinthome that this music relishes and helps to discover, a reckless innocence that takes on the aspect of pathology only from a certain symbolic position that is surely not the only one available. The traditional way to describe this movement would be to say that it is structured around the repetition and elaboration of a short motive. But to say that is to say virtually nothing; it merely restates the obvious in terms that recuperate the peculiarity of the movement for an illusion of stable system. We know what typical first movements sound like in Mozart and Haydn, and they do not sound like this. It would be far more accurate to say that the movement uses its formal or generic identity as a pretext for the gleeful repetition of a meaningless little figure, enjoyed for its very meaninglessness: irresponsible play with the sinthome. Or, to put it in eighteenth- century terms, echoing David Hume: reason here is, and should be, the servant of the passions. Of course Reason, capital R, has its reasons, and the movement does not simply disdain them; the second theme is beautiful on purpose. But the music lets that beauty act like a promise to return to good sense after taking a vacation from it—just not today. Enlightenment thinking is based above all on observation and taxonomy; hence the central concept in Kant is the concept itself, understood as the result of the subject’s ability to place things perceived or understood into categories. The impulse behind this movement is to move rhythmically outside that ability, by challenging the very notions of themes and their formal purposes. We can forget here about “sonata form”—sometimes it’s important to remember that the so-called form is actually only a useful anachronism for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and to recall that for them the essence of form in a first movement consisted in the conjunction of two parts, usually unequal, and the question of how, or if, the parts fit together. In the first movement of K. 614, they become a collector’s pretext, a means of gathering up as many pleasures in the sinthome as possible. Mozart marks both halves of the movement for repetition—the second half brings on a riot of wiggling, jiggling trill figures that 74

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we can’t have just once—and he extends the hedonistic uproar that ends the second half into the coda. One can even hear this movement as a reflection on its choice to be what it is. The chief factor here is the division of the opening motto into its two segments, the triple one-note first beat and the triple trill figure with the trill-accented second beat. Mozart’s treatment of this motive resembles the famous game invented by Freud’s infant grandson, who would toss a spool away from him and then retrieve it while uttering sounds that Freud interpreted as approximating the words fort and da. These approximations to language led Lacan to think of the game as marking the grandson’s initiation into the system of oppositions supposedly characteristic of language and therefore into the symbolic order.15 But the grandson not only stages the full fort-da game but also, even more often, stages the fort by itself. Mozart, likewise, not only repeats the full motive but also, even more often, harps on the trill figure. This shuddering figure is never rationalized. It constantly varies in form, texture, and number. It returns on itself in close imitative textures with an insistence that seems almost involuntary. At times it doubles its pleasure by repeating itself in the higher strings against rude visceral grunts from the cello. The trill figure, perhaps most of all when it sounds only once, is the heart of the musical sinthome, and it is this contracted, systolic sinthome that becomes the independent part of a da-fort game. But wait a minute: shouldn’t I just have said “fort-da”? No: the reversal is part of the point. The triple one-note segment is “here”; its role is to lead to the “there” of the triple trill figure. Hence da-fort, not fort-da; and hence no act of symbolic appropriation. The action is one of flinging outward, of releasing the here to the there rather than of recouping the there for the here. So the erroneous formulation is the right one: the musical sinthome is the independent part of a da-fort game. And the fort is where things end. The last sound we hear before the final cadence is the trill figure exposed in the upper register of the first violin. The cadence follows instantly, more curtailment than conclusion. Its blunt imposition offers the opportunity to reflect on the capacity of the cadence, or anything else, to contain the sinthome. What prevails in this music, its unreasoning indulgence in the prized motto or its rationalization of the motto in the second theme, which normalizes the one-note figure and dissolves into a lyrical melody that absorbs and grows out of the trill figure? As I suggested earlier, this is not just one question. Is the hedonism of the music ultimately rational, tolerant of an excess that can flout but not harm it, or is Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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there a gap between the pursuit of pleasure, which may be rational, and pleasure itself, which is not? Is the culture of rational hedonism bound to exceed itself? Does the legitimacy of reason support or subvert the legitimacy of pleasure in such a culture, and vice versa? The answers are not certain, and our inclination in answering them will no doubt differ with different performances. But the questions stand, and simply asking them brings in a pleasure of its own. Repeated performances make the question itself a kind of sinthome. The degree to which K. 614 enjoys this state of affairs can be measured by a trill figure similar to its own in the slow movement of the Haffner Symphony (No. 35 in D major, K. 385)—also a movement with both halves repeated. The figure in this case is essentially the sole melodic content of the movement’s “development” section (which is only a feint—a miniature inserted as an interlude). Conspicuously unrelated to the music around it, this floating trill hints at an alternative to that other music’s search for a lyrical plateau. But the symphony keeps it firmly within bounds in both placement and extent; the figure has only the one locus and there is no coda into which it can spill over. The pleasure it offers is slightly capricious but not unreasonable—the very opposite of its madcap counterpart in K. 614.

expending desire What happens between the sinthome and the fetish? How and when do they coalesce and what impels the prized melody to become either or both? We will need an example to think these questions through. It should be added at this point, and the example will have to show it, that the sinthome, prize, and fetish are not different things or different conditions but different aspects of what is valued that may blend and shift. Aspect is Wittgenstein’s name for a trait that gives sense to an act of perception as if from within. The aspect (playing on an older English sense of the word) is the face that what I perceive presents to me as a feature of my attitude towards it.16 The love theme from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture is a revealing example, and perhaps not just one among others. After the relatively little known and absolutely eccentric Mozart quintet movement, it seems somewhat strange, somewhat ironic, to be talking about such a warhorse. This music is so fetishized and canonized that to think of it as being in transition away from Romantic sentiment may seem absurd. But I hope to persuade you 76

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that it may be heard as precisely that, music not so remote from the Mozart as one might expect, though entirely different in expressive texture and temperature. Times had obviously changed, as the suite of orchestrations that Tchaikovsky called “Mozartiana” makes all too clear. But pleasure is still at stake, the pleasure found only in the prized object—prized at all costs: in this case, that of one prized object assuming the allure of another, that is, of the melody standing in the place of the singular thing that the lover seeks in the beloved. The fetish, as we will see, comes later. The overture pursues a pleasure that defies reason whereas its parallel in the quintet simply ignores reason. The music of the overture is grounded in a steady unconcealing of raw sexual hunger that defies aesthetic sublimation into ennobling passion—or rather, tries to defy this sublimation almost successfully. The almost is the key to the music’s popular success. The point in hearing this piece against the grain is not to announce that high Romantic feeling has a sexual basis; everyone knows that. The point, rather, is that transgression and self-destructiveness are not the byproducts of such sexual impulses but their motive; desire proves its authenticity by being the sole survivor of those who feel it. In both its forms the melody is divided against itself: first on muted violas and English horn, the sonorities not quite blending, like the son and daughter of warring families, Montague and Capulet; second on high, almost shrill woodwinds and a pulsating horn, the latter always on the verge of taking over from the former, the horn’s constant underlying pulsation (of body, heartbeat, breath, genitalia) always able to be heard as undercutting the allure, the bounded sentiment, of the prize melody, and so to be open without limit to the throbbing of undisguised desire. But not quite: I did not say heard but able to be heard. The rhetoric of the winds, and the enclosure of the horn within an acoustic drapery stretched between the winds and shimmering strings, invites listeners to fetishize the sound of the melody without acknowledging their action, to enjoy the continuity between romance and lust without recognizing it. This effect is rarely, if ever, acknowledged; it is the more denied, perhaps, the more moving the music is felt to be. The digital archives of the New York Philharmonic allow for a quick confirmation of this point via a sampling of program notes. For a concert in March 1949 Leonard Bernstein correlates narrative events with a succession of keys (though why the keys matter he does not say): “Friar Laurence takes his bow in a solemn andante introduction . . . in F-sharp minor. The feud . . . rages in a B minor allegro. Romeo and Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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Juliet enter via muted violins and English horn in a famous theme in D-flat suggesting Tschaikowsky’s [sic] song, ‘Wer nur die Sehnsucht kennt’ (None but the Lonely Heart).”17 The comment is perfunctory, even careless (the “muted violins” should be violas; the first two words of the German song title are reversed; Friar Laurence should follow, not precede, the family strife), but just for that reason it is revealing. Bernstein makes no mention of the love theme’s fervid climax; instead he alludes to a song in which the melody bears little or no resemblance to the theme, but does share its key. The real connection rests on the “suggestion” of romantic tragedy in the song’s title, for which the name of the key serves as an esoteric musical cipher. (The magic of this “D flat” draws especially on the sentimentality of the mistranslated English title; the original, from Goethe, is about sensuous longing, Sehnsucht, not loneliness.) If there is a good reason why the theme is in D flat (and there is; we will come to it later), there is no hint of it here. In the notes for a concert in September 1966, Edward Downes amplifies Bernstein’s casual disavowals, also with the help of a song: “After a long hesitation there begins very softly the love music of Romeo and Juliet. . . . In a duet . . . found among Tchaikovsky’s papers after his death, this marvelous soaring melody builds the climax, the phrase on which Romeo sings O nuit d’exstase, arrête-toi! O nuit d’amour, étends ton voile noir sur nous! (Oh tarry, night of ecstasy, Oh night of love, stretch thy dark veil over us).”18 This statement stretches its own veil over the proceedings. It oddly omits the transition from “the tender song of the lovers” to the theme’s soaring melodic climax in the piece itself, and turns instead to an obscure posthumous fragment, the French text of which is first given in “climactic” italics and then translated with elevated poetic diction. But at least Downes doesn’t divert us with a mystical D flat. A few years later, in 1970, he simply refers to “the very soft, yet somehow incredibly incandescent love music of the ‘star-crossed lovers.’ ” Again, there is a certain merging of the two forms of the passage which serves as an evasion of the implications of the second one. Oh, and in case you think this might just be a New York problem, here is a description from a program note for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2012: John Mangum refers to the overture’s passage through “music that is, by turns, thunderingly dramatic and achingly beautiful”; the beauty comes in one of the work’s “two theme groups,” namely “a rapturous love theme for Romeo and Juliet.”19 Mangum, unlike Bernstein and Downes, is honest about the personal roots of the music, which are homosexual, not heterosexual; Bernstein and Downes feel compelled to trot out an old story about 78

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a misguided engagement to a Spanish singer. And this dimension of sexuality in the music demands to be taken into account and linked to the social allegory of Romeo and Juliet. One wouldn’t expect that in a program note, but the note’s language of aching beauty and rapturous love themes is about as clichéd as such language can get; it reduces the music to the underscore of a Hollywood melodrama. It is true that we listen to such sentimental underscores with respect these days, but the question is whether that’s what this music wants of us. One other feature of these moments of reception needs our attention. Mangum uses the changes undergone by the love music to track the story of Romeo and Juliet through the overture; Bernstein did the same thing. They assign a program to the music and reduce the music to the program. But why should we assume that Tchaikovsky is bound to retell the story of Shakespeare’s play (or some skeletal version of it: lovers good; feud bad) rather than to appropriate the play’s story in order to tell a story of his own: to install the inherited story in the zone of musical transition? It’s obvious enough that the violence opposing the music’s lyricism signifies the external violence between the families that eventually claims the lovers, but it is not obvious that matters end there. There is an audible continuity between the music’s two styles of agitation. When the love theme is recapitulated it combines with and eventually becomes swept up in the violence; the violence is thus just as intelligible as an expression of the lovers’ self-destructive abandon and as an expression of rage against a social order incompatible with any genuine desire. Shakespeare stresses the destructive potential set in motion by these young lovers: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume” (II.vi.9–11). In Tchaikovsky’s overture, the violence consummates itself in the place where the prized object is lost, an object that is at once Romeo and/or Juliet, the full-bodied music that embodies their desire, the transparent sonority that introduces them, and the unnamed ideal object for which they are surrogates. This is music furious over the loss of an object, the singular, irreplaceable love object, in part because it finds itself compelled to reenact the object’s loss. Recognizing as much brings us to another point of transition. Earlier I suggested that the animating principle in things is bound up with the circulation of desire for an object that is always lost or impossible, the Thing for which the Lacanian objet petit a serves as a stand-in. In the frame of reference I have been working with here, Life, capital L, is just that Thing. Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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Both our Mozart and Tchaikovsky examples illustrate that point of reference, which is historically conditioned by the emergence of life as a general concept, above and beyond living things, in the eighteenth century at about the same time as the invention of the aesthetic. The insistent, unreasoning energy in the Mozart points to the priority of life over mind, despite what mind thinks; the bodily dimension of the eroticism in the Tchaikovsky, heard against inevitable tragedy, anchors the lovers’ story in the dimension of loss that is always necessarily present in the life of things. The proximity of loss, in which the loss that arrives is always a repetition of a loss that has always already occurred, is the very principle of animation and of interpretive and phantasmal desire on which music abundantly draws. The vivifying aspect of the lost object works not in contradiction to its mortifying possibilities but in tandem with them. We constantly follow the passages between them from one end to the other and back again. Until, that is, we halt before the fetish, which is one of the things that the music does seem to want of us: to make a thing of it.

fetishizing music So music demands fetishes; what does that mean? The fetish in general is a substitute object that is overinvested, in particular treasured, glamorized, by its assuming the charisma of the (missing) object for which it substitutes. It is the object sine qua non: in the Marxian scenario, the object one can’t live without; in the Freudian, the object one can’t come without. In both cases (and this Freud makes explicit) it is an object that defers the recognition of something primordially distressing: in the Marxian case one’s captivation by a faux-animate object that has expropriated the “social character” of one’s labor, in the Freudian case one’s (masculine) vulnerability to castration.20 Both cases—treating both as symptomatic—expose one’s potential lack of wholeness, intactness, and self-possession. The modern subject is both condemned to this lack and blamed for it. No one can be wholly one; for those who want to be, or can’t help wanting to be, subjectivity is an exercise in its own futility. The fetish is the secret charm by which the “inner” self denies and compensates for that culturally ordained failure. But fetishes are visual above all. So their relationship to music must have something to do with what Richard Leppert calls the sight of sound; Leppert reminds us that there is always such a sight and that it always matters.21 Music 80

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wants something to be seen without being seen itself. (I realize how odd that statement sounds: What would music look like, anyway? An absurd question. Yet is there anything else, short of mind or spirit, that we allow to be invisible on principle?) An unseen presence within a cultural tradition that equates vision with knowledge and perception themselves, music requires the supplement of the visual to anchor its otherwise too-uncanny animation. This is obvious in the strongly visual culture of popular music, but it is hardly less true of classical music. Hence the once ubiquitous and still clichéd bust of the Great Composer, the scowling Beethoven atop Liszt’s or Linus’s piano. The auditorium of the Berlin Konzerthaus is still ringed with such busts below rows of golden plaques. Hence, too, the Metropolitan Opera’s rotating display of historical costumes and props, the bodily souvenirs and reliquary shells of the Great Singers, those acrobats of voice: the performer’s body as space of the voice, receptacle of applause and bouquets. Hence the more recent practice of sexualizing star classical performers, especially the women. And hence the glamor of worshipful rhetoric posing as critical discourse—or its unacknowledged double, the fetish of respectful scholarly attention. To the extent that we listen to music rather than do something while it is played or play it ourselves, the fetish, that which empowers the listener by fi lling the visual lack, must be fashioned both internally in the music and externally in the music’s reception, performance, and criticism. Music is a Wagnerian love potion taken by ear rather than mouth. We fetishize it to defend against an invasion that constructs us as radically passive and suggestible, identified with stigmatized, dependent, helpless or hapless figures that embody what Žižek terms interpassivity,22 the fundamental susceptibility of the subject to substitution, mimicry, replication of and by another. Music, supposedly the most abstract of the arts, is in a certain sense the most physical and material. It coerces; it exerts pressure; and we cannot resist what we cannot see. We fetishize music—but also prize it, also make a sinthome of it—to guard ourselves against too much receptivity and too much openness to mere sound. None of this is to say that the concert tradition of focused listening, which the culture of recordings both inherits and undoes, is to be written off as neurotic or repressive, or that popular traditions of background listening and/or visual sumptuousness are any better (some are worse). Like it or not, fetishism is a basic structure of semantic and libidinal exchange. It is in some sense normal and inevitable, even if it is always on the verge of becoming perverse and excessive, which we sometimes want it to do. Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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The famous Freudian and Marxian fetishes are the paradigmatic instances— excessive, peculiarly literal and to some degree founding versions of the basic structure which also represent the too-captivating character that the structure assumes when it is overvalued. The fetish is both pathetic and powerful, and the impulse to fetishize is ineradicable. With the arts, the fetish commonly takes the form of glamor (surplus glitter, flawless beauty) put in the service of devoted partisanship or fandom. Music criticism tends in this direction when confronted with the difficulty— which is real enough, but hardly unique—of saying what music means. A frequent result, which flourishes in program notes (the very existence of which is witness to the problem) is to rely on the kinds of cliché cited earlier, which no one quite believes in but most consent to circulate as common coin. There is no real difference between doing that and invoking the well-worn trope that music transcends mere words. More complex (that is, academic) critical fetishism often takes the form of premature or overassertive strategies of recuperation—order-mongering— which amount to a failure to acknowledge the other, the discontinuous, the different as such. (In Nietzchean terms, the ascetic ideal returns, as if eternally.) Aggressive normalization, with assertions that the normalizing concept holds the key to power and mastery, is one sign of this. The structure of recuperation matches well with Octave Mannoni’s classic psychoanalytic formula for the fetish structure: “I know very well, but all the same . . .” 23 The critical position, like its aesthetic counterpart, treasures a perfection in the full but disavowed knowledge that it is not there. It does so even when, especially when, it is duly circumspect. Musical hermeneutics is the antagonist of such fetishism. Its formula would be something like, “I don’t know, exactly, but all the same . . . ” Interpretation counters the fetish, or the spectrum running from sinthome to prize to fetish, without denying its force. This technique cuts against deeply entrenched cultural routines by placing a premium on what may never be known directly yet is purely nontranscendental. Interpretation does not adorn what is apparent with glosses, but invites what is unapparent to appear and what is apparent to appear differently. The moments or sites of such reappearance are often vivid, but their vividness rarely if ever exhausts their significance. For an example we can turn again to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture. This is about as fetishized a piece as one can imagine. Its use in advertising to express gushy love for an object is almost ritualistic; one example from 82

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the 2000s showed a man clinging with passionate erotic desire to the body of his car. The love theme has also been used to advertise kosher hot dogs. The inviting, even seductive, element is the piquant mixture of muted violas and English horn in the theme’s initial statement, a meshing of same and other that is touching precisely because its beauty depends on its failure. The timbres form a distinctive sonority but not quite a union. The differently voiced statements of the theme are divided by an almost imperceptible gap that nonetheless haunts all the fuller statements that follow, the instrumental details of which may be heard to voice an excess that seeks to disguise or compensate for the absence that no one wants to hear, the audience above all. And the less one hears it, the more it appeals. This incipit is an invitation to the fetish; it is a musical seduction. Against this, however, is the horn countermelody that overtakes the theme when the theme passes to the swelling winds and, later on, to the strings: the pulsation that eroticizes the inherited mysteries of the pastoral or forest world, far from the intrigues of Verona; the throbbing that projects the image of panting, of the heart beating, of desire mounting, and in particular of the genitals pulsing. This surge of what cannot be fetishized or sublimated, in Lacanian terms this incursion of the Real, changes the scene of listening by undoing the fetish the music has so alluringly invented. To stay with the Lacanian vocabulary, the love theme becomes the objet petit a, the “objectcause” of desire: “that in you more than yourself,” in a turn of phrase much favored by Žižek. But here, in too close proximity to the Real, the theme as objet petit a exceeds itself; it no longer appears as something in the “you” that absorbs my love and desire but as this you, this literal second-person-singular that has now become first. The theme is accordingly revealed as self-consuming, perhaps in some sense ultimately self-falsifying—not false as to feeling but blind to what Judith Butler might call its unlivability.24 Tchaikovsky’s other treatment of much the same story, the overture Francesca da Rimini, follows the same logic to the same conclusion. No one can bear to be the subject of this passion and no one can bear to be its object. It is in relation to this impasse that the key of the love theme becomes significant. The music that builds up to the theme strongly profiles itself as a dominant, but the dominant, not of D flat, but of D. In its harmony, the theme arrives by slipping away into a previously unimagined distance that in another sense is very close by. The more accurate name for its key is D flat-forD. The harmony is an echo of the timbre; the theme is a surrogate for something that it is not. It simultaneously represents passage into a transfiguring Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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world apart and an interlude of impassioned non-consummation. Its riven identity, its status as an impossible object, emerges even more strongly when the theme is recapitulated in D. The theme is now more impassioned than before, with the strings rather than the winds carrying the melody, but much of it sounds in dissonant combinations over a huge dominant pedal (a dark drone with tubas and bassoons doubling the string basses) drawn out for fourteen measures. At its height the theme insists on tearing itself apart. This is an outcome that the popular response to the Romeo and Juliet Overture has done its best to evade. The music almost fetishizes the love theme; again, the almost is the point. The candor of the horn pulsation as sinthome pulls against the glamor of theme as fetish. The logic of the prize goes to the limit, but it stays within that limit—probably. Listeners, however, have not usually been so restrained—odd though that word is when applied to this music. The music is always represented by the love theme and the love theme is regularly described in language of the kind we sampled before: “rapturous,” “heartbreaking,” “incandescent,” and so on, especially “soaring,” the term for sublimation par excellence. The banality of these terms is not necessarily a problem in itself. As I have argued elsewhere, such language may often act as a place-holder for something more thoughtful. For example, terms like “heartbreaking” and “achingly beautiful” suggest a certain enjoyment of suffering, or enjoyment in suffering, that deserves attention both in its own right and as an element in this music. One might, for example, think of the gloomy opening of the Overture as a way of starting after the end, a kind of funeral music that gives a post-mortem quality to everything that follows; even at their most immediate, the lovers are already dead. This discrepancy creates the potential for a pathos that easily translates into heightened aesthetic pleasure. The trouble is that interpretive steps like this have so rarely been taken. The fetishizing response defends against such understanding and throws a forgetful haze of glamor around the clichéd terms. But can all those adjectives really be dismissed in this way? One might argue that the wide consensus on the character of this music settles the case; the love theme is exactly what everyone hears it to be, and it could not be otherwise. All those listeners cannot be wrong. Well, true enough: they’re not wrong, and I am not saying that they are. The theme is without doubt an expression of ideal Romantic passion. The signifiers of this particular passion have already long since been fetishized. The theme condenses a long history of reception that idealizes these lovers and this play and affirms the figure of Shakespeare as genius and inspiration, especially in matters of the heart. That 84

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much remains true even if one observes an ideological edge to the fact that the passion so celebrated is precisely a symbol for all those passions that must not be acted on. But why are the listeners right? We lose something by not asking, and what I am saying here is meant to be part of an answer. My suggestion is double, just like the theme. The first part is that the love theme exposes the continuity between idealized passion and the material and bodily basis of passion, each of which is continually in transition toward the other. The second part is that if the “lower,” corporeal, and largely unacknowledged or disavowed element were lacking, the theme would not soar at all; there would be no rapture or aching beauty or what have you. Similarly, the violence of the music supports as much as it supplants the romance; it allows empathy and sentiment to seize on the figures of the lovers by allowing listeners to tell themselves that they are not naïve; they know all about the bad stuff; they’re aware that this story ends very badly for everyone. The music’s violence thus offers to immunize its romance against modernist skepticism and irony, something it has done very effectively for more than a century. But it does so not because the violence is a mere pretext or because the conflict of violence and lyricism activates the familiar trope of an oppressive society, but because the violence is immanent in the very romance that it destroys, immanent even in the bodies whose senses the music translates into instrumental colors and textures. If we really want to hear this music, we have to learn to hear that, and at exactly the same time as we take the doomed lovers into an empathetic auditory embrace. Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality assumes renewed pertinence in this connection. On the one hand it leads him to prize the love of two not yet adult, and hence androgynous, figures who are also doomed in advance. On the other hand it leads him to fetishize this love and to negate it in brutal terms, acquiescing in and even assisting the “fate” before which he represents himself in other works (the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, the whole of the Sixth) as decisively helpless. But I don’t want to be misunderstood: the love that the music embodies is neither homo- nor heterosexual in essence. In psychoanalytic terms, which I continue to find useful, this love operates at the level of drive, not of object choice. One might even suggest that the violence of the music signals the subordination of desire to drive, if not the negation of desire by drive. This suggestion in turn raises questions about the overture’s chorale-like ending, the rhetoric of which plainly declares itself as part of an effort of sublimation and even spiritualization. Is this ending an act of social responsibility, or is it an act of disavowal that slides back once Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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more from prized object to fetish? Presumably different performances will leave different impressions; the alternatives remain open. That last observation deserves a second thought. For how long now has it been possible to think without further ado that music can pose such alternatives and performance help deliberate on them? Pleasure and valuation are hardly new topics on music, but tracking them here has led to matters far afield from what might ordinarily be considered, or might at one time have been considered, discourse about music. The implication of this centrifugal movement is that something beyond understanding music alone might be at stake—at stake musically. What might that be?

from the history of pleasure: a fragment Among possible answers, let me suggest two: one historical, the other epistemic. The difference between Mozart’s and Tchaikovsky’s treatments of the sinthome is an index of historical changes and therefore a potential source of historical knowledge. Mozart treats the sinthome as musical matter, almost in the dimension of touch—something he offers to the players even more than to the listeners; the musicians get to finger the sinthome again and again, to lose themselves in its reiterations, to play for giddiness. The ensemble, adding the extra viola—supposedly Mozart’s favorite instrument—to the string quartet, is a perfect theater for the purpose. Mozart’s quintet movement gives the possessive impulse behind rational hedonism a socially protected space in which to run riot. For Tchaikovsky, the possibility of such protection becomes uncertain. Tchaikovsky sexualizes the sinthome, and he does so in terms that constantly threaten to tear away the idealizing gloss of his theme. His overture—and here we should remember that its actual, more suggestive name is Fantasy-Overture—complies in exemplary fashion with its era’s demand, identified by Michel Foucault, to put sex into discourse, to make the truth of the subject the truth of sex.25 The passage of history between Mozart’s and Tchaikovsky’s practices tracks a shift from a surface model of pleasure under the sign of the haptic to a depth model of pleasure over the undertones of the erotic. This shift may also be understood as an indication that even the Real has a history. Mozart finds the pulse of the Real in the negation of sense by the senses; he forms his sinthome by embracing, not a signifier without a signi86

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fied, but not-a-signifier. Tchaikovsky recasts the process as a regression to sensory intensity. The pulsation of the horn is initially readable as a signifier but its repetitions de-realize it into pre-signifying substance, a pleasure indifferent to meaning and even, in the end, to life itself. This is a step that Mozart will not take. The other, epistemic possibility concerns the fundamental link between subjectivity and understanding, something that music may be especially good at modeling. Another name for that link is experience. The key to this possibility depends on recognizing—surmising, positing, discovering—that understanding is not simply an activity performed by the subject. Instead, understanding is the means by which the subject sustains its consistency in face of both the shocks that inevitably interrupt it and the elements of the unthought and unknown that can never be erased from a subject’s composition. The understanding is approximate at best, but it keeps the self going. Judith Butler proposes that ethics should be founded on the subject’s ultimate inability to succeed in what she calls giving an account of oneself. What happens if we shift the concern from the ethical to the epistemological? Here is Butler, commenting on the necessity and the futility of narration: “Narrating a life [which she thinks must necessarily fail] has a crucial function, especially for those whose involuntary experience of discontinuity afflicts them in profound ways. No one can live in a radically non-narratable world or survive a radically non-narratable life.”26 Narrative, Butler suggests, is our defense against the intrusions of meaninglessness on life. What is at stake in narrative is the possibility of maintaining an intact sense of subjective being, the very sense to which most Western music historically ministers. But is narrative really required to do that? The musical compositions considered here do not agree. Mozart’s says No. If narrative involves a meaningful change of condition, then there is no narrative in the first movement of K. 614. Nothing happens there, nothing changes; the mandatory harmonic adjustment of dominant to tonic is inconsequential. But this radical resistance to narrative or narratability is the very foundation of the pleasure that the music models and enacts. Not only can one live it, but one can live it happily, become happy in living it. Tchaikovsky’s piece says Yes to narrative, but only in desperation, because narrative is what it cannot have, despite being so-called program music. This music repeatedly tries to create narratable transitions between its antagonistic forces, but the more the effort continues, the more transition becomes interruption—and the lovers, at least, do not survive. A similar narrative lack drives Shakespeare’s play, in which the Pl e a s u r e a n d Va luat ion

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source of the feud between the lovers’ families remains unidentified, permanently non-narratable. But in this case another defense against subjective destitution arises, namely the logic of the prize and the fetish, through which the love theme, hapless in a narrative framework, becomes the bearer of the intact subjectivity otherwise lost. Under that aspect the theme becomes a parable of what music can carry—can transport, can bear—from iteration to iteration. The theme survives, and livable subjectivity survives within its hearing.

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five

The Cultural Field beyond context

We have now come to a threshold. Regardless of whether the preceding chapters have examined musical knowledge via concepts, language, or sensation, the knowledge proposed has always been culturally inflected. What else could it have been? Musical knowledge is cultural knowledge. That is so virtually by definition. Or it would be, if we could somehow stabilize the protean term culture. Culture is something—a word, an idea, a metaphor—that we cannot seem to do without but that we always ask to do too much work for us. For present purposes, the term may be taken to denote the loose assemblage of meaning-giving practices—values, beliefs, customs, habits, forms of imagination and representation, and so on—characteristic of communities large or small. Th is definition does not exclude social, material, technological, or other concerns; it does, however, focus on questions of knowing, valuing, and understanding and on the kinds of persons, the types of subjectivity, associated with these. The question to be pondered is what we know when we know about these things, especially when we know them in or about music. The question provides a point of orientation, if not exactly stability. Where do we go from there? Too many places, one might say, which is just the right number. Any such work of cultural understanding is a cheerful cacophony, and probably should be. A casual look at the two editions of a widely read recent book, The Cultural Study of Music (2007, 2011), will make that abundantly clear.1 Both editions are utterly diverse; the second is roughly twice as long as the first. About the only thing one can safely say is that numerous scholars, for some years now, have felt an imperative to bring their understanding of music and their understanding of culture into close proximity. There are too many possibilities for doing that to enumerate or to arrange in a closed system. To 89

borrow the language of Deleuze and Guattari, the cultural understanding of music is rhizomatic, not arborescent.2 So how best to address the question of what that understanding is, or should be, or can be? And how to do so without slipping into saying what it must be? One answer is to narrow the question: to ask how to advance one particular project, solve one particular problem. And one way to do that is to situate the project or problem at a limited site, or sites, on a continuum that runs between collective practices and individual actions, between the conditions of cultural production and the force of cultural products. For me, to do that has meant to ask how the products of one particular musical tradition, or the loose coalition of traditions grouped under the rubric of Western classical music, can be understood culturally. My question has been how the works, events, and practices of classical music can be understood as responses to and interventions in the circumstances amid which they emerged, and again amid the changed circumstances in which the music continues to be played and heard. If the answers are effective, they should also be exemplary to a significant degree and have a ripple effect on other, cognate projects and problems. The music, meanwhile, needs no apology. Its claims on our attention are compelling, and so is its value as a vehicle for thinking about music generally. Accordingly, this chapter is an essay about how to understand works of classical music as agents of cultural production—a process that does not, in this instance, refer to the preservation or transmission of customs, values, and practices, but instead to the real or imaginary transformation of such things. Or rather, since the project of understanding music in these terms has been going on for quite some time, the chapter is a reflection on the conditions of possibility of such understanding. The course of that reflection will lead on the one hand to the problem of interpretation—all cultural understanding is interpretive, and the things it interprets are themselves interpretations—and on the other hand to a trio of sites where cultural production and musical agency come together in especially generative ways. The three sites are those of making music, listening to music, and conjoining music with moving images. These sites are not surprising; on the contrary, they are unavoidable. (The sequence, making-listening-imaging, is historical as well as conceptual, a point that deserves more than the simple observation I can give it here.) But a look—a hermeneutic gaze—at typical examples of what goes on at these sites will prod us toward a reexamination of a series of key concepts, including context, norm, interpretation, and description—perhaps even of music itself. 90

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That will come later. For now, sticking with classical music, the question is narrower. How do we take the particular cultural practice surrounding this music, the habit of absorbing oneself deeply in the music as a work of art, and shift that practice from the aesthetic sphere, its place of origin, to the sphere of critical and historical hermeneutics, without, however, leaving the aesthetic wholly behind? There are, of course, other ways to think about classical music in cultural terms, some of them more oriented to the collective end of the spectrum, and some to a particularity that exceeds the particularity of the work—that of performance, for instance, something in which I also have an interest. But as I have already said, the only way to make a useful contribution to the general project of interpreting music in culture is to stay resolutely particular. So I will.

context. circle. meaning. The cultural turn in the academic study of music that rippled across the 1990s is commonly thought of as an effort to understand music in its “cultural context.” But placing music—or anything else—in what is supposed to be “its” context is no simple matter. How do we know what context is pertinent? And why do we suppose that any context is bounded, stable, clear, or authoritative? The actual frame of reference in which we encounter musical works and practices, and, for that matter, anything else, is none of these things. Furthermore the effort, as thus defined, is circular. If music is actually a cultural agency, then it is already part of the “culture” employed to explain it. The idea that one can understand music by positioning it in “its” context— however we learn what that context might be—ignores the effects that music must already have had on the context involved. If this problem sounds familiar, it should. It is a variation on the famous hermeneutic circle, in the circle’s classic form: that hermeneutics must always presuppose what it claims to discover. In an often-quoted passage from his Being and Time, Martin Heidegger famously denied that this circle was a vicious one; “What is decisive,” he wrote, “is not to get out of the circle but to get into it in the right way. . . . The circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move. . . . It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing.”3 T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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But what, exactly, is the right way? Heidegger never really said. Instead he warned against letting understanding be influenced by “fancies and popular conceptions” and admonished us to understand “in terms of the things themselves”—all of which is a good deal less than nothing. Heidegger’s principal heirs, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, are more explicit but also more constricting. They offer different forms of a model of accommodation that, like the generic maxim to understand things in context, is strongly over-idealized. The model, indeed, really just is that maxim in another form. Both Gadamer’s famous “fusion of horizons” and Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic arc” propose a process of approximation by self-correction.4 The interpreter forms hypotheses about meaning, tests them against what Heidegger called “the things themselves,” modifies the hypotheses accordingly, then turns the wheel again as often as needed. And what’s wrong with that? The hermeneutic circle in this form is a continuous feedback loop between constitutive detail and what Heidegger calls fore-understanding, starting with the latter. The points of turn and return identify the hidden flaw in the perfect circle, which is precisely the circle’s perfection. Regardless of whether it is vicious, the circle is closed. It is a circle in which all the details are integrated or subject to integration, once the structure of fore-understanding has intervened to start the interpretive process. Its underlying assumption, and really its underlying rule, is that however remote the opening interpretive move may seem from the letter of the text (always assuming, further, that we can know what that letter says), the outcome of the intervention is an accommodation or reconciliation. The horizons of the text and the interpreter are ultimately, or even more or less proximately, continuous, or else the interpretation could not proceed at all. Gadamer even says that the two horizons are a heuristic illusion; there is really only one.5 The meaning produced cannot escape being a representation of a meaning already immanent in the text. Even if the hermeneutic circle does not absolutely determine the terms on which an interpretation is arrived at, even if (a point less easily granted) it avoids immunizing itself against ideological critique—Jürgen Habermas’s classic objection6—the circle nonetheless does determine that only certain kinds of understanding, certain kinds of discourse, are possible. Meanings are acceptable only if their origin falls along the circular path, which inexorably closes in on itself, like a noose. But that entails that only the safest and most static meanings are acceptable. Are those even meanings at all? Meaning exceeds its sources in principle, whether or not it does so in any given prac92

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tice. Neither context nor method can contain meaning, or constrain meaning, nor, even less, can they produce meaning. To follow, that is, to obey, the rule of the hermeneutic circle is to refuse excess meaning, which is tantamount to refusing meaning itself. (Can one even do that? We will return to that question in the last chapter; for now, the question is: why try?) The refusal is particularly marked when the meaning at stake is explicitly cultural, because—as the examples to come will show—culture depends fundamentally on the operation of meaning as excess. That inherent excess also belongs to language. Meaning may or may not turn in a circle, but it must pass through the figural density, associative vitality, and ambiguity of language. Interpretations are not ideas; they are discourses, extended speech acts. They require reading and rereading and they always leave behind an unorganized remainder, not just contrary possibilities of understanding but conceptual dark matter: inert, uninterpreted and uninterpretable material, which serves to mark or testify to the interpreter’s necessary, energizing interposition. The result is not a fusion of horizons but a kind of lattice- or lacework with unfinished borders, a series of localizations within a totality that is not the whole. Another name for that porous totality is culture. To understand the cultural significance of anything is always to propose a cultural interpretation of that thing, sometimes informally, sometimes discursively. (As I argued in Interpreting Music, this process begins with acts of pre-interpretation in the form of descriptions that may, but need not, provide the nucleus of a full or proper interpretation.7 Full interpretation is always an extended act of discourse, above all in writing; we will return to the question of writing before we are done.) The question for music, as for anything else, is how we can understand its participation in the activity of culture without reducing the music to the reproduction of a presupposition, however refined the presupposition might be. How, in other words, can we address the musical phenomenon, whatever form it takes, not as a sign or instance, not as the reflection of a cultural context, but as an event? The question applies even if we follow Heidegger in observing a positive continuity between knowledge and fore-knowledge, and it applies even more strongly if we regard such continuity as something that, like hermeneutic circling, may, but need not, occur (and may not be something that we want to occur). A more powerful operator than context is needed to support an understanding of music as a cultural agency rather than as example of a preconceived idea or prior condition. T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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the art of critique That operator can be found by adapting the concept of critique, in the philosophical sense of the term, in a form that somewhat resembles musical composition or improvisation. Critique in this sense, including self-critique, is the investigation of conditions of possibility. Like open interpretation,the mode of impromptu critique I have in mind, critique entwined with critical invention, is a practice in need of a theory to catch up with it.8 The two practices overlap in their readiness to redraw conceptual boundaries and to test covering concepts against singularities. Allowed to flourish, both would limit the authority of context and replace the traditional antagonism between musical and verbal discourse with a performative energy that understands each as a trope for the other. When I interpret some musical event, I propose that the event has certain connections and makes certain uses of them. Where this proposal comes from does not matter; what matters is what the proposal proves capable of producing. And if I want to address, not a fi xed idea and an example of it, but a field of action, I need to focus on what makes the action possible. I need, that is, to ask two questions: first (though it need not come first), what are the conditions of possibility for the musical event’s connections and their uses; what must I assume in order to think them and imagine them? And second (though it need not come second), what do the connections and uses thus made possible make possible in their turn? To what are they the conditions of possibility? In other words, I need to give my interpretation the force of a critique, though it does not necessarily have to take the form of a critique. Its form remains open to invention, not bound to any single protocol, because interpretation, as Schleiermacher claimed long ago while laying the foundations of hermeneutics, is an art (“Das Auslegen ist Kunst”).9 Like works of art, acts of interpretation cannot be verified or validated. They succeed insofar as they create a community of discourse, a grammar of understanding that becomes a qualitative part of the music—or anything else—that is being interpreted. There are no reliable criteria to predict which interpretations will flourish and which will not. The process runs partly by sheer chance, partly by institutional sanction, and partly by the idiosyncrasies of the given case. Mehr Kunst als Wissenschaft: although knowledge of culture, history, customs, imaginaries, and so on are necessary for cultural understanding, understanding becomes cultural only when it goes beyond that knowledge. 94

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To frame a cultural understanding of music, then, one imperative of which is the cultural interpretation of music, we must first ask about the conditions of possibility for cultural meanings (in general, in particular) to permeate music, in every dimension of music: work, performance, genre, history, style, recording, memory—the list goes on and the dimensions overlap. An interpretation becomes cultural, or, we might say, explicitly or lucidly cultural, when the meanings it proposes appear in concrete relation to their preconditions. Of course all interpretation is “cultural” in the sense that the interpreter always acts from within a culture at some point in its history. But interpretation becomes cultural in its mode of understanding when it connects the meanings it proposes to their potential emergence from a habitus, an episteme, a network of practices.

like a city To make that connection, it is necessary to have a description or inventory of the culture in question and of music’s place in it, but it is important not to confuse such an account with cultural interpretation itself. The interpretation, like whatever it interprets, is more intervention than reflection. In this connection it should be added that the questions and procedures typical of cultural interpretation are unlike those of traditional ethnomusicology. As envisioned, for example, by the American “New Musicology” and its offshoots, cultural interpretation does not fit music into a niche or a master narrative. It does not take a certain concept of culture as a stable point of reference for describing musical activity. Cultures sponsor action and understanding; “Culture” does not exist. Instead, the cultural interpretation of music is part of a more general project of open interpretation. That project is as much conducted by and in music as it is by conceptions about music. The same principle of equal and mingled measure applies to other cultural products. The boundary between participation and interpretation, practice and reflection, is permeable at every point. Its weakness is its strength. Or would be, if we would let it. Although this kind of interpretive activity is at work everywhere and constantly overrides the constraints set for it by scholarly and other institutions, the forms of knowledge it fosters are still not generally recognized as fully legitimate. But the practice is irrepressible and it needs to be reckoned with. It is not simply a cultural practice but basic to cultural practice as such. Its fluidity is perhaps especially appropriate to T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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music, which is now so ubiquitous, so inescapable, that it no longer has a secure or characteristic location or identity. Music can turn up anywhere and metamorphose into nearly anything. As for example in the streets of the metropolis. Early in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein likens what he calls “our language” to a city laden with history. What he says applies equally well to “our music,” and to the cultural field at large, in keeping with his subsequent observation that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life: “Our language can be seen as an old city: a maze of alleyways and squares, old and new houses and houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a crowd of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and with uniform houses.”10 This imaginary city, which perhaps echoes the figure of the mind as ancient Rome in the first chapter of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents,11 is rimmed by order but is all nooks and crannies (Gewinkel) at its core, a palimpsest of pathways without plan. As a figure for the cultural field (which is never entirely “ours”) the city tells us at least three things: that to explore it, we must recognize its material and practical, almost improvised character; that for that to happen, we must in some sense dwell there; and for that in turn to happen, we must know how to navigate its winding streets and alleys. As a metaphor for language or cultural practice, the city tells us that no matter how sure we may be of where we are at the moment, there is ultimately no separating the irregular from the regular pathways. We are always on the way through both. To get around properly, we can rely only on the fact that living in this place has made it familiar, a terrain we can navigate. But the navigation is always touched by ambiguity and it derives less from design than from experience.

in the streets How well does this metaphor transfer to a real metropolis, a place that can literally serve to exemplify the first of the three musical sites I mean to explore, the site of making? (“Making”: is that poeisis, fabrication, construction, reproduction, or . . . ? Even this term is porous today; what is the difference between playing classical piano and compiling a playlist or composing a track from samples? The example may have something to say about this.) Since 2008 the British artist Luke Jerram has been turning cities into musical performance spaces by distributing thirty or more pianos around 96

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prominent public sites for several weeks at a time. When the pianos turned up in London in the summer of 2009, they received wide press coverage and a warm welcome from the public; the event was repeated the following year in London and New York, and again in London in 2012, at which point the number of pianos had swelled to 50. The pianos were inscribed with the Alice in Wonderland–like injunction that is also the name of the project: “Play me, I’m yours.”12 And people did exactly that; young and old, they thronged to the pianos and played everything from Chopin (lots of Chopin) to Van Halen. What kinds of events did these pianos encourage and/or make possible? What did their availability mean? How did the pianos transform public space? The news coverage suggests at least four distinct answers (there are surely more), which I will canvass briefly here while confining myself primarily to the 2009 London installation:13 1. The street pianos regularly became the nucleus of instant communities. Whereas buskers typically remain at a remove from their listeners (if they have any), many of the performers on the street pianos elicited warm, if obviously passing, relationships with the people around them. Conversation flowed. Participants shared anecdotes. People made requests (“Do you know any Chopin”?). One woman, on learning that the man playing Scarlatti sonatas near the Millennium Bridge was not doing so for money, left the scene briefly and brought back a bottle of water for him (it was a hot summer day). The pianos dissolved the social boundaries that normally govern street life. And in an exception to the “warm but passing” pattern, a few of the piano-sparked encounters resulted in marriages; in one case the piano even became the altar.14 2. This blurring turned public spaces into pleasure grounds. Sites normally used for transitional movement became spots to gather and linger. The unexpected pianos acted as assurances of civility and promises of enjoyment. Their invitation to play even seemed to dispel the specter of stage fright; the pianos relaxed inhibitions. 3. Perhaps as a result, the pianos revived dormant musical passions in some of the people who played them. The Scarlatti player, a visitor from Argentina, said he had not played in public since childhood: “I felt like I was a little boy again. I think it’s a beautiful idea, and it makes people nearer to the music.” At the other end of the spectrum, a 74-year-old woman who had retired from playing jazz piano four years earlier got off her bike, flexed her fingers, and tossed off a ragtime number. “I think my friends were worried about me,” she told a reporter, “because I don’t play anymore. But I’m glad this has happened today because music is my life.” The reporter said she hoped the pianist would T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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start playing again; in return she got a hug and a double “I think I will. I think I will.” 4. The pianos inspired a notable treatment—call it a revival or reclamation—of classical music as a source of elevation without pretentiousness. Freed from the protocol of the concert hall, the music became an embodiment of festivity. Thanks to the unqualified openness of the invitation “Play Me, I’m Yours,” pieces by Scarlatti, Ravel, Chopin, and Beethoven, among others, became “yours” not only to the players but also to the listeners— something shared out rather than passed down.15 The bright, whimsically ornamented pianos seemed to become a particularly noncoercive locus of consistency, clarity, and order, qualities also reassumed by the classical selections, even while—or is that “because”?—the instruments remained continuously available for improvisation and festive play.

at the concert What happens when we move from such communal activity to the more cloistered space offered (we don’t always accept) by the musical work qua work of art? That move certainly tends to lead to classical music, where the work, in the traditional sense of Western art music, the fully-scored composition, maintains a high degree of authority and even, sadly, reverential status. The elevation of the work persists despite a decade or more of vigorous criticism from scholars intent on elevating performance instead, and on using the instabilities of performance, adaptation, and so forth to debunk the supposedly fi xed, authoritative musical work and its supposedly fi xed meaning.16 Those scholars are wasting their time, not because fi xed authoritative meanings are finally too strong to be taken down, but because they are so weak. True enough, there is a tradition of idealized musical authority that we are better off without, but that is just the point: we are already without it. The work these days (at least in the field of open interpretation, which is not confined to scholarly interpretation) is not an idol or a fetish. It is a perennial project. The notion that any interpretation can establish meaning once and for all is purely precritical; the moment one reflects on it, it falls apart. If it is possible to interpret a work or text, performance or action in one way, then it is possible to interpret it in another. The condition of possibility of interpretation is the plurality of interpretations. A text (inter alia) that clearly, deci98

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sively, and exclusively meant only one thing could not be interpreted at all; its meaning would preempt or supersede any interpretation. The only trouble is that (happily, happily) no such texts exist beyond “Yes” and “No” and not always even there. Every interpretation is an assertion of possibility, no more—but no less. The thing being interpreted may well have a scattering of fi xed, authoritative meanings in or about it, but those meanings are not determinative. They are breadcrumbs, not pearls. It is usually important to recognize them, but it is more important to figure out what to do with them, which is something that they, the facts on the ground, will not tell you. The instabilities revealed by performance thus precede performance, and performances are as subject to interpretation as the works (or scores, scripts, blueprints) that they perform. We did not need a heightened awareness of performance to tell us that musical works and their meanings are subject to entropy. The fact is that these things only survive through entropy. But this is a creative kind of entropy, in which loss in one area becomes gain in another. Another name for it is culture. So the project of understanding music culturally rests on situating musical phenomena—let’s call them performance works and their support networks—within the dynamics of culture and its strangely positive form of entropy. To do that, moreover, requires doing a great deal more than putting these performance works in their “cultural context.” Context, too, is a weak concept, far weaker than it is usually thought to be. Its usefulness, like that of fi xed meaning, which is only another version of context itself, is real but limited. To illustrate, consider an example that returns us to the issue of prized objects broached in the previous chapter, and to the figure of Tchaikovsky, who is almost certainly the paradigmatic figure for the problem of the prized/ fetishized melody in classical music. The example is not from Tchaikovsky, however, but from Prokofiev, for whom Tchaikovsky is a contextual presence whose status is hard to deny but even harder to characterize. This Tchaikovsky in or around Prokofiev poses a series of questions (in a single performance, or many, or a recording, or a memory, or a score) that only a listener can answer. And when someone does answer, when we do, you and I, we do not abstract from the cultural field or stand outside it as an observer, even a participant observer. Instead we enter the field, act on it, change it, and continue its migration beyond the context and facticity that support it. The result, as I noted earlier, will be an assertion of possibility, but because being continually reminded of that fact is tedious, it will normally sound somewhat stronger. It will often leave an impression of positivity that is most T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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likely the source of the frequent criticism that some interpretation or other is seeking to establish itself as the only way to understand its object. (The criticism is not without bite; to steal a phrase from Nietzsche, who did not see a problem here, interpretation must at some point put a limit on its own will to power.) That dynamic will apply to the next several pages as well, which, however, should also offer a demonstration that the course of an interpretation depends on an initial and initiating observation that has the force of a commitment, at least for the time being.

Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto, composed in 1912, begins with a grand climax, which returns at the end of the second movement and again at the end of the work. Heard just over a century later, the opening sounds very much like an allusion to the opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Both passages move quickly from a brief fanfare to a majestic theme (Tchaikovsky’s is marked molto maestoso); both give the piano highly repetitive figures in the upper registers with which to adorn the theme. The melodies do not resemble each other much but the gestures are virtually identical. Prokofiev’s contemporaries did not hear this resemblance as an allusion, and there is little to suggest that Prokofiev did, either. (This little, though, may be a lot; we will get to it.) The allusion, if it exists, may have become audible only with the passage of time. Discerning it, however, concretizes a context that Prokofiev’s contemporaries did observe, and observed in print. They heard the concerto overall as a travesty of the kind of music Tchaikovsky represented, a modernist attack on Romanticism by a brash young man (Prokofiev wrote the concerto when he was only twenty; it was his graduation piece for the Moscow conservatory).17 The opening would thus set the terms for the work of musical vandalism or iconoclasm, though its use as a structuring device would complicate the situation. And thereby hangs a tale of Romantic subjectivity and modern energy—sensibility and steel—but only if we don’t ask or expect too much from the music’s context. Is the dislocated climax an example of citation, emulation, parody, satire, imitation, rivalry, unconscious memory, or secret homage? The context could not be clearer but it will not tell us. Not only that, but the music affords a listening post (one among others) from which the best answer to this question is: No. The question cannot be answered, which is conceivably the point of the music’s asking it, not to make mysteries, but to register a reorientation from memory to anticipation, from what a Romantic gesture has been to 100

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what it must henceforth be. Prokofiev mirrored the uncertainty marking this shift by calling the passage a “whale”: a great big statement from which music erupts like a spiracle from a blowhole. Is this self-mockery to be taken at face value, or is it a sign of defensive embarrassment at having made a Romantic gesture at all: at sounding like Tchaikovsky? We can’t know that either, but we can know—can think, and/or perform, and/or write—where this uncertainty may lead (future tense, at the time) or will perhaps have led (conditional future anterior, in the time of this writing). Prokofiev’s career is often described as turning from motoric modernism to a more Romantic style at about the time of the composer’s return to Russia from the West in the early 1930s, but the confrontation of these two styles, these two sensibilities, are present in much of his music from start to finish. Modern energy and skepticism defines itself against a Romantic sensibility that it cannot help longing for, however covertly, while reanimations of sensibility are haunted by the thought that they have lost all credibility, that they represent only a wishful disavowal of the hard facts of modern life. Hardboiled music claims the cold truth at the possible price of becoming dehumanization; soft-boiled music claims human warmth at the possible price of being sentimental delusion. But it is a mistake to think this quarrel can ever be settled. What the music expresses is not so much a quest for resolution, or even for reconciliation, as it is a depiction of what life is like under the conditions of this dilemma, which is the historically determined condition of modernity. In a world ruled by matter in motion, spirit lives on as fiction, illusion, and dream. But it never lives on without irony, and never without an obstacle. The dilemma is compounded by the recognition that the nineteenth-century rhetoric of spirit was already a substitute for more specific, belief-laden forms of enchantment and religion lost to the Enlightenment (at least in their pristine forms, the forms one could trust without question, backed by community and tradition). The twentieth century had to cope with the further decline of substitute truth for substitutive fiction, together with its political correlate, the decline from the power of self to the subject of power—one repeatedly offered up, across the era, to death in large numbers. Motoric music hovers uneasily between resisting that power, whether through antagonism or mockery, and identifying with it. And this ambivalence in turn prompts the moments of lyric nostalgia that tend to arise within and against the mechanism. Such music shows how stubbornly the past (the spirit of the past, the past as spirit) lives on, how it is never possible, whatever one means T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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by the terms, to fulfi ll Rimbaud’s “classic” avant-garde motto and be absolutely modern. The Prokofiev concerto has the feel of a free fantasy on motoric and fanfare-like themes, broken by two contrary episodes: a lyrical slow movement and the recurrence of the noble but ambivalent “whale” as a framing device. The opening offers no promise of return; the outburst of motoric energy seems to sweep the grand gesture aside, as if impatient with its majestic illusions; only later does the music show that such illusions are not all that easy to give up, even if they can be retained only ironically by citing a precedent (acknowledged or otherwise) that can no longer be a model. The first whale already intimates the problem by the strenuousness of its melody, one phrase of which must be repeated over and over to gain climactic turf. But the gain is immediately abandoned for an episode of highly motoric music for the piano alone. The second whale, which is the first sign of real structure in the piece, is the most “Romantic” both in its orchestration—Tchaikovsky would have appreciated the soaring strings—and in its absorption of piano figuration in the manner of Liszt or Rachmaninoff. For a while, virtuosity is allowed to keep its historical alliance with grandeur, and even with a hint of an almost accidental (or should I say residual, or preordained?) organicism that for a moment binds together the music’s centrifugal energies. But the final whale shifts gears—grinding gears—so as to alter the whole tenor of the climax it conveys. We will attend to that below. The same drama is played out to different effect via the slow movement, which stands as an enclave of sensibility within the steely modernist envelope. But qua enclave it stands here not as a reserved space but as a (poorly) walledoff one, endangered by a world in which sensibility is false, even hypocritical. Feeling in this music is always the site of a struggle over its authenticity, which gives the tenor of the modernist treatment of enclave, form, and expression. In starting with a paraphrase/parody of the beginning of the Tchaikovsky concerto (already a too-popular classic?), the Prokofiev anticipates the effect of defamiliarization (estrangement) that the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky would describe in his 1917 essay “Art as Device.” For Shklovsky, art made objects unfamiliar so as to recover “the sensation of life” dulled by habituation. “Habituation,” he wrote, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” It made life seem unlived. Prokofiev’s concerto treats Tchaikovsky’s as too familiar to be saved from what Shklovsky called “the automatism of perception.” The later work presents both itself and its thoroughly equivocal sensation of life as modern 102

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replacements, better devices. Prokofiev’s opening is Tchaikovsky’s in a cracked acoustic mirror. All the elements are there, and all skewed: the brief stagesetting introduction, the broad tutti, the rapid assembly of short phrases to form a climax without an antecedent. The key of Tchaikovsky’s famously wrong-footed opening, DH major in a BH-minor concerto, becomes Prokofiev’s tonic—the little sign that may mark a deliberate, if not necessarily a deliberated, allusion. And the fractious dissonance in the Prokofiev points to an element of windy hyperbole in the idea of starting with a climax. To what end? Prokofiev’s movement seems bent on launching a self-confident constructivist modernism. Whereas Tchaikovsky continues by reverting to folksong—an actual folk song, the first of several, is the “proper” first theme of his first movement; even the theme of the opening Maestoso derives from a folk song—Prokofiev shifts to an immersion in mechanism. This plunge, however, proves only to initiate the clash of the mechanical and the organic, a clash that is itself neither mechanical nor organic: no dialectic but an incoherent tussle of allegiances and fantasies that exemplifies a defining trope of early modernism in general. Unlike Tchaikovsky’s quotation and subsequent adaptation of the folk tone, Prokofiev’s citation of Tchaikovsky creates no background, no mythical past. The question posed by the citation is not how to spiritualize modernity, which is already Tchaikovsky’s question, but how to affirm modernity as an antidote to the supposed fictions of spirit. What for Tchaikovsky was still—barely—culture or custom has become a curio for Prokofiev. By drawing on folk music, Tchaikovsky makes the traditional firm association of spirit with place, in particular with a rural, preindustrial space defined in national terms. Prokofiev pointedly avoids this association precisely by echoing Tchaikovsky, denaturing the folk-friendly idiom on behalf of cosmopolitan technological modernity. Modern mechanical energy and its entrepreneurial will are able to go anywhere and everywhere and never be, or need to be, at home. Tchaikovsky marks the relation of spirit and place with a double articulation of the folk tune that succeeds the Maestoso, the first one rough, as befits its origin, the second smooth, as befits its role in more refined form as a “first theme.” This transmutation is perhaps the pivotal event in Tchaikovsky’s concerto. The native material represents an authenticity that is threatened by, but must be reconciled with, the expression of a more cosmopolitan, metropolitan artistry that is also, at least potentially, the mark of a deracinated modernism at odds with rooted traditional culture. Prokofiev’s concerto dismisses the need for anything of the kind. It just doesn’t care. T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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Or does it? The situation is complicated by the “organic” use of Prokofiev’s “whale,” which might actually be less “modern” than Tchaikovsky’s device for giving the three movements of his concerto a single trajectory. The Maestoso passage famously withdraws from the music it summons up. Tchaikovsky leaves his own whale beached. But this withdrawal is precisely what permits the concerto to unfold without apparent nostalgia for the lost beginning, and instead to assume an obscure sense of direction that learns its heading only much later, at the end of the Finale. This conclusion is a grand long crescendo that bookends the Maestoso: a lyrical apotheosis that answers a question, or satisfies an expectancy or wish that, spanning the entire concerto, gives the music its continuous intensity and surplus subjectivity. The crescendo does so by giving the Maestoso the form that the latter can assume in the world we know—a world in which the cosmopolitan rootlessness expressed by the off-key opening and the rootedness of national tradition captured in melodic memory must somehow belong together. Must, that is, until “belonging” is no longer an issue. Prokofiev’s concerto both affirms that this “no longer” is now and questions whether this now will ever arrive. Tchaikovsky’s once-only opening is a self-enclosed A (A) B A form with a cadenza-like quasi-improvisatory B section. Prokofiev’s “whale” also forms an enclosure on this pattern, framing the extended motoric action of the first two movements “proper.” After the third movement traverses its separate lyrical sphere, the Finale breaks out with ferocious mechanical energy. The outbreak eventually requires curbing by the final “whale,” which, however, also consummates what it curbs. Especially as heard against the “regressive” Romanticism of the second whale (seduced in advance by the lyrical intermezzo it invokes) the third and final whale is something of a Leviathan. It magnifies the estrangement effect by expanding the general dissonance at top volume. This whale swells up with clashing sonorities in response to the accelerating clatter of the final mechanistic episode. Each extreme counteracts and assimilates the other. There is no reducing the ambiguity of this music. The final whale is both absurd, like a big pop-up toy, and, yes, Maestoso. Perhaps this unabashed, duck-rabbit-like ambiguity is one reason this music is so compelling to me. And, in the spirit of auto-critique, one has to ask what my fascination with these pieces (pieces, because the ambiguity is not absent in the Tchaikovsky, just inchoate there) has to say about my own cultural circumstances and the subjectivity that has to negotiate with them. Perhaps the 104

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ease with which signifiers may now be turned into empty tokens, almost without the pretense of being anything more (while we agree to act as if they were credible, for lack of any alternative), gives the music a power of foresight that can be grasped only in retrospect. The music is more contemporary now than it was when it was composed. But it is also possible that what appeals so strongly about this music is something quite remote from it: a nostalgia for a time when, or so we imagine, the danger of vacuous signification could be contained within boundaries tight and clear enough to hem the danger in. The question of boundaries was also a motif in the earlier discussion of “Play Me, I’m Yours,” though notably in the absence of danger; it will be a motif again, with danger restored, as we turn to the third site of cultural interpretation, the conjunction of music and moving images. Perhaps these motifs are more broadly symptomatic; perhaps they are a product of my own impulse to put a frame around this discourse. The question can be left open, at least for now.

through the screen My examples form an unlikely pair: Max Fleischer’s “My Merry Oldsmobile,” a strikingly bawdy animated cartoon from the early sound era, and Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, one of the great European art films of the 1960s. The two items seem to come from different worlds—high art and low, the cultivated and the vulgar, the enigmatic and the blatant—but they are joined by a common logic that links music with a surplus of vital energy, at bottom a surplus of desire, that may be uncontrollable but that culture demands must be controlled. They are also joined by outrageous sex acts. “My Merry Oldsmobile” splits into seemingly unconnected halves, the first a grotesque cartoon adventure, the second an advertisement for the car company that sponsored the cartoon.18 The first half begins with a leering villain, a caricature of a stock figure of melodrama; he is peering through a window and becoming aroused as he watches a woman undressing. (We see her throw off one garment after another in a never-ending series; the image simultaneously satirizes the voyeur and extends the basis of voyeuristic desire to infinity.) The peeping quickly escalates; the villain breaks into the woman’s apartment with the clear intent to rape her. A hero appears to rescue her after a series of violent exchanges, but the dominant motif is the conjunction of sexuality and aggression. T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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This is unusually strong stuff for a movie short of 1931. It is there to set the terms of a sublimating process—a certain popular Freudianism, typical of its time, is part of the cartoon’s frame of reference—that, as we will see, links this strange short feature to the equally strange but more cultivated Bergman. The controlling element turns out to be the car, the Oldsmobile, which allows the rampaging desires framed at the outset to be transformed into a romance ending in marriage. Buy the car, take a ride in the country, and instead of a grotesque outcast you can become a happy member of the community, which is even now singing along as you ride, following the text of the song (“In My Merry Oldsmobile”) as a bouncing ball travels from word to word on the screen. The logic of this sublimation is spelled out in a curious saga involving a lock and a door. When the villain first arrives at the woman’s apartment, he tugs at her door and, failing to get in, smashes a large hole in the door panel. But after stepping through the hole, he turns around, locks the door, and swallows the key. When the hero, a pint-sized figure suggesting a kind of alter ego to the villain, later arrives to save the day, he too tugs at the door despite the gaping hole right in front of his eyes. Then, paralleling his predecessor, he steps through the hole, turns around, and unlocks the door (don’t ask where the key comes from). The byplay with door and key suggests the futility of trying to lock up one’s raging desires; they will always break through and keep on acting even when one ignores the hole they make in the world around one (in Freudian terms, the return of the repressed, which in this case has never left; in Lacanian terms, the tearing of reality by the Real). The only way to deal with these impulses is to sublimate them. That happens literally here as the little hero beats the villain into the shape of a rising stairway, which hero and damsel then ascend until they reach a window—and out they go, defenestrating themselves into the waiting Oldsmobile and the metamorphosis it brings. The extended conclusion is a pastoral on wheels. The happy couple drives merrily through the countryside to the accompaniment of the tune while the audience in the movie theater, another instant community, sings along. Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, from 1961, tracks the descent of its sole female character into madness and incest. The incest occurs between brother and sister, Karin and Minus, and shortly after its consummation the two appear clutching each other in the hold of a wrecked ship while the melancholy, even keening Sarabande from Bach’s Second Suite for Unaccompanied Cello sounds as underscore. The scene is static and remote; the brother and 106

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sister are shown in long shot, barely visible amid the clutter of the hulk, as rain pours down through the wreck. Nothing else happens. Nothing moves but the music for over 30 seconds, a long stretch of cinematic time. As a result the scene is one we see by listening; we listen to see what the music sees. We have heard the Sarabande before. It appears four times in the fi lm, for which its unremitting melancholy sets the tone while also imparting a sense of dignity and elevation to the dismal narrative. The dignity comes partly from music’s design, partly from the iconic status of Bach. The scene in the wreck draws heavily on both elements—and this is the scene in which the music assumes the greatest weight, since it is only here that image and sound match each other in gravity and darkness. It is pointless to ask whether the music here is edifying or ironic, consoling or mournful; it is all of those and more. To interpret the music, which we cannot avoid doing, we must see and hear an aspect of it independent of the meanings we impute to it. The music’s import lies not in what it signifies or expresses (though these might be important in other situations) but in how it affects the narrative. And with that the wreck becomes a melancholy Oldsmobile: the music sublimates the mess of desire and madness made visible in the hulk. It does so by substituting musical for narrative action, assured order for improvised disorder. The world of this fi lm is still a Freudian world and the music acts in the classical spirit of Freudian sublimation. The music displaces desire upward, like the stairway in the cartoon; it elevates uncontrollable impulses from the order of desire to the order of culture. The question of just what to make of this is unanswerable. The fi lm is in effect “about” two things, the absence of God and the destruction of a young woman by the three men—father, husband, brother—who claim to love her. In the scene of the wreckage, there is an implication that in the absence of God, Bach will almost do, a cliché that redeems itself by exposing the desperation that leads to it. But at the same time there is a realization, echoing in the sound of the music, that although Minus, unlike his father and brother-in-law, probably does love Karin in some genuine sense, that does not mean he can help her. His consoling clasp is no less futile, no less minimal (visually as well as narratively) than the displacement of his love into the act of incest that immediately precedes the scene. The independence here of the force of the Bach Sarabande from its meaning can serve as a prompt to further reflection. All interpretation requires that we go beyond what is apparent, but this is especially so with regard to music, where content of any sort is notoriously underdetermined. In T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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Interpreting Music I argued that the prominent necessity of this sort of response makes the interpretation of music paradigmatic for interpretation in general.19 To understand music is to respond to musical events in terms that acknowledge but are not bound by the apparent underdetermination of the music’s content. At the same time—and this is really the same thing from a different angle—to understand music is to respond to musical events in terms that recognize but are not determined by the music’s contexts. Context is not expendable, but it is not decisive, either. Virtually anything can be put in a context; virtually nothing can be reduced to its context. If it could, the world would be a much less interesting place. To understand music I must follow its circulation through cultural spaces but also continually put myself in advance of it, continually divert it from its seemingly foreordained paths. To engage with music both responsively and responsibly I have to marshal my entire experience as the subject of a language, a culture, and a world. I cannot do otherwise.

improvising culture A language, a culture, a world: the sequence is not merely rhetorical. Response is sensuous and intuitive as well as verbal and conceptual, but its articulation depends above all on language and, within language, on writing. Writing is both the primary medium of interpretation and the primary object of interpretation. Speech is less reliable as a cultural indicator. Although exchanges of speech are—obviously—an essential medium of cultural meaning, they are limited by their relative simplicity and lack of exactness, deliberation, and opportunity for revision. (This caution should be of special moment to sociologically-inclined “empirical” musicologists and their kin in other fields.) Of course the fact that writing has the advantage of reflective distance does not immunize it from its own mode of unreliability under rubrics such as mystification and ideology, but those effects are themselves matters to be interpreted. Interpretation does not, or at least should not, address writing with any more credulity than it does speech. What should the address be like? Along the Gadamerian lines (recalled earlier) that so often underpin modern hermeneutic practices, interpretation is understood to emerge from a fusion of the horizons of text and reader, impelled by the letter of the former and the fore-understanding of the latter. But although Gadamer takes a Heideggerian view of the world-constituting 108

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power of language, he tends to represent this process—and he is hardly alone—as if it were conceptual rather than textual. The interpretation appears as the outcome of a mental operation; it consists of ideas applied to language. (Gadamer takes all language as his province but he tends to avoid choosing examples from literary language, perhaps because its figurative drift and density would challenge the more rigid conceptual boundaries he prefers.) This elevation of the concept is more often tacit than explicit, because Gadamer and others are perfectly aware that interpretationis not, and cannot be, purely ideational.20 Interpretation in the first instance consists of language applied to language, of text produced in response to text. This remains true in an enlarged sense when the “text” to be interpreted, like most of the instances in this chapter, is non-verbal or an intermedial mix of the verbal and non-verbal—all the more so when several such texts enact an interpretive relay among themselves before language intervenes. Interpretation affects our conceptualization of reality by indirection. Its power to do so says nothing about whether we can know reality apart from interpretation; that is a separate question much debated in contemporary philosophy under the rubric of speculative realism and its critique of “correlationism.”21 But reality, which concepts serve to organize, is precisely what is never interpreted. No more than in the “primary” text (taking the term in its widest sense) is the text of an interpretation the expression of a transparent and independent structure of ideas. The ideas and the language are inextricable, and the interpretation is the record or the script of a complex illocutionary action. In dealing with literary texts this recognition tends to be obscured by the conceptual pressure of language itself. The language of the primary text is inevitably saturated with traces of an underlying conceptual order, or several of them, to which the language of the interpreter must somehow be accountable. This surface determination, really a kind of context, is rarely more than preliminary, but even so it can often veil the independence and inventiveness of the interpreter’s language. The whole process—the default process—is deceptive, and from both ends. Whenever two texts meet, each interprets the other. The language of each always matters in its own right and always exceeds its nominal limits. When one moves over to music, which initially seems to lack the conceptual aspect of texts, and is often valued for lacking it, the constructive force of the interpreter’s language suddenly comes to the fore. Traditionally, this has served as a means of dismissing such language; nothing is worse than T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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prattle about music. But all that is really happening is that the musical scenario exposes the underlying form of the interpretive scenario in general. The result is, or could be, a mandate to create consciously crafted verbal designs capable of both giving and receiving musical meaning. One only interprets music (as one only interprets dreams or the past, moments or images) by interpreting the language that describes it. Hence, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, “The theory of description matters most.”22 Description is a kind of improvisation, a site of performative effectiveness in which language makes the world look—I would like to say be23—now this way, now that. Invention is a part of this; so is experiment; and so is socialization, because a good deal of social life rests on exchanging descriptions and negotiating about them. Anyone who has ever worked through the rehearsal of a piece of music will recognize the process, which is as essential to making music as it is to understanding it. Perhaps we should add a codicil to Stevens’s maxim: The theory of description is the practice of description. But is it not possible for invention to become fabrication, for description to become merely fanciful? Heidegger, as noted earlier, was worried enough about this possibility to caution against it, and Umberto Eco later expressed similar worries in similar terms.24 Both approach the question from a position of self-assurance that invites skepticism; each is quite certain that he can tell the difference—but how does he know? Still, it is not unreasonable to look for points of orientation on the assumption that cultural activity is not simply random. Are there any? One possible resource is the circulation of what I have elsewhere identified as cultural tropes.25 A trope in its classic sense, etymologically a “turning,” is a linguistic detour, a turn from a given meaning that allows for a turn to other meanings not yet given. The trope is the necessary detour by which meaning means. Some tropes are unique; others belong to families, large or small. If we extend the sense of the trope as detour to encompass practices, habits, typical actions, and the like, as well as acts of language, we can scan a cultural field for tropes that have entered its systems of circulation and exchange. A trope of this kind—and any culture is studded with them— becomes a mandated turning, or, otherwise put, an instituted floating signifier. Such a trope moves readily from one scene of action to another and from one form of realization to another. Its formal or procedural element is appointed as a bearer of meaning and assumes a history of meanings, but at no time is its meaning simply fi xed or determined or “saturated.”26 To understand the trope is to help keep it moving. 110

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For example: consider the act of breaking into song, an action not unlike stopping to play something on a street piano, or intruding Bach on a soundtrack, or throwing oneself into a dissonant crescendo. Breaking into song is not deciding to sing, but turning, often abruptly, as if spontaneously, from speech or from instrumental music to song. At a certain moment in history this device migrates from being an unmarked convention in opera or Singspiel and becomes a declaration or enactment of high or urgent significance. There is thus a recognizable community of interest among such diverse instances as the much-imitated, -celebrated, -derided, and -cited finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “Urlicht” movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the antagonism of Moses and Aron in Schoenberg’s opera (one speaks, the other sings), and the interaction of diegetic and extradiegetic singing in such classic Broadway musicals as South Pacific. It is possible to find deposits of meaning not only in these gestures broadly understood but also in the musical details of each instance. Yet it would be impossible, historically absurd, to consider that all these are instances of the “same” meaning. Instead they define a certain hermeneutic field that becomes active as soon as, but only when, one intervenes in it. Why does this work? The question is tantamount to asking why culture works, and finding an answer to it is important both for understanding music’s place in culture and for recognizing music as a means of understanding culture. Why does any expressive or symbolic utterance work? Such things only work as cultural forms, but that fact explains nothing; it just raises the stakes of the question. The statement that some form of social contract or system of conventions stands behind the force of utterance is true only in a trivial sense; this too is simply another way of asking the question. J. L. Austin relied on convention to explain the force of what he was the first to call performative utterances, but the general performativity that his theory helped disclose, beyond its self-imposed limits, quickly outstripped that explanation. There seems to be something primary, almost primordial, about the effectiveness of utterance, which makes itself evident in the power of words to wound, as theorized by Judith Butler. Jacques Lacan’s concept of the symbolic order can offer some help here, insofar as it identifies language with a radical otherness that implants itself in anyone who speaks—in other words, in everyone—with the effect he calls “extimacy,” a fusion of the intimate and the external. The mutual reliance of music and language on the force of extimacy binds them together closely without effacing their immediate differences. But the extimate only opens a door, or, if you will, a T h e C u lt u r a l F i e l d

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hermeneutic window; it does not come close to finishing what it starts, and neither will I. Still, enough has been said to suggest why cultural interpretation is necessarily a process of invention and necessarily an answer in kind. In sum, to understand music as cultural practice is to practice the culture in which the music turns. Such a practice, at least in one of its registers, and if and when it exists, could do worse than take as its model what happens when a street piano draws passing strangers into an impromptu community, whose members use the instrument as a means to open interpretation and negotiate the hazards and pleasures of everyday life.

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six

Virtuosity, Reading, Authorship a genealogy

In 1840 Josef Danhauser painted a famous picture of Liszt at the piano that now hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin. Liszt’s audience consists primarily of famous composers (Paganini, Rossini) and authors (Sand, Hugo, de Musset); he also has a silent auditor in a large bust of Beethoven that sits in the window at the upper right. The bust is prominent enough to suggest that it is Beethoven’s music that Liszt is playing, a suggestion that also makes good historical sense. If so, the picture is also a puzzle. The mingling of composers and authors in the scene makes an implicit claim on behalf of music. If composers, like writers, make art by inscription, then composers too are entitled to the elevated rank of authorship. Music is more than ephemeral sound. Liszt is shown playing from a score, and if the score is by Beethoven, then Beethoven presides over the picture in the role of preeminent author. And there the puzzle lies. The select audience is hearing Beethoven, but they are listening to Liszt. It is Liszt who commands the pictorial space; it is Liszt around whom the auditors are spaced in a halo-like circle. Only Beethoven interrupts the painterly composition. But if Beethoven is the author and Liszt’s fellow artists are the audience, what, then, is Liszt? For a long time, the answer would have been obvious: Liszt is the performer. He is the executant who transmits the author-composer’s work by giving it an audible form to match its written form. By doing so exceptionally well, he leaves his listeners in a state of transport, something the picture plainly shows. But the answer is no longer so obvious. On the contrary: what used to seem obvious now seems obviously wrong. Over the past decade or so it has become virtually axiomatic that the “realtime” performance of classical compositions undermines the concept of a 113

fi xed musical work whose composer is its author. Performance acts independently of what Nicholas Cook has called the “performance ‘of ’ paradigm.”1 It goes beyond the notation it nominally follows and recreates the work it nominally reproduces. The idea that the aim of the performer is to “realize the intentions of the composer”—no matter how many performers say so—is defunct. Performers are not slavish executants and they have intentions of their own. No one can realize the intentions of the composer, because the very act of performance is two steps beyond them. So yes, Liszt in the picture is the performer, but he is not the music’s conduit; he is its source. The bust is just a bust. There is no author-composer present at all because composers are not authors. The picture itself would seem to disagree, however, and on several fronts. It positions Beethoven on high at the source of light, with overtones of both natural and divine illumination and of enlightenment with both a small and a capital “e.” It pointedly splits the viewer’s gaze between Liszt and Beethoven as centers of attention. And it self-reflexively suggests a relay of authorial positions as Danhauser pays tribute to Liszt paying tribute to Beethoven. The picture thus suggests that within its own frame of reference, musical authorship corresponds neither to the performance “of” paradigm nor to the rival paradigm of performance without the “of,” performance-in-itself. What the picture shows is something more like “performance with.” Recognizing as much affords us the opportunity to ask about the historical import of this third model, and thus to take a fresh look at the impact of authorship, as the nineteenth century conceived it, on the possibilities of musical experience. There is no question here of which model is “right.” Each one is a historical formation; each opens certain possibilities of addressing and responding to music; and once introduced each becomes part of an ever-enlarging field of such possibilities. At the same time, each model enlarges possibilities that the others diminish, and vice versa. Among other things, performance-of encourages cultural continuity and aesthetic contemplation, performance-in-itself highlights immediacy and energy, and performance-with unleashes charisma and transport.2 Each model also opens a different range of relationships between performance and the musical work, however the latter may be understood. But of course the models can mix, and do, and their vicissitudes should serve as a reminder that the terms “author” and “work” do not name single concepts or categories but fields of changing practice. Works do not always need authors, or authors works; neither is necessarily dependent on fi xed or unique forms; and, with specific reference to music, there is no 114

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unchanging principle governing the effects of performance on either the form of the musical work or the work’s ties to its composer-author. So, yes—and here is what I take to be the answer to the puzzle, and the one I will explore in what follows—Beethoven in the picture is the author. But so is Liszt.

the literary metaphor In the nineteenth century the terms for authorship, authority, work, and performance were defined in ways that often blurred the differences between them, and that often left each trying to achieve the condition of the others. As Danhauser’s picture suggests, the extension to music of the literary category of authorship played a key role in this process, and so did the iconic figure of Franz Liszt. Liszt’s contributions played out in two venues that merged in his career as a performer. On the one hand there was the rise of virtuosity and the concomitant transfer of primary responsibility for the performance of “classical” compositions from amateurs to skilled professionals. On the other hand there was the development of compositional genres, especially for solo piano, based on literary models. Th is literary music was traditionally subordinated to the more abstract genres, but its impact, not least on those genres themselves, was extensive. Like the multiple models of performance, the literary model not only opened a new range of possibilities for musical experience but also altered the understanding of musical experience in general. We will come back to this point. For Liszt, the literary model most often meant composing technically demanding solo piano pieces linked with admired texts and then using virtuosity to convey the literary inspiration of the music to the audience. The underlying point was that the inspiration was not casual but real and substantial. The music did not simply evoke a loose literary association but entered into a metaphorical identification with the text, as if the music were literature by other means. Liszt was, and I use the term advisedly, the author of this metaphor, and he both enjoyed and suffered the consequences. Unlike the free paraphrases of opera tunes that Liszt also composed, the literary piano pieces are based on the principle that there is no necessary conflict between serious expression and virtuoso performance. On the contrary: a certain virtuosity became a criterion of seriousness. Virtuoso performance animated the literary metaphor and at the same time verified it. V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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The implications of this principle branch off in two directions. First, the principle implies that profundity of expression demands difficulty of performance. Virtuoso display is simply the means of meeting the difficulty. It is composed into the music and cannot be dismissed as the mere show of “effects” that hostile critics accused it of being. There is no such thing as expression without “effect.” Second, the principle implies that the performance of such music does not involve a separation of roles between author and performer, even when the composer and performer are different persons. The virtuoso who performs a work of literary music is acting as an author: not like but as. Hence the double focus on Liszt and Beethoven in Danhauser’s painting. Another way to state the first implication is to say that the music acts like literary fictions in suggesting meanings to be communicated through performance. The “like” here returns us to metaphor, and the metaphor has been very influential, more so than is generally admitted. But it also caused a great deal of trouble. After Liszt, anyone who wanted to could rationalize ad hoc musical invention by giving the music involved an evocative title and thus an expressive imperative. Such music sets the demands of metaphor above the traditional demands of form or genre. But no sooner did works of this sort emerge than they generated both disdain in their antagonists and a certain lack of faith in their proponents. It became mandatory to issue assurances that literary associations or “programs” went only so far. Such verbal formulas could neither ground nor explain nor exhaust the expressive value of musical compositions. It is doubtful than anyone ever supposed they could, but the denial took on a life of its own that is still not exhausted, and that has had the effect of obscuring the actual dynamics and impact of literary music. Liszt devised the literary metaphor to account for musical procedures that would otherwise risk making no sense; which came first, the metaphor or the procedures, is impossible to say. Either way, he needed to explain the kind of expression his music was offering. To do that, he needed to explicate the link between formal invention and expressive purpose in music that could no longer take their unity for granted. The breaking of this unity (or, anyway, what seemed like unity in retrospect) forms part of the era’s broad cultivation of oppositional subjectivity, that is, a subjectivity defined by its difference from the social and symbolic systems that envelop it. But the same rupture has an even more potent source in the assimilation of music to the category of the aesthetic—at the time a still recent invention, with far-reaching effects on the character of perception that were still in flux. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, the establishment of the aesthetic as an autonomous category of 116

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experience depends on, or is even identical with, the production of a gap between form and expression that can never be bridged.3 As an aesthetic practice, art is the inevitably futile effort to close the gap it cannot help but open. Both the literary metaphor and the music Liszt sought to validate with it were caught up in this dilemma. The music harbored at least three potentially perplexing tendencies. First, the music was additive; it tended more to accumulate material than to project a dramatic or organic process. Second, the music was modular; it inclined more to transform its ideas as wholes than to break them down for development. Third, and most important, the music was quantitative; it leaned more to repetition and intensification than to narrative or dialectic. With symphonic music these tendencies led primarily to an accent on tone color and novel orchestration—which also got Liszt into trouble: just think of the infamous triangle in the scherzo of the First Piano Concerto. Still, Liszt’s career with the orchestra is neither as singular nor as influential as his career with the piano. The Faust Symphony is intriguing, but the figure of Liszt and Lisztians at the keyboard changed the nineteenth century. It is not hard to imagine why. The tendencies of additive, modular, and cumulative form all depend on a principle of surplus—more notes, more sound, more feeling; they go very well with keyboard virtuosity. They invite the virtuoso soloist to become an embodied fount of expressive energy, a possibility that quickly evolved into a demand. But a question remains. Why should virtuosity and an aesthetic of intensification involve the literary metaphor in particular? Why the figure of music as literature by other means? Why the musical expression of literary ideas? The culture of early nineteenth-century Europe fostered at least two interrelated reasons. One stems from an emergent model of individuation and the other from the changing status of the literary. Basic to both is a growing attraction to sources of charismatic authority that enter the public sphere in order to transform the character of private life. The figures who wielded that authority were less often political leaders (the original objects of the theory of charisma framed in the early twentieth century by Max Weber) than they were artists, performers, entertainers, authors—the masters and inventors of feeling and harbingers of the mass culture of the century to follow. The immediate effect of keyboard virtuosity is to individuate both the music and the performer. Both the means and the end of this process is the identification of the person of the performer with the expressive value of the music. With Liszt the performance was never simply of the music at hand, V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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but precisely of the music in Liszt’s hands. The performer, as an especially vivid presence, becomes the source of the music’s expressiveness independent of its source in the composer, even if the performer happens to be the composer. The highly visible exertions of virtuosity become the sign of surging authentic emotions that bind the performer, the audience, and the music together with transfiguring force. The performer takes possession of the music by becoming possessed by it; no one can say which is in control. The dazzled audience takes the same attitude toward the performer, symbolically taking possession of him by falling completely under his power. Danhauser’s picture shows this circle of transport as a privilege of the private sphere; the point of Liszt’s performing career was to trace the circle on the much larger canvas of the public sphere. From the start this charmed circle was enveloped with ambivalence. The element of theatricality that inevitably went with virtuoso performance led to a persistent suspicion that the virtuoso’s public power over the private feelings of his audience was either false or debased or both. But Liszt’s sheer star power kept carrying the day, although his music, lacking his presence, fared less well over time. Even Eduard Hanslick, who constantly tried to keep separate his admiration for Liszt the pianist from his disdain for Liszt the composer, found himself caught on this cusp. Writing in 1880, after many years of ambivalent absorption, Hanslick observed that the “protective magic” of Liszt’s personal magnetism made the effect of his music impossible to judge when Liszt performed it; the “fascinating power [ fascinirende Gewalt] of this man,” he added, “is no fable.”4 But in this aspect, Liszt, like Charles Dickens in the latter’s public readings (discussed below), was not simply “himself,” even as a carefully constructed persona, but an embodiment of the communicative power of authorship that his era had learned to crave. The cliché of Liszt as the first “rock star” has a kernel of truth to it, in that Liszt was one of the first performing artists to become a cultural icon rivaling the figure of the great author. So once again, and not for the last time, we find Liszt positioned face to face with that bust of Beethoven in Danhauser’s painting.5

virtuoso reading Liszt’s invention of the solo piano recital was both a cause and an effect of the increasing coalescence of virtuoso performance and charismatic authority. 118

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Liszt came close to saying as much in a letter of 1839: “So limitless has my impertinence become!—. . . I dared to give a series of concerts by myself alone, borrowing from Louis XIV and saying to my public cavalierly, ‘le concert, c’est moi’ ” [I am the concert].6 What does this statement mean? The statement “I am the concert” is not a simple boast but a way of claiming the power and prestige of an author. This claim would apply both when Liszt was playing his own music and when he was not, both when he was being faithful to a score and when he was not. The status of the author, for Liszt and many others of his time, did not depend on what the author wrote but on how the author addressed an audience. Liszt’s literary metaphor, the equation of a composition with a poem or other fiction, was not based on similarities of form. It was based on the way the literary content was transmitted to an audience. The nature of that transmission depended on the role of reading in nineteenth-century Western culture. Among other evolving changes, reading was increasingly supposed to produce a state of absorption in the reader, an obliviousness of concentration such as those famously identified by Michael Fried in the paintings of Chardin. One of Fried’s paradigmatic examples is Chardin’s Un philosophe occupé de sa lecture of 1753, which a contemporary critic described as depicting “a truly philosophical reader who is not content merely to read, but meditates and ponders, and who appears so deeply absorbed in his meditation that it seems one would have a hard time distracting him.”7 Some years into the next century, that truly philosophical reader had become the ideal reader; the distinguished exception had become the norm. But absorption itself changed in the process. If we think of reading on the classic model of communication wherein a sender sends a message to a receiver, we can identify the traditional focal point of reading as the message and its determinants: rhetoric, style, genre, idea.8 Perhaps that is true for Chardin’s philosopher, but for his nineteenth-century heirs the focus had changed to the relationship between the sender and the receiver. The text increasingly acted as a vanishing mediator, leaving the reader and the author in an imaginary state of direct contact, something felt especially strongly with a living author.9 Although reading was still supposed to be edifying, it was now also supposed to be moving, transporting, even transforming. In his autobiography, John Stuart Mill recalls an experience of absorbed reading that can stand as a model for the practice. Reading for Mill is basic to his life story; he tells us who he has been by telling us what he has read. At V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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one point, his narrative becomes a story of redemption. Faced with what he calls “A Crisis in My Mental History,” he finds “a medicine for my state of mind” in meditating and pondering on the texts of a single author: William Wordsworth. Mill suffered from an archetypal malady of the early nineteenth century, a sterile analytic self-consciousness that paralyzed him emotionally. In Wordsworth he found an author to teach him how to feel, much as Matthew Arnold would later in the century: [Wordsworth’s poems] seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings. . . . From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. . . . At the conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, “Intimations of Immortality,” in which . . . I found that [Wordsworth] too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.10

This passage is important not only because it makes high claims for absorbed reading but also because it demonstrates that the process is founded on an affirmative contradiction. On one hand the author becomes fully and transparently present to the reader the more the reader reads. Mill learns Wordsworth’s lessons because in reading Wordsworth’s text he literally reads Wordsworth’s mind—the mind that feels as well as knows and which, he discovers, is also his own. But on the other hand this intimate and immediate knowledge is the reward of multiple acts of interpretation by the reader; the reading just is that interpretation. Mill records his surmises in even more detail than my quotation shows, and his paraphrases replace Wordsworth’s phrases, none of which appear in this passage. The texts of Wordsworth’s poems vanish so that he and Mill can have their empathic meeting of minds, but Mill’s own text restores the work of mediation in tangible form. Liszt’s technique in his virtuoso piano pieces, both as composer and performer, sought to provide a public, external equivalent to the kind of private, internal experience that Mill found in absorbed reading. The theatricality of Liszt’s performances was a means of transferring the excitements of such reading to a new venue—what would nowadays be called re-mediation. Mill 120

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would not have been surprised; he was an ardent music lover who recorded that Weber’s Oberon gave him an emotional lift that helped open the way to Wordsworth. It is well known that Liszt was the first pianist to make sure that the audience could see his hands. He did so in part to show his hands disappearing into a vertiginous blur widely noted and caricatured at the time. That was a model of the first half of the equation: music too would become a vanishing mediator through which the listener comes into direct contact with thoughts and feelings that both are and are not his own. Mill is to Wordsworth as the musical audience—for example the artists depicted in Danhauser’s painting—are to the virtuoso. The subject-positions are the same, or nearly so; absorbed reading and its musical counterpart share less than an identity but more than an analogy. At the same time the titles and epigraphs of the literary piano pieces on which much of Liszt’s compositional legacy rests conjoin the effect of absorbed listening with a demand for interpretation. These “paratexts” summon listeners to understand half-hidden meanings, meanings that the music offers and withdraws at the same time. The titles and epigraphs do not act as glosses on the music but the reverse. The music embodies the process of interpretation latent in all absorbed reading: the process that gives voice to a meaning perceived as speaking for itself, that encounters the meaning it makes as a meaning it receives. The music that adopts this model assumes the presence of an audience addressed by the virtuoso as author; it is music to be played by few but heard by many. That disposition forms the second half of the equation; it requires the listener to complete the circuit traced by the absorbed reader and to complete the effect of immediacy with a contradictory work of mediation. The results for listeners who admired Liszt were as sensational as they were for Mill. It is more literal than metaphorical to describe Liszt’s command over his audiences as the equivalent to a celebrated writer’s command over a devoted readership. This brings us back to the second implication of the principle that denies any conflict between virtuosity and serious expression. Liszt’s literary pieces may or may not have communicated everything their titles suggested, but they all addressed the audience in the same way. More importantly, their form of address carried over into all the “serious” music on the concert program. Liszt’s recitals were monodramas in which the fusion of charismatic authorship and performative energy subsumed the fusion of empathetic communion and interpretive agency typical of absorbed reading. The parallel went beyond literary music to cover music in general. As with Chardin’s philosopher, the exceptional figure had become the norm. V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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This state of affairs was powerful but unstable. Those hostile to the display of “effect” also tended to resist the hermeneutic dimension of the literary metaphor in favor of something like pure absorption in the musical event. Their disposition prevailed for most of the twentieth century. Yet it might be said that the practice of such counter-listening tended to reproduce the Chardin-Liszt norm without knowing it, or at least without admitting it. Meanwhile the edifying side of the norm could not help colliding with the obvious entertainment value of virtuoso display. The charisma of the author, whether channeled through words or music, expressed itself as the exercise of a half-magical power just then emerging on the cultural scene: the power of celebrity. Absorption as a means of cultural self-fashioning comes to draw on the same energies that would power mass-media entertainment in the twentieth century. If the initial problem with absorption was how to achieve it, the eventual problem was how to emerge from it. What Mill received as a gift evolved into a task.

performing authorship: the recital What made the scenario of absorbed listening possible? What social meanings did it have? The answers here lie in changes to the concept of authorship that occurred as absorbed reading rose in cultural value. We therefore need to backtrack a little. By the early nineteenth century in Europe, authorship was losing its traditional association with fi xed forms and the timeless authority of the printed word. Like the figure of the virtuoso pianist—a role one had to play as much as one played the keys, not simply something one could be—the author was becoming something like a dramatic character. The figure of the author was no longer an abstraction, a potent name, anchoring the value of a text; authors were persons and personalities. Authorship was the author’s mode of action; it increasingly appeared as a mode of performance. For many nineteenth-century observers, literary works were performances. For that reason, where the performing arts were concerned, performers were authors. The line between the categories was continually blurred. In the concert hall, the liberties that virtuosos often took with a composer’s score did not represent a dismissal of the work of favor of performance. Rather, depending on your taste, they were either a dazzling extension of authorship or a failure of it. After a few years of mixed practice, Liszt came 122

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to minimize such liberties by the standards of the day. Like a poet or novelist reading his work in public, the virtuoso pianist best conveyed the power of authorship by presenting his material strongly rather than by reinventing it. But the point was not to make performance subservient to an author’s text; it was, rather, to make the performance as much the work of an author as possible. The closest contemporary parallel to Liszt’s public persona was no doubt that of Charles Dickens, who followed up on the vast popularity of his novels by giving public readings from them: giving recitals. Like Liszt’s concerts, these events were received with wild enthusiasm. As a recitalist, Dickens was even more commanding an author than he was in print. In an especially revealing comment Dickens’s tour manager George Dolby observed: It is well known with what care and elaboration Mr. Dickens prepared his books, and the same system was carried out in preparation of his Readings. He has a singular habit, too, of regarding his own books as the productions of someone else, and would almost refer to them as such. Chief among his favorites was David Copperfield, so that it is not a matter of surprise that, when he presented it to the public as a Reading, he should throw into it all the colour, light, and shade of which his artistic nature was capable . . . [a] wonderful combination of whimsicality and pathos [that] was received with visible expressions of rapt interest on the part of the audience.11

Authorship in this context assumes a double or extended form. First there is the abstract figure of the author as writer whose imaginary presence behind his words rouses the reader to enthusiasm. Second there is the animated figure of the author as performer whose actual presence behind his words rouses the audience to enthusiasm. Although Dickens as a performer feels as though his written works had been authored by someone else, that feeling is overcome by the performance itself. Dickens the recitalist unites the abstract and the animate figures of authorship. There is abundant evidence that enthusiasm for Liszt’s performances engaged the same double form, both when the music involved was Liszt’s own and when it was the production of someone else. Reviewing a performance in Vienna in 1839, Heinrich Adami wrote that “[Liszt’s] way of playing, far from straining for empty effect, is but the expression of his innermost being and the sentiment that dominates him. . . . It is this that marks out the genuine artist.”12 Liszt himself claimed authorship in these terms. He wrote that the virtuoso animates the “still lifeless form” of the notes in the score and V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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thus “engenders the music anew and in his turn. He gives it a palpable and perceptible existence, and by that act he establishes the claim of his art to be ranked with those called autonomous.”13 It is important to note that the autonomy Liszt invokes here is not the supposed independence of external reference that would come to be valued by later, especially twentieth-century, music theorists. On the contrary: the music Liszt is talking about brims over with external references. The autonomy at stake is, paradoxically, independence from performance. By giving the music a palpable and perceptible existence, the performer endows it with a virtual materiality that allows the listener to address it as a viewer addresses a painting or, especially, as a reader addresses a text. The aim of performance is to deny itself, even where, perhaps especially where, it most strongly affirms itself. Three of Liszt’s large cycles of virtuoso piano pieces extend this process repeatedly to the work of a single celebrated author. Five of the nine numbers in the “first year” of the Années de pèlerinage, “Suisse” (composed 1848–54, published 1855), carry epigraphs from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; the organizing thread of a secular pilgrimage, part travelogue and part quest for relics of transcendence, is itself a literary idea, popularized in Europe especially by the four cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold poems. Three of the numbers in the second year, “Italie” (composed 1837–49, published 1858), are musical recreations of sonnets by Petrarch, and a fourth, notably extended, is the one-movement Après une lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi sonata. Half of the numbers in the collection Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (composed 1846–51, published 1853) quote or otherwise invoke the writings of Alphonse de Lamartine, as does the collection as a whole, which is named after one of the poet’s books. The composer-performer of such pieces extends but also transforms their literary inheritance and the cultural authority that goes with it. The same virtuoso would also trade in those operatic paraphrases and pots-pourris that mainly served to keep popular melodies in circulation (and why not?). But with high-minded compositions inspired by literature the Lisztian virtuoso acted like a literary pilgrim seeking thresholds and crossroads. His aim was to join the transfiguring effect of virtuoso performance to the edifying sentiments conveyed by the music’s literary titles and epigraphs. The cultural point of such virtuosity was not primarily to entertain or amaze. It was, in every sense, to authorize the performer. That is why Liszt’s recourse to the literary metaphor was almost foreordained. Part of the change 124

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that authorship underwent in the early nineteenth century arose from the proliferating public career of absorbed reading. This development went on in tandem with the growth of recreational reading, with no firm boundary separating the two types. Absorbed reading expanded along with the space of private life and the number of people privileged to inhabit it. Poring over the pages of a favorite author became a means of cultivating what I have elsewhere called “the private, hermeneutically active, emotionally varied subjectivity that became the favored model of the era.”14 At the same time the private space of reading extended into the public sphere. The market for books soared; the serial novel flourished; public libraries and reading rooms were established throughout Europe and America. The era was pervaded by something like a cult of the book. More exactly, it developed a cult of authorship whose medium was the treasured book. Readers would return again and again to the authors they cared about; they would memorize and copy out passages; they would choose—the metaphor is from Yeats—their own “sacred books.” Literature flourished primarily not in the monumentalized form of the work but in the personified form of the author. This way of treating the author is part of a complex history. In his celebrated essay “What is an Author?” (1971) Michel Foucault separated what he called the “author function” from the author as a person or personification.15 Foucault claimed, and the claim became famous, that the author function was meant to control and limit the multiplication of meanings. The figure of the author is a curb on invention, the personification of a set of rules designed to make sure that texts are read in only one way. This claim works well for various historical periods, including most of the twentieth century, but it does not work so well for the nineteenth century. In Liszt’s Europe, and by the way in America too, the author function was more positive than negative. It was an open invitation to form imaginary relationships. Readers identified with the authors they admired or treated them as sources of advice, emotional support, approval, and wisdom. The “counsel” that Walter Benjamin thought had disappeared with the tradition of oral storytelling persisted in the inner orality of reading.16 Liszt practiced this sort of reading intensively. According to Alan Walker, the young Liszt “often sat up half the night with [edifying] literature, looking for some key with which to unlock the world. [Joseph] D’Ortigue once saw Liszt remain motionless for four hours, sitting beside the chimneypiece, with a volume of Lamartine in his hands.”17 What stands out most strongly from this description is a certain quality of attention betokened by the reader’s V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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stillness, a readiness for absorption that Liszt’s literary compositions assumed in their listeners or sought to elicit from them. Listening to music thus fuses once more with the attitude of Chardin’s philosopher, who in his pondering and meditation is from one point of view the exceptional self, the genius, while from another point of view he can be anyone at all. Th is alliance between reading and listening was a two-way street. Absorbed reading could take the form of imaginary listening, no less than absorbed listening took the form of imaginary reading. Like the self-transcending performance that according to Liszt made music materially autonomous, the reading of books by celebrated authors engendered a self-transcending textuality that—to borrow Liszt’s formula—gave palpable and perceptible existence to the voice of the writer as a speaking subject. It is just that simulation of voice, and hence of person, that gave the writer the status of an author. In earlier times it had been customary to speak of what an author did; in the nineteenth century it became customary to speak of who an author was. Authorship in this frame of reference depends on the act of silent ventriloquism by which the reader simultaneously personifies the writer and listens closely to him. This structural ventriloquism helps explain why the music that seeks a parallel effect must be performed by a virtuoso. The listener, as distinct from the performer, cannot provide the necessary personification; that is role of the virtuoso who animates the lifeless notes in the score. With this observation we are again back at Danhauser’s painting, with its division of authorship between Beethoven and Liszt. The virtuoso acts both for the author, who may or may not be himself, and as an author. He bears and transmits the “counsel” of Benjamin’s storyteller and joins it to the edifying rapture that was also the author’s province. He invites the listener to become absorbed in the music by becoming absorbed in his absorption. Thus by 1843, according to Franz von Schober (best known today as a friend of Schubert’s), “In [Liszt] people saw embodied and accomplished what they wished and strove for.”18 Mill saw the same thing in Wordsworth, in a relationship that went beyond simple admiration and even beyond identification. The practice of the absorbed reader or listener is an affirmative subordination to a second self. The literary authors who could wield this kind of authority had a characteristic profi le suggested by names like Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, and Hugo, all the subjects of intense admiration at the time. These were prolific writers whose scope was broad, whose range of reference was wide, and whose 126

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resources of allusion were deep. They were, in short, the literary equivalents of the virtuoso pianist, whose parallel profile arose from his capacity to command the flow of sonority at what seemed the limits of the possible, if not beyond. This parallel operated on the author’s medium as well as on the author function. By laying claim to the literary metaphor, Liszt was not only staking his own claim to authorial status but also staking a claim on behalf of music to wield, even usurp, the rising cultural authority of literature. One striking sign of this appropriation was Liszt’s habit of publicly revising his literary piano works. The revisions did not detract from the music’s “work” status but enhanced it, by rendering the activity of authorship visible—a point noted appreciatively by Robert Schumann in a comparative review. But despite its success—and as I suggested earlier this is a success that has often been dismissed but never escaped—the literary metaphor was curtailed on two fronts. Predictably, its very success made the metaphor obsolete. Once music had gained a place at the top of the aesthetic pyramid, once composers could make their way as culture heroes, who needed literature for vindication? Music could stand on its own. More importantly, perhaps, the metaphor was premature. The idea behind it was that an affinity of topical concern, feeling, and attitude to a valued literary model could shape and energize a musical work. But the nineteenth century lacked the hermeneutic resources to explicate the results. All that was available was the idea of programmatic representation, which could lead nowhere, except to clumsy parallels between musical and narrative events. No wonder that most such narratives, and there were plenty of them, came hedged about with warnings not to take them too seriously. Their inadequacy was painfully obvious. A lot, of course, has happened since. Thanks to more than a century of theorizing about language—as text, as trope, as performance, as interpretation—we now have the means to work out the full implications of the literary metaphor. We are able to trace the possible circulation of values, meanings, and historically specific modes of feeling between music and other cultural products, including literature, without invoking one-on-one parallels that satisfy no one. In that regard we have caught up with Liszt at last. But note the turn of phrase that spoke of “other cultural products, including literature.” The literary metaphor is historically important in its narrow sense, but theoretically important in its extended sense. Its specific engagements with acts of meaning form a powerful model of general engagement. The literature V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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it invokes invokes textuality in its turn, from which the entire field of cultural production opens up on all sides.

authorizing performance: “harmonies du soir” To illustrate the point, we can to turn to a piece that is both inspired by literature and may have inspired some, the eleventh of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, “Harmonies du soir.” Aside from being rich in meanings generated by the literary metaphor, this etude is as reflective as Danhauser’s painting; it both illustrates and interprets the “performance-with” paradigm of musical experience. We can hear in this music a robust model of authorship that extends equally to composition and performance, neither of which can take priority over the other. The title came to Liszt as an afterthought. It refers to no particular literary work, but it does link the piece to a literary genre, the Romantic reverie, and its characteristic tone of nocturnal melancholy. Examples well known to Liszt include the climactic episode of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, and any number of poems by Lamartine, the most famous of which is “Le Lac.” Byron regards “the hush of night” as an occasion for sharp feelings and difficult thoughts that elude the thinker: “All heaven and earth are still—though not in sleep, / But breathless, as we grow when feeling most; / And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep.”19 Lamartine’s speaker recalls a night with his lost love on the lake of the title. Possessed unresistingly by his sorrow, he seeks only to gather up sensory impressions that revive or give substance to the memory of what is lost: O lake! Speechless rocks! Caves! Forest obscure! You that time spares or else makes young again, Keep, of that night, keep, beautiful Nature, At least the memory! Let it be in your calm, let it be in your storms, Beautiful lake, and in the face of your laughing hillsides. And in these black pines, and in these wild rocks That overhang your waters!20

The metaphor underlying these radiant traces of the past is that of memory as communion, and in particular of communion on the Catholic model, in which a remnant or symbol is transubstantiated into real, sacred presence. 128

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The model connects Lamartine’s secular with his religious poetry. Memory in sensory form incarnates the presence of what time has not spared. As Lamartine explained his credo in two passages quoted by Liszt to preface the score of Harmonies poétiques et religieuses: There are meditative souls that solitude and contemplation raise irresistibly toward infinite ideas, that is, toward religion. . . . They seek in themselves and in the creation around them steps to climb to God, expressions and images to reveal him to them and to reveal themselves to him: I would that I could lend them some of these! . . . There are hearts broken by sorrow, pressed down by the world, that take refuge in the world of their thoughts, in the solitude of their soul . . . I would that they might be visited by a muse as solitary as they are, to find sympathy in her harmonies.

Liszt’s “Harmonies du soir” shares in this impulse to sacramentalize the memory trace. But at the same time it maintains an attitude of skeptical or regretful, even ironic, detachment from the fusion of memory and presence that is foreign to Lamartine. The sacramental process, as it often does, works in alliance with Liszt’s characteristic procedure of expressive intensification, but it operates here with a special nakedness. The successful quest for communion occupies the main action of the piece, where it subordinates everything to its demands. The countervailing irony is a product of framing, that is, the positioning of the main action between a prologue and an epilogue that are set apart from it and aligned, at a distance, primarily with each other. Framing may suggest either narrative or lyric modes of utterance; in this case the suggestion is lyric—for the music does not move along a narrative arc but around a lyric spiral. Or so it can be played and heard. The trajectory goes something like this. The quiet beginning conjoins tolling octaves in the left hand with a slow, continuous stream of chords—the first of the harmonies of evening—in the right (see Example 6.1). Liszt explicitly identified the bass octaves with the sound of bells in the first version of the piece; although the final version omits his original marking, Glocken, the suggestion remains unmistakable. Given the low register of the bell sounds, it seems clear that these are church bells, not the bells of a clock tower. Given the quiet dynamic and the presence of fermatas that let the sounds echo, it seems clear the bells are tolling faintly from the distance; they invite the ear to discern them and the mind to contemplate them as the hush of night comes on. V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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Harmonies du Soir Andantino



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example 6.1. Liszt, “Harmonies du soir,” opening.

The prologue ends on a series of arpeggios, anticipating what will prove to be an important element of texture. Then a new stream of nearly continuous eighth-note chords begins a theme that branches out across a broad span, gradually accumulating weight and gaining speed (Example 6.2). The theme is indefinite, more a continuous wave motion than a melody. But in picking up and elaborating the initial stream of right-hand chords, first shifting the stream to the bass and then superimposing a parallel stream in the treble at 130

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dim.

Poco piu mosso dolcissimo 3

una corda

4

5

example 6.2. Liszt, “Harmonies du soir,” initial thematic gesture, mm. 35–40.

the lag of a sixteenth note, this extended wave motion dissolves the quasipictorial character of the prologue and replaces it with the expression of sentiment. The music moves from observation to response. There is no specific moment at which one can say the transition has occurred, but its occurrence is a certainty well before the segment ends. It ends on a deep-bass diminuendo leading to a deceptive cadence and the appearance of the first and only fully-formed melody in the work. The melody, marked dolcissimo, is a reshaping and enrichment of the eighth-note chordal V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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streams of the prologue and first segment; it stands to the preceding wave motion as that motion stands to the first evening harmonies of the prologue. But the effect is not one of development or even of variation, but one of regression. The melody arrives triple piano; it is played una corda; its extremely soft dynamic is sustained for eight full measures. The effect, hovering so close to the threshold of audibility, is less of something heard than of something remembered. The spatial distance of the prologue has now become a temporal distance from which the melody is tenuously recovered. The transition from depiction to expression is redoubled by a transition from the expression of sentiment to the disclosure of self—a transition from subjectivity to the subject. The tenuousness of the melody persists until the deceptive cadence that ushered it undergoes a reversal. The cadential sidestep goes to G major from the dominant of E major; as the melody evolves, G major leads it to a fortissimo climax on the dominant of E major. Although brief intimations of E flicker across the passage (a plagal phantom, an interposed arpeggio), there is no E-major cadence until the start of the next section, “Piu lento con intimo sentimento.” The climax sustains itself for four measures marked appassionato but then falls steeply toward the bass, decrescendo, and dies away leaving only its bare accompaniment behind. Its melodic assertiveness proves to be an illusion belied by its unfinished harmony. (Other illusions will follow.) The subsequent “Piu lento” is dominated by arpeggios, which rise up from the bass on weak beats in alternation with a thin, hesitating theme in the middle register that struggles to put itself together and disappears as soon as it does. The effect is a kind of soliloquy or dramatic monologue that continues the introspective drift of the work, or perhaps retreats from it back to the level of sentiment. But the episode is relatively short, and it may best be thought of as a device for deferring the next, and central, statement of the melody until a new dominant evolves from which the melody can return squarely on E major. This it does fortissimo, marked Molto animato—trionfante and endowed with a thickened texture and a pulsating new accompaniment. What was memory becomes epiphany, and the triumphant voicing blazes on for many measures. But illusions persist. There is something overwrought about this triumph, something insecure. Perhaps the problem is that the cadential dominant has been hemmed in by dissonance and weakly profi led (it’s a last-minute 6/5 chord that flits by in less than a second). Or perhaps the problem is that, after all, the melody’s discovery of its proper key is not decisive. Far from it. The tonic of “Harmonies du soir” is not E major but DH major, and it is a cadence 132

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to DH that carries the prologue into the initial stream of melody. E, or more properly FH, is supposed to be the site at which the faint intimation of remembered experience rises in triumph to the force of presence, of quasisacramental closeness. But this tonal space remains, in itself, a site of distance. The epiphany that occurs there is almost literally dis-placed. Perhaps in response to this impasse, the episode into which the melody segues after its E-major elevation is both long and loud, full of sustained triple forte bravura writing that seems bent on drowning out any hint of hollowness in the epiphanic spell. Although “Harmonies du soir” shares none of the sensuous melancholy of Lamartine’s “Le Lac,” this episode does share some of the frenzy of Lamartine’s successive apostrophes to the lake, the rocks, the caves, and the obscure forest. The music defies skepticism with a vehemence that borders on violence. But this too is only a means of deferral. Beneath the virtuoso hammering (which the music nonetheless asks its listeners to take on faith as a sign of overwhelming feeling) the episode is doing exactly what the introspective “Piu lento” has done. It is looking for a dominant, and this time the dominant, so that the melody can return again in DH at the top of its elevating spiral. The latent model for this procedure is probably the treatment of the second theme in the classical sonata—resolution to the tonic of a theme first sounded off the tonic—but the procedure destroys the model in the act of appropriating it. The spiraling melody is no second theme, not only because there is really no independent first one, but because this theme is the only one that matters, the cherished substance of memory that the music is bent upon recovering for the longest moment possible. The moment comes in a second triumphant outburst, still triple forte, that begins the melody on a rock-solid full cadence from the dominant seventh. The addition of the tonic completes the apotheosis of the melody and gives it the emotional force needed to render memory and presence momentarily indistinguishable. As the melody passes through the supertonic, EH, and subdominant, GH, it even seems to revoke the particular distances represented by the GJ and EJ sonority of its initial appearances and thus to make near what was far. But the moment of consummation is also, and already, the moment of imminent collapse. No sooner has the final turn of the melodic spiral enjoined our engagement than it invites our detachment. After sounding for two measures on the subdominant, the melody descends diminuendo subito for two measures more. As it does so the bass line returns to a long series of wide, wedge-shaped arpeggios that had formed the accompaniment to the V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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sempre piu piano

3

example 6.3. Liszt, “Harmonies du soir,” dissolution of theme, mm. 132–35.

original statement of the melody but that has not been heard since. The accompaniment continues as the melody melts away, as if the entire formation were breaking up and dissolving. The arpeggios continue under a recollection of the stream of eighth-note harmonies—the bearers of sentiment— that first led up to the core melody (see Example 6.3). Then the arpeggios dissolve in their turn into a recapitulation, also in arpeggios, of the harmonies that had followed the prologue and precipitated the stream. The music ripples away as it flows in reverse to its close, which arrives in an ever-slowing, ever-softer series of further arpeggios. Just before the end, two of these arpeggios in a row mark the fading of the vision with a touch of regret. They fall on minor triads that intervene between the tonic and its dominant seventh (see Example 6.4). Their presence shadows the arrival of the longest, slowest arpeggios of all, which, marked tranquillo, span six octaves to whisper a cadence just short of the highest register. Although the music is clearly reluctant to end, to let go, its reluctance appears only once there is nothing left to keep—except, perhaps, a memory already lost to the distance. Memory may have become sacramental for the longest moment possible, but the longest moment possible turns out to be very brief. It, too, can survive only in memory, but of no sacramental order. But it can, of course, revive, if only in passing, each time the score is re-performed. The deferrals, intensifications, and repetitions of “Harmonies du soir” are literary in two senses. First, they belong to a genre of Romantic reverie that is originally poetic. But they do not simply imitate the literary genre; they actively reinterpret it; they rewrite it. Second, the music projects the formal 134

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dolce, armonioso

sempre arpeggio

5

(l'arpeggio sempre piu largamente)

10





 

  





  

Tempo I

m.s.

m.s.

tranq.

 



 DDD  

sotto voce

 

8

example 6.4. Liszt, “Harmonies du soir,” close.

design of its reverie as the work of an author. But because this is virtuoso music, in the first instance music for Liszt himself to play, its author function assumes an ambiguity that cannot and need not be resolved. The music belongs both to the composer and to the performer, or, since in the first instance these may be the same person, to the composer persona and the performer persona. There is no antagonism between the two personae over the question or privilege of authorship. These twin authorial personae are bound together by the plasticity, the mobility, the transmissibility of the subjectivity they are felt to share—and share out. The literary idea assigned to the composition as a source fulfills that role in the strict sense of forming a point of departure. It is not a meaning or a content but a stimulus. The idea is addressed to the performer first and only secondarily to the audience. It is only the start of a chain reaction that passes audibly through the performer and finishes as the music in performance replaces the idea that inspired it. The replacement is also audible; the idea is V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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not lost, but changed. The sense of its content, in relation to compositional design, may remain more or less intact; my account of “Harmonies du soir” would thus best be read as a description of what is entrusted to the performer’s understanding, if perhaps only at the level of intuition or assumed knowledge. But the status of this content changes with the performance, as it is always possible that the content itself will change. The listener hears the performer’s expression of the idea through the music, not the music’s expression of the idea through the performer. The idea, or ideas, rather, since they always proliferate, may also become visible via the pianist’s face, torso, arms, and hands. At the same time—and I mean that phrase literally: this happens concurrently, not sequentially—the listener, like Mill reading Wordsworth, reexpresses the idea thus heard in the very act of hearing it. This abundantly signifying chain cannot (that is, it could not) be confined to the piano or to solo performers. Once established, it became the model for expressive performance in general, and not just in music. The core of that model is not the antagonism that may occasionally arise between the roles of author and performer, author and interpreter, but, on the contrary, the multiplication and distribution of authors in the proliferation of performances. The model licenses the activity of a non-Foucauldian “author function” that, far from seeking to curb the effects of performance, courts them as vigorously as possible. One result is the music’s extension into a further arena of subjective agency that its literary sources prefigure without having foreseen. The memory the music models is closely akin to involuntary memory, the type often called Proustian memory after the famous episode of the petite madeleine in In Search of Lost Time. Like the memory invoked in Lamartine’s “Le Lac,” involuntary memory is epiphanic and quasi-sacramental. But unlike Lamartine’s version, it cannot be asked for; it is triggered unexpectedly by an external stimulus and acts outside of the subject’s control. Literary intimations of this memory-genre appear throughout the nineteenth century; those that Liszt might have known include Gerard de Nerval’s “Fantaisie” (1832), in which memories of a previous life rise up in a flood of sensations prompted by a melody. As a feature of actual life, involuntary memory had to wait for recognition until 1885, when the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus described it for what appears to be the first time: Often, even after years, mental states once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they 136

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are reproduced involuntarily. Here, also, in the majority of cases we at once recognize the returned mental state as one that has already been experienced; that is, we remember it.21

“Harmonies du soir” is closer to Ebbinghaus than it is to Lamartine or Nerval. It forms part of the genealogy of involuntary memory by transforming its literary sources, disengaging epiphanic memory from both conscious pleading and quasi-Platonic anamnesis. To a considerable degree, perhaps surprisingly, this disengagement had a mechanical character. The reading practice invoked by Liszt was a technology of animation that could apply equally well to memories, others’ as well as one’s own, and to persons, the dead as well as the living. It is likely that this use of reading as a technology of artificial life is specific to, and limited to, the nineteenth century. Friedrich Kittler, reading backwards to what he regards as a species of “hallucination,” suggests that such reading became obsolete after the development of moving images and sound recording. “As long,” he wrote—but only as long—“as the book was responsible for all serial data flows, words quivered with sensuality and memory.”22 But what happens if we read forwards? What made reading possible as a medium of virtual experience (not of hallucination; people knew the difference) before film and the gramophone made it impossible? One answer would be the development of pre-cinematic and pre-phonographic devices, popular throughout the century, that as Kittler says could capture time as well as sight and sound. Reading flourished briefly as a technology of animation not because film and the gramophone had not yet been invented, but, on the contrary, because their rudiments had been invented already and had already changed the conditions of perception. Reading served as a place-holder until the technologies on which it modeled itself reached their first maturity.

postscript: “i salute you in immortality” The literariness of Liszt’s music, perhaps even of “Harmonies du soir” in particular, drew the admiration of at least one important literary contemporary, Charles Baudelaire. The two men do not seem to have met while both lived in Paris, though they may have, and Baudelaire played little or no role in Liszt’s reading. (Liszt did apparently read Baudelaire’s essay on Wagner’s Tannhäuser, in which Liszt figures prominently, and in response sent Baudelaire an inscribed copy of his, Liszt’s, book on gypsy music.) But V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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Baudelaire was inspired enough by Liszt to write about him in a prose poem, “The Thyrsus,” and perhaps to emulate him in a poem, “Harmonie du soir.” The close similarity of titles may be just a coincidence; we don’t know. But the mood, the setting, and the unfolding of the poem bear an intriguing resemblance to those of Liszt’s “Harmonies”: Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu’on afflige; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir. Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu’on afflige, Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir! Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir; Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige. Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir, Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige! Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige . . . Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!

(Now comes the time when, trembling on its stem, Each flower exhales its fragrance like a censer; The sounds and perfumes whirl in the evening air, Melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo! Each flower exhales its fragrance like a censer; The violin quivers like a heart in pain; Melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo! The sky is sad and sweet like a great altar. The violin quivers like a heart in pain, A tender heart that hates the vast dark void; The sky is sad and sweet like a great altar; The sun is drowned in its own clotted blood. A tender heart that hates the vast dark void Recalls each vestige of the lustrous past; The sun is drowned in its own clotted blood; Your memory in me gleams out like a monstrance!)23 138

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This is not the place to comment in detail on this text; I will confine myself to a few simple observations. “Harmonie du soir” retrieves Lamartine’s sacramental trope in a form more explicit and more sophisticated than Lamartine’s. Baudelaire presents the fusion of memory and presence much as Liszt does, as the outcome of a complex process, rather than, as in Lamartine, a rhetorical fait accompli. Hence the image of the gleaming memory/monstrance emerges only in the last line, with “monstrance” [ostensoir] the last word. Like Liszt’s too, Baudelaire’s work proceeds along an elaborate lyrical spiral. The poem follows a Malaysian form, the pantoum; it consists of a series of quatrains in which the second and fourth line of the first stanza become the first and third lines of the next, and so on. Like the music, the poetry depends on the heightened repetition of emotionally charged utterance. A pantoum is supposed to end by taking the first and third lines of the first stanza as, respectively, the fourth and second lines of the last. Baudelaire breaks this rule, the better to project a sense of apotheosis with that final line: “Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!” (A trace of the rule does linger in the close phonetic tie between the final line’s rhyme word “ostensoir” and the first line’s semantically related “encensoir.”) Like Liszt, however, Baudelaire asserts his authorial voice by combining absorption in the consummating moment with detachment from it. He does so via the shocking juxtaposition of two images: the communion plate rising and gleaming, and the sun setting and drowning in its own clotted blood. Aside from the semiblasphemous literalizing of the blood in the context of communion, this combination creates a tension between the grotesque and the exalted, or what Baudelaire called spleen and ideal, that cannot be resolved. In both the piece and the poem, ecstatic incantation rises precisely to the point of its own loss. If Baudelaire is invoking Liszt in this text, he is doing so as one author to another. He has no qualms about linking virtuosity with authorship, either Liszt’s or his own—after all, to write a pantoum in French is also a virtuoso performance. Unlike latter-day critics, Baudelaire has no ideological urge to pry authorship apart using performance as a wedge. He regards virtuoso performance not as the contrary of authorship but as a medium for it—even a model for it. He could do so because listening to music had become a transplanted form of absorbed reading and performing music had become a transplanted form of writing absorbingly. The conditions remain even if the two “Harmonie(s) du soir” were just drawing on a common stock of metaphors. Baudelaire, for one, certainly thought so, as the conclusion to “The Thyrsus” testifies: “Dear Liszt, through the mists, beyond the rivers, over the V i r t uos i t y, R e a di ng , Au t hor s h i p

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cities where the pianos sing your glory, where the printer translates your wisdom . . . singer of Pleasure and eternal Anguish, philosopher, poet, and artist, I salute you in immortality!” This greeting no doubt makes Liszt sound like a musical Baudelaire, but the possibility of such a “reading” is part of what Liszt’s literary metaphor cultivated. The metaphor helped create a new kind of listener, the literate listener, whose enthusiasm was united with an ability to grasp the wealth of unspoken meanings surrounding the virtuoso’s display of musical art.

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seven

The Newer Musicology? context, performance, and the musical work

The vicissitudes of authorship revisited in chapter 6 point to a larger issue. Since around 2000 there has been a lot of musicological effort lavished on the “workconcept” and the competing claims of the fixed, authoritative musical work and the creative act of performance, mostly to the detriment of the work. Like most such binary quarrels, this one reveals a little and obscures a lot. It certainly oversimplifies the historical situation, which is full of complex instances in which the roles of the work—as inscription, conception, or instruction—and of performance—as animation, interpretation, or reproduction—meet, mix, and collaborate. I want to take the term collaborate in a strong sense, beyond the common usage that would lead one to say, “Well, of course composers and performers collaborate to produce music.” In its strong sense the term breaks down into its chief component parts: to co-labor, to work together, to work with or along with or alongside with in an effort that assumes separate agencies. Antagonism is only one variety of collaboration in this sense, and not the most frequent or most important variety. There is in any case no fixed form of relationship between musical potentialities and musical actuality. The scenario of collaboration is continually renegotiated. In some cases the scenario plays out in social and institutional terms; in others, it arises from passages or movements of music that require some sort of collaboration as a condition of possibility, or are at least thought or felt to do so. And of course the contrasting terms in this description are permeable and provisional. As chapter 3 hinted, the musicological opposition of work and performance is essentially a belated replay of the quarrel voiced in Roland Barthes’s famous essay of 1967, “From Work to Text.”1 Barthes denounces the work as a fi xed, dead, consumable, “computable” form in contrast to the text, or Text, as a changing, living, incalculable process that cannot be possessed. The work 141

kills; the Text gives life. The work can only be read; the Text can only be written. Barthes’s own writing, which is nothing if not a work, made all the more so by being endlessly taught, is candid about the utopian and hedonist impulses that guide it. The Text is a model of liberation from dogma and social constraint. But Barthes cannot maintain the distinction between work and text, either in this essay or elsewhere, and neither can anyone else. The musical version of this impossible distinction depends on a confounding of the occasional antagonism between work and performance with the fundamental relationship between work and performance. This confusion has also formed the basis of skepticism about the desirability or possibility of musical hermeneutics, which necessarily addresses itself to the meaning of musical works. The aims of this chapter are to counter that skepticism and to map out a possible synthesis between musical hermeneutics and the study of music as collaboration. If a culturally oriented turn to hermeneutics constituted a “New Musicology” at the end of the last century, what might a newer musicology look like?

the body in the work Let’s begin by backtracking a bit. I need to preface this move with an apology because I’m going to start it by quoting someone with whom I have an obvious personal relationship—namely myself. Th is is from the very first page of my 1990 book Music as Cultural Practice: “Music has discursive meanings . . . produced as a part of the general circulation of regulated practices and valuations—part, in other words, of the continuous production and reproduction of culture.” From my present perspective these claims are missing one important word; we’ll deal with that later. Meanwhile let’s deal with the words we have. These sentences form perhaps the earliest programmatic statement of what would subsequently come to be called the New Musicology, in capital letters. I can do without the label. The project is something I would like to see continue. Its nucleus, which I would simply like to call interpreting music, is the understanding—and that means the interpretation, with all its attendant risks and uncertainties—of music in wide-ranging humanistic terms informed by critical theory, philosophy, history, and culture. This is an entirely open and open-ended process. That is the point of the key phrase in my self-quotation about the circulation of practices and valuations that constitutes culture. I have tried to embrace a certain restlessness as 142

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a working principle, and restlessness is a subject to which we will return. There is no question here of fetishizing the artwork in some long lost Romantic vein, and no question of hunting the unicorn of fi xed, authoritative, or certain meanings. The question is what kind of knowledge we can have about things of the imagination, in this case musical things. Note that I have just said “things,” not “works,” and that I have said nothing about “context.” There are reasons for that. The original focus of New Musicology was on the musical work in the traditional sense of Western art music, the fully-scored classical composition. Th is was never meant to be a restriction or a paradigm, and it quickly expanded to cover other repertoires as well as other matters of concern such as genre, cultural institutions, and performance. Performance has been especially important because, as I began by observing, some writers have used it as a means of debunking the supposedly fi xed, authoritative musical work and the work’s supposedly fi xed meaning. And it is perfectly true that the initial efforts at interpreting music in the broad sense meant here could, and should, have paid more attention to performance, though it might also be said that it was necessary to take one thing at a time and that, in any case, performance did get some attention before very long. But any dichotomy between the work and performance is simply false. Works and performances may in practice come into conflict, but any attempt to build that conflict into a principle falls prey to the Work/Text problem. Realizing that leaves us to ponder two broad questions. The first of them is substantive. Given that the relationship between works and performances is fundamentally multiple, and not simply a contest over precedence, what values, aims, and logics should we ascribe to it? This question assumes that what we call “works” are only relatively fi xed and what we call “performance” is only relatively variable. Beyond first impressions, works are performances; performances are works. The second question is methodological. How do we bring works and performances, together with the conditions they rely on (genres, institutions, technologies, and so on), into the framework of interpreting music? But before we can tackle either question we have to clear the air. It is important to distinguish between the “work” as a historical concept we might want to follow through time, and the work as an ostensive category that requires theoretical elaboration if we want to continue to talk about the music to which the term refers. (In this connection questions such as whether Bach wrote “works” are sheer scholasticism—angels on pins, anyone?) The T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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underlying issue is the relation of history to ontology in cultural matters. Once a category is invented, once it becomes a designator of practice, it acquires a durable being. Its durability, however, depends on its capacity for reinvention. Such things (and we are dealing here with things known by persons, not objects known by subjects) remain viable so long as it remains possible to characterize and theorize them beyond the moments of their origin. What we call a work in this frame of reference is not a form of mummified authority but the nucleus—a migratory nucleus—of manifold reflection and use. As Foucault says of his preference for terms like “the painter” rather than “Velazquez” in his classic account of Las Meninas (just read “music” for “painting”): “If one wishes to keep the relation of language to painting open . . . as a starting point for speech instead of an obstacle to be avoided . . . then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task.”2 The work, in its useful and usable aspect, is any locus we find for this creative erasure, which is the incessant opening of one thought and practice into another. Two aspects of musical performance have been especially forceful in muddying the waters about the collaboration of performance and the work. The first is variability, or what one might call creative entropy. Even in the most controlled of cases, that of classical pieces with detailed scores and few textual variants, the transfer from prescription to action involves changes, additions, and choices that the score cannot control and that profoundly affect how it sounds. Of course this is perfectly true. No one—well, almost no one—has ever seriously thought otherwise. But the idea that this variability somehow discredits interpretation is not only false, it is absurd. For one thing, the performance itself is an interpretation, as common parlance acknowledges, and if it is legitimate then so is verbal interpretation—hermeneutic writing and thinking, which is part of the same family that includes reuse and reapplication of the music and its performances in subsequent works or different media, most notably in combination with moving images. For another thing, the process of entropic transfer is not antithetical to understanding. It is understanding. No other kind is available. Even empirical understanding has to allow for slippage; humanistic understanding thrives on it, or would do so if it did not stifle itself by constantly looking for handrails. The same variability occurs whenever one looks at an image or reads a text. It occurs whenever you talk to another person or, for that matter, talk to yourself in the privacy (or apparent privacy) of your own mind. As the slang of the day goes: get over it! 144

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The second confusing feature of performance is its relation to the body, which, with a kind of unreflective Cartesianism, has too often been allowed to suggest an antagonism to the mind. Of course even to talk about mind and body is to fall onto a pair of Cartesian coordinates, so I will try to avoid that. The essential claim is that performance intensifies the experience of embodiment with results so intense that thought is suspended or obliterated. If so, it makes little sense—or only a little—to fi ll in a void that is more welcome than not with retrospectively applied concepts. Interpretation, like translation, is doomed to betray what it represents. Well, of course it is, though one might put things rather less drastically. The same considerations that apply to variability of transfer apply here as well. All thinking is to some degree retrospective. Even when the excitement of performance intensifies rather than obliterates a verbal or verbalizable insight, that is, when it sparks an epiphany—a possibility the Cartesian scenario does not consider—the experience escapes in the moment of its recognition. Is there any other kind of experience? The actions of the body in performance depart in the moment of their arrival, just the way the music does—just the way thoughts do. We cannot possess the present experience of music because we cannot possess the present experience of anything. We can only traverse it and reckon with its aftereffects. As Goethe’s Faust learned the hard way, there is no point in asking the present moment to stand still. Embodied experience, embodied music, is thus just as subject to interpretation as music considered apart from particular performances, that is, what we call the work. Each is ultimately just a precondition for the other, already latent in the other in an active rather than a passive sense. This conclusion leads directly into the area of method, where, it turns out, we have been all along. It is just as possible to interpret performances as it is to interpret works. And not just performances: genres, actions, institutions, materials. This is so in part because there are no fundamental differences involved. Interpretation is not dependent on the local character of the thing that concerns it. But in greater part this breadth of coverage comes about because in order to interpret anything, one must treat that something not as a thing at all but as an event. The hermeneutic tradition failed to understand this, and thus promoted various ideals of interpretation that served to limit the very meanings that hermeneutics was supposed to enlarge. Interpretation as an open practice is a way of understanding and representing something that happens. And works, genres, and so on are no less events than musical performances; they T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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are just events on a different time scale. To understand music is to interpret musical events. To understand music as cultural practice is to interpret musical events as actions that belong to the circulation of regulated practices and valuations. But because events always escape us in the moment of our grasping them, because entropy is the condition of experience, we have to supplement this methodological formula, roughly as follows: to understand music as cultural practice is to interpret musical events as actions that not only belong to the circulation of regulated practices and valuations, but that also resist, evade, change, or disrupt every attempt to regulate them. The word that my opening quotation should have contained, but didn’t, is imperfectly: the circulation of imperfectly regulated practices and valuations.

against context This imperfection is anything but a defect. It establishes the zone of instability and therefore of potentiality that allows practice and understanding to change. This is the zone where interpretation flourishes with little or no regard for prior regulation. But this last observation must not be misunderstood as a mere rallying cry for interpretive freedom. The point is not that interpretation should not be regulated but that, in practice, it cannot be. It never is and never has been, and the epistemic consequences of this brute fact have never been fully explored. The question that follows is how this intrinsic irregularity affects our understanding of interpretation as a kind of knowledge. The default demand on interpretation is that whatever else it does, it should ground itself by putting what it interprets in the right context. So here is the point at which the inadequacy of the concept of context must be brought out. To pick up where chapter 5 left off: Contexts raise as many questions as they purport to answer. How do we find them? What do we take from them? Is culture a context at all? Is being “in” context a position of subordination, interaction, or, so to speak, insubordination? And why suppose that any context can or should be unaffected by what it frames? Derrida raised some of these questions in his classic essay “Signature Event Context.”3 The essay observes that every sign, as such, carries the potential of breaking with every context, and that it does so because of the intrinsic character of signification. But that—you’ll now recognize the refrain—is not enough. There could be, and are, institutions in place to limit this contextual migration. One might even define culture in its traditional form as the col146

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lection of such institutions in force. But the very presence of these limiting forms points to something else. Culture is dynamic; its definition in practice is not the preservation of or return to regulative contexts but precisely the incessant breaking from such contexts. Culture demands contextual change. Culture is the demand for contextual change. And the source of that change is the very collection of signs, and more, of discourses, artifacts, narratives, expressive gestures—anything that calls for a response—that context is supposed to regulate. Culture consists in taking things out of context. It operates as a nearly irrepressible impulse to break out of contextual constraints. Of course that impulse may in some cases call forth highly repressive forces; the choice of which impulse to favor may carry grave consequences. But simply as a matter of observation the transformative impulses continually outrun the impulses of preservation. The most important consequence is that understanding a cultural event— music, for instance—does not consist in identifying the contextual cue that gives the event its supposed meaning. All that such a contextual cue can do is establish a topic or field of concern. It cannot tell us what to do with them. This account of context is in part an act of self-critique; it has me taking my own medicine. In Musical Meaning (2002), I spoke of seeking “a critical practice meant to affi liate music richly with things beyond itself without either allowing it to fade into a mere echo of those things or succumbing to the illusion that it has any genuine identity apart from them. Music cannot ‘speak’ with its ‘own’ voice until it finds a voice, or voices, among a multiplicity of others that constantly blend with, mimic, and chafe against the rest.”4 I am happy to stand by that statement, but not with my characterization of it as representing a “nonreductionist contextualism.” From my present standpoint, the first term cannot rescue the second from claiming too much and clarifying too little. Like signification, context has too often been asked to carry a burden in excess of its real but limited usefulness. So, too, has the concept of the norm, often conflated with form, and creative departures from it, whether violations or deviations. I have sometimes been misunderstood as a proponent of this concept when in fact I regard it in exactly the same light as I do the contextual cue, of which it is indeed only another version: sometimes useful, but only in limited ways. What matters in any musical event (more on the event shortly) is not what norms it breaks or observes, but how it acts in doing whatever it does, and thus how it claims to achieve a singularity for which we can value it. The demotion of context also entails the demotion of the norm. T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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For example, consider Schubert’s Moment musical no. 2 in A flat, D. 780, which we will later interpret in some detail as an exemplary reflection on musical collaboration. (Whether the interpretation goes into too much detail is a topic we will take up later.) The opening theme of the piece sounds like a lullaby; its gentle rocking motion and suggestions of folksong-like melody clearly invoke a certain context, or contexts: on the one hand an idealized relation between folk and art traditions and on the other an idealized view of motherhood and childhood innocence. But although the context gives us these cues, it cannot tell us what to do with them. It cannot measure their relevance, cannot determine the music’s attitude toward them, and above all cannot explain why and how the piece abandons, undercuts, transforms, and—perhaps— recovers them. We simply have to decide these things for ourselves. Reference to generic norms is no help, either. The music opens like a lullaby but that does not mean it is one. And even if it is one, if, say, we note that even lullabies have their moments of contrast or danger (“Down will come baby / Cradle and all”), that fact cannot determine how we assess or understand this especially complex and vexing instance, or, and this is really the same question, in what ways we might choose to perform it, or, if we don’t play, which performances we might prefer to hear. (It happens, as we’ll see, that the music takes up this very question.) The issue before us is not whether this music conforms to a Platonic idea of a lullaby, or not, but what kind of lullaby, or “lullaby,” it seeks to be. That too we have to decide for ourselves. And we have to decide without advance assurances. When we do, we do not abstract significance from the music’s cultural field. We do not stand on the outside as an observer, even a participant observer. Instead we enter the field, act on it, change it, continue the contextual migration that supports it. We enter into a collaborative action. That action entails interpretation. And interpretation as traditionally understood requires that we travel along the famous hermeneutic circle, the principle that no understanding can arise that does not depend on prior understanding, but that genuine understanding must do more than merely reproduce prior understanding. No explicit criteria can be found for achieving this. As noted in chapter 5, Heidegger famously says that we have to enter the circle in “the right way,” but he does not tell us what the right way is.5 Of course it is possible to invoke familiar and admittedly indispensable guidelines such as credibility with respect to the source, that is, the interpretation’s power to engage richly with a multiplicity of details and their cultural and historical associations. But just what that means changes so much from case 148

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to case that it is impossible to generalize about it. It is true enough, and now a truism, that there is no knowledge without presuppositions. But this truth does not entail that knowledge brings its presuppositions along with it, or even heeds them as it proceeds, or may not go forward by ignoring the “right” presuppositions in favor of something else.

breaking the circle I therefore want to suggest that there is, in fact, no hermeneutic circle. To say so is to take yet another step further, in this case further than even the radically open hermeneutics I proposed in Interpreting Music. So let me repeat: There is no hermeneutic circle. The circle is the wrong figure: wrong in Schleiermacher, wrong in Heidegger, wrong in Gadamer. Interpretation does not proceed as a mutually correcting loop between part and whole, nor does it proceed as the explication of an existential understanding that precedes its articulation in language. These things may occur in the framing of an interpretation but they occur as events, not as founding forms. One might echo Paul Ricoeur and speak of a movement of detour,6 but the idea of a detour implies a direct path from which the detour is a departure. There is no such path. If there is detour here there is nothing but detour. Perhaps it would be better to speak of ambling, strolling, wandering, flanerie. Interpretation takes us right back to the streets of the imaginary city that Wittgenstein took as a model for “our language” and that chapter 5, in keeping with Wittgenstein’s dictum that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life, extended to “our culture.” The city models imperfect regulation as the root principle of that culture which is never entirely “ours”: one knows the city but not in ways that would show up on a map or an aerial view. One just knows one’s way around, one’s short cuts, scenic routes, back alleys, and so on. One can move through these streets with purpose or just amble along. But space here must also become time, so we need to give this city scene a soundtrack. One is always in the midst of the city. One is in place there the way the ear places itself in the midst of the simultaneities of polyphony, counterpoint, harmony, texture, layer—all things conducing to a movement of attention in many directions, on many levels, at once. No matter the dimension, space or time, one knows the larger vicinity in knowing, roughly, how to go from here to there. With the hermeneutic circle broken, perhaps we should even stop talking about musical hermeneutics, or any hermeneutics for that matter. Hermeneutic T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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attributes are enough. The noun form refers to a system that does not exist and never will. It postulates a false distinction between interpretation and understanding and it fails to acknowledge the performative dimension of both. We can still find hermeneutic windows everywhere, but only if we see them as opening onto vistas that “gradually recede to the infinite distance.” The phrase comes from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s account of hermeneutics as art, Kunst, of which he says further that “such a construction cannot be given through rules that carry within themselves the assurance of their application.”7 Interpretation is not a matter of testing hypotheses; it does not simplify but complicates; it does not take reconciliation or integration as an elemental goal, though these things may also happen as events. The knowledge that interpretation produces is always retroactive, and its credibility rests not on conditions that precede it but on the conditions that its performance produces. The characteristic actions of interpretation are surmise, suggestion, extrapolation, conjecture, speculation, trope, confabulation, narrative, evocation, coaxing, modeling, imagining. To interpret is to think informally. An interpretation devises a vantage point from which to read, see, hear, and speak, from which to perform and devise and reinvent, and it stands or falls on the results—the rewards, the disappointments, the degree to which the inevitable remainder of unclaimed understanding provokes another round of interpretation. The position I’m sketching here is perhaps closest to Nietzsche’s conception of interpretation as an expression of the will to power, but it is not power that I understand as the pervasive force, even in Nietzsche’s expanded and much-misunderstood sense of the term. The driving force is a “will” to participation, absorption, an involvement with meanings so rich and eventful that the absence of any transcendental meaning—either in the text, the work, the act, or the world—is not a matter for regret. Interpretation is theology without divinity, or, one might say, the secular form of polytheism. It is time to return to Schubert.

affect and subject An important development in the history of music as collaboration (in the strong sense) emerges in the second or third decade of the nineteenth century as the gradual separation between music and the traditional doctrine of the affects becomes irrevocable if not quite final. Music undergoes an epochal 150

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shift from the affective to the subjective. Although there is no single turning point for this development and no one form that it takes, the piano music of Beethoven and Schubert may be heard as a model with significant historical impact. This music contains occasional passages—rarely anything more— that remain audibly incomplete without the collaborative agency of the performer. Once one becomes alert to their possibility, there are more of these passages than one might expect—and their number tends to grow. At this point we need to fi ll in some background. According to a very useful entry in the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the so-called doctrine of the affects was “The belief, widely held in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, that the principal aim of music is to arouse the passions or affections (love, hate, joy, anger, fear, etc.), conceived as rationalized, discrete, and relatively static states.”8 Affects are as much bodily as they are mental and they have little or no capacity for change. They are understood to be universal, essential, and transparently understandable. Their transparency, however, is their weak point; affects cannot do without it. An affect without sense is no affect at all, but something that disrupts the very concept of an affect. And as music becomes increasingly volatile in the eighteenth century, as it becomes more capable of quick changes in perspective, of irony and mystification, of contradiction and the free play of its elements, music’s transparency is lost. Music even becomes the art of the nontransparent, especially when it is theorized aesthetically in opposition to words and images. By the end of the century, to reverse the dictionary’s description, the belief most widely held was that the principal aim of music was to express feelings, moods, or emotions, conceived of as non-rational, indefinite, and thoroughly dynamic states. Such feelings occur to individual, not generic subjects; they are contingent, particular and idiosyncratic. From this vantage point it is a relatively short step to Hegel’s description of music as the means of expression that makes the inner life of the conscious subject apprehensible to itself. Music is sound that sounds the subject out. Inevitably this change in the orientation of musical sound would bring with it changes in the orientation of musical performance. Whereas the performer was once unable to alter or determine expressive content (since affects were unchanging), now the performer is unable not to do those things (since feeling is elusive). (Of course this distinction is no more absolute than most others; exceptions are duly noted.) The performer’s subjectivity must now be added to give music the expressivity that it is otherwise supposed to contain immanently. T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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The resulting sense of music as transportable subjectivity is anything but inevitable; it is culturally and historically specific, and it is to some degree a thing of the past. But it is also one of those phenomena that cannot be entirely revoked and that persists in most subsequent experience of music as art. Concurrently the score—that is, the classical score, which is granted something like the authority of written law—becomes a kind of hieroglyph that can be deciphered only by the action of the embodied subject. Th is image is not fanciful. In the early nineteenth century the Egyptian hieroglyph was widely understood in the West as the epitome of a sign with a profound secret message. Hegel, for one, understood the undeciphered hieroglyph as a kind of tomb, like a pyramid; the hieroglyph stores and preserves a once-animate meaning as the pyramid stores and preserves a once-animate soul.9 When music becomes such a hieroglyph, the performer becomes the Champollion who deciphers it, like an ad hoc Rosetta stone, and restores the sign to life. The performer understands the music by collaborating with it, specifically by so handling a musical instrument that the act of performance translates sensibility, the capacity to feel, into expressivity. In terms of musical tradition, this translation carries over to instrumental music from the opera stage, where it was well established but often disdained; the instrument learns to sing in the performer’s hands. In terms of philosophical speculation, the collaboration remedies the defects that Hegel found—though he did not make the connection—in both the hieroglyph and music. Both were too material, the hieroglyph because its phonetic code was still tied to its pictorial character, and music because it depends on the sensuality of tuned vibrations. The hieroglyph could thus never achieve full transparency of signification and musical expression could not carry subjectivity beyond “abstract generality”—in other words, beyond the affects that do not properly belong to the subject at all. Music as a collaborative effort bypasses any such difficulties by making expressive meaning the outcome as well as the source of the performer’s action. Neither comes first and neither observes the limit of abstract generality. During an expressive performance, the distinction between materiality and meaning that troubled Hegel, and many others, effectively disappears. The more particular this disappearance is, the more it depends on specific actions or choices, the fuller its impact becomes. More matter gives more meaning. (The reverse is true if the performance somehow goes wrong. Hegel, one might say, was right about bad performance.) Of course the distinction is stubborn, and likely to reassert itself quickly. It has certainly long asserted 152

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itself in overdrawn quarrels about the relative authority of composition and performance. So let me interrupt myself to state this as bluntly as possible: terms like meaning and materiality, composition and performance, may be opposed in this or that circumstance but not opposed in principle. Theory has typically lagged behind practice in this area, and not just with regard to music, but thinking of music in terms of collaborative action may help right the balance, at least in one area.

virtuoso simplicity As I noted earlier, the history of collaboration in the strong sense pertinent here has no single origin or turning point. But there can be little doubt that the rise of virtuosity, the aestheticizing of difficulty, played a pivotal role. Less noticed is the role played by the contrary with which virtuosity is often mingled: music of transparent simplicity, music so spare in its texture and character that its expressive value has little basis in its immanent qualities and must come instead from the way it is played, the way its playing records the embodied subjectivity of the player. This is music that does not impart meaning to or through the performing body, but instead receives its meaning from the body. And it is not music for players of lesser skill, but precisely for technically accomplished players who know how to be simple. Such simplicity differs from virtuosic difficulty—which is just its other side—because, as I noted earlier, the aesthetic of simplicity primarily affects passages rather than whole movements or pieces. Episodes of simplicity emerge to expose the underlying dynamic of expressive performance that operates across the field of musical performance in general. How much we hear of that operation varies widely; we can be distracted both from it and by it; and it obeys no rule. But it is always there, and bare simplicity opens a hermeneutic window on it. Piano music is the exemplary medium for this reflective expression not only for the obvious reason that it focuses on a single performer, but also because it draws its expressive life from the symbolically potent movement of the performer’s two hands. Consider, in this light, Schubert’s not-really-a-lullaby, the second of the Moments musicaux: music that can be heard to model the process of collaboration that it especially invites. The piece heard under that description is a reflection on what may be at stake in the collaboration of performer and composer, or so the voice of a listener (mine, in this case) may hope to make T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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audible as part of the ramifying collaboration needed to carry the work forward. This possibility, or, as we will later call it, this affordance, finds its hermeneutic window in the persistence of repercussion, or re-sounding: in the expanded ternary form A B A B A; in the emergence of a pulsation, the repercussion of a single note or chord from short to long, weak to strong, as a melodic signature in the various A sections; and in the repeated appearance of an exposed repeated note at pivotal moments in the B sections. These exposed one-note repercussions are especially important. They sound on each beat of the 9/8 measure over equally bare arpeggios in triplets—the most naked texture possible within Schubert’s style-world (see Example 7.1). The texture is simplicity itself, although, as we’ll see, it houses nuances of articulation that demand attention from the performer and listener alike. The nuances are doubly significant. First, their presence points to a simplicity that asks to be pondered—literally and figuratively a resonant simplicity. Second, and accordingly, their particularity tells the player not to mar that simplicity by adding embellishments. Doing so was a distinct possibility in 1828, when the piece was published. Schubert’s notation, however, models a practice more oriented by gesture, touch, and accent than by independent invention. Beethoven, who, unsurprisingly, did not like his published scores tinkered with, voiced the same orientation when he wrote to Carl Czerny, “You must forgive a composer who would rather have heard his work performed exactly as it was written, however beautifully you played it in other respects.”10 Although adding embellishments would still involve the audible supplement of subjectivity, it would fail to uphold the far-reaching collaborative claim that the expressiveness made possible by that supplement extends to the primordial dimension of tone itself. This issue deserves a pause for reflection, especially in light of the motif of collaboration. Ornamentation in Schubert’s piano music (and in his songs) has been the subject of substantial and somewhat acrimonious debate.11 One side claims that “voluntary” ornamentation (that is, ornamentation in the absence of its notation) is inappropriate and historically inaccurate; the other side claims exactly the opposite. What the two sides share is an implicit (or not so implicit) positivism that renders the whole quarrel moot. The problem is not that we are unlikely ever to know which position is right, although there is plenty of uncertainty to go around. Rather, the problem is the supposition that there is a right position in the first place. The situation in the opening decades of the nineteenth century seems to have been as unsettled and confused as the present, when present, usually is; the present’s becoming 154

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 0

4

O 

8

cresc.

O 

11

14

17

O 

example 7.1. Schubert, Moment musical no. 2, first B section, mm. 17–36.

the past is not a fi xative. Some of Schubert’s contemporaries favored voluntary embellishment at the keyboard; others—increasingly—did not. What that means about the piano music is that the music is consistent with both a strict and a loose attitude toward the score. The possibility of interpreting but also following the score coexists with the possibility of adding the performer’s invention to the composer’s. This remains true even if the performer is the composer. It is just as reasonable to extend understanding to the one alternative as to the other, as well as to intermediate practices. The alternatives are not matters of truth and falsehood, right and wrong; they are matters of preference, aesthetic judgment, and point of view. The question of the score invites a further comment in passing, though to do it justice would be digressive. (Further discussion appears in the Postscript to this book.) The idea that performances from score are realizations or reproductions of a preexisting form is no longer credible. The critique of what Nicholas Cook calls the “textualist” tradition is right about that.12 But it is not the score’s fault that a certain strain of twentieth-century study venerated it too much. All performance exceeds the letter of the score. It is impossible not to. Exceeding the letter while incorporating it just is the act of performance. Understood collaboratively, the score is part of a relay from one medium of musical production to another. The relay spirals through inscription, embodiment, and apprehension from no single point of origin or end. (Technological mediation chimes in too, especially after the invention of sound recording.) Performances from score observe what the score requires in order to share in what the score imagines. They embody their participation for listeners who treat the performance as performers treat the score. Our Schubert Moment musical is exemplary in this connection because it can be read/played/heard as a reflection on its own genesis from this activity of transfer and transformation.

the work in the body Time, then, to return to this music, score in hand. The nakedness of the texture that anchors the B sections—the dare of its simplicity—stands out particularly against the voicing of the chords in the A sections, which is notably lush; the main theme in particular comes all in chords that occupy both hands (see Example 7.2). The difference between the two textures is like the difference between a richly colored painting and a sketchy line drawing. 156

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Andantino

O  

example 7.2. Schubert, Moment musical no. 2, opening.

There seems to be a dialogue or antiphony set up between music that gives the impression of having inherent sensory fullness and meaning, an innate sensuous value, versus a sonority that depends for its impact on a translation of the performer’s sensory apparatus into expressive sound. That the former is static and pleasurable, the latter progressive and rueful, is the enigmatic core of the work: why does a complex pleasure precipitate a simple sorrow, and what consequences does that have? The question is pointed by the tonal contrast between the sections, AH major for the A sections and FG minor for the Bs; as we’ll see, the relationship between the two is less harmonic than enharmonic. But even setting harmony aside, the lush texture of the main theme is a kind of excess over the normal demands of melody; note the way that the chords splay the pianist’s hands as if to gather up thick handfuls of music. The bare texture, at the other end of the spectrum, acts as a paring down of the lush melody to its essential elements, the minimum beneath which melodic articulation with supporting harmony cannot go. Is that supposed to suggest that pleasure is an overcompensation for a pain it cannot relieve? Perhaps so; perhaps more. This question too is pointed. There is a slight but disquieting vulnerability written into the A sections in the form of mysterious silences and moments of static dissonance that linger (too long) before subsiding. Something is not quite right. (Yes, but what? The basis of the A sections is essentially the varied restatement of a single idea— another kind of repercussion. Th is music sounds as if it were trying to remember something, trying to get it right, only to find, as its era would often find, that the obstacles to one’s wishes come from the place of the wishes themselves.) Let’s begin in medias res. The first B section (see Example 7.1) begins with the one-note repercussion, one measure long: three CGs over static 5–3 arpeggios form an extended upbeat to the section’s melodic line. The gesture invites T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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dismissal as a mere transition, but it proves to be much more than that. The first A section ends with a melodic cadence on DH; the first B section begins with an enharmonic shift that immediately turns this DH—the same pitch, not just the same note—to CG. The measure of transitional CGs is thus already a repercussion, a repetition at the origin. And in the middle; and at the end: these CGs give the section a simple narrative shape and they govern the section’s entire melodic action. The CG gesture returns in the middle of the section to ground and renew that action, and the same gesture ends the section in enhanced and extended form. The initial statement of the CGs rises to a single lingering D, a touch of indeterminate potentiality; the potentiality is released by an echo of the A section’s repercussive signature, from which the full melody follows. The central statement of the CGs modifies the arpeggios in the bass to create a contrapuntal inner voice, a slight disturbance—a minimal narrative middle—that the extended conclusion will put to rest. The central statement also introduces a crescendo and changes the articulation of the arpeggios from low staccato plus rising legato to a blunt non-legato. The arpeggios in the first and central statements cover a span wider than the hand, requiring a leap to reach their top note; the CGs serve to bind the widely spaced bass figures together. The significance of this detail will become clear shortly. The destination of the crescendo on the central CGs is, as it was before, a sustained D, which again leads to a melodic elaboration returning to the CG—except that at the last moment, there is a descent to FG instead. That is, a descent to the tonic: but this is not to take hold as a resolution. Instead CG exerts its force and draws the music back to itself via a measure of transition. In the third statement of the CGs the dynamic level rises from pianissimo and above to piano and above, a subtle change that invites nuance from the performer and discernment from the listener. (When the section is subsequently repeated, the change occurs in reverse; the dynamic level falls from piano with a touch of pianissimo to pianissimo and above. Everyone involved must collaborate to nuance the nuance.) And this time there is not just one measure of three CGs but two measures of six. At the same time the slight counterpoint of the internal statement collapses back into the original simplicity, heightening the original demand for the expressivity of performative action. The demand is articulated further by an abrupt harmonic shift. The third statement of the CGs differs from its predecessors in sounding over the dominant rather than over the tonic. Accordingly, the harmony is in the major mode—but it does not stay there. The second measure of the doubled 158

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statement makes an abrupt shift to the minor. Is this a slight darkening of the dominant or is it something more? How can we tell? The significance of this modal shift makes up a good part of what the performer has to invest with expressive meaning. The double series of bare CGs now lead not to a sustained D but to seven staccato DGs moving at the pace of the underlying arpeggios, and on the downside of a hairpin. Here again the arpeggios are non-legato, but they now fit comfortably in the compass of the hand, at the very moment they fit uncomfortably in the compass of the harmony. The reiterated CGs now have to accomplish two things, or, rather, playing them does. First, they have to impart meaning to this juxtaposition of comfort and discomfort, in collaboration with a crescendo that begins a beat after the turn to the minor mode. Second, they have to impart meaning to the fractured form of the familiar destination note, D, that is, to the pulsing DGs that will serve as the retransition to the subsequent second A section. Like the earlier transition, the retransition takes the form of an enharmonic shift; as one section follows another, DG becomes EH, just as DH has earlier become CG. Like the transition, too, the retransition immediately reinterprets a specific pitch, this time in the bass, not in the melody. This enharmonic frame will reveal, or perhaps acquire, its full significance later. The true “event” of both B sections belongs here, in what amounts to the sections’ coda. The expressive value of the music depends entirely on how it is played. This dependency becomes even more pronounced—must, so to speak, be pronounced more—in the second B section, where the DG staccatos are slurred; in the first B section the slurs are absent. Sensibility must again make a subtle shift and must make that subtlety audible as an event in itself. This small change is perhaps best treated as the mark of a large disturbance— for the stakes have now gone up. The second B section intrudes a surge of melodic drama in its first half. Instead of the bare introductory CGs, we get a harsh series of right-hand chords with a new melodic profi le in the upper voice, now raised a sixth and chromatically twisted: reiterated As rising to AG. The chordal texture still belongs to the A section, but the harmony says we’re in B—shouts it, really, breaking the calm of a pianissimo with the only sustained forte passage in the entire piece. Loud agitation reigns. The effect is as if the second A section had stumbled blindly into the second B and become vexed there in the sorrows of FG minor. And the stumble makes the sorrows worse. This turn of events sounds—may be heard to sound, played to sound— like a response to something that happens in the second A section. The T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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short-long melodic repercussion becomes even more pervasive there, a character it retains in the final A section. This new twist in A ties the start of the second B section in a knot. But the knot carries the clue to its own denouement—its own undoing. It creates an implicit demand for a return of the bare CGs in their perfect simplicity. The demand is met by the recovery of the central, lightly contrapuntal CG statement, which also quiets the music down. But nuance again intervenes. The articulation of the bass arpeggios is now that of the missing first statement, to which the counterpoint of the second statement has been added. The demand for renewed simplicity is subsequently met again by the double CG statement of the coda. And the coda, particularly in the nakedness of its modal shift and the weight, or not, of its hairpins, becomes the point on which the whole piece must pivot: which is to say that the pivot is more in the hands of the pianist than in the formal elaboration of the score. Although the player’s actions had always been understood to convey expression, they had not yet generally been understood to constitute expression. (Please note that I said “generally”; again, exceptions are duly noted.) The texture in these passages is so simple, so exposed, that the music seems to offer the possibility of expression by withholding it. The CGs define a zero degree of melody that calls for a direct translation of feeling into sound. The DGs that follow do likewise. Attention goes to this performative intervention because the music could not hold the attention otherwise. With the reiteration of the bare single notes, the gesture in which the expressive logic of the whole work is concentrated, expressive performance is not a matter of finding a way to interpret the music, but of allowing the music to interpret the performer. Everything depends on the details of touch, the weight and clarity of attack, the shades of articulation. What one hears is not the music abstractly regarded, but the musical translation of feeling to the body’s action and from the body’s action to sound. Th is is music that makes audible the translation of sensibility to embodiment. More exactly, it reduces the music to that translation, exposing the process on which music in general is thought to rest. In collaboration with both the player and the listener, who may, of course, be the same, the music performs a phenomenological reduction on itself. But the reduction does not stop with the B sections; far from it. In both the second and third A sections an inner voice unheard in the first A section appears, in the form of a short-long pulsation on the fifth scale degree, EH. This isolated little figure is the new twist I referred to earlier. It emerges in 160

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example 7.3. Schubert, Moment musical no. 2, ascent of EH repercussion, mm. 49–57.

the second half of the second A, after the first half takes a new turn and gently jostles the prevailing chords into melodic triplets, something the original version of the section has largely avoided. The release of the triplets coincides with a harmonic shift that momentarily throws the section out of focus. As if taking a hint, the EH figure disturbs the sensuous texture of A by raising the profile of the section’s persistent but subdued short-long repercussions. The new figure first arises as an exposed inner voice, and it persists as a throbbing within the texture for several measures thereafter. Thus singled out, the repercussion also echoes the single-note repercussions of the B section; the implication of this echo or sonorous trace is that sensibility and receptivity to pain are somehow joined at the origin. But this union has a surprising consequence. In the closing passage of the second A section, the EH repercussion leaps up two octaves to become the upper voice, while the original melodic line slips down a notch to continue as a middle voice (see Example 7.3). Once at its peak, the EH figure assumes— that is, it may be played so that it assumes—a gleaming, caressing quality. Should it be? It can be played in other ways too. The high EHs can be frail or ethereal or firm, they can fade or brighten—each possibility carries its own T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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set of implications for the relationship of sensibility and pain or the cognates of that pairing. How these EHs are played forms the answer to a question, even as it also helps frame the question. So does the way we speak about them, which is also a mode of performing them. But how, we might want to ask, have they been played, and why? Isn’t it necessary to relate possible performances to actual performances? From an empirical perspective, the answer to the second question would presumably be Yes. But although there is no reason not to consult actual performances, there is no necessity to consult them either. No matter how many actual performances one samples, they cannot exhaust the range of possible performances, even if the range of variation is relatively small. There is always another possibility. Nor is the knowledge offered by actual performances fully empirical. Actual performances, some of them, may be symptoms of cultural attitudes, but only if these interpretations are themselves interpreted. Reflection on possible performances is part of a discovery procedure aimed at both articulating what actual performances may have made apparent and uncovering what may not yet have become apparent. In this frame of reference, for this kind of knowledge, potentiality has greater epistemic force than actuality. However it is played, we hear the EH pulsation pianissimo three times in succession. Three times it enfolds the inner voices and renews itself at the point where the sound of its long note has reached, or, on Schubert’s piano, perhaps crossed, the threshold of audibility. The music thus issues a claim that it can reconcile its inner differences by transforming, by literally sublimating, its disturbing element into something desirable and consoling. This ascent would even imply something like an act of grace, were it not that the music throughout is so unassuming. There is no heaven-storming here, no reaching for the sublime. On the contrary: the music seems averse to the sublime; it wants to preserve the ordinary as a site of pleasure and meaning. If there is a grace here it is the grace of the everyday. This affirmation runs into trouble when the second B section erupts with its jarring forte chords. The outburst declares itself by breaking the enharmonic thread of melody that had connected the first A section to the first B; instead of DH-CG we get AH-A natural. For a while the violence has a free hand, and it continues to cast its shadow even after the second B section has settled down and resumed its earlier course. But we already know where that course will lead; we just need to hear it, or rather to hear what the performer can make of it. When the final A section emerges from the troubled second B, a new change supervenes. The final A combines the first half of its original 162

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version with the second half of the middle version—the harbinger of all the trouble. The final A thus extends its expressive force to include the possibility of restoration or reconciliation. The note of that possibility sounds literally when the final A begins by recovering the original enharmonic shift linking the first A to the first B. The music mends its broken thread. The fact that, here as earlier, the pitch immediately affected by the enharmonic shift is in the bass, not the melody, adds a sense of enhanced interiority. So does the absence of the second A’s anomalous harmony and melodic ripple, an absence that frees the EH figure to bear—to assume, invite, receive—its own import. The music’s confidence in the sublimating ascent of the EHs assumes greater authority than before. Or perhaps I mean greater tranquility. Either way, the claim feels more fully embodied—more experienced, more aware, more considered. Unless, that is, it sounds tentative or merely wishful; the possibilities cannot be excluded— and those silences are still there. The force of the claim becomes known here, but just what that force is depends on how the player plays and the listener hears. Regarded from another angle, the ascent to EH is reminiscent of tonepainting, and in that perspective it stands out, or stands out all the more, within the texture of both the second and third A sections. But this is tonepainting taken out of context. It does not form a sign that closes onto the presentation of an external object or condition, but a signifier that opens onto its own action. What the signifier signifies remains in suspension until the act of expressive performance animates it—animates it in all its simplicity, just a repeated note in dotted rhythm, nothing more. The note acts as a hieroglyph, enigmatic in principle until the spirit-subject comes to inhabit it. Understood thus, thus performed, the bare note in its pulsation becomes a potential means of imagining music in general as the continuously renewed meeting of sentience and sound.

affordance But hold on a minute. As Mallarmé’s faun said, let’s reflect: have we been chasing an illusion? At this point we’re deep into a pretty elaborate “reading” of a musical “text.” Should we really be doing that? Have we really deflected the implication that due allowance for the effects of performance more or less disallows such hermeneutic involvement? And what happens when we flip T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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the enterprise and ask not about what the music is doing but what has been done with it, as if following Richard Taruskin’s precept to ask not what music means but what it has meant? The answer to the first group of questions depends precisely on taking the activity of performance seriously. If we think of the musical event as an act of genuine collaboration, we have no choice but to get involved hermeneutically. A performer necessarily pays close attention to details and makes numerous decisions about what to do and what not to, how to do this and not that. Some of this decision-making is intuitive, of course, based on training and habit; some of it is deliberative; much of it lies somewhere in between. The observer as collaborator has to act in a commensurate way. Collaboration requires that we bring a level of attention to hearing and understanding comparable to the performer’s own. In this situation it does not matter at all whether a score is involved or how closely it is followed; the bogey of the bossy score vanishes with the cockcrow. The performer will encounter chances, opportunities, options, to shape meaning—decisively here, with nuance there—together with the question of what means are available to bring particular meanings to life or to choose some over others. As interpreting collaborators, the performer and the listener act in much the same way, although their points of concrete intervention will not always be the same. The answer to the remaining question depends on rejecting the way it is posed. Of course—of course—it is impossible to maintain the distinction between the thing, the event, the work, call it what you will, and its uses. And of course to ask about usage at all is to require acts of interpretation that exceed their foundation as abundantly as the object of interpretation exceeds any set of intentions or contexts that may have framed it at its inception. Even passing over these considerations, decisive as they are, there remains the stubborn fact that what is done with “the” music, or anything else, is not merely whimsical. A great deal can be done with any cultural artifact—hence that double principle of excess—but “a great deal” is still a finite quantity. Supposing one identifies a usage, an adaptation, an appropriation, or the like, the question remains of why this usage befell that artifact. What is it about the latter that, in the frame of reference in question, encouraged or allowed the former? The question can be framed usefully by borrowing the psychologist James Gibson’s concept of “affordance,” the possibilities of action made available by an object or environment.13 (More properly, we need to extend the concept to include not only what is “there” but also what may be seen or foreseen— 164

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“apprehended” in a large sense). To understand the cultural career of anything, and a fortiori of some condition of music, it is necessary to investigate affordances. That necessity carries us right back to the scene of hermeneutic encounter, which, in fact, we have never left. But a cultural career cannot be confined to or by concepts of usage, appropriation, or reception. There is also a symptomatic relationship between artifacts and their cultural circumstances. Both the artifact and its uses may form indices of tendencies or practices not recognized fully, or not at all, or not recognized in the particular artifact, at a particular historical moment. Culture is no more transparent to itself than anything else. Interpretation is still the condition of possibility of understanding. To understand the cultural dynamic, it helps to understand the artifact that comes, often retrospectively or retroactively, to act as a cultural symptom—a relation that works equally well the other way around. Schubert’s AH Moment musical offers fairly straightforward examples of both the effects of affordance and the formation of cultural symptoms. The relevant information is quite well known. For a century or more after his death, Schubert was esteemed mainly as a composer of songs and other small forms; his genius was such as to make him the most major of minor composers. His piano sonatas, among other large instrumental works, were largely neglected (and deprecated) in favor of the character pieces, including the Moments musicaux. For many, this music belonged to the domestic interior, not the concert stage. As Scott Messing observes, for Hans von Bülow, “the impromptus and Moments musicaux were gentle things (“Sanfte”) appropriate for private gatherings . . . In 1874 [Bülow] wrote to Louise von Welz that he would play some of them for her and her spouse, who would enjoy them as much as Bülow loved them because their difficulty was not sufficient to overpower their strengths.”14 Bülow’s explanation implies that the difficulty of the piano sonatas (only one of which he ever performed) does overpower their strengths, that is, that their technical demands outstrip their expressive value—a clear instance of what I have elsewhere called the limit of listening. According to Arthur Schnabel, whose performances helped rehabilitate the sonatas, Schubert’s shorter works had been regarded at the turn of the century as “a playground for sentimental governesses, for ‘Victorian’ spinsters.” As Messing notes,“[in 1898,] the same year that Schnabel made his debut, Oscar Bie opined that Schubert’s music required delicate fingers and that the Moments musicaux constituted the peak of Schubert’s keyboard works.”15 T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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Delicate fingers? Certainly not in the outburst that begins the second B section of the AH Moment musical! What is it about this piece that would have given affordance to the attitudes recalled by Schnabel and shared by Bülow and Bie among many others? The relation to domestic pleasure and comfort, and to music easy enough to fit in the home under delicate, mostly feminine, fingers is not a mere fabrication. The lullaby-like rocking of the A section, which would be conveyed not only by the music’s sound but also to and through the pianist’s hands and torso, would afford such an understanding, and so would the stark simplicity of texture in the B section—its pathos felt as affecting in proportion to its perceived naiveté. In this milieu, it is perfectly plausible, even reasonable, to subsume these qualities under the domestic rubric without bothering about the complexities and ironies of their interaction, which the rubric itself would render inaudible. Change the angle of affordance, and audibility changes too. For Brian Newbould in 1997, the AH Moment musical and its companion pieces cannot be confined by “social gatherings” (for which they were nonetheless suitable) because they “sometimes touch the world of the sonata.” The AH piece in particular has a bold profi le; it “contains some daring modulations, none more so than the direct jump from A flat major to F sharp minor for the second B section—one of the most astonishing tonal juxtapositions in all Schubert.”16 The music might be thought to afford this touch of creative license by its constant sectional variation, which Newbould remarks on. Astonishing harmony becomes an incitement to change, or else a confounding result of it, either of which may be indulged by agitated (or curbed by deliberate) playing. Bülow and Bie do not seem to have been impressed by such things. Indeed they seem scarcely to have noticed them, or at least not to have bothered about them. If my own account tends more towards their indifference than towards Newbould’s astonishment, the reason, clearly, is not that I share their view of the music’s domesticity but, on the contrary, because I understand that view as the product of an obsolete subject position—not uninteresting, but no longer available. Bülow and Bie regard the idyll of the domestic interior as a given that goes without saying, almost a product of nature rather than of culture. Peeling the domestic rubric away from the music sets loose the complexities and ironies that the rubric holds in check. And among the musical vicissitudes that become audible as a result, the oblique tonal relationship between the sections loses the centrality with which Newbould endows it. The tonal diptych becomes just one feature among many others, 166

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including the enharmonic relationships that bind the two keys together and thus underline the involvement of each section in the others’ business. This loosening of former preoccupations based, in effect, on grandiosity of form, or, if you will, on the grandiosity of form, also affords a hermeneutic window onto the music’s symptomatic value. The A sections, however one characterizes them—as sensuous, lullaby-like, sanft, intimate—are exercises in refined sensibility, the cultivation of feeling, sensitivity, even delicacy. In Schubert’s time such cultivation did not belong to sexually deprived women (the governesses and spinsters) but to aspiring civil servants. In the Germanspeaking world of the 1820s, the famous cultural regime of sentimental education, or Bildung, was directed primarily at the young men who would mature to staff the many-layered bureaucracy on which social order and social rank depended. Cultivation was supposed to help humanize what would otherwise be a stultifying life and career. As Wilhelm von Humboldt put it, “Nothing is as important in a high-level official of the state as the complete conception he has of mankind—how he conceives its dignity and its ideals as a whole— and as the degree of intellectual clarity with which he ponders these questions and responds to them emotionally. There is nothing so important as his interpretation of the idea of Bildung.”17 Friedrich Kittler’s classic study Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 links this task of interpretive self-fashioning to the bureaucratic subject’s gradual emergence from the cocoon of a pedagogy that was both maternal and domestic—the very qualities embedded, perhaps with a certain nostalgic appeal, in Schubert’s A sections. For some years after 1815, Schubert belonged to a circle of like-minded young men dedicated to the idea of Bildung and to the role of the arts in inculcating loft y ideals. The group drew its aesthetic from the anti-Romantic Goethe who, in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, had sought to reject the excesses of subjectivity and the expressive shocks that go with them. The youthful Schubert may have wanted to go along, but it is striking— symptomatic—that his musical realizations of songs from Wilhelm Meister are sympathetic portraits of just those characters, Mignon and the Harper, who embody subjective excess. The AH Moment musical is open to a similar and equally telling ambiguity. If the A sections invoke feeling in its edifying, consoling register, the B sections can be heard and/or played as a critique, if not an outright rejection, that hears cultivation as compromised and compromising, perhaps even as regressive. The bare texture and pained forcefulness of the B sections (culminating with the eruption of the second B at the point of tonal juxtaposition that impressed Newbould) issues a protest on behalf T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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of feeling in the raw. It affords the possibility of grounding sensibility, not in the function of functionaries or in airless moderation, but in simple, sincere, and natural feeling: in short, uncultivated feeling. Bildung would be both justified and surpassed by this appropriation, a process that would find its dramatic representation in the emergence—the literal rise—of the EH figure in the second and third A sections. The milieu of the music in this connection would be distinctive for being, indeed, interior and private but also exposed and decidedly not domestic. The nineteenth-century understanding of pieces like this, and presumably the performance of them, as intimated by Bülow’s description, would thus appear as part of an active and generally coercive process of domestication, an enterprise meant to establish a zone of immunity from precisely the sort of critique that Schubert’s piece could have afforded if it had not been locked in the parlor.

restless care; or, knowledge Only when the necessary collaboration realizes the critical potential of the B section can the pulsation that underpins the entire composition stage the meeting of sentience and sound that I spoke of earlier. Such meetings typically take the form of a break in appearance, whether a plus like the ascent of the EH pulsation or a minus like the silences that the ascent seeks to repair. And here too we can take what may become audible in music as a model of what may become thinkable in interpretation. To reprise a point made in chapter 5: All interpretation requires that we pass beyond what is apparent, but this passage, whether we make it in performance or usage or speech, is especially marked with music, which notoriously leaves its content underdetermined, so much so that we can perfectly well enjoy music without knowing or worrying (or so we tell ourselves) about what it “means.” That enjoyment, however, is best regarded as a threshold: the potentiality, afforded by music, of robust and exemplary acts of understanding. The music’s immanent demand for surmise, conjecture, speculation, extrapolation, even inspiration, does not expose interpretation as a weak or defective form of knowledge, but, on the contrary, discloses the primary role such processes play in any and all knowledge. To understand music is to respond to musical events in terms—positive, complex, nuanced terms—that acknowledge but are not bound by the apparent underdetermination of the music’s content. 168

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But what does “response” mean? Is there any single form or practice, or even a coherent set of forms or practices, to which the word refers? What sorts of response are distinctive or particular to music, or, because there is no one “music” either (far from it), what is the modality of response on which all types of music, whatever their profi le, must draw? A perhaps unlikely source offers a clue. In connecting the ideas of response and responsibility, Emmanuel Levinas makes a provocative statement, an enigmatic aphorism: “Proximity is not a simple coexistence, but a restlessness.”18 “Proximity” here is my shared presence with another, whom Levinas calls “the neighbor”; the restlessness is a primordial, pre-signifying weight of obligation, responsibility, indebtedness, and guilt imposed by the exposure of the other’s liability to be “delivered over to . . . things, contaminated, profaned, persecuted, [to be] in fault and in distress” and ultimately to be killed.19 Against this proximity stands my distance from the neighbor, which Levinas identifies with “cognition.” And between proximity and distance there passes language, with contradictory effects. There is a necessary difference, Levinas says cryptically, between the saying and the said, which cannot coincide: “For the saying in being said at every moment breaks the definition of what it says and breaks up the totality it includes” (126). We might gloss this difference by saying (the word is inevitable) that language as such, language as the medium of a “first saying” (126) recurrently given in proximity, is not a means of communication with the neighbor—communication presupposes distance—but a medium of contact. But this same contact is degraded by any actual occasion of speech, which cannot occur at all without imposing the very distance that it seeks to bridge. And music? What does any of this have to do with music? A great deal, perhaps. If we conjecturally put music in the place where Levinas puts language, the logic of distance and proximity changes significantly, and so does the relationship of language, as a vehicle of response, to both of them. The driving force behind these changes is the peculiarity of using sound as the material medium of the artwork. For music, we need two variations of Levinas’s statement about proximity and restlessness. We need two because my relationship to the music I am listening to is always double; it is both proximate and distant. On the one hand, the music touches me intimately, the sound enters my ears and reverberates in my body; it constantly undoes the cognitive distance classically associated with visual observation. I do not observe music but open myself to it; in a sense it is the music that observes me. On the other hand, I may take T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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the music as something to be contemplated, regarded, given auditory scrutiny—that last slightly oxymoronic phrase is meant to capture the participation of a quasi-visual modality that nonetheless does not (because it does not want to and because it could not in any case) subordinate or supplant the auditory intimacy. I do not have to contemplate music in this way, and with many kinds of music I may not want to, but I always can. Insofar as I do, I do observe the music, but in a way that changes what it normally means to observe. I observe, I listen, I collaborate in a mode that is simultaneously aesthetic and hermeneutic. Classical music in particular is composed to encourage this sort of participation, but it cannot be confined to any one genre. The chance to collaborate on these terms is one of the principal reasons that music moves us—or me, at any rate: one of the reasons I listen at all. We can now vary Levinas’s saying about proximity, and in doing so break it up and share it out. On the one hand, with music proximity is never restlessness; it is non-simple coexistence (or, better, co-presence). The music absorbs me, envelops and orients the feelings and ideas it elicits in me; it constantly reels me back in when I try, if I do, to move away from it. Whether the music is restless itself does not matter, and neither does whether its effects on me are tumultuous. So far as I consent to keep listening, my relationship with the music is always, as it were, in tune, in harmony, even against my better judgment, even against my will. On the other hand, with music distance is never simple observation; it is a restlessness. To observe the music is to marshal my entire experience as the subject of language, culture, and world. There is no other way to hear the music: none. I hear as the subject I am (or were, or wish to be, or am becoming) even if I do so without thinking about it—even if I do so in order not to think about it. The music appears to me (flees from me as it comes to me?) as a form of motion, and my mind has to move faster than the music does, just in order to keep up with it. To listen to the music I have to appropriate it, even if my goal is to be appropriated by it or, better, to open myself to its otherness. To think of music, to think with music, I must wander into a dense, branching cluster of values, practices, judgments, social relations, cultural practices, types of identity, flows of feeling and attitude—the list goes on. It is an open-ended list; it cannot be completed. But whatever occurs on any particular occasion, music, as we saw in chapter 2, always forms an expression of the engagement with world and time that Heidegger called care, the activity of witnessing and stewardship that for Heidegger was synonymous with 170

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Dasein, human being in the world. Care is essentially the working-out of attachment (to what we care for, care about, take care of) in time. It is what gives time meaning as opposed to mere measurement. Care does not move through time but dwells in it. Care has its own languages, which circulate through culture and constantly invent and reinvent themselves. Every subject of culture knows how to speak those languages, has the opportunity to expand on them, and confronts the problem of recognizing new ones when they appear and cause changes in the landscape of care as a whole. Language about music becomes revealing, becomes critical discourse, escapes being captured by its own image, when—and only when—it mobilizes one of the vocabularies of care, which is precisely what the music itself does and what each act of performance is asked to do. What composition, performance, and understanding (not necessarily in that order) do best is afford each other the opportunity to be restless together. But the music that induces this restlessness also sets it at rest. To call on Levinas one last time, music brings me back to the neighbor even when I am alone. The proximity that results is still challenging, but it is also hospitable. The primary condition of music is not listening, but listening with others; not playing or singing, but playing and singing with others, for others. Music models the social relationships that inform all acts of understanding—and vice versa. We share music as readily as we share speech, and perhaps more so, with all the uncertainty and expressive hubbub that ensue. But insofar as it gives pleasure (which, unlike speech, it takes as a primary aim), music reinterprets the social force of proximity, which it also endows with a qualitative, material form. The proximity composed by music affords me the possibility of practicing, or at least rehearsing, a form of restlessness no longer beset by Levinas’s burdens of guilt and obligation. Music takes proximity as a medium of care. Music, whatever kind of music one likes (I like a Mozart tune; how about you?), is a loosely bounded neighborhood in Wittgenstein’s imaginary city, a place where wandering and knowing one’s way about are mutually dependent. The combination of those activities is what I call my response to the music. In turn, that response offers the opportunity to find a language suitable to account for it, though not, of course (and a great deal of confusion would disappear if we only remembered this more often) to exhaust or supplant it. In this way music offers a model of responsibility grounded in reciprocity rather than guilt or debt. The music at once models a non-harassing, non-punitive form of my relation with the neighbor, with the other, and T h e N e w e r M us ic ol o g y ?

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offers me, rather than imposing on me, the responsibility of telling a story about it. To take up that responsibility, to tell that story, means using language in any and every way I can, including musically. It means that I must not be afraid to interpret, resignify, and reimagine the music that arrests my attention, that I must feel free to hear meanings there and to speak personally where doing so can help advance understanding. It means that I must not assume that the music must somehow tell me how to think before I think it, or that it can be circumscribed by a determinate and determining context or historical archive. It means that what I say about music should be understood, not as a thesis or a hypothesis based on specialized learning, no matter how much learning may go into it, but as part of a continuum of expressive acts through which we, the neighbor and I, negotiate the hazards and pleasures of proximity and distance. The means of that negotiation is the primary effective force on which every utterance, in any medium, calls. Its end is, or should be, a musicology that keeps itself new by restlessly performing, now this way, now that, the thought of music.

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postscr i p t imagining the score

The musical score is iconic in classical music. Only with the score can fully composed music, musical works, be transmitted intact for realization in multiple performances. The score, one would think, is a wonderful invention. But in recent years the score has lost a good measure of the authority and prestige that once seemed to accrue to it automatically. For some, at any rate, the chief features of the score are its incompleteness and imprecision, up to and including a fundamental falseness. The indictment has many counts. Scores always leave out something essential; they are never wholly unambiguous; they seek something like the authority of written texts but can maintain that authority only when propped up by too “literate” a musical culture (the term comes, with a frown, from Richard Taruskin’s massive Oxford History of Western Music).1 Scores come in many editions and versions, undercutting the idea that the work of musical art can claim a single unimpeachable source. Moreover, the effective power of music ultimately comes from performance, so that although there is certainly a sense in which we utilize a score to perform what we still call a musical work, the idea that such performance is an act of subordination by which the performer or performers seek to realize the composer’s written intentions is highly questionable, so much so that we might well decide to abandon what Nicholas Cook has criticized as the “performance ‘of ’ paradigm.”2 There is an element of truth to each one of these now familiar claims. We might conclude from them that although scores provide the tradition of classical music with a nominal consistency, in the sense that we repeatedly use the same scores (or related versions of them) as a basis for performance, the most authentic act of performance is departure from the letter of the score. Performance is rupture. 173

There is truth to that position, too. But we might nonetheless want to raise some questions about just how forceful a truth is involved. The works that we continue to perform continue to be recognized; it is sometimes possible to recognize them on hearing just one or two notes. So if performance has such a force of rupture, why do the performances of most works sound so much more alike than they sound different? We have no trouble recognizing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony whether we hear it in a historically “inauthentic” recording by, for example, Wilhelm Furtwängler, or an interpretation by John Eliot Gardner fully informed by the performance practice of Beethoven’s time. The performances differ widely, to be sure, and the differences carry wide differences of meaning, but multiply them as one will, they do not lead beyond the performance “of” paradigm. Agreed: music played from score is more than a mere “realization.” But can it ever get beyond the score (to echo Cook)?3 And if not, where does it get? Where—and what—does it get us? Although it would be a fine idea to scrape classical music clean of the moldy layers of reverence that have disfigured it for much too long, just how far does an understanding of the limitation and relativity of the score take us from traditional forms of understanding? Composers since the nineteenth century have increasingly sought to be exact in their notation, but when did anyone assume that everything in a composition could be notated, or fail to observe that much remains implicit, subject to custom on the one hand and the musical intelligence of the performer on the other? The classical score has always come wrapped in the paradox that it is supposed to be followed exactly (at least in the high-prestige genres), but that the effect of this exactness is ideally to produce a performance that differs significantly from those that precede and follow it. Scores are not merely subject to interpretation; they require interpretation. A score is a request for a rupture that repairs itself in the act of occurring. Indeed, as a composer myself, I don’t want to hear my supposed “intentions.” I want to learn something about my own project as a result of the insight that performers can bring to it, and the ways they shape it to their own ends. A score, moreover, is equipment; it is there to be used. As a book, booklet, or leaf of paper, it is a surface on which to write as well as something to read. A score is a strange compound of text, instruction manual, and diary. Most performers, at least those I have met and worked with, do not treat their scores with reverence. They mark the scores, dog-ear them, fold them, drag them to coffee houses, spill coffee on them. The scores become as much a part of the musicians’ personal domain as their instruments are. This sort of affec174

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tionate rough usage transforms the nature of the score, just as annotations, underlining, and other paratextual inscriptions (otherwise known as scribbles) transform the nature of books. Otherwise there would be little reason for projects such as the New York Philharmonic’s online score archive, replete with annotations by conductors. Performers who write on their scores act much as composers used to do in the course of sketching and revising, before music notation soft ware made those processes invisible. Performers, that is, use the score as a handy storage device to abbreviate or suggest interpretation. The pristine published score is indeed incomplete and imprecise. It is supposed to be. The score does not become fuller and clearer until someone has put it to use and constructively disfigured it in the process. What conclusions do these observations support? Cook has suggested helpfully that scores are like fi lm or play scripts, instructions that guide but do not fi x performance or production. But most classical performances follow their scores more closely than that. The history of the score is a progressive narrowing of latitude, as practices such as figured bass, liberal ornamentation, and improvised cadenzas disappear one after the other. Scores, modern ones, anyway, are not lead sheets. Reading or playing through a score, interpreting or studying a score, is more like reciting a poem or, to update the process, like making an audiobook. There are many ways to do it, but you have to have a feeling for the whole to do any one of them, and the one you choose today may not be the one you would choose tomorrow. You do have to recite the words of the text in full and in order, but just how you do it is up to you. The potential always exists for performative ruptures, contrary impulses, alternative paces, intonations, and intensities. Thinking of the score in these terms helps situate it as something to be used rather than “realized,” something to be marked in the double sense of being written on, at least figuratively, and being scrutinized—as the idiom has it, taken note of. What else do we need to consider if we want to take the score as part of the fully scored composition rather than as a detached template? The score is a form of writing, but a rather strange form, in which calligraphy counts more strongly than it does in writing with words. That is, the score operates primarily as notation, but it also has a visual dimension that in some cases is suggestive, forming not only a signification of the music but also a kind of drawing of it. The score, in short, is both code and image.4 What provisions does this dual aspect of the score convey to the reader or performer? Or rather, with what degree of assurance does it convey them? P os t sc r i p t

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The score as code specifies some things unambiguously, such as pitches and rhythms in most classical scores, while leaving others relatively underdetermined, such as tempo and its modifications and details of phrasing. But the score also conveys things by indirection. It poses questions to be considered all the more inquiringly because they are posed by intimation or even by omission. Some things can be “conveyed” only if the performer or score reader reads between the notes. Sometimes such things stand out, even jump out. Sometimes they have to be looked for. At the inevitable risk of being arbitrary, I will turn to a single example to suggest the kinds of understanding that might come of regarding the score as a surface for writing, reading, and drawing. The example will not be comprehensive, but purely illustrative. It will dwell on a small group of details, specifically those that help make the example paradigmatic rather than merely occasional. The example should also serve as a reminder of a point too often forgotten in debates about the score versus performance. The idea that the score is only a surrogate for the “real” music, which is the music we hear in performance, is questionable at best. Although it is true that most listeners are not musicians, and that not all musicians read or work from scores, it is also true that for those who do “read music,” as the saying goes, the score is considerably more than a mere surrogate. It “is” the music no less than an individual performance is. The music exists not only as sound but as the sonorous image in the mind’s ear, and as the visual image on the page for those who know how to see the notation as a means of hearing. Scores are visual maps of acoustic possibility. The performer neither humbly “follows” the score nor proudly appropriates it. The performer imagines the score. What makes this different from any other act of imaginative response is its medium. The performer imagines the score in sound.

The score of Chopin’s Ballade no. 4 in F Minor, typically for its time, leaves the performer ample room for intervention in tempo and dynamics. Tradition extends the freedom to include pianists’ using their own pedaling rather than Chopin’s. But what lies beyond this typical Romantic practice? What else must or may be performed with the help of these pages? One possible answer involves the need to “follow” the score; another involves the need to interpret the score while “following” it, that is, the need to form a certain understanding of the music and to project that understanding in perform176

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ance. This is an odd kind of following. Perhaps it would be better to speak of leading the score. The score of the Fourth Ballade poses particularly intense forms of these questions, which is why, I believe, it makes a paradigmatic “best example.” This ballade is one of Chopin’s most difficult pieces; to perform it requires virtuosity at the highest level. Its difficulty is not merely a question of keyboard acrobatics, though there are plenty of those. The music is relentlessly contrapuntal and its elaborate textures are in constant change. The first requisite in dealing with a score of this complexity is just to master the notes, to get the piece under one’s fingers and, for concert performance, into muscle memory. To say that much is hardly surprising, but for present purposes what matters about this obvious necessity is that it entails granting a very high degree of authority to the score. For as long as it takes to master the technical challenges, the score assumes the power to interpellate the performer. Even if one annotates the score pages with fingering numbers, slurs, and the like, these additions remain subordinate to the task of playing what is written— wide leaps, cascades of notes, interweaving fast-moving lines, irregular rhythmic groupings, and so on. The eventual performance will presumably, in some sense, belong to the performer, but it is not possible without a selfabnegating period of study and practice. The origin of the performance resembles the state that Susan Stewart calls “lyric possession,” the surrender of one’s will to the force of an external utterance or expression.5 I do not mean this as a description of the performer’s state of mind, which would obviously be dubious. I mean it as a description of technique. Once the technical challenges have been met, the performer has other issues to negotiate and a greater measure of freedom to negotiate them. In the case of the Fourth Ballade, many of those issues include a high degree of overlap between the score as visual image and the score as notational instruction. Two or three passages should suffice to show what is at stake. For convenience, I will refer to these passages with the terms traditionally used to assimilate the Fourth Ballade to sonata form, though I am not convinced that the music is best thought of in that way. Its deeper concern, lightly reflected below (and thoroughly explored in a seminal essay by Michael Klein), is with narrative.6 Just before what amounts to a double recapitulation of the main theme, there is an unmeasured written-out cadenza in small notes that shares space in the same measure with a phrase in standard notation (see Example PS.1A). In the first published edition, the measure occupies a full system at the P os t sc r i p t

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3 3

 K K    K  



  

dolciss.   

loco

G 

   G   K   G          

  G      



rallentando.    





G 

     



G 

 



3

G 

  

3



A.

cresc. _

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

_

B.





C.

example PS.1. Chopin, Ballade no. 4. A: Cadenza in small notes. B: Restatement of theme, mm. 58–59. C: Beaming in coda.

bottom of the page. The notational style is not unusual, but there are two similar transitional passages elsewhere in the score that receive standard rhythmic notation. So why (convention aside) is the cadenza scored in small notes? The notation invites a high degree of freedom with the material, but that invitation is contradicted by elaborate pedal indications and a rallentando marking in the second half. It looks like the passage is supposed to be played freely, as long as one does what one is told. Another marking suggests at least one answer. The cadenza is marked dolciss., the only such instruction in the entire score. As an image, specifically as an impromptu iconic sign for the music it abstractly encodes, the cadenza in small notes suggests a glimpse of a world outside the world of the piece, a plateau of difference or reflection identified by that instruction to play it as sweetly as possible. The glimpse is tenuous; the small notes are distinctly 178

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paler than the full ones they complement. The performer, upon arriving at this passage, may or may not interpret it conceptually in terms compatible with those suggested here, but either way s/he has to interpret it in the playing. Someone who does not recognize the “exterior” quality of the cadenza may obscure it or else reveal it inadvertently; someone who does recognize it will presumably seek to project it via the chosen manner of playing the passage. Whatever the outcome, the score at this point affords the performer and, by extension, the listener, the opportunity to reflect on what kind of world the ballad invokes by reflecting on alternative worlds that neither the written nor the sounding music allows for. The way the cadenza is played will determine whether it is most readily heard, for the fleeting moment it occupies, as the contribution of a new narrative voice, or as a merely ornamental transition, or as something in between. The subsequent double recapitulation of the main theme completes a series of thematic transformations that begins with the theme’s second appearance. On that occasion, the theme, previously presented lucidly over a mazurka-like accompaniment, proceeds as the upper voice in a four-voice contrapuntal texture with all the voices highly active (see Example PS.1B). One has to take some trouble to pick the theme out visually amid the thicket of notes, and this visual difficulty has an auditory parallel. The immediate question for the performer is whether, or how much, to bring out the theme as opposed to letting it be swallowed up by the agitation on which it rides. The answer, and of course there is no single answer even for individual performers, depends on forming a sense of just what the theme is doing here, or perhaps more exactly, what is being done to it. Is its power to act as a narrative voice, in control of an implacably tragic ballad, being affirmed, or tested, or negated? Does it present a dark turn of events to be quelled or surmounted by the later recapitulations, or does it unleash a force of dissolution that will overtake the later statements of the theme as well? No one, of course, can expect a performer to ask these questions in just these terms (though nothing prevents that), but it does seem one would at least have to get a feel for both the question and its possible answers. One way to do that is to think about the coda, part of which supplies the last passage to be examined here. The final recapitulation of the main theme is also the occasion for its dissolution, as rapid note motion begins to take over the musical texture. The process continues through the recapitulation of the second theme and culminates in the coda, which essentially consists of continuous rapid motion spanning the keyboard in rising and falling waves. P os t sc r i p t

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But at the same time a notable contradiction arises between the unbroken continuity of sound and the appearance of the music on the page. The coda is rife with unmarked sixteenth-note triplets, so that measure after measure is fi lled with as many as six separate groups of three beamed notes in one or both hands (see Example PS.1c). As notation, this procedure simply indicates how the notes should be phrased; it has no special import. But given the sheer number of notes involved, together with the expressive use of white space, beam angles, and cross-staff positioning, the notation does take on import as a visual image—an image of fragmentation, rupture, chaos, the slicing of inaudible empty spaces in the rushes of sound. How does one make (or does one make?) something also articulate of this jumble, knowing in advance that for most listeners it will come across as a kind of high-velocity blur? The image belongs to the music, via the score, independent of the way the music sounds in performance. But at the same time the performance can, if the pianist chooses, seek to project some or all of what the image shows via the sound of the playing, and even, in live performance, via the sight of it. The score is not like a map of the imaginary cityscape of sound that the performer has to navigate, but something like the city-dweller’s memory of that maze of streets in material form. (The material inscription becomes a mental one if the virtuoso pianist plays, as expected, from memory.) The performance remains of the score because it is done with the score. The music gets ahead of the score, but never beyond it.

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not es

preface. the thought of music 1. “Work-concept” is from Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); the reduction derives from the book’s—the work’s—reception, not from the book itself. 2. Maurice Blanchot, “Characteristics of the Work of Art,” in idem, The Space of Literature (1955), trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 221–33; Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” in idem, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202–37; Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 3. Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010); Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2012). 4. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 48. 5. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in idem, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 314–32; Heidegger, “Language,” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial, 2001), 185–208. Benjamin regards human language, constituted by words and names, as only one expression of a more universal “linguistic character”; his position, although stated in idealist terms, anticipates the much later development variously known as speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, and objectoriented ontology. See, for example, Graham Harmon, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002); idem, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011); and Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013), freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/realist-magic.html.

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6. Quoted in Derrida, “University,” 213, 302n.14; translation slightly modified. 7. Derrida, “University,” 211. 8. Derrida, “University,” 212. 9. Derrida, “University,” 234–35. Derrida takes the perhaps as a bridge to cross from the Kantian as-if to the event that “does not allow itself to be domesticated by any ‘as if,’ or at least by any ‘as if ’ that can already be read, articulated, or decoded as such” (234; italics in original). 10. Essay Three, section 24; quoted from Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 151. 11. Derrida, Without Alibi, 282 n.4. 12. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 434–72. A key text in affect theory is Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect,” in his Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 23–45. For an overview by advocates, see The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 13. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 57–60. In Eco’s own terms, borrowed from Richard Rorty (whom he is critiquing), one must distinguish between “critically interpreting” a text to discover “something about its nature” and “merely using” a text to “get something else” even at the risk of misrepresenting the text “from the semantic point of view.” 14. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), remarks nos. 19, 23, and 241. 16. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 71.

chapter 1. music and the forms of thought 1. Gary Tomlinson, “Monumental Musicology,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132 (2007): 349–74. 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), sec. 53, p. 205; Matthews translates Kant’s “mehr Genuss als Kultur” as “more enjoyment than culture.” 3. James Currie, “Music After All,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62 (Spring 2009): 145–203. 4. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 151–65. Mitchell’s particular concern is with visual and verbal art, and the fear of too perfect a reciprocity between them: 182

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“Ekphrastic fear perceives this reciprocity as a dangerous promiscuity and tries to regulate the borders with firm distinctions between the senses, modes of representation, and the objects proper to each” (155). Although this perception puts both the visual and the verbal, that is both the object and the means of ekphrasis, at risk, Mitchell tends to emphasize the danger to language. My tendency is to do the opposite, with music in the place of visual art. The tendency is symptomatic. Art objects have generally seemed to need less protection than music does from debasement or reduction by language. On the role of ekphrastic hope and fear in descriptions of music, see my Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), 11–28. 5. J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). On best examples, see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 23–24. Best examples are prototypes that strongly characterize the classes they exemplify. 6. Jacques Lacan, Seminar 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 11–28. 7. See my Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2012), 89–90, 133, 148. 8. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 120. 9. Ibid., 144. 10. Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (New York: New American Library, 1962), 204. 11. Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10–12. 12. Lacan, Seminar 3, The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 268–70. 13. Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2003), 291. Fink translates point de capiton as “button tie.” 14. Lacan, Seminar 3, The Psychoses, 268. 15. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 55. Again: “If the void is thematized, it must be according to the presentation of its errancy, and not in regard to some singularity, necessarily full, which would distinguish it as one within a differentiating count. . . . The void is thus distributed everywhere. . . . [T]he void, in a situation, is the unpresentable of presentation” (57). 16. In view of the statement quoted in the previous footnote, one might argue that the CG in the Eroica is not eligible to be the void element; the void would instead be a condition not describable in the technical vocabulary of music and not achievable until the movement, or the whole symphony, has run its course. But to say so sounds, to my ear, fussy and dogmatizing. There is as much or more to be gained from countering or reframing this—or any—idea as there is from adhering to it. We have to interpret what we hear, or can hear, and if the results run counter

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to the idea, so much the worse for the idea. Beethoven, we might say, owes no allegiance to Badiou. His CG, above all in performance, thematizes itself as a wandering fullness and dares us to hear or play it any other way. 17. The song may also have more than just one void element. The famous beginning with birds and bees was an afterthought; the original lyrics began with some epithets referring to racial others who “do it,” a device that Porter withdrew but that echoes in several of the lyrics he kept, for example in the early reference to the somewhat exotic “Lithuanians and Letts (i.e. Latvians, with a pun on “Let’s). The song’s act of subtraction may thus include racially marked pleasures denied to normative Western whites, regardless of (or because of) their social and economic dominance—pleasures that may themselves be a stand-in for the then-outlaw pleasures of Porter’s homosexuality. 18. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 180. 19. See my Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010) and Expression and Truth. 20. On the performative effects of shifters, see Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 46, 150–52. 21. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 64–72. One cautionary note: it is important not to confuse singularity with rarity or unusualness. My approach to this question has sometimes been misunderstood (for example by Holly Watkins in her review of Musical Meaning and Human Values, a volume edited by Keith Chapin and myself, in Music Analysis 31 (2012): 259–71). The judgment that something is unusual may be useful or pertinent in certain circumstances, but in itself it settles nothing. Singularity comes not from what something is but from how it is. Black swans are unusual but not, for that reason, singular; the white swans (real or fictitious) described in Yeats’s poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” are singular, even though they are perfectly ordinary birds. Beethoven’s “Funeral March” Piano Sonata (no. 12 in A-flat, Op. 26) is unusual because none of its four movements is in sonata form, but what makes it singular is, among other things (singularities have plural sources), its refusal (or rather the details of its refusal) of the affirmative narrative arc of another, larger work, also containing a funeral march, that it anticipates: the Eroica Symphony. The sonata plays a central role in chapter 2 of this book. 22. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 40; 39–40. Nancy prefaces his remarks by saying that he does not aim to give timbre primacy over the other elements of music (39), but it is hard to read him as doing otherwise, especially as he goes on to link timbre genealogically with the stretched skin of a drumhead, which he extends metaphorically to the skin stretched over the listening body (42–43). 23. The arrangement is part of an unusually complex reception history. See Thomas Larson, The Saddest Music Ever Written (New York: Pegasus, 2012), and especially Luke Howard, “The Popular Reception of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’,” American Music 25 (2007), 50–80.

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24. “The judgment of taste differs from logical judgment in that the latter subsumes representation under a concept of the object, but the former does not subsume under a concept at all, for otherwise the necessary universal approval could be compelled by proofs. All the same, however, it is similar to the latter in that it professes a universality and necessity, albeit . . . grounded only on the subjective formal condition of judgment in general”; Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, sec. 35, p. 167. 25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 232–39. 26. In Expression and Truth, see pp. 60–61, 72, 155–57; “everyday enchantment” in the present text condenses several different formulations.

chapter 2. speaking of music 1. See especially Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 505–36. For a more considered defense of ineffability, see Nicholas Cook, “Theorizing Musical Meaning,” Music Theory Spectrum 23 (2001): 170–95. 2. See, for example, Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001). 3. Personal communication. 4. The task is taken up in my Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010) and entails, among other things, a critique of hermeneutics, a reconsideration of meaning and interpretation, and a rethinking of the complex categories of work and performance. See also my earlier Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001). 5. Jacques Derrida,Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 111–12. 6. The liar, says Derrida, “must know what he is doing . . . otherwise he does not lie”; in other words the liar, who aims to deceive, must know what he says to be false (Without Alibi, 34–35). J. L. Austin argues that speech acts, though themselves neither true nor false, carry an implicit claim of correspondence with fact, whereas statements, though only supposed to be true or false, also have performative effects. The result is the strange bifurcation of speech-act theory, which is rooted in a stilloperative distinction between statements and speech acts that the theory itself renders moot. For the short version of this argument, see Austin, “Performative Acts,” in idem, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 233–52. 7. Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns” (1797), trans. James Ellington, in Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 63–68. 8. Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” in Without Alibi, 28–70. 9. Derrida, The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). No t e s t o pag e s 2 0 – 2 8

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10. On the imagetext, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 83–107, and my Musical Meaning, 145–72. 11. Emily Dickinson, poem 1129, in idem, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 506. 12. Peter Szendy, “Parole, Parole: Tautegory and the Musicology of the (Pop) Song,” in Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, ed. Keith Chapin and Andrew Clark (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 188–89. 13. On being under a description, see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 234–35. 14. For more on the connections between the sonata and the symphony, and further discussion of the meanings of the former, see my “Eroica-traces: Beethoven and Revolutionary Narrative,” in Musik/Revolution, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister (Hamburg: von Bockel Verlag, 1997), 2:35–48. 15. For further discussion and context on this point, see my “The Mysteries of Animation: History, Analysis, and Musical Subjectivity,” Music Analysis 20 (2001): 151–76. 16. Heidegger continually reiterates the theses that care is the being of Dasein and that it is grounded in the mode of temporality by which Dasein is always “ahead of itself.” See “Care as the Being of Dasein” in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 169–212. 17. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 169–90. 18. For a recent defense of this credo, see Steven Rings, “Mystères limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige,” 19th-Century Music 32 (2008): 178–208. Rings is writing in part to rebut Abbate’s polemic in favor of ineffability, cited above, and to that extent his argument and mine share common ground. We part company, however, over whether analytical understanding either can or should ground musical understanding. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1873), trans. Ian C. Johnston (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources, 2010), 6–12. The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis (the latter designating “lived”—that is, finished, delimited—experience) was of signal importance to Walter Benjamin, who associated modernity with the decline of Erfahrung; see Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 155–200. 20. “Chopin at the Funeral: Episodes in the History of Modern Death,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001), 97–126, at 118–19. 21. Hugh Macdonald, “GH Major” in 19th-Century Music 11(1988): 221–37.

chapter 3. the ineffable and how (not) to say it 1. See my Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010), esp. chapters 1, 14, and 15. 186

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2. From “To Autumn,” in John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 360. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “How the True World Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Vintage, 1954), 485–86. 4. “Colloquy: Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (2012): 215–56. The colloquy comprises articles by Brian Kane, Steven Rings, Michael Gallopi, James Currie, Michael Puri, Judith Lochhead, and James Hepokoski. I should stress that my quarrel here is not with any of these colleagues, all of whom I admire, but with a disciplinary investment in Jankélévitch’s musical ontology, which I think is regrettable at best. (Regrettable, in part, because even accepting Jankélévitch’s terms as a basis for critique tends to produce caricatures of real musical hermeneutics. So perhaps I have a bit of a quarrel with some of my colleagues, after all.) The article in this group that most closely accords with my own position is Hepokoski’s, with its thoughtful critique of modernist anti-rationalism. For a more extended critique of Jankélévitch, see Michael Klein, Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 49–59. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), 122, 117. 6. Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition”; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 7. “Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum),” in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 50. 8. Derrida, On the Name, 50–51. 9. Ernst Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen, 9th edition (Jena: Fischer Verlag, 1922; rpt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 8–9. 10. “Brief des Lord Chandos an Francis Bacon,” http://gutenberg.spiegel.de /buch/997/1; accessed 21 November 2011. My translation. 11. My translation from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: The Humanities Press, 1961), no. 7, p. 150. 12. “From Work to Text,” in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1989), 56–66, at 63. 13. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 154–56. 14. In my Interpreting Music, esp. 1–45; Barthes’s claim is in “From Work to Text,” 58–59. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), Third Essay, “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?” secs. 24–27, pp. 148–61.

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16. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 437, 443. 17. James Hepokoski, “Ineffable Immersion: Contextualizing the Call for Silence,” in “Colloquy,” 223–30. 18. http://fleursdumal.org/poem/103. 19. W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 2007), 98. The poem begins with three quatrains; this six-line stanza breaks the pattern and therefore, ironically, breaks the law. Auden’s judge is only one of a series of figures who appropriate the law unto themselves, but he is the pivotal figure because his closing maxim reduces to an empty tautology Kant’s principle that we obey the law because of its form. 20. Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 38–42. 21. From chapter 23; quoted from Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Perennial, 1967), 410–11. My earlier discussion appears discontinuously in my After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997) and continuously, with additions, in my Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Ashgate, 2006), 145–62. 22. Santner, Psychotheology, 19, 42–43. 23. Peter G. Davis, “An Outsider Who Followed His Own Path,” The New York Times, Sunday, March 18, 2012, AR 17. 24. Slavoj Žižek, “The Undergrowth of Enjoyment,” New Formations 10 (1989): 10. 25. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, no. 5.6, p. 115. The full (famous) sentence is: “The limits of my language mean [bedeuten] the limits of my world.” 26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations, ed. Rush Rhees (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 166. 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), part II, sec. XI (p. 206), translation modified; in the original the last sentence reads “—In diesem Ton drückt sich auch das Aufleuchten des Aspects aus.” 28. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 304 (ch. 13). 29. Francis Ponge, Mute Objects of Expression (La Rage de l’Expression), trans. Lee Fahnestock (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008), 37. 30. Text quoted from Stéphane Mallarmé, The Poems (bilingual edn.), ed. Keith Bosley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 118; my translation.

chapter 4. pleasure and validation 1. These terms are to be understood historically throughout, as they are in Linda Austern, ed., Music, Sensation, and Sensuality (New York: Garland Press, 2002). 188

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2. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48. 3. W. J. T. Mitchell traces both types of fetish to the larger nineteenth-century category of the totem; see his “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 167–84. 4. Jacques Lacan, Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 43–70, 101–114; Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3–47. 5. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial, 2001), 163–80. 6. Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2007), 35–70. 7. Jacques Lacan, Seminar 23: Le Sinthome (1975), trans. Luke Thurston, http:// www.scribd.com/doc/97204361/Seminar-of-Jacques-Lacan-Book-XXIII-LeSinthome. 8. Lacan, “Joyce the Symptom” (1975), trans. unattrib. http://traceofink.fi les .wordpress.com/2010/08/joycethesymptom.pdf, 9. 9. “Joyce the Symptom,” 8. 10. For more on the musical sinthome, see Michael Klein, Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 96–121. Klein’s approach and mine are complementary; his concentrates on the formation of subjectivity, mine on the deformations of pleasure. The concept might best be thought of as a vacillation between the two perspectives. 11. For those who like topic theory (I am not one of them), this opening phrase may sound like a hunting topic. If so, however, Mozart’s treatment of it quickly strips the phrase of all semiotic value, the way the constant repetition of a word can empty the word of meaning. The phrase is not rendered ironic or even deconstructed; it is pulverized. On topic theory in its original eighteenth-century framework, see Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980); for subsequent developments, see Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 14–80; and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). The theory (so-called; it is really a taxonomy) is a subdivision of musical semiotics; for critiques of the latter, see my Interpreting Music, 21–25, and Michael Klein, Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject, 120–21. As Klein observes, “Semiotics as it is practiced today all too often falls into the formation of neologisms and taxonomies that end up telling us what we already know.” The taxonomies, one might add, all too often discover only what they look for, namely themselves. 12. The quotation is from Wordsworth’s description of the hopes inspired by the early days of the French revolution: Now was it that both found, the meek and loft y Did both find, helpers to their hearts’ desire,

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And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish,— Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia,—subterranean fields,— Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all! (The Prelude [1850], Bk. XI, ll. 136–44, http://www.bartleby.com/145 /ww297.html; accessed April 27, 2014)

13. Georges-Marie Butel-Dumont, quoted in Michael Kwass, “Ordering the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the Classification of Objects in Eighteenth-Century France,” Representations 82 (2003): 87–116, at 93. 14. David Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” from Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1777), Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles /hume-essays-moral-political-literary-lf-ed; accessed April 27, 2014. See also Ryu Susato, “Hume’s Nuanced Defense of Luxury,” Hume Studies 32 (2006): 167–86. 15. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in idem, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 197–269, at 262–64. Freud’s account is in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 13–17. 16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part II, Sec. XI (pp. 193–229 in the 2nd edn.). On the relationship of change of aspect and musical meaning, see my Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2012), 10–13 and passim. 17. http://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/20a748c2-ef85–4b72–849aae5beed7b627/fullview#page/6/mode/2up. 18. http://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/72d4f60c-b6e4–43e8–9969f79a8a897414/fullview#page/8/mode/2up. 19. http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/romeo-and-juliet-fantasy-overturepeter-ilyich-tchaikovsky. 20. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1st Engl. edn., 1887), https://www.marxists.org /archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, 46; Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), in idem, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1962), 214–19. 21. Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), 1–14 and passim. 22. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 106–116. Interpassivity (linked here especially but not exclusively to modern media) exemplifies what Žižek terms the “primordial substitution” at the core of subjectivity.

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23. Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien, mais quand-même . . . ” in idem, Clefs pour l’ imaginaire ou l’autre scène (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 9–33. Mannoni borrowed the phrase from one of his patients. 24. See Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1–6; Butler develops the idea from Theodor Adorno’s Problems in Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 15–19. 25. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). 26. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 59–60.

chapter 5. the cultur al field 1. Both editions edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton and published by Routledge (New York and London). 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 153. 4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1996), 265–307; Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” in Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145–64. 5. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 306. The whole passage needs to be read closely. In brief, the distinct identities of the two horizons “supposedly existing by themselves” dissolve during a movement of retraction that occurs—is always already occurring—as “historical consciousness . . . immediately recombines with what it has foregrounded itself from in order to become one with itself again in the unity of the historical horizon that it thus acquires.” 6. Jürgen Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” in Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds., Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), 334–63. 7. Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010), 52–66. 8. “Invention” should be understood in a compound sense embracing the multiple meanings of the term: fertility of ideas (originally in rhetoric, later in music), devices or concepts that redefine the possible, things or practices positioned between creation and discovery. For a fuller account, see Jacques Derrida, “From Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” trans. Catherine Porter, in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1991), 311–17, 337–43.

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9. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 80. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), remarks 19 (“form of life”) and 18. The text is bilingual; the translation here is mine. In the original: “Unsere Sprache kann man ansehen als ein alte Stadt: Ein Gewinkel von Gäßchen und Plätzen, alten und neuen Häusern, und Häusern mit Zubauten aus verschiedenen Zeiten; und dies umgeben von einer Menge neuer Vororte mit geraden und regelmäßigen Strassen und mit einformigen Häusern.” W. G. Sebald closely paraphrases this statement in his novel Austerlitz (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 2003): If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad for a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.

Trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2011), 174–75. Sebald strips away Wittgenstein’s rim of order, which in this version of the city exists only in the cultural know-how that his narrator has lost. In the original: Wenn man die Sprache ansehen kann als ein alte Stadt, mit einem Gewinkel von Gassen und Platzen, mit Quartieren, die weit zurück reichen in die Zeit, mit abgerissenen, assanierten und neuerbauten Vierten und immer weiter ins Vorfeld hinauswachsenden Aussenbezieken, so glich ich selbts einenen Menschen, der sich, aufgrund einer langen Abwesenheit, in dieser Aglommeration nicht mehr zurechtfindet, der nicht mehr weisst, wozu eine Haltzustelle dient, was ein Hinterhof, eine Strassenkreuzung, ein Boulevard oder eine Brucke ist (183).

11. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 16–18. 12. “All Around London, an Invitation to Make Music,” The New York Times, Saturday, 11 July 2009, C1. According to its website, http://www.streetpianos.com/, accessed 17 April 2013, Play Me, I’m Yours had installed street pianos in 35 cities around the world by the end of 2012, with installations in four more—Boston, Munich, Cleveland, and Omaha—to follow in 2013, starting in May. Mention should also be made of a similar program, Sing for Hope Pianos, which each year since 2011 has for a limited time distributed 88 artist-decorated pianos (one per key) around New York City. (The instruments are donated to schools and charities once the event runs its course.) Anthony Tommasini, writing for the Times as a participant, reports social and musical behavior very similar to that elicited by Play Me, I’m Yours; see “88 Spots to Tickle the Keys and Your Fancy,” The New York Times, Friday, 7 June 2013, C1. 13. The details to follow come from the Times article “All Around London,” cited above, and from Emine Saner, “The People’s Piano,” The Guardian, Tuesday, 192

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23 June 2009 (accessed online 17 June 2013 at http://www.guardian.co.uk /music/2009/jun/24/piano-art-installation-luke-jerram). 14. Luke Jerram describes the marriages, together with much else, in a radio essay done for the BBC Radio3 Programme, accessible online (with slide show) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 9OiuLtSJC7I. It is worth noting, as Jerram does, that the rate of vandalism on the street pianos has been close to zero. 15. For a video of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in Times Square (2010), see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Hbaf8K6qbyU. Also in 2010, the pianist Ren Yuan played Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude, Op. 10, no. 12, on eight of the street pianos in London, including the one near the Millennium Bridge; see http://www .youtube.com/watch?v = b1iyZ-4AK2U. Not to be outdone in pianistic tumult, Beethoven turned up near the Millennium Bridge via the finale of the “Moonlight” Sonata played—from memory!—by a boy named George who looks to be about 10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = uLg7lTB52WI. A young music student, happening to pass by the Millennium Bridge piano in 2009, stopped to play the first movement of Ravel’s “Sonatine.” 16. The most thoughtful critics of the work-concept, notably Lydia Goehr, Jim Samson, and Nicholas Cook, were interested in expanding the frame of reference, not in debunking, but the appropriation of their initiative has tended to simplify its claims and to narrow (and thus mistake) its implications. Carolyn Abbate’s widely read polemic “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 505–36, did, on the other hand, have debunking very much on its mind. See Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Nicholas Cook, “Music as Performance,” in The Cultural Study of Music, first edition (New York: Routledge, 2007), 204–14. For further critique, see the chapters “Performance” and “Works” in Interpreting Music, 241–57 and 258–77. 17. For a sampling of the contemporary critical commentary, see Israel V. Nestyev, Prokofiev, trans. Florence Jonas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 63–64. 18. The company was General Motors, which manufactured the high-end Oldsmobile brand from 1908 until 2004. The fi lm’s title refers to the song, “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” which became a hit in 1905 and remained popular through the 1950s. 19. Interpreting Music, 1–19. See also chapter 7 of my Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001), 145–72. 20. Nonetheless, Gadamer continually returns to the dream of a language that transcends itself in the process of reaching an understanding. The argument cannot be made here but the following statement is representative: “If all understanding stands in a necessary relation of equivalence to its possible interpretation, and if there are basically no bounds set to understanding, then the verbal form in which this understanding is interpreted must contain within it an infinite dimension that

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transcends all bounds. Language is the language of reason itself ” (Truth and Method, 401). 21. On speculative realism and its cognate, object oriented ontology, see Graham Harmon, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005) and idem, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester, England: Zero Books, 2011); Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Continency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008); Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013); and Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 22. “Description without Place,” in Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1954), 345. 23. On this stronger claim, and the role of description in musical understanding, see Interpreting Music, 52–66, and my Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2012), 1–31, 161–63. 24. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 57–60. 25. The term is introduced in my Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) as an alternative to “structural trope” from my earlier Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990): “The alternative terminology reflects a shift in emphasis from the capacity of structures to act as tropes to the proclivity of cultures to act through tropes” (260 n. 3). The initial formulation emphasized “structure” to suggest the expressive possibilities of formal devices or procedures. The later formulation tried to peel off the latent ideology of aesthetic order built into the term “structure,” in favor of the loosely regulated circulation of particular (families of) signifying practices. 26. The metaphor of saturation is from Derrida; see the essay “Signature Event Context” in his Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–30.

chapter 6. virtuosity, reading, authorship 1. See Nicholas Cook, “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance,” Music Theory On-Line 7:2 (April 2001). 2. On the history of the work-concept in relation to performance, see Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); for a critique and reformulation of the concept, see my Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010). 3. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 194

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4. Eduard Hanslick, Concerte, Componisten und Virtuosen der letzten fünfzehn Jahre, 1870–1885 (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Literatur, 1886), 274; accessed via Google Books. Hanslick’s comment is the more revealing because in this case Liszt was performing as a conductor, not a soloist: “Liszt was on view, standing upright on the flower-bedecked podium, the baton in his hand, of which he also sporadically made distinguished use” (273). The grammatical ambiguity between “hand” and “baton” appears in the original, and is certainly resonant, as a similar image had been for Baudelaire in his prose poem “The Thyrsis”; for comments on the latter, see my After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997), 61–64. 5. For more on this general topic, see, in addition to Samson, Virtuosity, Richard Leppert, “Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso,” in James Parakilas, ed., Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 200–223; “Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere,” in my Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002) ; and Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 6. Quoted in Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and SelfPromotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 152. 7. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1980), 11. The image, like Danhauser’s of Liszt at the piano, is readily available online. 8. For a critique of this model see my Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010), 74–75; for a history, see John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010): 321–62. 9. The concept of the vanishing mediator has its origins in Hegel; its chief modern theorists have been Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. See Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2008). 10. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 87–88. 11. George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (London: T.F. Unwin, 1887), 19–20. 12. Quoted in Leppert, “Cultural Contradiction,” 214. 13. Quoted in Samson, Virtuosity, 81. 14. “Liszt and the Literary,” in John C. Tibbetts and Michael Saffle, eds., Liszt: A Chorus of Voices (New York: Pendragon Press, 2011), 220. 15. Michel Foucault, Genealogy, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 113–38. 16. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in idem, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 83–110 at 108–9.

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17. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 138. 18. Quoted in James Deaville, “The Politics of Liszt’s Virtuosity,” in Michael Saffle and Rosanna Dalmonte, eds., Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2003), 125–26. 19. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, Stanza 89. Text quoted from Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5131/5131-h /5131-h.htm#link2H_4_0005. 20. My translation from Alphonse de Lamartine, Poèmes choisis (Manchester: The University Press, 1921), 4–5; accessed via Google Books on 15 July 2011. 21. Quoted in John H. Mace, ed., Involuntary Memory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 1–2. 22. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 10. 23. My translation; the French text quoted from Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, http://fleursdumal.org/poem/142.

chapter 7. the newer musicology? 1. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 56–66; originally published as “De l’Oeuvre au texte,” Revue d’esthétique 3 (1971): 225–32. 2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (A Translation of Le Mot et les choses) (New York: Vintage, 1994), 9–10. 3. In Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–31. 4. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), 6. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 153. 6. Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” in idem, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145–64. 7. “Denn jede Anschauung eines Individuellen ist unendlich. Und die Einwirkungen auf den Menschen von außen sind auch ein bis ins unendlich Ferne allmählich Abnehmendes. Eine solche Konstruktion kann nicht durch Regeln gegeben werden, welche die Sicherheit ihrer Anwendung in sich trügen.” From Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 80–81; my translation. In quoting this statement from Schleiermacher’s 1819 lecture outline in my Interpreting Music, I used the phrase “to the disappearing horizon,” taken from a published translation, for “ins unendlich Ferne.” The image is visually correct, but the more literal translation is obviously preferable. 196

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8. The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th edn., ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 17. 9. In the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel likened the sign to “the pyramid in which a foreign soul has been placed on deposit and where it is stored”; in the Aesthetics, he finds hieroglyphic writing riddled with ambiguity because its “symbolism confusedly intertwines meaning and shape,” that is, signification and depiction. Both passages are quoted from Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Hegel’s Semiotics,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 83, 99. The first quotation above modifies the standard translation following Derrida’s glosses, which merit quotation in themselves: “[The sign] is the pyramid [Hegel’s emphasis] into which a foreign soul [eine fremde Seele] has been conveyed [transposed, transplanted, translated: versetzt; versetzen is also to place on deposit . . . ] and where it is conserved [aufbewahrt: consigned, stored, put in storage]” (83–84). For more on this topic see my “Rosetta Tones: The Score as Hieroglyph,” in Silence, Ellipsis, Absence: Word and Music Studies 15, ed. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 10. Quoted by David Rowland, “Performance Practice in the Nineteenth-Century Concerto,” in Simon P. Keefe, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 244. Czerny came to agree; he subsequently upheld the emerging orientation in terms more forceful than Beethoven’s. In serious or profound music, Czerny wrote, “every kind of addition would be most inappropriate” (1829); in music by Beethoven and “classic authors” generally, “the performer may absolutely not allow himself to make changes, additions, or cuts to the composition” (1849). Quoted by Martin Edin, “Cadenza Improvisation in Nineteenth-Century Piano Music,” in Rudolph Rasch, ed., Beyond Notes: Improvisation in Western Music of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Brepols: Turnhout, 2011), 168, 170. 11. See Malcolm Bilson, “The Future of Schubert Interpretation: What is Really Needed,” Early Music 25 (1997), 715–22; Robert Levin, “Performance Prerogatives in Schubert,” Early Music 25 (1997), 723–27; John Butt, Playing with History: The Alternative Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112–13; and David Montgomery, Franz Schubert’s Music in Performance: Compositional Ideals, Notational Intent, Historical Realities, Pedagogical Foundations (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2003), 173–209. 12. Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 13. James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Robert Shaw and John Bransford, eds., Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977), 67–82. 14. Scott Messing, Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume I: The Romantic and Victorian Eras (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 80. 15. Messing, Schubert in the European Imagination, 81.

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16. Brian Newbould, Schubert: The Music and the Man (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997), 341. 17. Quoted in Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 59. 18. Emmanuel Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” in idem, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 109–26 at 121. 19. Ibid.

postscript. imagining the score 1. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 5 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2. Nicholas Cook, “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance,” Music Theory Online 7 (April 2001). 3. The phrase echoes the title of Cook’s Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), a sustained critique of he “textualist” paradigm of music as reproduction. 4. For more on this topic, see my “Rosetta Tones: The Score as Hieroglyph,” in Silence, Absence, Ellipsis: Word and Music Studies 15, ed. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Brill, 2015). 5. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 124–143. 6. Michael Klein, “Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative,” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2004), 23–55.

Addendum The quotation from Viktor Shklovsky on p. 102 in chapter 5 is from Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12; the title in this translation is “Art as Technique.”

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Bülow, Hans von, 165–66, 168 Butler, Judith, 59, 83, 87, 111 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 124, 126, 128

Abbate, Carolyn, 193n16 Adami, Heinrich, 123 Adorno, Theodor W., 47, 48 Agamben, Giorgio, x, xvii, 5, 58, 116–17 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 69 Auden, W. H., 58, 60 Austin, J. L., xvii, 111

Cavell, Stanley, 9, 61 Chapin, Keith, 25–26 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste, 119, 121, 122, 126 Chopin, Frédéric, 41, 97, 98; Ballade no. 4 in F Minor, 176–180; “Raindrop” Prelude, 19 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 63 Cook, Nicholas, 114, 156, 173, 174, 175, 193n16 Currie, James, 2 Czerny, Carl, 197n10

Bach, J. S., 68 Bacon, Francis, 50 Badiou, Alain, 3–4, 5, 9, 11–15, 183n15, 183n16 Barber, Samuel, Adagio for Strings, 19–20 Barthes, Roland, 53, 54, 141–42 Baudelaire, Charles, 56–57, 137–140, 195n4 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 19, 30, 74, 81, 98, 111, 113–15, 116, 118, 126, 151, 154, 174, 184n16, 184n21, 197n10; Piano Sonata no. 12 in A-flat, “Funeral March,” 31–36, 37–39, 40–43; Symphony no. 3 in E-flat, “Eroica,” 11–14 Benjamin, Walter, xii, 7, 58, 125–26, 181n5, 186n19 Berg, Alban, 68 Bergman, Ingmar, Through a Glass Darkly, 105–07 Bernstein, Leonard, 77–79 Bie, Oskar, 165–66 Blanchot, Maurice, x Bonaparte, Napoleon, 35 Bowie, Andrew, 8 Brahms, Johannes, 68 Britten, Benjamin, Billy Budd, 68–69

D’Ortigue, Joseph, 125 Danhauser, Josef, 113–14, 115, 116, 118, 121, 126, 128 Davis, Peter G., 60 Derrida, Jacques, x, xii–xiii, xiv, 20, 27, 28, 49, 50, 59, 60–61, 63, 146, 185n6, 197n9 Descartes, René (Cartesian), xv, 55, 66, 145 Dickens, Charles, 118, 123 Dickinson, Emily, 30 Dolby, George, 123 Downes, Edward, 78 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 136–37 Eco, Umberto, xvi, 110, 182n13 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Lili Marleen, 60

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Fleischer, Max, “My Merry Oldsmobile,” 105 Foucault, Michel, 86, 125, 144 Freud, Sigmund, xiv, 70, 96, 106–07; fetishism, 58, 80, 82; fort-da game, 75–76 Fried, Michael, 119 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 174 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 27, 92, 108–9, 149, 191n5, 193n20 Gardner, John Elliott, 172 Gibson, James, 164 Goehr, Lydia, 181n1, 193n16 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 78, 126, 145; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 167 Habermas, Jürgen, 92 Hanslick, Eduard, 118 Harper-Scott, Paul, 3–5, 10–12 Haydn, Joseph, 74 Hegel, G. W. F., 16, 151, 152, 195n9, 197n9 Heidegger, Martin, xii, 5, 17, 20, 40, 61, 66, 67–68, 93, 108, 110; care, 36–37, 170–71, 186n16; hermeneutic circle, 91–92, 148–49 Henze, Hans-Werner, 60 Hepokoski, James, 55 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 62; “Letter of Lord Chandos,” 49–52 Hugo, Victor, 126 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 167 Hume, David, 51, 72, 74 Husserl, Edmund, 49

Kramer, Lawrence, 142; Musical Meaning, 147 Kraus, Karl, 49 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9–10, 16–17, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 106, 111; sinthome, 69–70 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 124, 125, 128–29, 133, 136–37, 139 Langer, Suzanne, 7 Latour, Bruno, 66 Leppert, Richard, 80 Levinas, Emanuel, 61, 169–171 Leys, Ruth, xv, 55 Liszt, Franz, 81, 102, 113–172; “Harmonie du soir,” 128–137 Mach, Ernst, 50, 51, 52, 55 Mahler, Gustav, 19, 59, 111 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 64 Mangum, John, 78–79 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20 Mannoni, Octave, 82 Marx, Karl, commodity fetish, 61, 80, 82 McClary, Susan, 185n2 McDonald, Hugh, 42 Messing, Scott, 165 Mill, John Stuart, 119–122, 126, 136 Mitchell, W. J. T., 2, 54, 182n4, 185n10, 189n3 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 77, 171; String Quintet in E-flat, K. 614, 70–76, 75, 76–77, 80, 86–87, 189n11

Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 47, 48, 187n4 Jerram, Luke, 96; “Play Me, I’m Yours,” 96–98 Joyce, James 69–70

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9, 19–20, 48, 56, 184n22 Nerval, Gerard de, 136 Newbould, Brian, 166, 167 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 37, 46, 54–55, 61, 100, 150; On the Genealogy of Morals, xiv, xvi, xvii

Kafka, Franz, 7, 9, 58 Kallman, Chester, 60 Kant, Immanuel, xii–xiii, 1, 20, 21, 27, 52–53, 58, 61, 74, 182n9, 185n24, 188n19 Kittler, Friedrich, 137, 167 Klein, Michael, 177, 187n4, 189n10, 189n11

Pater, Walter 61 Petrarch, Francis, 124 Ponge, Francis, 63–64 Porter, Cole, 14–15

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Prokofiev, Serge, Piano Concerto no. 1, 99–105 Proust, Marcel, 62, 70, 136 Rachmaninoff, Serge, 68, 102 Racine, Jean, 10 Ravel, Maurice, 98; La Valse, 59, 62–63 Ricoeur, Paul, 37, 92, 149 Rings, Steven, 186n18 Rosen, Charles, 1 Samson, Jim, 193n16, 194n2 Santner, Eric, 59 Scarlatti, Domenico, 97 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 27, 94, 149, 150, 196n7 Schnabel, Arthur, 165 Schoenberg, Arnold, Moses und Aron, 111 Scholem, Gershom, 58 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 55 Schubert, Franz, 10, 74, 126; “Der Lindenbaum,” 21–22; “Moment musical” no. 2 in A-flat, 148–68 Schumann, Robert, 127 Sebald, W. G., 192n10 Shakespeare, William, 126; Romeo and Juliet, 79, 84, 87 Shklovsky, Viktor, 102

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Stevens, Wallace, 110 Stewart, Susan, x, 177 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 69 Stravinsky, Igor, 59 Szendy, Peter, 30 Taruskin, Richard, 1, 4, 164, 173 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilych, 59, 68, 99; Fantasy Overture: Romeo and Juliet, 76–80, 82–86, 86–88; Piano Concerto no. 1, 100–104 Tolstoy, Leo, The Kreutzer Sonata, 59 Tomassini, Anthony, 192n12 Tomlinson, Gary, 1 Tovey, Donald, 1 Wagner, Richard, xvii, 68, 81, 137 Walker, Alan, 125 Weber, Max, 117 Whitehead, Alfred N., 18 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xvii, 48, 49–53, 56, 60–62, 76, 96, 149, 171 Wordsworth, William, 71; and John Stuart Mill, 120–21, 126, 136 Yeats, W. B., 125, 184n21 Žižek, Slavoj, 9, 10, 14, 59, 60, 67, 81, 83

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I n de x of Concep ts

Aesthetic, aesthetics, xiii–xiv, xv, 1, 11, 16, 48, 52, 54, 58, 60, 67, 69, 77, 80, 82, 84, 91, 114, 116–17, 127, 151, 153, 156, 170, 194n25 Affects; affect theory, 15, 40, 55–59, 65, 150–53 Affordance (Gibson), 154, 163–68 Analysis, musical, 25, 36, 37–43 Application (of ideas), 4–6, 7, 9, 11–12, 30 Apophasis, xvi, 46, 49, 51–52, 54, 60 Ascetic ideals (Nietzsche), xiv, xvi, 54, 55, 82 Aspect (Wittgenstein), 62–63, 76, 80, 88 As-if, xii–xiv, 59, 61–62, 63, 182n9 Author function (Foucault), 125, 127, 135, 136

Embodiment, the body, xv, xvi, 20, 55, 77, 81, 83, 142–46, 153, 156–162, 165–66, 169, 184n22 Entropy, and culture, 99, 144, 146 Event, xi, xvii, 4, 16–18, 29, 36, 37, 61, 93–94, 108, 122, 145–46, 147, 149–150, 164, 168; in Badiou, 11–14 Extimacy (Lacan), 111

Best example, 3, 177, 183n5 Bildung, 167, 168 Borromean knot, 17

Gaze, hermeneutic, 90

Fetish, fetishism, 20, 66, 68, 69, 76–77, 80–86, 88, 98, 99, 143 Force without significance, 58–59 Fort-Da game (Freud), 75

Hearing-as (Wittgenstein), 62–63 Hedonism, rational, 71–76, 86 Hieroglyph, 152 Hermeneutic circle, 91–93, 148–150 Hermeneutic windows (Kramer), 16, 112, 150, 153, 154, 167 Hermeneutics, xii, 17, 26, 30, 44, 62, 108– 09, 111, 127, 142, 185n4, 187n4; open, 1, 6, 9, 27–29, 82, 94, 144, 145–46, 149– 150, 163–64, 170; weakly contextual (closed), 1, 47, 145

Care (Heidegger), 23, 36–39, 40, 42, 168–172 City, as cultural metaphor, 95–96, 149, 171, 180, 192n10 Context, ix, x, 1, 90, 91–93, 94, 99–100, 108, 143, 146–49, 164, 172 Crisis of language, 49–53 Critique, impromptu, 94–95, 104–05 Cultural tropes, 16, 110–111, 194n25 Deictics (“shifters”), 18 Description, xi, 16, 30–36, 39–43, 93, 110 Descriptive realism, xi

Imagetext, 29, 63 Ineffability, x, xvi, 24–26, 29, 31, 45–64, 65 Interpassivity (Žižek), 81, 190n22 Interpretation, x–xi, xvi–xvii, 16, 26–30, 43, 54, 90–91, 93, 95, 120, 121, 149–150,

Ekphrastic fear (Mitchell), 2–3, 5, 54, 183n4

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Interpretation (continued) 164–65, 174–75; open, xiv, 1–2, 6–8, 82, 94, 95–96, 98–100, 107–110, 112, 127– 28, 142–46, 168

Recital, 118–19, 121, 122–28 Reference, xii, 21, 29, 124 Referral, animation of, 121 Restlessness (Levinas), 142–43, 169–72

Literary metaphor (for music), 115–18, 119, 122, 124, 127–28, 140

Score, musical, 10, 17, 31, 98–99, 113, 119, 122–23, 126, 134, 143, 144, 152, 154, 156, 160, 164, 173–80 Signification, and meaning, xv, 2, 4–6, 9–10, 17, 20, 21, 54, 58, 60, 69, 86–87, 105, 107, 110, 146–47, 152, 163, 197n9 Singularity, xiii, 3, 8, 11, 14, 16, 17–18, 19, 53, 61, 63, 69–70, 94, 147, 183n15, 184n21 Sinthome (Lacan), 69–86, 189n10 Speculative realism, 109, 181n5 Sublimation, 41, 77, 84, 85, 106–07 Suspension, suspended meaning or reference, xii, 124 Symbolic order (Lacan), 2, 28, 36, 59, 75, 111 Symbol, unconsummated, 7

Meaning, ix–xi, xv,2, 6, 7, 10, 17, 27, 55, 91–93, 171; musical, xvi, 16–17, 23, 29–30, 36, 40, 45, 57, 62, 70, 95, 98–99, 107, 110, 116, 121, 127, 142–43, 150, 153, 164 Memory, involuntary, 136–37; sacramental, 128–29, 133–34 Musical understanding, ix–xi, xii–xvii, 5, 6, 7, 9–11, 16–20, 24, 36–37,43, 45, 47, 51, 57–58, 60, 87, 89–90, 93, 95, 99, 110–111, 115, 136, 142, 144–45, 156, 166, 171, 176–77 Narrative, 37, 77–78, 87–88, 95, 107, 117, 127, 129, 147, 158, 177, 179 Negative theology, 48–50, 53, 61 Neither/Nor, xii, xiv, 61, 63 New Musicology, x, 2, 45, 95, 142–43 Norms, 18, 82, 147, 148

Th ing, the, Das Ding, 67, 79 Th ing, versus object, 66–68 Thrownness (Heidegger), 37 Timbre, 19–20, 56 Time-within-ness (Ricoeur), 37 Tropes, cultural. See cultural tropes Truth, xiii–xiv, 7, 11–12, 14, 26–30, 36, 48, 54–55, 63–64, 156 Twinning, cognitive, 16, 61

Perceiving-as (Wittgenstein), 62–63 Performance, musical, x, xvi, 2, 6, 7, 17, 28, 31, 37, 40, 45, 62, 96–98, 99, 113–18, 120–28, 136, 139, 141–171, 177–180; performance “of ” paradigm (Cook), 114, 173–74; performance-with, 114, 128 Performativity, xi, xii–xiii, xvii, 28, 29, 53, 94, 110–111, 121, 150, 158, 160, 175, 185n6 Postal principle (Derrida), 28 Prizing, prized things, 67–69, 70, 75, 76–77, 79, 81–82, 84, 85–86, 88, 99 Proximity (Levinas), 169–170 Proximation, 40

Undeath, “undeadening,” (Santner), 59–60 Vanishing mediator, 119 Virtuosity, 102, 113–140, 153, 177, 195n4 Void element (Badiou), 11–15, 21,183n15, 183n16, 184n17 Work, musical, “work-concept,” x, 7, 17, 31, 37, 45, 91, 95, 98–99, 114–15, 127, 141–45, 164, 173–74, 181n1, 193n16

Quilting-point (Lacan), 4, 5, 6, 8, 9–10 Real, the (Lacan), 83, 86–87, 106

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