Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives 9780415699099, 9780203136348

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Aesthetics of Music

Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives is an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to ‘the music’ as possible. Each essay includes musical examples, which are drawn from works in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics have been selected from among widely recognized central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation. Stephen Downes is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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Aesthetics of Music Musicological Perspectives

Edited by

Stephen Downes

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Stephen Downes to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ideas in the aesthetics of music: musicological approaches/edited by Stephen Downes. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Music – Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Musicology. I. Downes, Stephen C., 1962– editor. ML3845.I34 2014 781.1′7 – dc23 2014011012 ISBN: 978-0-415-69909-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-13634-8 (ebk) Typeset in Minion Pro by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK Senior Editor: Constance Ditzel Senior Editorial Assistant: Elysse Preposi Production Manager: Mhairi Bennett Marketing Manager: Emilie Littlehales Project Manager: Amy Wheeler Copy Editor: Diana Chambers Proofreader: Hamish Ironside Cover Design: Jayne Varney

Contents

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements 1

vii ix xi

Introduction

1

STEPHEN DOWNES

2

Values and judgements

23

JAMES GARRATT

3

Absolute music

42

THOMAS GREY

4

Program music

62

JAMES HEPOKOSKI

5

Beautiful and sublime

84

STEPHEN DOWNES

6

Dialectics and musical analysis

111

JULIAN HORTON

7

Classicism/neoclassicism

144

KEITH CHAPIN

8

Romanticism/anti-romanticism

170

SANNA PEDERSON

9

Jazz – avant-garde – tradition

188

KENNETH GLOAG

10

Narrative

203

NICHOLAS REYLAND

v

vi • Contents

11

Music and the moving image

224

JEREMY BARHAM

12

Irony

239

JULIAN JOHNSON

13

Propaganda

259

JIM SAMSON

14

Virtuosity and the virtuoso

276

JAMES DEAVILLE

List of contributors Index of musical works, composers and performers Index of terms in aesthetics General index

297 301 305 307

Illustrations

Musical examples 2.1 2.2 2.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2

Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade, Andantino, mm. 5–19 Bruckner, Symphony No. 1 (1890–1 version), finale, mm. 361–7 The Beach Boys, ‘God Only Knows’, figured bass reduction Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, Finale, mm. 216–36 Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act 3: Isolde, ‘Tristan! Ah!’ Poulenc, Pastourelle, close Poulenc, Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings, opening organ solo Poulenc, Sextuor, ‘Divertissement’, opening Tchaikovsky, Rococo Variations, mm. 17–21 Mozart, Piano Sonata, K. 457, first movement, mm. 1–19 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, ‘The Tempest’, first movement, mm. 1–24 6.3 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first movement, progress of motive ‘y’ in exposition 6.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first movement, first-theme recapitulation 6.5 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first movement, mm. 121–217, bass progression 6.6 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, first and second themes 6.7 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, closing group, progression from lyric to march topics 6.8 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination of march and chorale in first-theme recapitulation 6.9 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination of first- and last-movement main themes in closing-group recapitulation 6.10 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, mm. 1–11, functional and motivic design 6.11 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, first-theme recapitulation 6.12 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, C minor/B minor duality in first theme and overarching cadential progression 7.1 Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, ‘Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen’ 7.2 Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, ‘Farewell for now’, mm. 1–25 7.3 Rousseau, Le Devin du village, ‘Dans ma cabane obscure’, mm. 1–15

30 31 38 88 92 96 98 102 104 121 122 124 125 126 129 130 133 134 136 138 139 145 147 152

viii • Illustrations

7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5a 10.5b 10.6 10.7 12.1a 12.1b 12.2 12.3 12.4

Beethoven, Fidelio, Act 2, Scene 1, ‘Gott! Welch Dunkel hier’ Riemann, Allgemeine Musiklehre (Katechismus der Musik), 2nd, revised edn, Leipzig: Hesse, 1897, 108. Mozart, String Quartet K. 590, Allegro moderato, mm. 1–18 Mozart, Symphony K. 551 ‘Jupiter’, Allegro moderato, mm. 387–92 Handel, Suite No. 6, Allegro (fugue), mm. 63–6 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 57, No. 1, ‘Appassionata’: Allegro assai, opening Beethoven, String Quartet in F major, Op. 135, fourth movement: motto Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101, Allegretto ma non troppo, mm. 35–40 Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, opening Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, mm. 20–7 Mahler, Symphony No. 9, first movement, Andante comodo: Fig. 3, mm. 20–4 (detail) Beethoven, Piano Trio No. 5 in D major, Op. 70, ‘Ghost’, opening enigma Mahler, Symphony No .9, third movement, mm. 352–5 (trumpets) Mahler, Symphony No. 9, third movement, mm. 444–5 (clarinets) Mozart, String Quartet in A major, K. 464, Minuet, mm. 55–72 Schubert, ‘Frühlingstraum’ from Winterreise, mm. 1–26 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 106, ‘Hammerklavier’, Scherzo, mm. 153–75

153 159 160 162 204 207 211 212 215 215 217 219 240 240 244 246 256

Figures 4.1 6.1 6.2

Generalized conceptual integration network Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, formal synopsis Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, formal synopsis

73 131 132

Table 3.1

Recurrent conceptual dichotomies in the discourse of ‘absolute music’

52

Preface

Aesthetics of Music is a collection of musicological essays that arose from two impulses. First, as an historical musicologist who enthusiastically drew upon the discipline’s recent assimilations (transformations and deformations) of new critical perspectives on history, politics, literary theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and so on – feeding on the new musicologist’s methodological smorgasbord – I began to be concerned for the place of aesthetics. Ideas that find their traditional place within aesthetics (notions of beauty, taste, judgement, value, unity, meaning and so on) seemed to permeate these diverse approaches to studying music, often in innovative ways. Aesthetic ideas were clearly being rethought, revalued and revitalized by the context of new creative and critical developments. But in other parts of recent musicology, reflecting aspects of wider intellectual fashion, the notion of an ‘aesthetic’ seemed to be neglected, rejected, even pilloried. In such a climate, on the one hand a sustained pursuit of the aesthetic could seem suspicious or anachronistic, while on the other hand a ‘return’ to the aesthetic could be deliberately provocative. It was clear that a renewed focus on how musicologists think through aesthetic ideas would be timely. The second impulse came from my experience as a teacher of aesthetics in British university music departments. As I prepared these courses, and as my students kept reminding me, there was no immediately obvious first place to go for an up-to-date picture of musicological thinking about ideas in aesthetics. Philosophers, by contrast, seemed well served, and musicologists rightly turn to them for specialist insights into musical ontology, meaning and other areas. But musicological ideas of aesthetics, though of course informed by the gains and claims made by philosophy, are (or should be) made different, through reflecting the specialist knowledge required and developed by the discipline. In particular, musicological work in aesthetics can confidently keep ‘close to the notes’ – however these are manifest or experienced in score, performance, and/or recording – and close to the ways these materials are creatively produced, related and received. The aim, however, is not to produce a traditional textbook, nor an exhaustive compendium or ‘companion’, but a collection which, while surveying important aspects of the development of ideas in the field and where they now stand, also offers new critical positions and thereby proposes fresh areas for research in the aesthetics of music. No collection of essays that seeks to offer space for sustained musicological discussion of musical manifestations of aesthetics ideas could possibly cover all topics that have legitimate claims for inclusion. The selection offered here has been chosen to offer perspectives on both long-established topics and more recent ideas in ways that facilitate discussion of a diversity of musical styles, including the Western classical concert tradition, popular music from a range of geographical origins, jazz and music for screen. The ideas focused upon in the essays reflect

x • Preface

and refract core issues of value, judgement, technique (virtuosity) and analysis; reconsider and problematize important oppositions (absolute music and program music; classicism and neoclassicism; romanticism and anti-romanticism; avant-garde and tradition; the beautiful and the sublime); and pursue new angles on constructions of meaning through engagement in debates on dialectics, irony, music and moving images, narrative and propaganda. Stephen Downes Royal Holloway, University of London October 2013

Acknowledgements

This book was completed during a period of research leave, the first part of which was granted by the University of Surrey, the second by Royal Holloway, University of London. I am grateful to both institutions for their support. I am also grateful to my editors at Routledge’s New York office, Constance Ditzel and Elysse Preposi, for their wise and patient guidance through the volume’s gestation. Jake Willson set the musical examples with exemplary skill and care. The cost of reproducing copyright examples was supported by the School of Arts, University of Surrey and Cardiff University Music Department. Examples from the following works are reproduced with permission: Francis Poulenc, Sextuor © Copyright 1945 Edition Wilhelm Hansen. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission. Francis Poulenc, Concerto en sol mineur pour orgue, orchestra à cordes & timbales (édition 1999) © Copyright 1999 – Éditions Salabert – Paris. Tous droits réservés – All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard, Italy. Francis Poulenc, Pastourelle, © Editions Heugel & Cie, reproduced by kind permission of Editions Heugel & Cie, Paris/ United Music Publishers Ltd, England. Chester Kallmann, Wystan Auden and Igor Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress © Copyright 1951 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

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1 Introduction Stephen Downes

The place of aesthetics in musicology There is no self-standing entry on ‘aesthetics’ in Grove Music Online. A search for this term results in being directed to well over fifty other entries of bewildering diversity, from ‘affect’ and ‘Armenian music’ to the Czech composer and aesthetician Otakar Zich.1 The plethora of apparently related entries suggests a topic pervasively relevant in musicology. Yet it seems undeserving of a single focused discussion.2 A search under the alternative spelling, ‘esthetics’ in one sense provides even less joy. Again, there is no self-standing entry and now the reader is encouraged to seek out but one alternative, a subsection of the long multipart entry on ‘philosophy of music’. Pursuance of this link raises the spirits of the aesthetically curious in musicological hyperspace, however, for it supplies several richly informative pages covering the history of musical aesthetics from 1750, discussion of key figures (with Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Schleiermacher headlining), and focused consideration of topics such as ‘subjectivity and language’, ‘Romanticism’, ‘formalism’ and ‘disintegration’. The entry is written by Andrew Bowie, author of books widely read and admired by musicologists (especially Bowie 2003 and 2009). Bowie is a Professor of Philosophy and German. Through both its commissioning and its structure Grove clearly positions aesthetics as a subcategory of philosophy. Up front, however, Bowie’s professional website declares his conviction that philosophical issues are inseparable from ‘other key cultural responses to the problems of the modern world’. Few would disagree with this. (We need not only take Bowie’s word for it: as well as being a superior philosopher, Bowie is also a very capable jazz musician.) Bowie provides a fine subentry, but Grove’s editorial decisions raise the key question of the place of the aesthetics of music in the disciplinary and interdisciplinary scrutiny of this cultural activity.3 Work by philosophers on the German aesthetic tradition in which Bowie specializes has flourished especially strongly in recent years. The consideration of music in this tradition has been richly explored by, for example, a collection of essays edited by Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter (2006) and Lydia Goehr’s Elective Affinities (2008), which also spreads its range to wider fields, for example, the aesthetics of John Cage (via Arthur Danto). More broadly, when philosophers have recently considered music, questions of ontology, expression and meaning are often the focus of attention, as represented by much of the work of the prolific Stephen Davies (e.g. 1994, 2003) and Peter Kivy (e.g. 2002, 2012).4 Other dimensions of the aesthetics of music are a prominent focus in the work of Jerrold Levinson; the second part of his Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996, 27–125) is devoted to the aesthetics of music, and this was quickly followed by Music in the Moment (1997); music also figures centrally in Nick Zangwill’s The Metaphysics of Beauty

2 • Stephen Downes

(2001) and his Music and Aesthetic Reality is forthcoming in 2014. This is but a small sample. Aesthetics seems to have a secure place and future within the philosophical discussion of music. The fruits of this vigorous activity in the past fifteen years or so offer a positive contrast to Roger Scruton’s pessimistic statement made in the early 1980s: There is little literature in the history of modern philosophy that is more exasperating than that devoted to the aesthetics of music. When the standard of philosophical competence is high enough to be taken seriously, the standard of musical competence is usually (as with Kant and Hegel) too low for the exercise to be worthwhile. Hardly any writer troubles himself with examples or analysis, and almost all rest their case in some vast and vague abstraction . . . (Scruton 1983, 34) On the other side of the musical aesthetic discourse it might equally be considered that musicologists have too often displayed lacunae in their philosophical competence. The result can be that even when philosophers and musicologists appear to be talking about the same thing, there is sometimes a despairing sense, to paraphrase Cole Porter, that while ‘You say sonata, I say sonata’. And so it may be tempting to call off any prospective interdisciplinary relationship. Yet, the philosopher Andy Hamilton has insisted, surely correctly, that aesthetics must not simply be a subdiscipline of philosophy: ‘writers in aesthetics should bring to bear as much critical awareness and practical knowledge of the arts as possible’. A plea one might, of course, reverse – musicologists who engage with aesthetics should bring as much critical awareness and knowledge of relevant philosophical insight as possible. Hamilton lays his Kantian and Adornian cards on the table, particularly lauding the latter’s efforts to ‘unify philosophical aesthetics and the analysis, criticism and history of art’, something he considers ‘essential though too rarely attempted’. He also hails Scruton as one of a rare breed of philosopher who can offer such a difficult ‘cross-fertilization’. Analytical philosophy, more broadly, gets it in the neck for a ‘puzzling philistinism’, the product of its characteristic ahistorical and ‘scientific bias’. For Hamilton, the aesthetics of music ‘has to be understood through its history’ and as dealing with something ‘humane in utterance’ (Hamilton, 2007, 2, 7–8).5 Hamilton’s more positive viewpoint suggests that philosophers and musicologists might, after all, be able to call the calling off, off. Scruton’s own Aesthetics of Music (1997), a full-length discussion of musical aesthetics tellingly rich in concrete musical examples and not shy of employing the terminology of music theory and analysis was clearly his own response to the bleak scenario he described in 1983. The book quickly proved productively provocative in musicological circles. Brave and bold, it is a work that wears the author’s musical expertise and his musical prejudices on its sleeve. In the view of a prominent music theorist and musicologist, Scruton’s book was especially important for drawing aesthetic inquiry closer to the concerns of music theory and analysis and thereby demanding critical scrutiny of the languages those disciplines deploy to describe music and its meaning. Scruton’s work provides sufficient demonstration of the pertinence of aesthetic thinking to music theory. Taking aesthetics seriously has a number of practical consequences. Meaning, for example, can no longer be left implicit in what we do, but must be confronted more explicitly. And to get at meaning, we need to take a hard look at our meta-languages and to probe the necessarily metaphorical nature of all talk about music. (Agawu 2000, 493–4)

Introduction • 3

Scruton, of course, remains a prominent figure who continues to write frequently on music and, in so doing, continues to stimulate vigorous debate. In a recent collection of essays responding to Scruton’s output on aesthetics (Hamilton and Zangwill 2012), a quarter are devoted to musical issues. But of the fifteen contributors (including Scruton himself), Michael Spitzer is the sole musicologist. Given the prominence of music in Scruton’s aesthetics, Spitzer’s may seem to be a token presence, even if it is a particularly authoritative one (Spitzer has produced two major musicological monographs steeped in philosophical erudition: Spitzer 2004, 2006). Elsewhere, Spitzer has urged for more balanced dialogue between musicology and philosophy. In his introduction to a collection of ten essays on significant figures in the German tradition of the philosophy of music (from Kant to Adorno), two of which are by musicologists, he lays down a gauntlet for both disciplines. On the one hand, he identifies an ‘inward turn’ in the ‘new’ musicology of the 1990s, which he characterizes as a ‘self-reflective’ scholarly project, one which, ‘where it does look out, is highly selective, or apparently unaware of the crucial philosophical backgrounds to its favoured sources of reinvigoration’. And on the other hand, he notes the disappointing ‘passing over of musical structure’ in the work of those analytical philosophers who deal with music, including, for example, Davies, Levinson and Kivy (Spitzer 2010). The recent formation and activity of the RMA and AMS Music and Philosophy Study Groups6 has provided a platform for scholars in the fields to engage more fully and publicly in Spitzer’s desired dialogue. Aesthetics would surely be prominent. And yet the inaugural 2011 conference of the RMA group listed just one session on aesthetics. The 2012 program included sessions whose titles focused on analysis, hermeneutics, ethics, perception, expression, music and language; as with Grove Online, it seems that aesthetics is nowhere and yet, one suspects, that it must be nearly everywhere. While philosophers have continued to pursue a wide range of issues in aesthetics, the position of aesthetics within musicology in recent times has seemed much more uncertain. The entry on ‘musicology’ in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (to which this current volume stands as in part complement and part contrast) states that the ‘bulk’ of recent activity in the discipline has been engaged in ‘critical interpretation of musical works: what they mean (or meant); why there were composed; and how they may inform a larger historical, intellectual, or aesthetic discourse’ (London 2011). Aesthetics here can be read as the third-rated term, as something of an afterthought. A decade earlier the prospects of aesthetics in musicology might have seemed even bleaker. In Alastair Williams’s view, musicology throughout the 1990s reflected the fact that ‘“aesthetics”, with its elitist connotations, is not a widely used term nowadays in the fields of critical and cultural theory, since it evokes a rarefied branch of philosophy concerned with the appreciation of art and nature’ (Williams 2001, 10). Such a view seems to confirm that by the end of the twentieth century aesthetics had apparently become irrelevant to the new, culturally informed and cutting-edge critical interests of musicologists. Not so long before, however, a tranche of major musicological publications had offered authoritative histories, digests and anthologies of musical aesthetics. The English translation of Carl Dahlhaus’s condensed, concentrated Esthetics of Music (1982) was widely read in the 1980s (part of the rich series of translations of Dahlhaus’s work appearing during that decade). Dahlhaus co-edited with Ruth Katz a vast, multivolume collection of source readings (Dahlhaus and Katz 1986–93). A collection edited by Peter le Huray and James Day was warmly received as providing a long-needed musicological resource (le Huray and Day 1981), as was a contemporaneous and comparably authoritative collection by Edward Lippman (1986–90). Lippman also provided a magisterial, one-stop History of Western Musical Aesthetics (1992) a publication closely contemporaneous

4 • Stephen Downes

with the English translation of Enrico Fubini’s own historical survey (Fubini 1991, whose publication history in its original Italian goes back to the 1960s). Less than ten years later, were these books really in danger of gathering dust in the musicology remainder bin? Musicological rumours of the death of aesthetics were, however, greatly exaggerated. Introducing the provocatively titled Resisting the Aesthetic (1998), a collection of musicological essays from the 1990s, Adam Krims called for a redefinition and interrogation, rather than indulgence in a ‘fantasy of escaping the aesthetic’. He argued that a rethinking of aesthetics needed to play a part of the development of a new musical poetics. In response to the ‘crisis of close reading’ which arose from the rush to discredit musical analysis as an activity that uncritically sustained outworn notions of aesthetic formalism and autonomy, Krims urged for the development of self-reflective modes of approach in which aesthetic questions gained a new place within critical practice. Crucially, for Krims, the disciplinary split between music theory and musicology, a ‘disciplinary reinscription of the text/context dichotomy’, needed to be overcome in order to develop a ‘postmodern’ music scholarship which resists the old ideology of aesthetic autonomy (Krims 1998, 2–11).7 (This disciplinary split has always been less operative in British universities, where they characteristically co-exist within music departments, but Krim’s arguments retained urgent currency across the oceanic divide.) In a surreptitious footnote Krims reflects that a familiar aesthetic binary may be at play in musicology’s disciplinary agony: ‘the fact that beauty, not the sublime, has constituted [music theory’s] principal means of validation helps to explain its resistance to some postmodern theories’. This binary returns later more prominently in Krims’s main text where he describes the ‘sublime presence of “the social” returning to haunt the formerly sanitized world of musical structure’ (Krims 1998, 13, n. 1). Krims is overtly influenced here by Joel Galand’s 1995 essay, ‘The Turn from the Aesthetic’, itself a response to the famous debate in the early 1990s between Gary Tomlinson and Lawrence Kramer on what should characterize a ‘postmodern’ musicology (Kramer 1992, 1993; Tomlinson 1993a, 1993b). Galand turns to Peter Brooks’s cautionary words regarding the impulse to ‘go straight for the interpretive jugular’, and the need to regard the importance of a notion of aesthetics embracing form, structure and genre (Brooks 1994). In particular, Galand urges that the ‘postmodernist distrust of the aesthetic needs to be tempered by a recovery of what was originally at stake in the positing of such an autonomous sphere’. He argues that the distinction between ‘aesthetic autonomy’ on the one hand, and ‘worldliness and contextual continuity’ on the other, is forced because notions of aesthetic autonomy were from the very first interwoven with problems both ethical (the mediation of individual and society) and epistemological (the mediation of precept and concept). (Galand 1995) Galand places special emphasis on the category of the sublime (and this is what Krims alighted upon), as an opening up to unanticipated potentiality, as an emancipation. This aspect of the aesthetic Galand traces right back to Alexander Baumgarten’s insistence in his seminal Aesthetica (1750) on aesthetic confusion and the resulting separation of art from a singular notion of truth or knowledge. The aesthetic emerges from contemplation and contingency; it need lead neither to mystification nor to the transcendent. Galand urges that we have to ‘dare’ to ‘become sublime’ (Galand 1995, 80–5). Hail the bravery of the newly befuddled aesthete!

Introduction • 5

Galand points out the contrast between the aesthetic implications of romantic irony (contingency, ambiguity and incompleteness) and the later romantic’s despair at the prospect of ‘the impossibility of attaining absolute knowledge, of reconciling our finite sensibility with the infinite’, the ‘sentimental’ romantic’s consequent indulgence in a fantasy of absolute music based on claims of art’s organic and transcendental properties (see Nelson 1998). From this late romantic position, Galand notes, ‘it is easy to envisage how the aesthetic might become ideologized’ (Galand 1995, 86, 90). If recovered, however, the critical edge of aesthetic’s original context can act as a potential check on the tendency, too often found in the counters to this aesthetic ideology, to reduce the richness of the human subject to a much less interesting, onedimensional political animal. If achieved, the aesthetic might then not merely survive the debunking of the ideology of ‘absolute music’ (see Chua 1999) (and its prized assets of autonomy and unity), but emerge invested with a revitalized relevance. Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) gave substantial impetus and focus to the critical interrogation of the transcendent claims historically made for aesthetics. Its impact in cultural studies was immense. After Eagleton, aesthetics was seen by some working in this field (and in many other disciplines, such was the reach of Eagleton’s book) as the forbidden fruit. But Michael Bérubé castigated those who, in recklessly polemical mode, proclaimed the purported ‘Return to Beauty’ in the 1990s for indulging in empty, provocative posing, for dismissing (or forgetting) in dubious acts of disciplinary politics decades of work in cultural studies in which the aesthetic remained a central concern (Bérubé 2004). Bérubé takes this critical moment as an opportunity to ‘revivify’ persistent but important questions and in particular to revisit a famous paragraph from Raymond Williams: If we are asked to believe that all literature is ‘ideology’, in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the communication or imposition of ‘social’ or ‘political’ meanings and values, we can only, in the end, turn away. If we are asked to believe that all literature is ‘aesthetic’, in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the beauty of language or form, we may stay a little longer but will still in the end turn away. (Williams 1977, 155) Bérubé insists that the aesthetic is not something that exists in a realm discreet from the social or historical: aesthetic functions become manifest under certain (social, historical) conditions. He also points up the potentially critical and dissenting edge to aesthetics by emphasizing that historically aesthetics developed in romantic opposition to the instrumentality and rationalization of the dominant social system. He argues: Where aesthetics went wrong theoretically was in its attempt to discover either the specific properties of an object or (following Kant) the conditions of possibility for certain modes of apprehension that would allow for a distinct realm of beauty. (Bérubé 2004, 11–12) In the early years of the twenty-first century several disciplines produced important texts that offered revaluations of the aesthetic displaying the kind of critical sophistication and historical awareness that Bérubé insisted upon. In literary studies, Isobel Armstrong proposed an ‘alternative aesthetic discourse’ in response to the anti-aesthetic voices, as counter to the way in which

6 • Stephen Downes

the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ has left the aesthetic impoverished. Aesthetics, for Armstrong, must not be a threadbare version of nineteenth-century German Idealism; recent aesthetic debate, she argues, has been too often based on ‘derivative, oversimplified Kantianism’ on an unchanging, historically uninflected notion of the aesthetic. In particular she notes a preoccupation with the sublime and widespread silence on the ‘politics and poetics’ of beauty, driven by the conviction that the beautiful is the province of reactionary anachronism (Armstrong 2000, 1–5).8 Critical theorists John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, introducing a collection on the ‘new aestheticism’, noted how ‘the rise of critical theory in disciplines across the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s’ had ‘all but swept aesthetics from the map’ (Joughin and Malpas 2003). Critical disdain for the image of the solitary, unworldly aesthete and debunking of proclamations of ‘Universality’ had done their work of aesthetic cleansing. In response, Joughin and Malpas were concerned to revalue the ‘singularity’ of the aesthetic which is too often ‘effaced’ through thick explications in terms of politics, culture, ideology, and so on. In pursuing this line, they argued, criticism is ‘in continual danger of throwing out the aesthetic baby with the humanist bathwater’. The requirement, therefore, is to ‘avoid the pitfalls and reductive unities of an old-style aestheticism’ and also reconsider the philosophical relationship of contemporary critical theory to aesthetics. In a fashion comparable with Armstrong, they urged that the characterization of the aesthetic as a ‘static’ or ‘essentialist’ category needed to be overthrown, and especially perhaps the prevailing over-simplified or one-sided notion of aesthetic autonomy. Joughin and Malpas are keen to emphasize that this does entail dismissing the relevance and significance of the recent critique of aesthetics. Rather, they seek a dialectical conception of autonomy. If specificities and particularities of the art work and experience are taken into account, then a historically, politically and critically informed approach need not be an ‘antiaesthetic’ one (Joughin and Malpas 2003, 1–21). Meanwhile, several prominent musicologists sought to untangle and reassess that web of contested terms – autonomy, analysis and unity. David Clarke called for a more ‘dynamic, frictional view of musical autonomy’, and noted the ‘slippage’ between autonomy and overlapping terms, one of which is the aesthetic. Clarke argued that such terms should be neither fetishized nor interred but rather, through examining their historical and political ‘situatedness’, be made more malleable (Clarke 2003, 159–69).9 Giles Hooper joined Joughin and Malpas in the aesthete’s bathroom in declaring that ‘we need not suppose that we must throw the analytical baby out with the pseudo-objectivist bath-water’. For Hooper, the challenge facing contemporary musicological study . . . has less to do with the vicissitudes of postmodern theory and the denigration of an outmoded ‘modernism’ – an attitude which only serves to obscure and distract from more productive and pertinent matters – than with the mediation between two apparently antithetical conceptions: music as an autonomous manifestation of abstract structural relations, and music as a thoroughly and multiply mediated concrete or symbolic phenomenon. (Hooper 2004, 311–29; see also Hooper 2006) Contemporaneously, Kevin Korsyn argued that, in the face of the charge that the aesthetic is ideological because it proposes a false synthesis or unity, the need was to historicize notions of unity and scrutinize the motives for their invocation. In particular, Korsyn noted that a ‘decisive shift in attitudes towards unity occurred with the development of aesthetics as an independent region of philosophy starting in the mid-eighteenth century’. From Bowie’s Aesthetics

Introduction • 7

and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche he draws out the significance of the link between the birth of modern aesthetics and the development of modern notions of subjectivity. For Korsyn, the ‘cryptosubjectivity’ of aesthetic discourse ‘is one reason why a reconsideration of the notion of artistic autonomy in our time, through concepts such as that of intertextuality, has gone hand-in-hand with critiques of the “Cartesian” subject’. Korsyn’s proposal is that in order to scrutinize this relationship between aesthetics and subjectivity musicologists move beyond formalism by opening the process of analysis to historical and contextual considerations. This would seem to require a large degree of interdisciplinary work, but ultimately he is doubtful ‘whether a synthesis or fusion of disciplines can fully achieve this goal, because the notion of synthesis may itself be a formalist ideal’ (Korsyn 2004, 337–51; see also Korsyn 1993 and 2003). In 2006 the bath-time aesthetics discussion group was joined by Richard Taruskin, who identified the jeopardized ‘baby’ in question as ‘the shared view that art is valuable “for its own sake”, worth our time even if it doesn’t give us new or useful knowledge’. Bemoaning a lack of critical interrogation of aesthetic autonomy in musicology, he noted the ‘regrettable metamorphoses’ of ‘that which sustained art in the nineteenth century to that which merely stained artistic thought and practices in the twentieth’ (especially manifest in a marginalizing avant-garde, moribund, anachronistic performance practices, and abstract, sterile, formalist analytical musicological methods). Taruskin attacked the ‘stale binarism’ that lies behind the separation of historical and aesthetic artistic significance in Dahlhaus’s Foundations of Music History, a high profile example of the ‘great bane’ of the rigid ‘either/or’ which he identifies as a legacy of Cold War cultural politics. Taruskin urges that we must now instead attempt a ‘truly dialectical’ interaction, one incorporating the human agencies and historical contexts that generate discourses concerning aesthetic autonomy, value and meaning of art. Ultimately, however, Taruskin is ‘hostile to the idea of aesthetic autonomy’, which he views as ‘debased beyond hope of redemption’ (Taruskin 2006; Dahlhaus 1983). Some of this early twenty-first-century debate was revisiting ground tilled several years before by the pioneering collection of essays on Music and Society edited by Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, whose keynote statement was an essay on ‘The Ideology of Autonomous Art’ by the sociologist Janet Wolff (1987). Contemporaneously, the relevance of aesthetic autonomy was hotly debated in studies of pop and rock music, where it was always at least problematic.10 Also in 1987, Peter Wicke’s study of rock music, while rejecting the claims of artistic autonomy, challenged the assumed blasphemy of talking aesthetics when Chuck Berry had well and truly rolled Beethoven over. For Wicke, though rock songs are not artistic objects designed for disinterested contemplation, and their content is not merely found in forms or some ‘hidden “content”’ that demands deciphering, the ‘theoretical apparatus of aesthetics . . . helps to decipher [rock’s] noisy sounds’. Rock is a ‘symptom’ of a social and cultural context but this should not mean that addressing ‘the music’ is neglected or deemed needless. In Wicke’s study aesthetics survives in necessary new guise. Rather than a ‘bourgeois’ aesthetics of art, which turns an ideological blind eye to artistic technique, the mundane modes of musical production, Wicke proposed an aesthetics of rock that turns its focus to the new technologies and is capable of moving between the profane and quotidian, the niche and commercial, the provocative and pleasurable. Two strands emerge as especially significant: an ‘aesthetic of sensuousness’ in which the simple, banal and trivial, rather than viewed as aesthetic failure, play vital roles, and an aesthetic of constructed synthesis, in which fragments snatched from the ‘whirlpool of mass culture’ are formed into a various ‘commercial conglomerations’ (Wicke [1987] 1990, ix, xi, 24, 26).

8 • Stephen Downes

Wicke’s book was a sophisticated piece of aesthetic work. But where, asked Richard Middleton in a sympathetic review, is ‘the text’ (Middleton 1991)? Any potential neglect of ‘the music’ was declared as vehemently avoided in Theodore Gracyk’s 1996 attempt to ‘map’ the aesthetics of recorded rock music. Gracyk aimed to ‘challenge the hegemonic impulses of high culture’, invoking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the complications in the relationship of aesthetic judgements to the particularities of cultural period (thereby avoiding the ahistorical dangers of transcendental aesthetics). By contrast with a bourgeois notion of ‘fine art’, Gracyk sought an aesthetic that can make meaningful insights into music which is commercial and technological but which also in certain practices embraces notions of autonomy. To develop this he argues that due regard is required of the social aspects lying in the aesthetic, that his predecessors have lapsed too readily into transcendentalism. He offers a defence of Kant against the devotees of formalist autonomy. A sliding scale of autonomy is proposed, an ‘elasticity’ in the concept (Gracyk 1996, i, xiii, 213–18). However, Gracyk’s rock aesthetics still left Donald C. Meyer yearning for scholarly demonstrations of the ‘beauty and meaning’ of individual songs, for a combination of ‘local’ and the ‘global’ perspectives (by which he meant text and context) (Meyer 1998). A rebalancing along these lines was something attempted by Allan F. Moore in his Rock: The Primary Text ([1993] 2001). Moore identified his ‘primary question’ to be an ‘aesthetic’ one, and the ‘primary text’ to be the musical sound itself. By contrast, for example, with Simon Frith’s self-declared technical ignorance, Moore’s approach is underpinned by detailed analysis of musical styles, which are considered to be ‘partially autonomous’.11 The work of Rose Rosengard Subotnik has been especially important in new musicological thinking about a range of important aesthetic questions. Subotnik’s essays began appearing in the late 1970s, when they were often met with consternation: their acceptance into the musicological ‘canon’ was confirmed when they were collected and published in two volumes (1991, 1995). Some have taken her work as cue to developing a musical aesthetics in which ideas of autonomy are renegotiated rather than, as Taruskin would much prefer, allowed to drain irrecoverably down the plughole. Andrew Dell’Antonio’s 2004 collection, Beyond Structural Listening?, takes its spur from Subotnik’s questioning of the universality of the ‘structural listening’ model – identified by Subotnik as the ‘leading aesthetic paradigm’ and ‘yardstick of aesthetic (and moral) value’ in twentieth-century German and Anglo-American musicology. In response, Dell’Antonio brings the discussion of aesthetics into the context of postmodern models of knowledge which, after Lyotard, offer a counter to the modernist aim of revealing the deeply embedded truth-content of art. This alternative model is one of negotiation, of recognizing the ‘impossibility of stable truth’ of pursuing the immanent meaning of structures other than those of supposed organic unity, the incomplete and partially integrated which allow spaces for the unknowable. Thus ‘new parameters’ beyond the teleological or totalizing are suggested for the aesthetic valuation of music. Dell’Antonio sees this as an expansion of possibilities operating in an implicit ‘politics of listening’. Precursors are identified in Schumann’s musical criticism and the sublime aesthetics of early nineteenth-century Romanticism (as noted by Galand, this is the notion of aesthetics widely explored before the fantasy of absolute music took hold among the later Romantics) (Dell’Antonio 2004, 1–11). In his contribution to the collection, Martin Scherzinger highlights how the ‘radical particularity of musical experience’ can resist the totalizing impulse and, more widely, how ‘the emancipatory figuration of the aesthetic’ can be provide an opportunity ‘for imaginative political intervention in the world’. Scherzinger is concerned with the question of how reflecting on the aesthetic (that is, an interpretative process that doesn’t read ‘right through the musical text as if it was a mere representation of the social’) might

Introduction • 9

generate social and political insights: he is proposing a new relationship between the work and the world, one based upon a dialectical antitheses between a ‘productive autonomy’ and an ‘effective resistance’ to that autonomy (Scherzinger 2004a, 253). In a closely related essay, Scherzinger similarly wrote of the ‘complex and dialectical’ relationship of art and world, of how within that relationship the notion of aesthetic autonomy has a ‘socially critical and provocative side’, one that can ‘defy’ ideological constraints on meaning. In modernism, with its characteristic discontent with the world, Scherzinger sees this dialectic being placed under heightened tension. He asks, then, how a new productive relationship between aesthetics and politics might be developed in ‘postmodern’ times. A trawl through the selected writings of Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch leads him to identify art’s authentic truth content as emerging through a dialectical relationship between aesthetic norms and conditions handed down through history and the particularity of subjective expression which negates or disintegrates these aesthetic materials and thus resists false unities.However, as this relationship is truly dialectical, this process serves to sustain aesthetic illusion. Scherzinger insists on the ‘vagueness’ and ‘variability’ of aesthetic autonomy, so that its meanings can only be revealed through analysis of particular artistic examples (Scherzinger 2004b). For Scherzinger, an opening up of discussion on the issues of aesthetic autonomy, value and particularity, still widely considered taboo, is most urgently needed in the early twenty-first century. This is because he sees the prospect of the emancipatory uncertainties emerging from a relationship of the political and aesthetic as offering a desperately required counter to the ‘closing’ of the American mind, the collapse of open, rational critique under the political and institutional powers held by the adherents to the new dogma, a force that has also been all too apparent in America’s strongest political ally, the UK. As Scherzinger noted, Korsyn’s (dissensual) musicological community would ideally be one populated by ‘ironic scholars’ who openly acknowledge, indeed delight in, the limitations and provisional status of their claims to knowledge (Scherzinger 2006). Gone would be the days when, hand on the Urtext score, a musicologist might make statements claiming to contain nothing but the whole truth. These declarations came, of course, at a time made fraught by a viciously divisive political atmosphere in both the US and UK, in which conflicting and contentious claims of ownership of the ‘known’ and the ‘truth’ became notorious. Satirists had a field day. In the first transmitted episode of The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, USA, 17 October 2005) Stephen Colbert said to camera: I will speak to you in plain, simple English. And that brings us to tonight’s word: ‘truthiness’. Now I’m sure some of the ‘word police’, the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anyone who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist – constantly telling us what is or isn’t true . . . I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today. ’Cause face it, folks: we are a divided nation . . . between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart. (Quoted in Erion 2007, 14, n. 5) Even more humorously apposite is Colbert’s audacious address at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, in which he compared himself with President George W. Bush, who was sitting just a few feet away:

10 • Stephen Downes

We’re not so different, he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we’re not some brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the Factinista. We go straight from the gut; right sir? That’s where truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to say, ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. (Quoted in Griffioen 2007, 227)12 In the Scherzinger–Korsyn vein, much musicological work in recent years has pursued a sceptical interrogation aimed at revealing the ‘truthiness’ of claims to know what is true (more widely, see Wolff 2008). However, the doubleness of Colbert’s devastating caricature is actually especially revealing. Music can hit us in the gut as well as get inside our head; it possesses the potential to have impact on both our physique and our psyche. Both can ‘get it’ but, partially because of that double hit, the ‘it’ of the music is far from a stable ‘truth’. Georgina Born’s work on cultural and aesthetic experience is pertinent here. She explores the musical experience as one of both presence and meaning, one that can move between the somatic and semantic where body and mind are interacting, potentially mutually intensifying, interfering, or momentarily erasing. In such a model no prior assumption is made on which of these binary terms is primary and each is always mediated by social and environmental contexts (musical practices, institutions, technologies, ‘imagined communities’, manifold cultural, political and economic processes). Both the social and the musical must therefore be considered multiple. To illuminate these experiences Born proposes a new type of interdisciplinarity, a ‘relational musicology’ (Born 2012; see also Born 2010a and in embryonic form, Born 1991). This aims to reveal how aesthetic ideas are generated within modes of listening (and here we might recall Subotnik), understood widely as ‘experiences’ which, depending on context, embrace the contemplative, the corporeal and the collective (Born 2010b).13 It is hard not to think of Prince’s 2004 funk hit ‘Musicology’ and in particular the line ‘ ’Cause we got a PhD in Advanced Body Movin’, which encapsulates the potent co-existence of the immediate pleasures of physical intoxication and a sophisticated knowledge-base that allows the listener, or dancer, to grasp the song’s complex, allusive content, with its nostalgic and canonizing functions (especially valorizing James Brown), which are visually reinforced by the imagery of the song’s video.14 The somaesthetic, to use Richard Shusterman’s term (Shusterman 2012), of the bodily experience, and the aesthetic pleasure of semantic recognition are brought together in a shifting, grooving relationship. The urge to understand the wide range of musical experiences that generate seemingly infinite variants of this kind of multiple aesthetics is what drives the recent development of relational, cultural and critical versions of the activity formerly known simply as musicology. Prince’s declaration of doctoral distinction in dance practices in one sense raises him and his funk band as highly trained specialists, musicians who have worked long and hard to reach an ‘advanced’ level of technique. Indeed, Prince is readily figured as a virtuoso artist making songs and performances of high technical and aesthetic complexity (see Hawkins and Niblock 2011). One is reminded of Susan McClary’s classic 1989 dissection of the political, institutional and social contexts for the valorization and self-validation of composers of ‘difficult’ music (headline figures in McClary’s discussion are Roger Sessions, Arnold Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez) whose work gains prestige as ‘high’ art in inverse relationship to its low levels

Introduction • 11

of comprehensibility and epitomizes an avant-garde stance of extreme autonomy (and also, McClary argues, of endemic misogyny). By way of provocative contrast, McClary raises the funk classic ‘System of Survival’ (1987) by Earth, Wind and Fire (who are name-checked by Prince on the faculty of his musicology groove academy) as an example of a complex idiom demanding musical (and technological) expertise and imagination yet also one with wide popular appeal. Vital and exuberant, this is music replete with ‘infectious rhythms’, but McClary’s hearing avoids the perils of primitivism, for this is a musical expression that ‘I’ will survive in the face of institutional and political marginalization, a song that also manifests ‘an intelligence that accepts experiences of the body . . . as integral parts of human knowledge that accrue value precisely as they are shared and confirmed publicly’. This is ‘smart’ music, one that, along with offering physical invigoration, invokes complex ‘forms of sedimented cultural memory’ (McClary 1989).15 The funk aesthetic, as outlined by Shusterman (1992, 169–202), is one example for David Hesmondhalgh of music’s ability to ‘promote human flourishing’ and its emancipatory potential. In the face of the ‘suspicion’ in cultural studies of categories, including the aesthetic, Hesmondhalgh mounts a defence of the experiences of music that can invigorate and vitalize, can move and shake, or bump and grind, without neglecting or denigrating the significance of meanings created by imaginative contemplation and emotional reaction (Hesmondhalgh 2012).16 To recall Colbert’s comical anatomy, the aim is to consider how the experience of different types of music moves between the instinctiveness of ‘gut’ reactions, the reflectiveness of the ‘head’ and the expressiveness of the ‘heart’. In his Music and the Politics of Negation James Currie argues that though musicology may seem to have woken up from the ‘nightmare’ of modernist dogma of aesthetic autonomy the apparently enlightened ‘postmodern’ musicology that emerged might equally be identified as ideological because of its wide exclusion of something to do with the ‘Music’ itself. For music to hold its due position in musicological scrutiny, Currie argues, we should allow it to move between enchantment (to suggest, or conjure aesthetic illusions of, something more beautiful than the real) and disenchantment (to suggest a contextual sublime, of how music can intimate and undermine, affirm and negate, its own autonomy through aspects of its musicality, including formal process of integration, disintegration, unity and contrast, topic and allusion, surface and depth, resolution and dissonance). We might then move between ‘enjoyment’ (the sublime experience of jouissance) and the ‘pleasures’ of the beautiful, and above all begin to embrace the singular riskiness of autonomy (Currie 2013, ix and passim).17 As Lawrence Kramer has recently put it, the ‘cultural turn’ that reached musicology some two decades ago is now mature – mature enough to confront its own conflicted relationship to the aesthetic. It was for a time necessary to subordinate aesthetic appreciation to cultural critique so that the latter could find its voice. But the aesthetic is insubordinate by nature. Kramer argues that ‘aesthetic play trumps ideological form, including the form of the ideology of the aesthetic’, that ‘we need to return to an arena that some of us have never left: the musical work . . . to consult the work, not to idolize it’, and thereby allow aesthetic pleasure to fulfil its potential as generator of an ‘immanent critique’ (Kramer 2008, 4–5). A volume that brings together essays that consider a range of musicological approaches to topics in aesthetics is, therefore, especially timely.

12 • Stephen Downes

On what follows As we have seen, the aesthetic, though contested and occasionally (it seems) detested, is everywhere. Selecting from the vast array of ideas in musical aesthetics was therefore a tough editorial task. The aim was to gather essays focusing on ideas that would include some long considered central to the aesthetics of music (absolute music, the avant-garde, program music), some important binary oppositions (beautiful and sublime, classicism and neoclassicism, romanticism and anti-romanticism), some that have become hot musicological topics in recent years (irony, metaphor, narrative, virtuosity), and some which may have seemed outdated, neglected or until now scattered around an assortment of writings (dialectics, judgement and value, propaganda). By contrast with a compendium of short entries, contributors were commissioned to write essays of a length that allows detailed discussion of musical examples as well as rich consideration of context.18 Inevitably, this restricted the number of essays. No doubt many readers will consider other or alternative topics to have strong claims to inclusion. However, some that may seem to be notable absentees are well represented in the recent literature,19 and checking out the indices of this volume should demonstrate that the selected topics facilitate the embracing of ideas related not only these issues but also, for example, to genre, gender, nation, performance, and so on. The selected range also allows the discussion of music from a wide variety of styles, tastes, traditions, functions, historical period, and socioeconomic and geographical origins. The authors were chosen to offer a balance between longestablished figures of musicological authority and those whose careers are ascending towards such status, as well as a balance between North American and British musicologists. It remains a source of regret to me that there is only one female author among them, but sometimes the availability and willingness of collaborators imposes such representation. I am, of course, enormously grateful to those who in writing the essays that follow have contributed to the making of this volume. James Garratt’s chapter on values and judgements provides an introduction to one of the most complex and controversial subjects in music aesthetics: value, in particular the issues and problems surrounding the evaluation of musical works. It explores the challenges posed by the collapse of traditional value systems – including the loss of a ‘gold standard of aesthetic judgment’ (Baudrillard) – and discusses whether in the wake of this, it is still possible to make principled judgements today. The opening section probes some key issues and problems, such as the relationship between aesthetic value and art’s other values, and the nature of the principles and criteria that might be used to justify a particular value judgement. In doing so, it introduces ideas from key figures within Western aesthetics, such as Kant, and also the views of opponents such as Bourdieu. It tackles head-on the charges of elitism and conceptual imperialism that have been levelled at traditional conceptions of aesthetic value, acknowledging that all value systems serve the ends of specific communities and rely on hierarchical, exclusionary strategies. It also probes the limitations of evaluative criteria, stressing the impossibility of Dahlhaus’s notion of ‘proving’ a value judgement. The chapter fleshes out these perspectives and relates them to practice by exploring two key phases of value formation within Western music: the consolidation of the idea of classical music within Austro-German culture in the age of Beethoven, and the defining phase of American rock music and discourse in the mid to late 1960s. It draws on a wide range of contemporary texts in order to shed light on how the new values emerged, how they were conceptualized by contemporaries and how they conflicted with more established value systems. As well as exploring

Introduction • 13

the differences between the values of these two cultures, it also highlights the parallels between the aesthetic ideas of rock’s champions in Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone and those of their counterparts in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 150 years earlier; as well as placing a premium on the idea of the artist, originality, authentic expression and the creation of fixed musical objects, both discourses placed themselves in opposition to a mainstream perceived as formulaic and commercially driven. This leads to a discussion of the precise relationship between cultures and values, and the idea that the concept of culture has become too cumbersome to capture the fluid ways in which value systems interact in the present age. The term ‘absolute music’ as a designation for autonomous instrumental art music emerged in the nineteenth century, although it became standard terminology only in the twentieth. In his essay Thomas Grey explores how in modern scholarship the term has become identified with a Romantic appreciation of the metaphysical value of instrumental art music as an ineffable ‘higher language’, resonating with affective and psychic states but not constrained within any system of signification. Recognition of instrumental music as a paradigm of formal, nonrepresentational beauty independent of linguistic concepts predates the Romantic view and continues up to the present. After reviewing the origins of absolute music as a term and concept, the chapter then interrogates the boundaries of the concept, proposes a traditional dichotomy of cultural attitudes, and notes ways in which ‘absolute music’ structures debates in current musical scholarship. The aim of James Hepokoski’s chapter on program music is to redirect a conversation now grown stale into more fruitful, more practical modes of approach. It starts by laying out some traditional understandings of and controversies surrounding program music (as a presumed alternative to absolute music or ‘pure music’) and then proceeds to suggest some ways of moving beyond the standard debates. Within the European art–music tradition the terms illustrative music and program music refer to instrumental compositions that invite their listeners to attend to them with the aim of grasping their correspondences with (normally) pre-given external images, texts, sounds, situations, ideas, or narratives of varying degrees of specificity. While broader understandings of the term have been advanced to include all illustrative music, program music is most scrupulously regarded as that subset whose otherwise idiosyncratic formal structures or musical materials are most readily grasped by mapping the details of the music on to a governing external narrative or temporal sequence of images. A piece’s backdrop storyline, that is, plays a vital role in helping one to understand its ongoing musical processes and intended representational content. When one peers into the voluminous literature on the history, aesthetics and practice of illustrative claims within art–music, one is immediately entangled in knotted arguments and terminological tussles. One of Hepokoski’s central contentions is that the traditional, philosophically posed question, ‘is pure music (or this or that piece) actually capable of expressing or representing things outside of itself?’ is unproductive. In part, this is because of the record of historical evidence: much music of the past has been created and listened to under the belief that it can. The traditional question’s narrow framing can imply a search for a hardened, essential nature for ‘music alone’ an abstraction to be thrown on to the examination table and considered largely apart from issues of the historicity of such questions or the differing affective and imaginative experiences of those who interact compellingly, and in multiple ways, with individual works. Some discussions along these lines can strike musicians as disorientingly unmusical, caught up in a skein of philosophically in-house argumentation, where concerns to preserve a disciplinarily sterilized wording seem distant from a more imaginatively attuned musical

14 • Stephen Downes

knowledge and experience. Instead, Hepokoski’s essay suggests ways of cutting through these issues by appealing to historical understandings and immediate experiences of listening. Consequently, this essay glances at three of the many issues currently in play in any such new understanding of program music: (1) titles and other paratexts (citing the views, among others, of Levinson and Genette); (2) topic families (Ratner, Monelle, Hatten, and others); signs, metaphors and blended spaces (Lakoff and Johnson, Fauconnier and Turner). These issues are not conceptually separate but rather intersect as complements, different ways of approaching the same theoretical problem. The essay concludes by touching on some practical problems of extramusical implication as confronted within the disciplines of music history and analysis. Right from what is often considered to be the birth of modern aesthetics in the eighteenth century the relationship between the beautiful and sublime has held a prominent position. The various manifestations of these concepts in philosophical discourse and artistic theory and practice from the seminal texts of the Enlightenment through romanticism, modernism, postmodernism and many other ‘-isms’ in between have received voluminous attention. In musicology itself, the categories are hardly neglected, but though the sublime has generated much prominent work, the beautiful has tended to do so rather more surreptitiously (this reflects a wider tendency in cultural discourse), with the prominent exception of the sustained debate over Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (first published 1854). Chapter 5 starts on familiar ground, discussing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as works which, as many recent commentators have noted, complicate and problematize the two terms and their relationship; it then turns to some under-explored categories – the comic, the Gothic, the sentimental and the grotesque – which in different ways twist and turn the beautiful and sublime to fascinating artistic ends. These aesthetic categories will be illustrated by examples from the music of Francis Poulenc (passing by way of Tchaikovsky) in order to offer maximal contrast to Beethoven and Wagner, and also to wrench the debate away from Germany. Although dialectical modes of thought have, from the early nineteenth century forwards, exerted a wide-ranging and fundamental influence on music-historical and music-theoretical scholarship, a broad introduction to this strand of engagement is yet to be written. Consequently, despite the fact that much current scholarship remains indebted to dialectical models there is as yet no introduction supplying a concise contextualization of this research or surveying the field to which it contributes. Julian Horton’s essay seeks to fill this gap, offering a thorough yet accessible guide to the subject, which combines explication of the basic mechanisms of dialectical thinking with a survey of landmark texts. The essay pursues five successive objectives. It begins with an introduction to dialectics as a philosophical strategy, from Hegel’s idealism and its impact on Karl Marx’s materialism to the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century. It appraises the Hegelian method, especially as formulated in The Phenomenology of Mind and construed in recent secondary literature, before assessing its evolution in the so-called left- and right-Hegelian tendencies of nineteenth-century thought, the persistence of left-Hegelianism in the theoretical Marxism of the interwar years, and ultimately the negative dialectics of Adorno, which stressed the failure of dialectical synthesis as an arbiter of social authenticity. Horton then offers focused surveys of two threads of musical thought: theoretical applications, as exemplified by A. B. Marx’s Formenlehre and Hugo Riemann’s theory of harmony; musichistorical applications, from Franz Brendel’s Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart to Theodor Adorno’s

Introduction • 15

Philosophie der neuen Musik and after. The theoretical impact of the dialectical model is keenly felt in A. B. Marx’s Die Lehre von der musikalichen Komposition, in which the evolution of forms is construed as a result of the dialectic of rest and motion (Ruhe and Bewegung) incipient in musical material and its resulting syntax (embodied respectively in the phrase forms of the Satz and the Gang). In Riemann’s functional theory, dialectical thought emerges instead in the concept of harmonic dualism, which proposes the antithetical relationship of major and minor systems. The historical dimension of Hegel’s (1931) thought – its narrative of intellect’s progress towards self-awareness, or the condition in which ‘mind is object to itself just as it is’ (Phenomenology of Mind) – had a fundamental impact on how the action of music history was conceived. Horton pays special attention here to the notion of historical progress developed by Brendel, and pursue its subsequent manifestations through the polarization of progressive and conservative tendencies in late nineteenth-century Austro-German musical discourse and the concept of historical necessity driving Schoenberg’s musical aesthetics, to the negative-dialectical opposition of Schoenberg and Stravinsky underpinning Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik. Taking Adorno’s direct affiliation of Hegel’s dialectic and Beethoven’s concept of sonata form as a starting point, Horton gives analytical substance to these considerations via a succinct case study, looking afresh at the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, as an example that has provoked influential dialectical interpretation (seminally in the work of Carl Dahlhaus) and sustained subsequent commentary. In particular, he evaluates both how antithesis might manifest itself in purely musical terms (as the embodiment of identity and difference within musical material), as well as the idea that structural events might act synthetically upon such an opposition (for example, in Adorno’s claim that dialectical overcoming is a characteristic of the Beethovenian recapitulation). Horton concludes by assessing the persistence of dialectical thinking and its prospects, notably in the wake of postmodern philosophies and their musicological implications, taking the thoughtful analysis of postmodern musicological trends in relation to Habermas’s work advanced by Michael Spitzer as a touchstone for debate. Classicism and neoclassicism are terms often linked to the music of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, or to an art-music tradition that originated in Europe and spread internationally, or, most broadly, to various musical traditions around the globe that have developed canons of classics and practices of emulation. This diversity of classicisms suggests that it is best to define classicism and neoclassicism liberally, as inflecting a variety of practices (canon formation, imitation and emulation), stylistic ideals (formal balance, the synthesis of parts into wholes, and the presentation of human artifice as nature), and values (restraint, order, control). Although these practices, styles and values take many forms, crossing times and cultures, they nonetheless often point in one of two different directions, termed ‘standard’ and ‘ideal’ classicism by Ernst Robert Curtius. Necessary for pedagogy but also beloved by dictators, standard classicism emphasizes the codification of imitable norms, stylistic regularity, and a restraint based on reason (or raison d’état). A tempering of standard classicism, ideal classicism emphasizes the production of inimitable works, a style that sometimes skirts the line between classicism and mannerism, and a restraint based on taste and good judgement. Both types of classicism can manifest themselves in composition, performance, dress, behaviour and all other aspects of musical practice. Despite the ubiquity of classicist practices, however, they owe their specific forms to the particularities of different historical situations. Notably, in the Western tradition, without a canon of classic works, genres or artistic rules handed down from Greek or Roman antiquity, musicians have had to establish their own classics and to develop

16 • Stephen Downes

their own classic genres and techniques. If musicians have always held a close eye on their fellows in other artistic media, they have also had to invent their discipline in a way unknown to others. Sanna Pederson’s essay on romanticism and anti-romanticism begins by summarizing the understanding of romanticism from the standpoint of a critical theory that argues for romanticism as the only possibility of getting disentangled from the dialectic of the Enlightenment. An historical account begins by showing how some of the main arguments against romanticism are found in Hegel’s critique of romanticism and music. These include the idea of romanticism as disease, as being all feeling and no thinking, and as having no real relation to the world. An examination of Eichendorff’s literary fairy tale ‘The Marble Statue’ from 1819 establishes romantic themes that recur in musical works from Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 38, to Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, and even his last opera, Parsifal. These include a dualistic understanding of music, religion and woman as potentially both dangerously intoxicating and restoratively purifying. The years around the 1848 revolutions marked the first groundswell of anti-romantic sentiment in music criticism. The confusion and contradictions within this critique reveal how Hegel’s fundamental ambivalence about music and art in general developed into an anxiety over music’s purportedly romantic nature. A realistic, politically engaged music would only be possible if it could be separated from romanticism. After 1848, Wagner took up precisely that question in his Zurich writings. His solution was to not question music’s essentially romantic nature, but to supplement it with what it lacked, namely ideas and political engagement. The Zurich writings are the most extended anti-romantic polemic against music that we have in the nineteenth century. They share the same premises of another enormously influential critique of the romantic understanding of music, Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen ([1854] 1986). The backlash against romantic music can also be seen in the success of Offenbach’s creation of opéra bouffe, a light, satirical genre that drew on eighteenth-century classical predecessors. Wagner found it impossible to sustain his anti-romantic manifesto while continuing to compose music. He found a way out with the writings of Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose pessimism and metaphysical theory of music gave expression to a renewed or neo-romanticism beginning in the 1850s. Inspired by Schopenhauer, Wagner came to see music’s romantic qualities as positive rather than negative. The resulting work, Tristan und Isolde, is arguably the most romantic opera ever written. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music also represents a highpoint of romantic expression. It tried to discredit anti-romantic arguments against music and celebrate the Dionysian force of music, proclaiming a rebirth of art through Wagner’s operas. However, within a decade Nietzsche reversed himself and turned against romanticism and Wagner. His notions of romanticism as diseased and decadent played a major role in the emerging concepts of decadence and degeneration that seemed to diagnose the condition of Western art and society at the end of the nineteenth century. Wagnerism reached its peak in the years leading up to the First World War. The inflation of Wagner’s metaphysical, mystical theories by his followers pumped the romantic aspect of music up to new dimensions. However, the First World War punctured the giant romantic bubble, and after the Second World War there was an even stronger reaction against musical romanticism. Since then, musicologists have been rewriting the history of the twentieth century and discovering a continuity of romantic music from the nineteenth century that survived the backlashes.

Introduction • 17

Another crucial opposition in aesthetics is that between tradition and the avant-garde. Certain forms of jazz music have routinely been described as avant-garde, with the provocative, challenging aspects of this music readily interpretable as subverting the conventions of a tradition. Kenneth Gloag’s chapter outlines some key ideas about how in general the term avant-garde may be positioned as a concept through an engagement with some of the key texts and ideas, with Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde providing a productive starting point. Three specific jazz musics that have all been identified as avant-garde in the literature – Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton – are used as case studies to illustrate some of the critical issues in the debate about jazz as an avant-garde art form. However, it is argued that, after a moment of critical tension, these examples of avant-garde jazz have been absorbed into a tradition in ways that begin to question how a concept of tradition is both constructed and interpreted. Slow-burning questions of music and narrative have long concerned musical criticism, but more recently they have ignited into debates engulfing leading contributors to contemporary musicology. As Nicholas Reyland shows in his essay, at their centre, the arguments have concerned whether instrumental music can tell or otherwise represent a story and/or aspects of a narrative discourse. Orbiting issues engage with (for instance) the role of the perceiver and her listening community when music is heard as a narrative, how the criticism of music with text (songs, program music, operas, concept albums, etc.) might be influenced by such debates, and how a study of music outside the common-practice tonal period in Western art–music (the crucible for most of the debating thus far) could impact on these considerations. Criss-crossing the debate are unavoidable questions relating to music history and hermeneutics, not least those concerning how and why music comes to tell specific (yet often opposing) stories for socially and historically situated subjects. The debate over music and narrative is not only about whether music can or cannot tell a story: it concerns the cultural work carried out when narratives are enacted by musicians, performers and perceivers. Reyland’s chapter surveys the relevant literature to date, summarizing key contemporary disputes and placing them in a broader historical context. This permits the identification of places where, broadly speaking, the literature has reached a consensus on central issues. From the threads of the many existing theories of musical narrative, a meta-theory of musical narrativity can begin to be woven. Yet cutting-edge work on the topic is also moving away, most productively, from the question of whether one can speak of musical narrative, to consider instead why one should be disposed to do so in the first place, and in turn what such acts of reading might seek to achieve aesthetically, culturally or politically, for the makers, performers and consumers of music (including, of course, the very music critics engaging in the discipline’s narrative turn). Reyland’s essay therefore frames its survey of the literature to date (which is itself divided into sections detailing narratological criticism of common-practice tonal music and other musics) with a framing narration of its own: a new theory of musical narrativity that draws on the existing literature but also on phenomenology, reader-response criticism and reception theory to explain how music can come to be interpreted as a narrative, and how many narrative readings can in turn be read for what they say about the construction of music’s aesthetic and sociocultural significance. Throughout the essay, thumbnail music analyses exemplify key points relating to the literature, to the study’s original theoretical proposals, and to its discussion of how and why musical narratives, and critical interpretations thereof, matter and mean. Julian Johnson’s chapter explores musical irony as a historical category from the classical style to postmodernism, suggesting that the ironic turn is part of a larger self-reflective or even

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self-critical attitude within musical modernity. After considering some basic examples of musical irony (founded in the disjunction between generic expectations and their subversion), it reviews the relative paucity of scholarly studies of this aesthetic category in music (compared to literary irony). Three historical divisions follow. The first of these examines irony and humour in Haydn and Mozart’s chamber music, showing how the influence of opera buffa introduced the possibility of irony into classical instrumental music, with a particular focus on Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets. The second section, focused on the nineteenth century, suggests that although big public forms of musical romanticism often avoid an ironic mode, the idea continues to play a key role in other forms, such as German lieder from Schubert and Schumann to Mahler, and also in comic opera, specifically the operettas of Offenbach. The third section examines the varied forms of irony in modernism, including works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Satie and Shostakovich before concluding with a consideration of polystylistic aspects of more recent music (Schnittke, Berio, Ligeti). The final section looks back across these two hundred years of musical modernity to argue that the self-critique of musical forms and language by means of irony points to broader philosophical significance. Not only is it contemporary with the selfcritique of language in literature and philosophy, but it also assumes a particular significance in that context (as a non-linguistic form of irony). The chapter concludes by focusing on a single moment of late Beethoven (the coda to the Scherzo of the Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106) arguing that in this ‘moment’ one can discern a faultline of the whole of modernity. Jim Samson’s essay on propaganda explores the concept in a rounded way, recognizing that negative connotations of the term were neither there from the start nor suggested by the etymology, where the essential link is with the propagation of values. The essay also identifies and discusses elements of propaganda avant la lettre, bearing in mind that the term entered the language as late as the seventeenth century, that it gained widespread currency only in the mid nineteenth century, and that a key stage in its subsequent dissemination occurred as recently as the First World War. A notably broad range of musical reference, which moves widely in historical and geographical focus, includes discussion of the workings of censorship and propaganda in the Bolivian Andes, the Griot or Jali musicians of West Africa, music in North Korea, Iran, South Africa and Tibet. The topic is further elaborated by discussion of music and confession in sixteenth-century Germany, music under Soviet Communism and recent examples of music from the former Yugoslavia. The discourse of virtuosity, as James Deaville explains, has occupied a central position in musical performance and aesthetics for the past two hundred years. It has been able to maintain its appeal despite ongoing aesthetic opposition and changes in popular taste. This continuing fascination with excessive performance and the figure of the virtuoso merits study in terms of history, practice, aesthetics and reception. However, as a cross-disciplinary cultural practice cultivated since the Renaissance, virtuosity has historically encompassed excellence not only in music, but also in other areas of human performance. Thus any aesthetic study of virtuosity must position it as indexing extraordinary – even excessive – accomplishment in general, as reflected in the earliest definitions of the term. As the concept and its phenomenal manifestation came to centre around music in the early nineteenth century, philosophers and aestheticians were challenged to bring virtuosity into intellectual discourse, however they may have responded to the practice and its practitioners. The topic has remained a site of contention for cultural observers and agents, marked by a series of constructed contradictions: genius or charlatan, extraordinarily endowed human or machine, sincerity or manipulation, and even superhuman or freak. These paradoxes that inhabit the world of the virtuoso and virtuosity may prove

Introduction • 19

irreconcilable, yet it is nevertheless possible to arrive at a description of the practice that draws upon a wide range of historical and current thought. It is clear that virtuosity is a product of performance that communicates something extraordinary between artist(s) and audience. The investigation of the aesthetics associated with virtuosity necessitates several steps, beginning with an exploration of the concept’s origins and historical meanings. This study focuses on its development within the realm of classical music, in the disparate discourses of the AngloAmerican, French and German reception. Along the way, it is important to consider the factors that have contributed to and hindered research into virtuosity and how the practice evolved in its specific social and cultural contexts in those language regions identified above. An extended review of the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century literature about virtuosity uncovers certain commonalities in its aesthetic assessment, including the centrality of Liszt, but it reveals considerably more divergences that arise from the positions and perspectives of individual authors and their own milieus. Thus the French have deployed aesthetics in their attempts to come to terms with virtuosity (as seen in the work of Vladimir Jankélévitch and Antoine Hennion, among others), while the numerically and conceptually wide-reaching array of English-language studies rely upon an admixture of cultural studies and new historicist approaches (e.g. Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer and Dana Gooley). This literature survey leads to a distillation of aesthetic issues regarding the nature and role of the practice and practitioner, a review of the critique of virtuosity and the related paradoxes, and a brief consideration of the possibility of somatic excess and disability as informing the reception of virtuosity. Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12

Available at: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music (accessed 30 July 2013). Aesthetics does have an entry in Beard and Gloag 2005, 3–6. In German musicology the place of aesthetics has long seemed more overtly central, manifest, for example, by the journal Musik & Ästhetik. Indeed musical aesthetics has long seemed more prominent in continental Europe than in Anglo-American musicology. Those with French can see Arbo 2007, which does contain a small number of English contributors but is dominated by French and Italian authors. It also possibly raises issues of disciplinary confidence. A recent textbook in ‘music studies’ (Harper-Scott and Samson 2008) also turns to Bowie for its chapter on aesthetics, when the rest of the sixteen chapters (except the one on Jazz, also by Bowie) are all by musicologists. See also the essays collected in Robinson 1997 and Stock 2007. A similar plea for the sustained interaction of philosophical aesthetics and modern artistic practices and criticism was made in Benjamin and Osborne 1991, xi. Available at: www.musicandphilosophy.ac.uk; www.ams-net.org/studygroups. Like Hamilton, Krims raises Adorno as an important and inspirational precursor of this sort of project, for his interrogation of the role of analysis and its relationship to historical interpretation in the pursuit of a work of art’s ‘truth content’. There has since been something of a reaction against Adorno in some quarters and support voiced for alternative philosophical figures for musicological engagement, for example Richard Taruskin’s hailing of Vladimir Jankélévitch as the ‘anti-Adorno’ on the dust jacket of Carolyn Abbate’s translation of Jankélévitch’s Music and the Ineffable (2003), or the stellar panel (the philosophers Bowie and Scruton and the musicologist Stephen Hinton) who discussed whether Adorno was a ‘dead duck’ at the 2012 RMA MPG conference (panel and floor seemed in favour of the opinion that Adorno remains in pecking good form). On the marginalization of the ‘beautiful’, see my essay ‘Beautiful and sublime’ on pp. 84–110. For an example of Clarke’s approach in detailed action, see Clarke 2011. Leppert and McClary’s volume also included Frith 1987, which argued that an aesthetics of popular music must be based on a sociology of popular music. The revised edition of Moore’s book symbolized the sustained relevance of its central argument in the new century. For a discussion of notions of the aesthetic and the nature of the pop ‘text’ closely contemporaneous with Moore’s second edition, see Hawkins 2002. British readers have little foundation for smug national feelings of political exemption or cultural superiority. For a hilarious dissection from a British satirist of how the ‘West’ moved from the Age of Reason to the Age of Reagan and beyond, see Wheen 2004.

20 • Stephen Downes 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

Nicholas Cook (2012) has pointed out the relationship with Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002). See Vernallis 2004, which includes a case study analysis of the video for Prince’s ‘Gett Off’ (1991), with its comparable evocations of James Brown (here alongside those of Jimi Hendrix). The latter themes are also considered in McClary and Walser 1994. Hesmondhalgh cites, as an important precursor, Anne Danielsen’s analysis, which moves along the ‘anti-primitivistic’ lines McClary suggested twenty years earlier, of funk’s deployment of technical and musical technique (a good deal of hard work) to produce physically uplifting art (Danielsen 2006). Currie 2009 explores the political aspects of his argument more fully. Carolyn Abbate 2004 made proposals closely related to Currie’s. Abbate sought to counter the tendency of hermeneutic interpretation to ignore the musical ‘real’ event, and find a central place for ‘aesthetic pleasure, the apprehension of beauty’ which, she argues, ‘is not evil, nor is it just a hedonistic consolation’, because beauty makes us more acutely aware of the phenomenal world. Important here for Abbate is Elaine Scarry’s influential On Beauty and Being Just (1999). (Susan Sontag said something very similar in Against Interpretation way back in 1964: that commentary should make the art ‘more real’, rather than tame it through interpretation, that ‘in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’.) This ‘erotic’ quality underlies (unstated) Ian Biddle’s discussion of the complex, ambivalent, relationship of the (institutionalized, professionalized, specialized) discipline of musicology to the pleasures and enjoyment of listening, of what it permits (and itself becomes enthralled by) and prohibits (what it might appear to be appalled by); Biddle proposed that ‘radical’ pleasures (traumatic, transformative, or contentious) be considered within a ‘radical musicology’, one which leads to questioning the apparently unquestionable. ‘On the radical in musicology’, Radical Musicology 1 (2006). Available at: www.radical-musicology.org.uk. In this way the book contrasts with the ‘companion’ approach of, for example, Gaut and Lopes 2013, or a ‘reader’ such as Stecker and Gracyk 2010. See, for example, Berger 2005, Watkins 2011, Macarthur 2001, Neal 2001 and Walden 2013. Aesthetics is also a major idea in, for example, Fonarow 2006 and Gracyk 2007; see also the images and texts in Savage and Gibson 2012.

Bibliography of works cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry, 30: 505–36. Agawu, Kofi. 2000. ‘Review of Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 44: 487–94. Arbo, Alessandro, ed. 2007. Perspectives de l’esthétique musicales: entre théorie et histoire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Armstrong, Isobel. 2000. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Beard, David and Gloag, Kenneth. 2005. Musicology: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Andrew and Osborne, Peter. 1991. ‘Introduction’, to Benjamin and Osborne (eds), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics. London: ICA. Berger, Karol, ed. 2005. Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bérubé, Michael. 2004. ‘Introduction: Engaging the Aesthetic’, in Bérubé (ed.), The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1–25. Biddle, Ian. 2006. ‘On the Radical in Musicology’, Radical Musicology, 1. Available at: www.radical-musicology.org.uk. Born, Georgina. 1991. ‘Music, Modernism and Signification’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 157–76. ––––– 2010a. ‘Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135: 79–89. ––––– 2010b. ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135: 205–43. ––––– 2012. ‘Digital Music, Relational Ontologies, and Social Forms’, in Deniz Peters, Gerhard Eckel and Andreas Dorschel (eds), Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity. New York: Routledge, 163–80. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Presses du reel. Bowie, Andrew. [1990] 2003. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Revised new edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ––––– 2009. Music, Philosophy and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Peter. 1994. ‘Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?’, Critical Inquiry, 20: 509–23. Chua, Daniel. 1999. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, David. 2003. ‘Musical Autonomy Revisited’, in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 159–69. ––––– 2011. ‘Between Hermeneutics and Formalism: The Lento from Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra (Or: Music Analysis after Lawrence Kramer)’, Music Analysis, 30: 309–59. Cook, Nicholas. 2012. ‘Anatomy of the Encounter: Intercultural analysis as Relational Musicology’, in Stan Hawkins (ed.), Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott. Aldershot: Ashgate, 193–208. Currie, James. 2009. ‘Music After All’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 62: 145–203. ––––– 2013. Music and the Politics of Negation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Introduction • 21 Dahlhaus, Carl. 1982. Esthetics of Music, trans. William W. Austin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 1983. Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 2, ‘The Significance of Art: Historical or Aesthetic?’. ––––– and Katz, Ruth , eds. 1986–93. Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music (4 vols). Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press. Danielsen, Anne. 2006. Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ––––– 2003. Themes in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dell’Antonio, Andrew. 2004. ‘Introduction’ to Dell’Antonio (ed.), Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1–11. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Erion, Gerald J. 2007. ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death with Television News: Jon Stewart, Neil Postman, and the Huxleyan Warning’, in Jason Holt (ed.) The Daily Show and Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 5–15. Fonarow, Wendy. 2006. Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Frith, Simon. 1987. ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Popular Music’, in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds), Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133–49. Fubini, Enrico. 1991. The History of Music Aesthetics, trans. Michael Hatwell. London: Macmillan. Galand, Joel. 1995. ‘The Turn from the Aesthetic’, Current Musicology, 58: 78–97. Gaut, Berys and Lopes, Dominic, eds. 2013. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge. Goehr, Lydia. 2008. Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Gracyk, Theodore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ––––– 2007. Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Griffioen, Amber L. 2007. ‘Truthiness, Self-Deception, and Intuitive Knowledge’, in Jason Holt (ed.) The Daily Show and Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 227–39. Hamilton, Andy. 2007. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum. ––––– and Zangwill, Nick, eds. 2012. Scruton’s Aesthetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanslick, Eduard. [1854] 1986. On the Musically Beautiful, trans. of 8th edn by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Harper-Scott, J.P.E. and Samson, Jim, eds. 2008. An Introduction to Music Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkins, Stan. 2002. Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. ––––– and Niblock, Sarah. 2011. Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hegel, G. W. F. 1931. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie. London and New York: Macmillan. Hermand, Jost and Richter, Gerhard, eds. 2006. Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2012. ‘Towards a Political Aesthetics of Music’, in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 364–74. Hooper, Giles. 2004. ‘An Incomplete Project: Modernism, Formalism, and the “Music Itself” ’, Music Analysis, 23: 311–29. ––––– 2006. The Discourse of Musicology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2003. Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Joughin, John J. and Malpas, Simon. 2003. ‘Introduction’ to Joughin and Malpas (eds), The New Aestheticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1–21. Kivy, Peter. 2002. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––––– 2012. Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsyn, Kevin. 1993. ‘Brahms Research and Aesthetic Ideology’, Music Analysis, 12: 89–103. ––––– 2003. Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––––– 2004. ‘The Death of Musical Analysis? The Concept of Unity Revisited’, Music Analysis, 23: 337–51. Kramer, Lawrence. 1992. ‘The Musicology of the Future’, Repercussions 1: 5–18. ––––– 1993. ‘Music Criticism and the Postmodern Turn: In Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson’, Current Musicology, 53: 25–35. ––––– 2008. ‘Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute’, in Steven Bauer, Raymond Knapp and Jacqueline Warwick (eds), Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary. Aldershot: Ashgate, 3–15. Krims, Adam. 1998. ‘Introduction: Postmodern Musical Poetics and the Problem of “Close Reading”’, in Adam Krims (ed.), Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic. Amsterdam: GB Arts International, 2–11. le Huray, Peter and Day, James, eds. 1981. Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ––––– 1997. Music in the Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

22 • Stephen Downes Lipmann, Edward. 1986–1990. Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader (3 vols). Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press. ––––– 1992. A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. London, Justin. 2011. ‘Musicology’, in Andrew Kania and Theodore Gracyk (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. New York: Routledge, 495–505. Macarthur, Susan. 2001. Feminist Aesthetics in Music. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. McClary, Susan. 1989. ‘Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’, Cultural Critique, 12: 57–81. ––––– and Walser, Robert. 1994. ‘Theorizing the Body in African-American Music’, Black Music Research Journal, 14: 75–84. Meyer, Donald C. 1998. Review of Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) and John Covach and Graeme N. Boone (eds), Understanding Rock: Essays in Music Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), American Music, 16: 487–91. Middleton, Richard. 1991. Review of Peter Wicke, Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology, trans. Rachel Fogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Music & Letters, 72: 487–9. Moore, Allan F. [1993] 2001. Rock: The Primary Text. Developing a Musicology of Rock, 2nd edn. Aldershot: Ashgate. Neal, Mark Anthony. 2001. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge. Nelson, Thomas. 1998. ‘The Fantasy of Absolute Music’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota. Robinson, Jenefer, ed. 1997. Music and Meaning. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Savage, John and Gibson, William. 2012. Punk: An Aesthetic. New York: Rizzoli. Scarry, Elaine. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scherzinger, Martin. 2004a. ‘The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique’, in Andrew Dell’Antonio (ed.), Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 252–77. ––––– 2004b. ‘In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modernist Musical Aesthetics’, in Arved Ashby (ed.), The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ––––– 2006. Review of Korsyn, ‘Decentering Music’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 59: 777–85. Scruton, Roger. 1983. The Aesthetic Understanding. London: Methuen. ––––– 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shusterman, Richard. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Oxford: Blackwell. ––––– 2012. Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1964. Against Interpretation. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spitzer, Michael. 2004. Metaphor and Musical Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ––––– 2006. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ––––– 2010. ‘Introduction’, to Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth (eds), Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction, trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Stecker, Robert and Gracyk, Ted, eds. 2010. Aesthetics Today: A Reader. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Stock, Kathleen, ed. 2007. Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 1991. Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ––––– 1995. Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Taruskin, Richard. 2006. ‘Is there a Baby in the Bathwater?’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 63 (2006), Part I: 163–85, Part II: 309–27. Tomlinson, Gary. 1993a. ‘Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies’, Current Musicology, 53: 18–24. ––––– 1993b. Reply to Lawrence Kramer, Current Musicology, 36–40. Vernallis, Carol. 2004. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press. Walden, Joshua S., ed. 2013. Representation in Western Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watkins, Holly. 2011. Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheen, Francis. 2004. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. London: Fourth Estate. Wicke, Peter. [1987] 1990. Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology, trans. Rachel Fogg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Originally published as Rockmusik: zur Asthetik und Soziologie eines Massenmediums. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1987. Williams, Alistair. 2001. Constructing Musicology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolff, Janet. 1987. ‘The Ideology of Autonomous Art’, in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds), Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–12. ––––– 2008. The Aesthetics of Uncertainty. New York: Columbia University Press. Zangwill, Nick. 2001. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ––––– forthcoming. Music and Aesthetic Reality. New York: Routledge.

2 Values and judgements James Garratt

Introduction Questions of value are at the heart of music aesthetics, prompting or shaping most of the other concepts, issues and debates explored in this book. This is hardly surprising, given that values and judgements of one kind or another are a basic and constant part of our life experience. Our values, and the values ascribed to music by the cultures we identify with, are fundamental to how we interact with it, shaping what we listen to and how we listen to it. Similarly, the process of evaluating music is not an abstruse activity limited to professional critics or examiners, but rather an inextricable part of performing, composing and writing about music. In spite of its importance, value is an issue that musicians and musicologists tend to talk around rather than confront directly.1 In part, this is because of the unconscious or unreflective way in which values – whether moral, political or artistic – often work: the criteria shaping our choices and judgements are not always transparent to ourselves, let alone communicated to others (see Levy 1987). The main reason for treading cautiously in this area, however, is the much broader crisis that has eroded and latterly engulfed Western conceptions of value, removing all sense of stability and certainty. While this crisis had been brewing for two centuries, it is only in recent decades that Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of a future in which ‘the highest values are devaluated’ has come to fruition (Nietzsche 2003, 146). Paradoxically, the causes of this process – social atomism, consumerism, a collapse of traditional sources of authority – resemble the ills that aesthetics, at the time of its emergence in the late eighteenth century, was meant to be able to heal; for Friedrich Schiller and contemporaries, aesthetic cultivation would ultimately instil wholeness and unity in place of fragmentation (see especially Schiller [1794] 1967). Today, the idea of a society united through beauty and shared aesthetic values seems a naive or even dangerous illusion. Rejecting the idea of universal values, and dismissing truth, goodness and beauty as ideologically dubious fictions, we have come to view values as made not given, emphasizing their culturally contingent nature and local field of operation. The idea that values are tied to particular cultures, and that each culture has its own unique value system, has helped foster the view that ‘all cultures are equal in dignity, and therefore of equal worth, since each can be seen as embodying an aspect of human totality’ (Koïchiro Matsuura, ‘Preface’ to Bindé 2004, ix). As this emphasis on equality and common humanity suggests, modernity has not entirely discarded the values bequeathed by the Enlightenment. Yet such values survive in a demystified and radically pluralistic form, drained of the confidence and optimism that originally engendered them. Western culture’s descent into what Gianni Vattimo describes as a ‘twilight of values’ has been far from painless (Bindé 2004, 7–12).

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For the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, writing at what was arguably the zenith of this process, the result has been a paralysing sense of decentredness and rootlessness: ‘a dispersal and involution of value whose upshot for us is total confusion – the impossibility of apprehending any determining principle’ (Baudrillard 1993, 10). The sense that all fixed or shared points of reference have melted away is particularly acute in relation to art and aesthetics; in Baudrillard’s analysis, the loss of a ‘gold standard of aesthetic judgment’ has robbed art of its capacity to innovate, counter reality or follow its own laws, making it wholly subject to the laws of the market (Baudrillard 1993, 14–15). Reduced to a value-free game, the artworld has little to offer but a repetition of hollow gestures divorced from the ideas that engendered them (Baudrillard 1993, 4; see also ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ [1996], and ‘No Nostalgia for Old Aesthetic Values’ [1996] in Baudrillard 2005). Aesthetic discourse and artistic institutions are for Baudrillard part of this ‘conspiracy of art’, concealing art’s commodification by continuing to draw on evaluative concepts that have lost their substance. In retrospect, the cynicism and world-weariness of such 1990s critiques may seem overstated (since 9/11, it has become abundantly clear that strongly held values are by no means a thing of the past). However, the central dilemma that Baudrillard identifies – the loss of a gold standard of judgement, and the difficulty of orienting ourselves among competing values – remains acute. This is particularly true in relation to music. Indeed, there are few more striking symptoms of the decline of established aesthetic values than the collapse in prestige of Western classical music over the last half century. Stripped of its claim to embody universal, transcendent values, classical music has become simply one genre among many. Value pluralism has brought clear benefits to the musical sphere, of course, as is evident from the ever more diverse curricula of university music courses: the classical canon has rightly receded as hitherto marginalized forms of music have been embraced. But this same pluralism makes it hard to invoke the progressive, universalist conceptions of culture and aesthetic education that enabled music to enter the academy in the first place. If traditional aesthetic values are irretrievable or undesirable, does that force us to accept the kind of value-free nihilism that Baudrillard describes? And is he right to view art’s commodification – the collapse of artistic value into economic value – as being unavoidable in our postmodern (or post-postmodern) age? (See Nealon 2012, esp. 43–65.) There are three possible approaches to these questions. The most common – for musicologists, as for the public at large – is to take it as read that musical evaluation is simply a matter of personal taste (‘it’s all subjective . . .’), and to regard as elitist or intolerant any notion that one work, genre or practice might be ascribed more value than another. This perspective certainly points to the lack of confidence characterizing our age, as well as reflecting some characteristic modes of present-day musical consumption (in particular the solitary musical islands we inhabit as iPod listeners). In relation to our discipline, this stance is exemplified by the 1990s New Musicology, with its zeal for highlighting the ideologically charged nature of the values shaping Western classical music, and for debunking earlier approaches to music analysis. This eagerness to critique the concepts and categories of old-school aesthetics is matched by a reluctance to posit new alternatives to them (symptomatic of this retreat from judgement, as Sianne Ngai has noted, is the use of the word ‘interesting’ as an ersatz for more emphatic evaluations; see Ngai 2008). If the first approach embraces postmodernism, the second represents a modernist or traditionalist resistance to it. From this perspective, the sceptical, subjectivist mentality outlined above is a form of mass delusion engendered by capitalism and the culture industry (modernist

Values and judgements • 25

critique) or by trendy relativism and cultural decline (traditionalist critique). Unlike the sceptics, latter-day modernists and traditionalists are keen to stress the superlative value possessed by the music they favour, whether it be the avant-garde or the classical canon. To sustain this viewpoint, they continue to draw on the assumptions, categories and hierarchies of earlier aesthetics, dismissing the idea that these have lost their substance and credibility. This endeavour to reassert traditional values is perhaps most associated with right-wing commentators (the best-known example within music aesthetics is Roger Scruton: see Scruton 1997, esp. 369–91, 474–508 and Scruton 2009, 205–27). However, it can also be seen in the problematic ongoing project to resurrect the modernist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno as a lodestar for musicology. A third approach – that informing the present chapter – seeks to avoid these extremes of debilitating uncertainty and false security. It rejects the idea that judgements of value are purely subjective, emphasizing how the tastes of individuals are shaped and articulated within social contexts. At the same time, it takes a pluralistic approach to value, recognizing the diversity of value systems that co-exist in the present, and rejecting conceptions of value conceived around the idea of a unitary artworld or aesthetic regime. Acknowledging the plurality of values, it should be noted, makes them no less real: principled judgements not only remain possible, but are fundamental to our involvement in and identification with different forms of music-making.2 Our active participation in musical communities – multiple, overlapping and, increasingly, virtual – entails not simply assenting to shared values, but rather a role in the ongoing process by which they are renewed and reinvigorated. It is this active engagement, rather than any aesthetic dogma, that prevents art’s value from being seen in purely economic or consumerist terms. All of which makes it essential that we probe the value concepts and criteria inherited from earlier aesthetics, establishing which remain useful and which need to be rethought or discarded. First, I explore some key issues and problems, such as the relationship between aesthetic value and art’s other values, and the nature of the principles and criteria that might be used to justify a particular value judgement. I then compare how musical values functioned within two different cultures at crucial junctures in the history of Western music: the crystallization of the idea of classical music within Austro-German culture in the age of Beethoven, and the defining phase of American rock music and discourse in the mid to late 1960s. After examining these case studies of value formation within particular cultures, I then explore what it is that enables us to appreciate the music of cultures beyond our own. Key issues and problems The first problem we must confront is that posed by the idea of aesthetic value. Up to this point, I have largely avoided this term and instead talked more broadly of value(s): first, because the values embodied in any musical work or activity are more diverse than even the most capacious definition of aesthetic value allows, and second because the phrase carries a host of misleading associations. For many postmodern commentators, particularly those identifying their stance as ‘anti-aesthetic’, the idea that artworks or artistic experiences may possess a form of value that is uniquely aesthetic – as opposed to cultural, social, economic and so on – is highly suspect: a means for an elite to assert the superiority of its preferred forms of art over the tastes of the majority (see especially Foster 1983 and Bourdieu 1984). As with broader critiques of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, assaults on aesthetic value present the concept as exclusionary in nature,

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seeing it as shunting aside other forms of value as ‘extrinsic’ and thus non-essential. For Barbara Herrnstein Smith, this pursuit of the purely aesthetic has the effect of stripping away art’s essential values until nothing remains: The recurrent impulse and effort to define aesthetic value by contradistinction to all forms of utility or as the negation of all other nameable sources of interest or forms of value – hedonic, practical, sentimental, ornamental, historical, ideological, and so forth – is, in effect, to define it out of existence. (Herrnstein Smith 1988, 33) There is some justification for this stance, given the highly restricted conception of aesthetic value presented in some of the key texts on aesthetics from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In part, this narrow view of value stems from a tension within the founding document of modern aesthetics, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). In carving out his realm of taste, Kant builds a series of distinctions, differentiating between useful and beautiful objects, extrinsic versus intrinsic purpose, and sensory pleasure versus disinterested contemplation. The purely aesthetic requires the exclusion of all extraneous factors, including emotional response and a concern for content, since ‘any taste remains barbaric if its liking requires that charms and emotions be mingled in . . . beauty should actually concern only form’ (Kant [1790] 1987, 220, 223). These stringent conditions for a pure judgement of taste are linked by Kant to an equally restrictive idea of ‘free beauty’: Many birds (the parrot, the humming-bird, the bird of paradise) and a lot of crustaceans in the sea are [free] beauties themselves [and] belong to no object determined by concepts as to its purpose, but we like them freely and on their own account. Thus designs à la grecque [Louis XVI style], the foliage on borders or on wallpaper, etc., mean nothing on their own: they represent [vorstellen] nothing, no object under a determinate concept, and are free beauties. What we call fantasias in music (namely, music without a topic [Thema]), indeed all music not set to words, may also be included in the same class. (Kant [1790] 1987, 229, section 16) As Kant’s examples suggest, this conception of the pure judgement of taste is an abstraction, applicable only to a narrow strand of art which he regarded as merely decorative. Although this ‘arabesque aesthetic’ has sometimes been viewed as anticipating formalism (in particular, Eduard Hanslick’s view of the musically beautiful), Kant makes plain that such pure judgements of taste do not apprehend art’s nature or value; the judgement of fine art is always impure, since only through being allied to other forms of value can art be invested with wider significance (Kant [1790] 1987, 229–36, sections 16 and 17). However, the effect of this is that Kant presents two distinct conceptions of value: one stressing purity, form and disinterested contemplation, and the other art’s capacity to engage with and enrich other spheres of human experience. Although most later conceptions of aesthetic value are grounded on less restrictive principles than Kant’s pure judgement of taste, they share the same tension between safeguarding art’s value and making it worth something: the paradox, as Steven Corcoran puts it, that ‘art is art to the extent that it is not art’ (Corcoran 2010, 18–19). Rather than segregate music’s aesthetic dimension from its other values, it is better to view the former as complementing and overlapping the latter. This enables us to view the aesthetic

Values and judgements • 27

not as the residue left over once the extrinsic and useful are filtered out, but rather as the ‘value added’ that the experience of all music provides. As this suggests, moving away from the separatist conception of aesthetic value – and the notions of purity, contemplative listening and transcendence associated with it – is essential in engaging with musical worlds beyond the ‘decorative’ absolute instrumental music invoked by Kant. This move also helps us to rethink some of the other hierarchies and binarisms which the idea of aesthetic value calls into play, emphasizing that such value is not the preserve of one particular artistic tradition or stratum. The most problematic of Kant’s dichotomies is the distinction between high and low art. Kant’s concern with investing high art with significance leads him to distinguish between the agreeable arts, ‘whose purpose is merely enjoyment’, and the fine arts, whose content prompts thought and discussion: ‘It is agreeable art if its purpose is that the pleasure should accompany presentations that are mere sensations; it is fine art if its purpose is that the pleasure should accompany presentations that are ways of cognizing’ (Kant [1790] 1987, 305–6, section 44). Famously, Kant included Tafelmusik, or dinner music, within his agreeable arts, presaging the low ranking he accords music in general: [If] we assess the value of the fine arts by the culture [or cultivation] they provide for the mind . . . then music, since it merely plays with sensations, has the lowest place among the fine arts (just as it may have the highest among those [whose value] we assess by their agreeableness as well). (Kant [1790] 1987, 329, section 53) The ideological agenda behind Kant’s opposition of high and low art – pitting the aesthetic cultivation of an elite against the sensual gratification of the masses – is not made explicit. Subsequent commentators such as Friedrich Schiller, however, were unabashed in presenting this dichotomy in class terms, distinguishing the ennobled tastes of a ‘few select circles’ from the animalistic pleasures of the populace at large, and considering music to epitomize the latter: for Schiller, when music exercises its effect, on all faces there usually appears an expression of sensuality, verging on something brutish . . . in short, all the symptoms of inebriation appear – clear proof that the senses are feasting . . . All these emotions, I say, are excluded from [high] art by a noble and masculine sort of taste, because such emotions simply gratify the senses. (Schiller 1993, 49)3 For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, such dichotomies reveal the self-interest and class prejudice behind the entire project of aesthetics. For Bourdieu, Kant’s aesthetic principles express the ‘sublimated interests of the bourgeois intelligentsia’, performing the ideological operation of making universal ‘the dispositions associated with a particular social and economic condition’ (Bourdieu 1984, 492, 493). In Bourdieu’s reading, the entire tradition of Western aesthetics from Kant to the present enacts the same operation through its institutions, discourses and practices, affirming as natural the tastes and values of a particular class. These dispositions serve not only as markers of status, but as a means to legitimize and perpetuate existing class structures and social inequalities. For Bourdieu, ‘nothing more clearly affirms one’s “class”, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music’ (Bourdieu 1984, 18). While classical music – ‘the “pure” art par excellence’ – may seem to epitomize the Kantian notions of

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disinterested pleasure and the pure judgement of taste, an appreciation for it is far from being something natural or innate; rather it is a sign of a high level of cultural capital, of acculturation within a ‘more polished, more polite, better policed world’ than that inhabited by lovers of other forms of music (Bourdieu 1984, 19, 77). The most important aspect of Bourdieu’s critique of the aesthetic is his reminder, as Tia DeNora puts it, that ‘unlike gravity or the sound barrier, artistic value is an institutional fact, not a natural one’ (DeNora 2004, 44). Bourdieu’s emphasis on the role that institutions such as concert halls, conservatoires and even university music departments play in producing value and perpetuating hierarchies has had a major impact on subsequent discussions of the topic (see, for example, Frith 1998 and Born 1995). However, there are several key problems with his account. While he is right to stress the ideological dimension of Kant’s dichotomies, he constructs an implausibly homogeneous picture of aesthetics and its values on the basis of them (and in doing so, gives a distorted account of the role that the pure judgement of taste plays in Kant’s text).4 The result is that Bourdieu actually deepens the divide between high and low art, presenting each as appealing to wholly separate, class-based constituencies. In addition, he entrenches the notion that aesthetic value has relevance only for high art (a move that helped ensure that aesthetics remained a dirty word within sociology and cultural studies until the late 1990s). Thirty years on, Bourdieu’s view of classical music as a marker of the dominant culture of the bourgeoisie looks decidedly outmoded. Today, listening practices no longer map neatly on to class distinctions (if they ever did), and current sociologists building on Bourdieu’s ideas tend to identify bourgeois taste not with high art but with cultural omnivorousness or – as Zygmunt Bauman puts it – ‘maximum tolerance and minimal choosiness’ (Bauman 2011, 14; see also Peterson 1997, Eriksson 2011 and Prior 2013). This points to a broader problem with Bourdieu’s view of how taste communities relate to social strata. In what Bauman calls our ‘fluid modern world’, the idea of rigidly demarked musical tastes, or for that matter, social classes, is a thing of the past; not only are listening practices more pluralistic, but the tie has loosened between value communities and the cultures that originally engendered them. Paradoxically, these socio-cultural changes only reinforce the argument that distinctions between high and low art, or claims for the superiority of one kind of music over another, are arbitrary and ideologically grounded.5 We should avoid assuming that aesthetic hierarchies and dichotomies are signs of a hegemonic culture flexing its muscles, however, since they can also serve as survival strategies for new or fragile subcultures. As the reference to a ‘few select circles’ attests, the distinctions employed by Schiller and contemporaries in carving out the aesthetic field, and in elevating the prestige of the art forms they valued, reflected the aspirations of a small minority, not the interests of a dominant class. Similarly, the two musical communities explored in the next section initially represented minority tastes rather than powerful institutions or interest groups. As a glance at some later artistic manifestos will confirm, the kinds of distinctions employed by Schiller were to remain crucial for those championing new ideas and movements or challenging the status quo. Rather than being unique to the discourses of high culture, all value communities rely on hierarchies and exclusionary strategies in order to define and perpetuate themselves. Recognizing that such distinctions – and the evaluative criteria that work alongside them – are ubiquitous and serve the ends of particular communities helps us to see them for what they are: propositions rather than diktats, unstable principles that continually compete with alternative aesthetic constructs. All of which suggests that we’re moving towards a position where good and bad music exist, but do so only relationally (i.e. in relation to the local, contingent criteria upheld within particular

Values and judgements • 29

value communities).6 We will return later to the problems posed by this notion of discrete musical cultures, each governed by its own unique set of values; for now, we need to establish how evaluative criteria work in practice. Musical judgements of value amount to more than preferences, since the evaluation is accompanied by a justification that appeals to shared principles. For an earlier generation of musicologists, including Carl Dahlhaus, evidence-based argumentation grounded in music analysis provides a means of objectively ‘proving’ a value judgement (Dahlhaus [1970] 1983, viii and 3). Today, there is little point in trying to resurrect the term ‘objective judgement’, since it conjures up a host of unhelpful associations (such as the idea of impartiality and of universal, timeless values). But another sense of objectivity – that judgements need to make reference to the properties of the musical object in order to be persuasive – remains crucial. For nearly 2,500 years, the general principles informing such object-based judgements have been remarkably consistent within Western aesthetics. From Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas, beautiful objects necessarily exhibit order, unity, proportion, clarity and complexity; similarly, Monroe C. Beardsley, in what is probably the most influential twentieth-century equivalent to such taxonomies, argues that aesthetic beauty rests on the interplay between unity, intensity and complexity (Beardsley 1981, 454–89). Whether the longevity of such criteria demonstrates their universality or simply their banality is a moot point. At best, such general criteria offer merely a baseline for judgement, a low-level hurdle that we expect musical works and experiences to leap over. At worst, they have been elevated as ultimate guarantors of value: not so long ago, music analysts assumed that a demonstration of unity was sufficient to secure a composer’s place in the musical canon, while for a generation of high modernist composers, the pursuit of complexity became an end in itself (see Morgan 2003 and the responses in Music Analysis 23, 333–88; Mahnkopf 2006). The limitations of these general criteria have led commentators to come up with alternative principles, more specifically attuned to musical processes. One wellknown example is Leonard B. Meyer’s argument that music acquires value by setting up expectations and then delaying their fulfilment; through creating and overcoming obstacles, music rises above the conventional and heightens the listener’s gratification (Meyer 1959). Another is Heinrich Schenker’s view that organic coherence, verifiable through his analytical method, provides an incontrovertible measure of musical value: a means to distinguish the masterworks of Bach and Beethoven from the inorganic aberrations of Wagner and Stravinsky (see Pastille 1995). For Lawrence Kramer, general value criteria such as unity, coherence, complexity and narrative tension fail to address the particularity of individual musical works, and thus miss what compels us to engage with them: Many forgotten or little-esteemed works meet all the criteria with little or no effect. The truth is that meeting aesthetic criteria is easy. Many much-beloved works do not bother to do it, or do it as a matter of routine while going about their more vital business. (Kramer 2009, 25) But the distinctive qualities of such works do not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, their individuality is dependent on their generic, institutional and cultural contexts – that is, the conditions of possibility within the value community that produced them. The sounding forms of individual works – to adapt a Hanslickian manoeuvre – are conditioned by the inner form of conventions and values with which they are in dialogue. The more we grasp this inner form, the more we

30 • James Garratt Andantino 5

Capriccioso, quasi recitando

12

Pno.

Musical Example 2.1 Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade, Andantino, mm. 5–19

understand the evaluative criteria pertinent to a particular work. These criteria are highly variable, being historically and generically specific. A seemingly universal aesthetic principle such as originality, for example, only emerged in Western culture in the second half of the eighteenth century, and offers a misleading measure for music of earlier periods; even during the periods when it was operative, its importance was outweighed by other criteria in some fields of composition (e.g. church music). (On originality, see Adorno 1997, 172–3; see also Garratt 2002, 9–11, 173–80.) In addition, we should avoid assuming that criteria that served as generic norms within one national tradition had the same weight elsewhere. Consider, for example, the theme from the second movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade (Musical Example 2.1). Approached with expectations shaped by the Austro-German symphonic tradition, there is some justification for Roger Scruton’s negative evaluation of the theme, which he bases on ‘the limpness of the melodic line, the lack of inner voices, and the failure to develop’ (Scruton 1999, 373). For Rimsky-Korsakov’s defenders, such as Steven Griffiths, such a dismissal mistakes as a failing the work’s chief strength – that is, its ‘directness of expression unhampered by quasi-symphonic complexities of texture and structure’ (see Griffiths 1990, 245). Certainly, Scruton’s reasoning seems faulty, given the quasi recitando idiom and the developmental potential of the theme’s metrical ambiguity (a potential fully taken up in the subsequent variations). Even so, Scruton’s negative evaluation may seem to be justifiable on other grounds. From an early twenty-first-century perspective, the theme smacks of orientalist kitsch (think desert caravans and harem girls); indeed, the sheer overexposure of this music, together with the numerous pallid imitations it inspired, has had the effect of leaching away at least some of its charm and vitality (on kitsch, see Kulka 1996).7 In the case of this example, two different lines of argument generate a similar overall evaluation. But what if a range of evaluative criteria produce a conflicting picture? We tend to assume that lower-level aesthetic criteria add up to produce an overall judgement. However, even if such criteria result in a litany of superlatives, there is no guarantee that the work in question deserves a correspondingly glowing overall evaluation; as Theodore Gracyk argues, ‘the piece might be a hodgepodge of merit-qualities that lack internal connection to one another’ (Gracyk 2011, 170). A more familiar problem is the degree of influence that one particular criterion should

Values and judgements • 31

have on an overall evaluation. In this connection, Dahlhaus cites the critic Hans Georg Nägeli’s negative appraisal of the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (‘Jupiter’); for Nägeli, the use of alternating tonics and dominants in the passage before the second theme debases the work through its triviality: Pay attention to measures 19–21 in the first Allegro and compare them with measures 49–54; furthermore, do the same in the second section, measures 87–89 and 117–122. Such a mere alternating between a triad and a six-four-chord based on the exact same note is already trivial per se, indeed, it is one of the most worn-out and common commonplaces that typically is only used by the most common composers in orchestral compositions to facilitate the entrance of the French horns into the tutti. Here, however, this triviality appears analogously twice (i.e., four times in the very same piece). (Nägeli 1826; in Dahlhaus [1967] 2004, 342) To damn the whole on the basis of such a detail would surely count as poor judgement. While musical preferences often rest on such small moments, moving beyond such narrow focuses is what differentiates a reasoned evaluation from a preference or a Nägeli-style polemic. If I had to plump for one of the two versions of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 1 in C Minor (1866, 1890–1), for example, the first thing that would enter my head would be the extraordinary passage in the coda of the revised version (Musical Example 2.2), music that seems to break out of the confines of its surroundings and offer a monumental summation of its composer’s late style. While I enjoy luxuriating in this moment of overripe romanticism, however, I have no doubt that a point-by-point comparative evaluation would find in favour of the earlier version of the symphony (in which the work’s pithily classical themes are matched by their elaboration rather than fussily reworked to suit a later idiom). Such judgements treat evaluative criteria as evidence that can be stacked up in order to prove a case. But although the language of judgement recalls the world of the courtroom, there is nothing remotely definitive about artistic evaluations. There is no equivalent to DNA evidence among evaluative criteria; rather, as Gracyk argues, they offer no more than ‘rough heuristics for evaluating partial aspects of works’ (Gracyk 2011, 173). 361

Sehr breit

Musical Example 2.2 Bruckner, Symphony No. 1 (1890–1 version), finale, mm. 361–7

32 • James Garratt

Value formation in classical music and sixties rock Within particular cultures, a range of different factors contribute to the shaping of values and evaluative principles. Rock’s mid-1960s transformation from a teenage craze into a more consciously ambitious medium was not triggered solely by influential albums such as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), but also points to the growth of a music-aesthetic discourse in which rock was taken seriously. Similarly, the crystallization of the values of classical music in the early nineteenth century was not just a response to Beethoven’s symphonies, but reflects complex changes in the way that music was written about and received. Engaging with the music of Beethoven and the Beach Boys is crucial to grasping these new values (and to seeing how these new ideas interacted with earlier perspectives). But to understand the value systems at work in these two cultures, we cannot simply deduce rules or principles from exemplary pieces of music; rather, we need to examine how musical and aesthetic discourses interact, and gauge the perspectives which most closely represent those of the broader value communities which engendered them. In examining both these cultures, it is important to disentangle the values of their formative phase from the later baggage they accumulated. Austro-German musical culture from c.1800 to c.1830 has often been fingered as the source of a host of ideas and developments fundamental to how Western classical music is still perceived today: the concept of the musical work and of aesthetic autonomy, the idea of absolute music, the practice of contemplative listening in the concert hall, the growth of the musical canon, the emergence of music analysis and the turn towards objectivism in musical evaluation. (The locus classicus for this approach is Goehr 1992.) In reality, many of these ideas and practices did not become established until the second half of the nineteenth century – the start of what might be termed the ‘museum phase’ of classical music – and were only then projected back onto Beethoven and his age.8 As well as distinguishing between the ideas of Beethoven’s age and later accretions, we need to avoid distorting our picture of the former by homogenizing different value systems into a uniform aesthetic of ‘serious’ music (see Garratt 2010, 27). Indeed, within the pages of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and other early nineteenth-century journals, the evaluative criteria found in music reviews reflect four distinct strands of thought: (1) the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller, and of music critics who adapted and developed their ideas; (2) the Romantic transcendental/ idealist aesthetic of instrumental music as popularized by E. T. A. Hoffmann; (3) pre-Kantian aesthetic theory, derived mainly from encyclopedists such as Johann Georg Sulzer; and (4) more practically oriented, genre-focused criteria drawn from eighteenth-century composition treatises (such as those by Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Heinrich Christoph Koch). Broadly speaking, the new musical values that emerge in the nineteenth century represent a combination of the first two categories, but even Hoffmann draws extensively on ideas from the latter two categories. Rock discourse in its formative phase was no less pluralistic. In part, this reflects the wide range of styles rock drew together, but it also points to the multiple strands of media that had a role in the production of its values. Initially, print discussions of rock were largely limited to teen magazines and trade papers, but the mid-1960s saw the emergence of specialist magazines such as Crawdaddy (1966–) and Rolling Stone (1967–), while serious attention began to be given to rock in the arts sections of newspapers and periodicals like Village Voice and Partisan Review; this shift was paralleled on radio, with new FM stations engaging more broadly and deeply with rock than the earlier top-forty focused AM stations (for more detail, see Regev 1994, 90–1).

Values and judgements • 33

If these developments all affirmed rock’s cultural importance, they represented its value in very different ways. As well as taking account of this diversity, we need to distinguish the values imputed to rock in this formative period from those it acquired later, particularly after it entered its museum phase in the early 1980s as ‘classic rock’. One common factor shaping value formation in classical music and sixties rock is the demand to be taken seriously, an aim that in both cases resulted in a complicated, ambivalent relationship with the dominant discourses of art. Rock musicians and critics wanted rock to be treated as more than simply a teen craze, while their counterparts around 1800 wanted music to be accorded the same aesthetic dignity as the other arts. The familiar tale of music’s emancipation c.1800 centres on questions of status: how musical commentators, in the decades following the publication of the Third Critique redressed Kant’s low evaluation of music and in particular refuted his notorious equation of instrumental music with Tafelmusik. But this tale ignores the other side of this strategy of legitimation, since in many respects, Kant’s aesthetic and evaluative principles were imported wholesale into musical discourse. While instrumental music required its own unique rationale, critics were in other ways keen to demonstrate that music – if assessed through ‘reasoned judgements’ rather than ‘mere impressions’ – was perfectly capable of satisfying the same aesthetic criteria as the other fine arts (Friedrich Rochlitz, ‘Gedanken über die Oper’ [1798], as quoted in Applegate 2005, 90). Accordingly, music critics and aestheticians such as Rochlitz, Christian Friedrich Michaelis and Amadeus Wendt sought to construct a category of musical art that marginalized music’s sensual dimension, lay emphasis on its capacity for purposive form, and stressed that musical works – like their counterparts in the other arts – demanded active engagement and repeated encounters for their qualities to be fully appreciated (see especially Michaelis 1997, 9, 16, 91). In relation to rock the idea of art proved more contentious. For some 1960s musicians and critics, it was unproblematic to view rock’s new seriousness as a sign of its ascent to the level of art (see, for example, Anderson [1967] 2007). Others repudiated attempts to ‘reduce rock to something other than itself in order to ascertain its validity’, and regarded the self-conscious artiness of albums such as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) as a threat to rock’s own unique values (Meltzer [1970] 1987, 15). Urging it to remain true to its roots, Jon Landau argued in 1968 that ‘rock is not primarily poetry or art, but something much more direct and immediate than either. Rock and roll has to be body music, before it can be head music, or it will wind up being neither’ (Landau 1972, 134). Rather than simply judging rock by principles that were alien to it, rock’s incorporation into the institution of art threatened for some critics to neuter its subversive, populist character. In an interpretation that later became standard within sociological studies, Ellen Willis claimed that rock has been co-opted by high culture, forced to adopt its standards – chief of which is the integrity of the art object. It means the end of rock as a radical experiment in creating mass culture on its own terms, ignoring elite definitions of what is or is not intrinsic to aesthetic experience. (Willis [1968] 2005, 222) The idea that the cultural establishment was imposing its own values on to rock led Richard Meltzer and other critics to sketch out an alternative ‘rock aesthetic’, with the aim of maintaining

34 • James Garratt

its distinctness and counter-cultural energy (Meltzer [1970] 1987; see also Chester 1970). The view that approaching rock from the perspective of art overlooks its true values, or ‘praises it for all the wrong reasons’, remains common today (Gracyk 2007, 12). But however valid, this standpoint should not obscure the extent to which sixties rock appropriated principles and practices from high art. The shift away from cover versions towards largely original material, and the concern for creating unified albums were two symptoms; just as important was the increasing concern with creating complex, fixed musical objects – sometimes irreproducible in live performance – within the recording studio. No less than classical music, rock began to be seen as rewarding repeated listening and demanding undistracted contemplation; commenting on Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson urged that ‘the best way to listen to the whole album is through headphones in the dark’ (Wyn Jones 2008, 46). Crucial to value formation within both classical music and rock were the kind of dichotomizing strategies seen earlier in Kant. In order to elevate some music to the level of high art, music critics around 1800 zealously partitioned the musical field, marginalizing genres, practices and even classes of listeners who failed to measure up to the new aesthetic ideals (see especially Sponheuer 1987). One particularly unhelpful dichotomy that emerged in this period is that of pure versus applied art, or art music versus functional music. (On the relationship between functional or ‘non-aesthetic’ music and value, see Gracyk 2011, 173–4.) Misreading Kant’s distinction between free and accessory beauty, Nägeli constructed a particularly rigid distinction between these two categories, consigning everything except pure instrumental music to the lower sphere of applied art (Nägeli 1802–3, 225–37, 265–74; see Garratt 2010, 33–4). Fundamental to elevating music’s status was excluding genres that offered only sensuous stimulation or empty virtuosity, with the aim of fencing off – as Rochlitz put it – ‘music which makes itself valid as art from that which is a mere fleeting entertainment’ (‘Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkunst’, in Rochlitz 1824–32, Vol. IV, 193). Such dichotomies were reinforced from the 1820s through the widespread elevation of Beethoven as an antithesis to Rossini, pinning the eagle against the butterfly, or German seriousness and truth against Italian sensuality and triviality (on the Beethoven–Rossini debate, see Sponheuer 1987, 9–35). During Beethoven’s lifetime, it must be emphasized, these new ideals represented a minority aspiration, remained in a state of flux, and in no sense reflected the norms animating contemporary institutions and practices. This explains the tensions that exist between some of the new artistic values and Beethoven’s own output; it was later generations that sought anxiously to distinguish the ‘true’ values of Beethoven’s age from those that produced the ‘Battle Symphony’ Wellingtons Sieg, or the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick (see Cook 2003). Rock defined itself through similar dichotomies, with musicians and critics seeking to distance its creativity and subversiveness from commercial mainstream pop. In an early issue of Crawdaddy, Paul Williams emphasized that ‘rock ‘n’ roll, or the big beat, or whatever clumsy term we want to use, is a musical idiom quite apart from what is selling at the moment; i.e. quite apart from pop music’ (Williams [1966] 2002, 39). Like the proponents of classical music a century and a half earlier, Williams distinguished the select category of listeners capable of appreciating rock from the majority, with its ‘strange affection for saccharine-sweet movie soundtracks and for Herbert Alpert and his Tijuana Dross’ (Williams [1966] 2002, 39). Although one British critic invoked the Kantian opposition of fine and agreeable art in championing the Stones over the Beatles, rock critics were in general wary of the distinctions and vocabulary

Values and judgements • 35

associated with high culture (Merton 1968). Far from rejecting sensuous pleasure or the idea of entertainment, critics like Robert Christgau emphasized rock’s physicality, ‘unrelenting eclecticism’ and ability to ‘dignify the ephemeral and demean the profound’ (Christgau [1970] 2013). The most extensive attempt to grasp rock’s eclecticism, Meltzer’s Aesthetics of Rock (1970), argued that rather than carving out a territory for itself through such dichotomies, rock had swallowed them whole, revelling in its ‘incoherency, incongruity, and downright selfcontradiction’ (Meltzer [1970] 1987, 7). Tellingly, Meltzer argued that only after acknowledging how rock had widened the vocabulary of aesthetics – through drawing in the ‘incongruous, trivial, mediocre, banal, insipid, maudlin, abominable, trite, redundant, repulsive, ugly, innocuous, crass, incoherent, vulgar, tasteless, sour, [and] boring’ – should critics consider applying high art terms such as ‘poignant, sincere, beautiful, etc.’ to it (Meltzer [1970] 1987, 13). Such a perspective – resisting the urge to tidy up or sanitize the rock aesthetic – finds plenty to support it in the Beach Boys back catalogue. The group’s most successful album of 1965–6 was not the arty Pet Sounds but a collection of covers (Beach Boys’ Party!), while one year earlier the band had released the kind of festive LP more often associated with fifties’ crooners (The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album). And few forms of pop more closely resemble a caricature of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry than the surfing songs – ‘Surfin’ Safari’ (1962) and ‘Surfin’ USA’ (1963), which made the group’s name. One shared component within the values of classical music and rock is an aesthetic of subjective expression, reflected in the ideas of genius, originality and authenticity found in both discourses. In both cultures these ideas were surprisingly fluid and multivalent. While genius and originality were well established as aesthetic criteria by Beethoven’s day, some of his critics understood them in terms quite different from Romantic notions of untrammelled creativity or rhapsodic personal revelation. Rather, reviewers schooled in eighteenth-century aesthetics conceived genius as inventiveness (the capacity to produce an inexhaustible flow of workable musical ideas) and an identifiably personal idiom, qualities that were expected to be matched by an adherence to other aesthetic principles if they were to avoid straying into bizarreness and caprice (see Morrow 1997, 99–133). Thus, a Viennese reviewer praised the ‘Eroica’ Symphony for its great and daring ideas, and, as one can expect from the genius of this composer, great power in the way it is worked out; but the symphony would improve immeasurably (it lasts an entire hour) if B. could bring himself to shorten it, and to bring more light, clarity, and unity into the whole. (Anon., ‘Vienna, 9 April’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 7 (1805), 501–2, in Senner 2001, 17) Only a small minority of critics used the term ‘genius’ in the Romantic sense when praising Beethoven, such as an 1807 review describing how, ‘scorning all fetters, he expressed himself with all the depth and genius of his soul’ (Anon., ‘News. Prague’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 9 (1807), 610, in Senner 2001, 34). Even Hoffmann, aware of the negative associations of genius with ‘extravagant bizarreness’ and ‘uncontrolled imagination’, avoided using the term without clarification: one of the most surprising aspects of his review of Beethoven’s Fifth is his recurrent qualification of genius with the idea of circumspection (Besonnenheit), as in his argument that

36 • James Garratt

is it only through entering very deeply into the inner structure of Beethoven’s music that the great presence of mind of this master reveals itself, which is inseparable from true genius and is nourished by unceasing study of the art. (E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Review’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12 (1810), 630–42 and 652–9, in Senner 2001, 97–8) If genius remained unstable and contested in the age of Beethoven, the concept of authenticity was in a similar state of flux in sixties rock discourse. Authenticity, in the sense of honest, heartfelt personal expression, was dismissed as ‘meaningless’ by Meltzer as a criterion of value (Meltzer [1970] 1987, 10).9 For other critics, however, it rapidly came to serve as rock’s key point of orientation: the glue that enabled its eclectic idioms to gel together and a brake on – or compensation for – its drift towards artistry and artifice. The concept entered rock discourse via folk rock; it first crops up in Crawdaddy, perhaps unsurprisingly, in relation to Bob Dylan, described as a ‘1960s bard with electric lyre and color slides, a truthful man with x-ray eyes you can look through if you want’ (Williams [1966] 2002, 36). The idea that rock offered a window on the soul of its creators put a premium on originality, spontaneity and raw emotion. A 1970 review of Van Morrison notes that ‘what one hears is not style, but personality . . . the authenticity of spirit’, while Landau argued that ‘the criterion for art in rock is the capacity of the music to create a personal, almost private universe and to express it fully’ (Anon. 1970; Landau, 1972, 15). Several of the concept albums from the late 1960s were perceived as suspect from this perspective; for Landau, the posturing, artifice and lack of truth of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request brought it close to kitsch, while Richard Goldstein condemned Sgt. Pepper as an ‘immense put-on . . . dazzling but ultimately fraudulent’ (Landau 1967; Goldstein 1967). Pet Sounds, in spite of its artistic ambitions, proved immune to such criticism. While band member Mike Love was concerned that it would be regarded as ‘ego music’, critics considered it to take the ideal of authenticity to a new level; for Stephen Davis, it showed that composer Brian Wilson had ‘his psyche on the pulse of universal subjectivity’, offering an ‘intense, linear personal vision’ with the ‘emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel’ (Davis [1972] 2013). In the case of Beethoven, contemporary reviewers employed a range of intrinsic and technical criteria – unity, organic development, clarity of modulation, diligence in contrapuntal elaboration, and so on – to back up their general evaluations. Even these kinds of criteria meant different things to different critics. Thus when Wendt talks of the importance of unity, what he has in mind is not primarily how themes or movements interrelate, but rather the necessity of a ‘dominant mood, which the work of art must bring forth as a total impression’ (Amadeus Wendt, ‘Thoughts about Recent Musical Art, and van Beethoven’s Music’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (1815), 630–42 and 652–9, in Senner 2001, 187). As Holly Watkins points out, Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth too remains loyal to the eighteenth-century idea that each movement should be governed by a single affect (Watkins 2004, 198). However, Hoffmann, alongside a handful of other contemporary reviewers, was also concerned with demonstrating the thematic unity of Beethoven’s works (in this case, the ‘deeper relationship’ between the themes of the two allegros and the minuet; Senner 2001, 110). Other critics such as Rochlitz also supported their judgements with detailed commentaries on the music, highlighting the ways in which Beethoven had departed from convention and thus deceived listeners’ expectations (Anon. [Friedrich Rochlitz], ‘Review’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 9 (1807), 321–3, in Senner 2001, 21–2).

Values and judgements • 37

This level of musical commentary is foreign to sixties rock discourse; indeed, some critics regarded such discussion as pointless, arguing that ‘the aesthetic originality of rock never inhered in its strictly musical qualities’ (Christgau [1970] 2013). As Ellen Willis noted in 1968, however, albums such as Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper, not to mention the preference for more complex music and lyrics exhibited by rock’s new ‘student-hippie-intellectual audience’, resulted in ‘an increasing tendency to judge pop music intrinsically’ (Willis [1968] 2005, 222). Certainly, internal musical criteria alone cannot give an exhaustive account of a song’s value, although they may not seem a bad place to start. Consider one of the best-loved songs from Pet Sounds, ‘God Only Knows’, hailed by Paul McCartney as the greatest song ever written. Indeed, the effusive praise routinely lavished on this song has led to something of a backlash: Gracyk singles it out in highlighting the distortions that result from treating rock as art, arguing that any subtlety it possesses is ‘only discernible against the backdrop of 1960s formulas’ (Gracyk 2007, 13). But this backdrop – just like the body of expectations that Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ plays against – is not something external to the music, but rather is heard in dialogue with it. The 32-measure song form provides the conditions of possibility for the music of ‘God Only Knows’, and there is nothing unusual about its 8+4 measure verse/chorus scheme; similarly, the idea of a bridge section in a related key is standard within the genre. What is different here, however, is how the move to the subdominant in the bridge conditions the tonal behaviour of the entire song, which, though nominally in E major, is characterized throughout by a tension between it and A major (see Musical Example 2.3). This tonal plasticity – emphasized by the avoidance of authentic cadences and root-position tonics – is what gives the song its feeling of expansiveness. But the rigidity of the eight-bar phrase structure is also softened by the subtlety of the voice leading, in particular the supple bass lines (notice how the tension between E and A major is reflected in the mixed messages sent out by the chords and voice leading in measures 7–8 and subsequently). By beginning each verse in the subdominant, Wilson makes the song’s masterstroke seem utterly natural. While the idea of presenting the verse harmonies in the subdominant in the bridge was not new, what is striking here is the smoothness with which the song drops back into the original key – a moment rendered even more arresting by the truncated three-measure phrase that precedes it. No wonder that Daniel Harrison claims ‘there is no moment in rock music more harmonically and formally subtle than this transition’, and that Dominic King describes it as ‘the most perfectly constructed song in pop history’ (Harrison 1997, 35; King [2005] 2013). All of which raises several questions. Does discussing the song in this manner – emphasizing its harmonic sophistication and how it plays with expectations – merely subordinate it to evaluative criteria conceived around art music? Given that, like any artefact, it is the product of a particular culture, should we restrict ourselves to the kind of appraisals that were the norm within that culture at the time it was conceived? And if not, does that mean that the music of all cultures and periods can be measured by the same standards: where should we draw the line? Clearly, the analytical comments made above only access one aspect of the song’s value (a fuller account would surely mention the colourful ‘Baroque rock’ instrumentation, the delicate ways in which the vocal line and harmonies respond to the lyrics, and the haunting lead vocals). Yet as my choice of ‘God Only Knows’ reveals, there is a danger when classically trained musicians venture into pop that they focus on material that can most readily be accommodated within their existing aesthetic biases; as Gracyk argues, ‘we know that some popular music meets some of the standards of excellence recognized by traditional aesthetic theory. But it usually satisfies

38 • James Garratt

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another set of standards, inimical to those traditional standards’ (Gracyk 2007, 25). As the comparative discussion above confirms, there are substantial divergences between the values of rock in its defining phase and those of classical music. Few would dispute Gracyk’s argument that rock should be accorded its own aesthetic, rather than judged from perspectives conceived around classical music: after all, doesn’t every culture have its own very different set of values? Perhaps it does, but the idea of culture is certainly an obstacle to understanding how these different values interact. The problem is that it suggests a series of hermetic boxes, each containing its own wholly distinct value system. Thus Gracyk speaks of the ‘barriers’ and ‘divides’ between musical cultures, a viewpoint that leads him to argue that ‘far from being a universal language, music appears to be a divisive force’ (Gracyk 2007, 69, 77; Gracyk 2011, 174). However, this perspective seems at odds with our everyday experience of engaging with and appreciating music from a range of cultures. The capacity to appreciate music from multiple cultures should not lead us to overlook the differences between their values, or to minimize the effort that fully understanding them involves. It does remind us, though, that value communities are loose, porous formations, constantly overlapping and intermingling; rather than emphasizing simply what’s unique and distinct about them, we also need to look for points of commonality. Two centuries ago, Kant assumed the existence of a sensus communis aestheticus – a shared sense of the aesthetic – that enabled cosmopolitan individuals to cultivate a broadened way of thinking and make judgements from a universal standpoint (Kant [1790] 1987, 295, section 40). While

Values and judgements • 39

Kant’s universalism is no longer attractive, we can surely still benefit from conceiving the aesthetic as an active endeavour to grasp the values of other cultures and to seek out common ground between them. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Notable exceptions include Dahlhaus [1970] 1983; Johnson 2002; Kramer 2009. Some examples of the broader project of re-establishing the idea of principled judgements include Squires 1993 and Wolff 2008. On Kant, Schiller and aesthetic ideology, see Eagleton 1990 and Woodmansee 1994, esp. 57–86. For a more detailed discussion of Bourdieu (and his misreading of Kant), see Gracyk 2007, 29–33. For a useful survey of how aesthetics has responded to critiques of the high/low dichotomy, see Novitz 2003. On the ubiquity of the concept of bad music, see the essays in Washburne and Derno 2004. See also www.arabkitsch.com (accessed 25 June 2013). The idea of a museum phase in the history of Western classical music stems from Burkholder 1983. The wider connotations of authenticity in rock are explored in Weisethaunet and Lindberg 2010.

Bibliography of works cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory, eds Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone Press. Anderson, Chester. [1967] 2007. ‘Rock and the Counterculture’, in The Rock History Reader, ed. Theo Cateforis. New York: Routledge, 99–102. Anon. 1970. ‘Van Morrison: Moondance’, Rolling Stone. Available at: www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/ moondance-19700319 (accessed 21 July 2013). Applegate, Celia. 2005. Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1990), trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. ––––– 2005. The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges. New York: Semiotext(e). Bauman, Zygmunt. 2011. Culture in a Liquid Modern World, trans. Lydia Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beardsley, Monroe C. 1981. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. 2nd edn. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Bindé, Jérôme (ed.). 2004. The Future of Values: 21st-Century Talks, trans. John Corbett. New York: UNESCO and Berghahn Books. Born, Georgina. 1995. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. New York: Routledge. Burkholder, J. Peter. 1983. ‘Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years’, Journal of Musicology, 2: 115–34. Chester, Andrew. 1970. ‘For a Rock Aesthetic’, New Left Review, 59: 83–7. Christgau, Robert. [1970] 2013. ‘Rock is Obsolescent, But So Are You’. Available at: www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkaow/obsolesc.php (accessed 21 July 2013). Cook, Nicholas. 2003. ‘The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14’, 19th-Century Music, 27: 3–24. Corcoran, Steven. 2010. ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum. Dahlhaus, Carl. [1970] 1983. Analysis and Value Judgment, trans. Siegmund Levarie. New York: Pendragon Press. ––––– [1967] 2004. ‘Trivial Music and Aesthetic Judgment’, trans. Uli Sailer, in Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno (eds), Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. New York: Routledge, 333–61. Davis, Stephen. [1972] 2013. ‘The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds’, Rolling Stone. Available at: www.rollingstone.com/music/ albumreviews/pet-sounds-19720622 (accessed 21 July 2013). DeNora, Tia. 2004. ‘Musical Practice and Social Structure: A Toolkit’, in Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook, eds. Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects. New York: Oxford University Press, 35–56. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Eriksson, Birgit. 2011. ‘Tasting the World: Universal Openness and New Boundaries in Contemporary Cultural Taste’, in Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Jakob Ladegaard, eds. Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 139–61. Foster, Hal (ed.) 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Frith, Simon. 1998. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

40 • James Garratt Garratt, James. 2002. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 2010. Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goldstein, Richard. 1967. ‘Recordings: We still need the Beatles, but . . .’, New York Times, 18 June, 104. Gracyk, Theodore. 2007. Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ––––– 2011. ‘Evaluating Music’, in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. New York: Routledge, 165–75. Griffiths, Steven. 1990. A Critical Study of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov. New York: Garland. Harrison, Daniel. 1997. ‘After Sundown: The Beach Boys’ Experimental Music’, in John Rudolph Covach and Graeme MacDonald Boone, eds. Understanding Rock Music: Essays in Musical Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 33–58. Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. 1988. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, Julian. 2002. Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Values. New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. [1790] 1987. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. King, Dominic. [2005] 2013. ‘God Only Knows – The Beach Boys’, Sold on Song Top 100 (April 2005). Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/songlibrary/indepth/godonlyknows.shtml (accessed 21 July 2013). Kramer, Lawrence. 2009. Why Classical Music Still Matters. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kulka, Tomas. 1996. Kitsch and Art. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Landau, Jon. 1967. ‘The Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request’, Rolling Stone. Available at: www.rollingstone. com/music/albumreviews/their-satanic-majesties-request-19671208 (accessed 21 July 2013). ––––– 1972. It’s Too Late to Stop Now: A Rock and Roll Journal. San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books. Levy, Janet M. 1987. ‘Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writings about Music’, The Journal of Musicology, 5: 3–27. Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen. 2006. ‘What Does “Critical Composition” Mean?’, in Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, ed. Critical Composition Today. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 75–87. Meltzer, Richard. [1970] 1987. The Aesthetics of Rock. New York: Something Else Press; repr. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Merton, Richard. 1968. ‘Comment’, New Left Review, 47, 29–31. Meyer, Leonard B. 1959. ‘Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17: 486–500. Michaelis, Christian Friedrich. 1997. Uber de Geist der Tonkunst und andere Schriften, ed. Lothar Schmidt. Chemnitz: Gudrun Schröder Verlag. Morgan, Robert P. 2003. ‘The Concept of Unity and Musical Analysis’, Music Analysis, 22: 7–50. Morrow, Mary Sue. 1997. German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nägeli, Hans Georg. 1802–3. ‘Versuch einer Norm für die Recensenten der musikalischen Zeitung’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 5: 225–37, 265–74. ––––– 1826. Vorlesungen über Musik mit Berücksichtigung der Dilettanten. Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta. Nealon, Jeffrey T. 2012. Post-Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2008. ‘Merely Interesting’, Critical Inquiry, 34: 777–817. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novitz, David. 2003. ‘Aesthetics of Popular Art’, in Jerrold Levinson, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 733–47. Pastille, William. 1995. ‘Schenker’s Value Judgments’, Music Theory Online 1/6. Available at: www.mtosmt.org. Peterson, Richard A. 1997. ‘The Rise and Fall of Highbrow Snobbery as a Status Marker’, Poetics, 25: 75–92. Prior, Nick. 2013. ‘Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments’, Sociology Compass, 7: 181–93. Regev, Motti. 1994. ‘Producing Artistic Value: The Case of Rock Music’, The Sociological Quarterly, 35: 85–102. Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1824–32. Für Freunde der Tonkunst, 4 vols. Leipzig: Carl Cnobloch. Schiller, Friedrich. [1794] 1967. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, eds. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ––––– 1993. ‘On the Pathetic’, in Essays, eds. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Continuum. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––––– 2009. Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation. London: Continuum. Senner, Wayne M. (ed.) 2001. The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by his German Contemporaries, Vol. 2. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Sponheuer, Bernd. 1987. Musik als Kunst und Nicht-Kunst: Untersuchungen zur Dichotomie von ‘hoher’ und ‘niederer’ Musik im musikästhetischen Denken zwischen Kant und Hanslick. Kassel: Bärenreiter.

Values and judgements • 41 Squires, Judith (ed.). 1993. Principled Positions: Postmodernism and the Rediscovery of Value. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Washburne, Christopher and Derno, Maiken (ed.) 2004. Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. New York: Routledge. Watkins, Holly. 2004. ‘From the Mine to the Shrine: The Critical Origins of Musical Depth’, 19th-Century Music, 27: 179–207. Weisethaunet, Hans and Lindberg, Ulf. 2010. ‘Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and the Changing Real’, Popular Music and Society, 33: 465–85. Williams, Paul. [1966] 2002. ‘The New Sounds: The Mamas and Papas, the Blues Project, Love’ and ‘Understanding Dylan’. In The Crawdaddy! Book: Writings (and Images) from the Magazine of Rock, ed. Paul Williams. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corp. Willis, Ellen. [1968] 2005. ‘Musical Events – Records: Rock, Etc.’, The New Yorker, 6 July 1968, 56–8, as presented in David Brackett, ed. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates. New York: Oxford University Press, 222. Wolff, Janet. 2008. The Aesthetics of Uncertainty. New York: Columbia University Press. Woodmansee, Martha. 1994. The Author, Art, and The Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press. Wyn Jones, Carys. 2008. The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums. Aldershot: Ashgate.

3 Absolute music Thomas Grey

Introduction Any music is ‘absolute’ – in the usual understanding of the term – if it is presented to the listener as a sounding aesthetic object without accompanying verbal text (in the form of vocal lyrics, program, or descriptive title) and without serving any particular function besides the listening experience itself. Normally, this is understood to be instrumental music, although vocalise or electronic music, for example, could also fit the definition. While clear examples can be found in the music of the late Renaissance or early Baroque in the form of instrumental canzonas, ricercares, contrapuntal fantasias and above all the Baroque fugue, the apogee of ‘absolute music’ as a practice and an ideology is usually located between the era of Viennese classicism, in the later eighteenth century, and the early Romantic era, when writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann began to articulate a distinct, positive aesthetic of pure instrumental music (most famously in Hoffmann’s 1810 review-essay on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony).1 The opposition to instrumental music expressed by British essayist Charles Lamb in his ‘Chapter on Ears’ (Essays of Elia, 1823) is a satirical provocation on the part of a professed musical agnostic, but it is in many ways just as instructive as the paeans to the transcendent powers of ‘pure music’ intoned by his German Romantic contemporaries: Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension. Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a-dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime – these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. (Lamb 1835, 43) Lamb’s complaint on the importunities of ‘empty instrumental music’ is essentially an amplification of Bernard de Fontenelle’s famous quip from a century before: Sonate, que me veux-tu? (‘Sonata, what do you want of me?’).2 Both respond to the sense that the relatively recent phenomenon of instrumental music is making unwonted – and unwanted – demands

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on the attention and even understanding of the listener. For Lamb, a concerto or other modern ‘piece of music’ harasses the listener with a surfeit of decorative ‘sweetness’ without signification, emotional gestures without referents, audible syntax without semantics, and the contours of dramatic mimesis without character or plot. The terms of his objections tell us much about the technical conditions that had evolved in the era of tonal music since the seventeenth century, enabling the rise of what came to be called absolute music. Even the anti-musical Lamb detects the role of affective, rhetorical gesture and syntactical phrasing or punctuation (‘a book, all stops’) that allowed contemporary listeners to hear music as a wordless ‘language of feelings’. Along with these internal, technical conditions of composition enabling genres of independent instrumental music are social conditions: the increasing presence of music-making within the everyday soundscape of bourgeois life in the form of domestic music-making and public concerts. Even apart from larger trends in late Enlightenment and Romantic-idealist intellectual discourse, there is good reason why the need for a theory of ‘absolute’ instrumental music came to be felt by the early nineteenth century. The following sections of this chapter will attempt to (1) sketch the historical development of ‘absolute music’ as both a concept and a specific term; (2) interrogate the parameters understood to constitute ‘absolute music’ in the era of tonal common practice; (3) distinguish between a Romantic metaphysics of absolute music and an other (empirical, formalist) versions; and (4) consider the status of the concept in contemporary scholarship and criticism. Absolute music as term and concept: an historical perspective The term ‘absolute music’ can be traced, tellingly, to two nearly contemporaneous and antagonistic sources: Richard Wagner and Eduard Hanslick, each writing around the very middle of the nineteenth century. Wagner introduced the term in a significant though historically obscure context, the programmatic commentary he devised for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony he conducted in Dresden in April 1846. Explicating the introductory gestures of the famous finale, Wagner writes: With the beginning of this finale Beethoven’s music takes on a more distinctly speaking character: it leaves behind the character of pure instrumental music such as had been maintained throughout the first three movements, the realm of infinite and indistinct expression. . . . We must admire how the master has prepared the entrance of language and the human voice as something both anticipated and necessary by means of the shattering recitative of the double basses when, nearly transgressing the boundaries of absolute music, this recitative engages the other instruments with its powerfully emotional discourse, pressing for some resolution, and finally issuing in a lyrical theme. (Wagner 1887, vol. 2, 60–1; trans. Grey 2009, 486) Wagner’s text would not have reached many readers, at least until it was reprinted in his collected writings in the 1870s. All the same, it tells us a great deal about the emerging critical discourse of what would eventually be canonized under his phrase, ‘absolute music’. First of all, he provides the alternative, more standard locution for the idea in the early nineteenth century, ‘pure instrumental music’. Second, he alludes to the Romantic aesthetic ideology that had been influentially articulated by E. T. A. Hoffmann, specifically with reference to Beethoven’s symphonies, in relating ‘pure instrumental music’ to ‘the realm of infinite and indistinct

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expression’. Third, he rehearses his own critical argument, more emphatically and influentially expressed in The Artwork of the Future some years later (1849), that Beethoven’s Ninth – like the later music as a whole – exemplified a modern aesthetic imperative for music to move beyond the realm of ‘indistinct expression’ and to seek new representational and expressive determinacy either through the internal development of compositional resources – harmonic, melodic and formal – or ultimately through a new synthesis of music with poetry or drama.3 While the initial circulation of this 1846 program note may have been very restricted, Wagner returned to the term ‘absolute music’ repeatedly throughout both The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama (1852), texts that were widely read and debated following their first publication. In both of those texts the term is subject to Wagner’s polemic against the cultivation of the traditional arts in their individual, isolated (‘absolute’) condition, which is to be superseded by the combined or ‘total artwork of the future’ (Gesamtkunstwerk der Zukunft). Eduard Hanslick’s path-breaking short treatise of 1854 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music or, in Geoffrey Payzant’s 1986 translation, On the Musically Beautiful) has traditionally been viewed as a theory of absolute music. This view is certainly accurate, even though – somewhat paradoxically – the term ‘absolute music’ appears only incidentally in the text. As with Wagner’s first use of the term, this ‘incidental’ appearance is nonetheless significant, and can help us understand the general purpose of Hanslick’s treatise as well as clarifying some common misapprehensions about it. In the middle of his second chapter, devoted to the demonstration that ‘the representation of feelings is not the content of music’, Hanslick comments on the methodology of this demonstration: ‘We have deliberately chosen instrumental music for our examples.’ (In addition to a brief analysis of the opening theme of Beethoven’s overture to the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus Hanslick invokes, in passing, Bach’s preludes and fugues, symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, and ‘an adagio of Beethoven, a scherzo of Mendelssohn, or a piano piece by Schumann or Chopin’ as representative types; Hanslick [1854] 1986, 14). This is only for the reason that whatever can be asserted of instrumental music holds good for all music as such. If some general definition of music be sought, something by which to characterize its essence and its nature, to establish its boundaries and purpose, we are entitled to confine ourselves to instrumental music. Of what instrumental music cannot do, it ought never be said that music can do it, because only instrumental music is music purely and absolutely (denn nur sie ist reine, absolute Tonkunst). (Hanslick [1854] 1986, 14–15; see Hanslick [1854] 1990, 52) Hanslick is making a simple clinical, procedural point. Arguments about how music ‘works’ or about its effects are best made with reference to music without accompanying text, function or other extra-musical dimensions. Hanslick’s later critical opposition to both the theories and the music of Richard Wagner has, together with the resonance of the phrase die reine, absolute Tonkunst when recalled out of context, probably contributed to the notion that Hanslick’s treatise glorifies instrumental music at the expense of vocal music or opera.4 In fact, in the very nextsentence Hanslick denounces invidious comparisons of the value of instrumental versus vocal music as ‘dilettantish’ and irrelevant, following which he turns to examples of vocal music (if only to prove the non-exclusive relationship of verbal semantics to musical settings of a given text). Just as in Wagner’s reference to ‘absolute music’ in his 1846 commentary on Beethoven, Hanslick’s single use of the phrase ‘absolute music’ (as absolute Tonkunst) exemplifies its

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genealogy in the locution ‘purely instrumental music’, which continued to remain standard parlance throughout most of the nineteenth century. Both Wagner and Hanslick apply the adjective ‘absolute’ in the sense made current at the time through the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach to denote an isolated, specialized branch of knowledge, practice or inquiry. Wagner would go on to emphasize the critical implications of this isolation – a ‘bad’ autonomy charged with cutting music off from a natural and healthy interaction with its sister arts – throughout the so-called Zurich writings from around 1850. Hanslick’s unique application of the adjective in On the Musically Beautiful, on the other hand, can easily be heard to resonate with the Hegelian metaphysics of the ‘Absolute’ (which he famously invoked in a passage later deleted from the final pages of the treatise at the prompting of his colleague Robert Zimmermann).5 To begin with, however, ‘absolute music’ denoted for both Wagner and Hanslick simply the repertoire of ‘pure instrumental music’ as it had developed over the preceding two centuries of European musical practice. Although, as Sanna Pederson has persuasively demonstrated, neither Wagner’s nor Hanslick’s original uses of the phrase ‘absolute music’ brought the term into regular critical use during their lifetimes, both of them exerted considerable influence on debates over the concept and status of ‘purely instrumental music’ at a time when the emerging canon of instrumental classics was confronted by modern, post-Beethovenian music with claims to new levels of expressive or semantic determinacy. Wagner stated his position in no uncertain terms. ‘Who will be to Beethoven what he was, necessarily, to Mozart and Haydn?’ he asks, rhetorically, in The Artwork of the Future. ‘No one, not even the greatest [musical] genius, since the Genius of absolute music no longer needs him’ (Wagner 1887, vol. 3, 101).6 That is to say, for Wagner the age of ‘absolute music’ has come and gone; the ‘greatest musical genius’ will henceforth be working in some other sphere (specifically, the combined musical-dramatic ‘artwork of the future’). And although Hanslick, as mentioned, did not set as his goal in On the Musically Beautiful to argue for the supremacy of a classical instrumental canon over opera, program music, or the dawning Wagnerian ‘music drama’, it is entirely justified to view his book as the first and faraway most influential statement on the idea of ‘absolute music’, even if he did not grant the term itself a special status. The essentials of this statement can be located in two arguments of Hanslick’s book: the ‘negative’ thesis of his second chapter, that the artistic value or ‘content’ of music (paradigmatically, instrumental music) is not to be sought in the putative feelings or emotions generated by it; and the ‘positive’ thesis of his third chapter, that the artistic value or ‘content’ of music, however elusive, is intrinsic to the materials of the composition and their treatment by the composer, what Hanslick tried to sum up as tönend bewegte Formen (‘musically sounding forms in motion’, or in Payzant’s translation, ‘tonally moving forms’; (Hanslick [1854] 1990, 75; [1854] 1986, 29).7 Hanslick had more difficulty in formulating the second, or positive thesis of musical beauty, in part because he was hobbled by an obligation to work with categories of ‘form’ and ‘content’ received from contemporary aesthetic philosophy. In treating the categories of musical ‘beauty’, ‘value’ and ‘content’ as all more or less synonymous, and insisting on their immanence to ‘musically sounding forms in motion’ Hanslick can be regarded as articulating a foundational principle of ‘absolute music’. A succinct definition of the idea can also be found near the beginning of his third chapter (‘The Musically Beautiful’), where he answers the question ‘What kind of beauty is the beauty of a musical composition?’ as follows:

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It is a specifically musical kind of beauty. By this we understand a beauty that is selfcontained and in no need of content from outside itself, that consists simply and solely of tones and their artistic combination. Relationships, fraught with significance, of sounds which are in themselves charming – their congruity and opposition, their separating and combining, their soaring and subsiding – this is what comes in spontaneous forms before our inner contemplation and pleases us as beautiful. (Hanslick [1854] 1986, 28)8 Along with ‘purely musical’, the phrase ‘specifically musical’ was another standard locution for the idea of absolute music in Hanslick’s and Wagner’s time, one whose currency can be directly linked to the impact of On the Musically Beautiful. It is worth recalling again, as Pederson has shown, that only Wagner used the term ‘absolute music’ with any regularity before the end of the nineteenth century, and that only in his ‘Zurich’ writings of 1849–51 where it is the object of a polemical critique (Pederson 2009). Despite the undeniable importance of a Romantic metaphysics of ‘purely instrumental music’, the Hegelian notion of the ‘Absolute’ routinely invoked in current scholarly discussion of ‘absolute music’ was not necessarily central to discussions of the idea in the nineteenth century. Hanslick’s ‘specifically musical’ and Wagner’s ‘absolute music’ around 1850 simply denoted ‘music alone’ (to invoke the title of one of Peter Kivy’s many essays on music aesthetics – see Kivy 1990), while the claims of such music to transcendent metaphysical import remained a matter of context, repertoire and individual critical beliefs. Questions of terminology aside, it has long been assumed that a philosophical discourse of absolute or purely instrumental music emerged between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in response to the rapid rise of instrumental genres such as the sonata, string quartet, and symphony during this period, above all in the canon of the ‘Viennese classical school’ of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Mark Evan Bonds has influentially proposed an alternative view, that a new propensity to ‘idealist’ structures of thought in German-language philosophy of the period provided the necessary matrix for a new valuation of instrumental music in the era of Beethoven and E. T. A. Hoffmann (Bonds 1997; see also Bonds 2006). The issue can easily devolve into a kind of chicken-or-egg problem if we attempt to isolate musical practice from intellectual-cultural context, and it probably makes most sense to view the two in a productive dialectical or symbiotic relation. Clearly much had changed between the time of Fontenelle’s querulous challenge, Sonate, que me veux-tu? and the effusions of Tieck, Wackenroder, or Hoffmann over the intimations of utopian and infinite other worlds vouchsafed by the sonatas and symphonies of their day. The concept of absolute instrumental music gained further critical traction soon after Wagner and Hanslick named it around 1850 with the extensive debates over program music, ‘music drama’, and the ‘New German School’ of musical progressives – debates generated in large part by the polemics of Wagner’s ‘Zurich’ writings of 1849–51. Testing the boundaries: three propositions As Wagner’s role in the terminological history of ‘absolute music’ suggests, it was not just the growing repertoire of instrumental music since the late eighteenth century that brought the category into focus, but also the aesthetic challenges issued to that ‘classical’ repertoire in the nineteenth century. The instrumental recitative ‘nearly transgressing the boundaries of

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absolute music’ in the finale the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (in the words of Wagner’s 1846 programmatic commentary) becomes a key figure in this process. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Couperin’s pièces de clavecin, or Scarlatti’s Essercizi all seemed to know their place and did not challenge the nominal hegemony of opera or sacred vocal music. The revolutionary example of Beethoven’s major instrumental works, most pointedly the Ninth Symphony, seemed to question the limits of ‘pure instrumental music’ and to encourage subsequent generations of composers, listeners, and critics to do the same. Absolute music thus became an important concept precisely when it became a contested one. Now, as then, the purposes of the category can be gauged by interrogating its boundaries. One heuristic exercise would be to try mounting an argument in defense of each of the following three propositions: All music is absolute. Some music is absolute. No music is absolute. Proposition 2: ‘Some music is absolute’ This second proposition is, of course, the normative one. In this view, most classical instrumental genres such as the fugue, the string quartet, the sonata, and the symphony are ‘absolute’ music. Granting some basic familiarity with Western tonal practice, individual examples of any of these genres can be heard and understood largely without reference to external factors. This does not preclude the fact that knowing other fugues, quartets, sonatas and symphonies will enhance one’s understanding of any given individual example. Most such music, however, can be adequately appreciated and ‘understood’ without reference to concepts, images or verbal data. Under this normative view texted vocal music, from Gregorian chant and Renaissance sacred polyphony to Italian madrigals, opera of any era, lieder or other genres of art song, and all types of popular song do not qualify as absolute music, for several reasons. In most cases the melodic material has been conceived to match at least some elements of the textual metre, rhythm, rhyme and so forth, so that it cannot be fairly evaluated without some reference to these. In most cases, too, the musical setting is understood to express, highlight or otherwise enhance the meaning of the text, usually in some affective dimension, though also as rhetorical utterance, or simply as resonating in some (admittedly unspecific) way with the semantic dimension of the text. Even if the text of a vocal composition is in a language not understood by a given listener – for instance, a Latin motet, an Italian aria, a Russian opera chorus, a Hungarian or Swedish art song, or a rock song with lyrics rendered unintelligible through raucous delivery and amplification – the listener will still likely be aware of the impact of structural or rhetorical linguistic features on the musical composition. Programs or, more commonly, simple descriptive titles also invite an imaginative, referential dimension into the reception of a musical work that disqualifies it as ‘absolute’ in the normative view. Proposition 1: ‘All music is absolute’ The metaphysics of music articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (vol. 1, 1818; vol. 2, 1844) can be cited in defence of the first of our three propositions. For Schopenhauer, music (meaning for him European art music from the early

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eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, essentially) differs from the other arts in being conceivable as a ‘direct’ reflection of the all-encompassing principle of the ‘Will’, rather than a second-hand representation of the Will’s external manifestations in the natural world or the universe of human affairs. The ‘absoluteness’ of music in this reading is not a matter of music’s essentially formal (decorative or patterned) attributes, as it would be in Kantian aesthetics or for Hanslick, but simply in its lack of reference to the phenomenal world. In this view any titles, programs or vocal texts may serve an illustrative function, but our perception of the music ‘itself’ is not fundamentally altered by them. This is why one may set a poem as a song, or a visual representation as a pantomime, or set both to music in an opera. Such individual pictures of human life, set to the general language of music, never correspond or connect to it with complete necessity; rather, they stand in the same relation to it as an arbitrary example does to a general concept. (Trans. Dahlhaus 1989, 131; Schopenhauer [1818] 1969, vol. 1, §§52, 263)9 The position makes sense for someone like Schopenhauer who had grown up in an era when imitation theory and the doctrine of affections were still the norm. One or another setting of one or another Metastasio simile aria differs only incidentally, not essentially, from the rest, never bearing the unique impress of single, unmistakable illocutionary model. Extrapolating from this view, even without reference to the Schopenhauerian ‘Will’, we could insist simply on the phenomenological pre-eminence of the immediate acoustic experience of any musical work, object or performance. Many textual and cultural contingencies may determine crucial elements of the sounding object in a performance of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov or a song by Rodgers and Hart or a mixed-media aleatoric composition of John Cage. But in this strict view, those contingencies will not fundamentally alter the experience of these as music, rather than as drama, lyrics or performance concept. Our attitude toward the music may, of course, be inflected by those other things, but the music is what we hear first. Proposition 3: ‘No music is absolute’ Richard Wagner’s open letter ‘On Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems’, written in February 1857, is often viewed as a document of Wagner’s reception of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic ideas, which he had encountered over the preceding few years. There is some justification for this; yet in trying to defend Liszt’s controversial essays in ‘program music’ against the background of his own heated polemics against all and sundry traditional musical genres in the ‘Zurich’ writings, Wagner backs himself into a defence of our third, apparently anti-Schopenhauerian proposition: ‘No music is absolute.’ He begins by rehearsing Romantic metaphysical claims of music’s ‘transfiguring power’, for example: ‘music will never, in any union into which it may enter, cease to be the highest, most redeeming art.’ And further: ‘It is the nature of music to realize in and through itself, unmistakably and immediately, certain truths that the other arts can only hint at or suggest’ (Wagner 1887, vol. 5, 191; trans. in Wagner [1857] 2011, 76). But since Wagner himself had argued earlier that all instrumental music was essentially a temporary, if historically useful, aberration in between Greek tragedy and the modern musical-dramatic ‘total artwork’, he is forced to perform an elaborate rhetorical dance around his own notions of musical ontology:

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Nothing is less absolute than music, as regards its presence in our lives, and the champions of an absolute music are clearly a muddle-headed bunch. To confound them it would suffice to have them name, if they could, any music independent of those forms derived from corporeal motion or from poetic verse (according to the causal circumstances). (Wagner 1887, vol. 5, 191; trans in Wagner [1857] 2011, 76)10 Wagner is referring to his ‘genealogy’ of classical instrumental forms from the traditions of binary dance forms of the earlier eighteenth century and, more broadly, the relation of classical phrase structure to symmetries of dance or rhyming metrical verse. In this view, there is no such thing as a ‘purely’ abstract music, since all empirical musical practices (as opposed to speculations about divine or celestial music) are conditioned by aspects of the human body, voice and fundamental cultural practices. Thus, if Romantic composers like Berlioz or Liszt choose to push the envelop of musical form by inflecting its primitive dance-based outlines with allusion to mythic or literary narrative, this need not constitute an unpardonable transgression. No music is truly ‘absolute’, since all music is founded, at some level, on shapes and forms of human activity. The foundational activities of song, dance and religious ritual, he argues, are merely giving way to more differentiated models of myth, epic and drama. As the musical means enabled by those first categories become more differentiated or sophisticated, with time, this expansion of the human ‘models’ for musical practice is a natural move in the cultural evolution of the art form. Further testing the boundaries: function, programs, titles All three of these propositional formulas could be argued at length and on the basis of examples from nearly any historical period or musical culture. The German Romantic–metaphysical tradition has tended to gravitate towards the first of them (‘all music is absolute’), while contemporary ‘post-modern’ cultural theory tends to promote the third one (‘no music is absolute’), as we will see further in the concluding section of this chapter. But since the second proposition remains the normative view in musical scholarship and criticism, it could be helpful to consider the kinds of discriminations that view presupposes – what makes some music ‘absolute’ and other music not? – against a small range of individual cases. The autonomy or self-sufficiency of absolute music, as traditionally construed, is often contrasted with music intended to serve a function, social or institutional in nature. To begin with, we would have to exempt the ‘function’ of aesthetic contemplation, since that is the function of any form of art, by definition. (The dividing line between aesthetic contemplation and edifying or ‘quality’ entertainment is, of course, porous, and in many contexts non-existent.) Even with that allowance, citing ‘function’ as a restrictive boundary for absolute music is problematic. The ostensible function of much early instrumental music within the Catholic Church service (ricercares, toccatas, trio sonatas, and so forth) is scarcely to be distinguished from the aesthetic contemplation of music in the salons of aristocratic or bourgeois amateurs or in the early concert hall. Speaking of an extensive four-part ricercare from a 1547 publication by Jacques Buus, Richard Taruskin maintains that it ‘is no “absolute music” in our modern sense of the term’ because of its nominal function of accompanying the communion during the mass service – and in spite of his own assessment of the piece as an ‘academic’ demonstration of compositional method (Taruskin 2005, 608).11 Of Giovanni Gabrieli’s sonata for three violins and bass from the posthumously published 1615 Canzoni e sonate, on the other hand, Taruskin points out:

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‘what would remain for centuries the elite genre of “absolute” secular instrumental music [i.e. the sonata] was born in church’ (Taruskin 2005, 796). For Taruskin, the Buus ricercare tends, in its effect, towards a kind of sonic wallpaper appropriate to its function as liturgical ‘background music’, whereas the Gabrieli sonata engages its listeners more forthrightly through an element of rhetorical flair in its deployment of instrumental textures and harmonically directed bass. As musical objects, however, both pieces have an equal claim to aesthetic autonomy. It is by no means clear that functional utility has dictated the differences between them, or that it constitutes a limiting contingency in one case and not the other. Reinhard Strohm’s objection to the idea that ‘function or relevance for social practices should, generally, have been a hindrance to music’s possession of work-character’ should thus probably be extended to determinations regarding absolute music (Strohm 2000, 135). Usually at issue, in either case, is a question of aesthetic ambition or demands: whether or not the music presupposes an attentive, engaged listener – a viable aesthetic ‘subject’. A piano etude may be wholly functional, like those of Charles-Louis Hanon, for instance. Most etudes, however, while still functional, may also be heard as musical works, whether of limited or more substantial aesthetic interest, as testified by Robert Schumann’s numerous reviews of etudes by his contemporaries, not to mention his own. The same applies to most other repertoires of ‘functional’ music, such as dance music or music for religious ceremony. Certainly, much of it may exhibit little or no ‘work’ quality, and may not even be preserved in written or other stable form. However, the potential functionality of a Bach cantata or a set of waltzes by Johann Strauss Jr neither precludes their status as works nor their ability to be heard, in some part, as absolute music. An instrumental sinfonia to a Bach cantata borrowed from a concerto, or vice versa, is surely an example of absolute music; a concerted chorale-based movement from such a cantata arranged for instrumental performance is probably an example; a recitative with continuo accompaniment is probably not. Compositional style and substance are the determining factors, not liturgical function. Similar factors are at issue when Wilhelm Seidl invokes ‘organic wholeness’ as a criterion of absolute music in the early Romantic view leading to Hanslick, citing the neo-Kantian Christian Friedrich Michaelis (Seidl 1994, col. 20). Granted, Michaelis echoes Karl Philipp Moritz’s classic formulation of aesthetic autonomy: an organically constituted artwork will ‘contain its entire purpose and raison d’être within itself’ (cited by Siedl 1994, col. 20).12 This is not so much determined by the presence or absence of social, religious or pedagogical function, however, as it is by the degree of interest that attaches to the internal ‘organization’ of the music (still in Michaelis’s terms). The relation of dance forms to concert genres from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries illustrates the process, or spectrum, very clearly. French court dances, polonaises and mazurkas, and indeed waltzes, all gained aesthetic interest as they lost functional purpose. A rudimentary 16-measure dance composition may be perfectly coherent as an autonomous musical object, just not very interesting in most cases. The self-sufficiency of absolute music implies a self-sufficiency of aesthetic interest. Function may weigh against that, but need not determine its presence or absence. The role of critical subjectivity in setting the bar of aesthetic interest in the case of nominally functional music is illustrated, somewhat surprisingly, by Hanslick himself in a response to Mozart’s ‘Posthorn’ Serenade (K. 320) on a Viennese concert program in 1881: Mozart’s Serenade No. 9 in D major belongs, like that whole half-obsolete genre of the serenade itself, to a more accompanimental, decorative kind of music. In the right place –

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ideally in the park of some old castle – and at the right time, on a fragrant summer night, such music might act as a balsam to our drowsy senses and feeling. Today, a century after its composition, it offers too little substantial interest [substantiellen Gehalt] for musical reflection and emotional engagement [unserem musikalischen Nachdenken und Nachfühlen] when presented as an independent concert item; it merely ripples past us softly and gently, without making any deeper impression. (Hanslick 1886, 294) Belying his posthumous, largely mistaken, reputation as a classicist and a formalist, Hanslick dismisses even one of Mozart’s more mature and, indeed, more ‘substantial’ serenades as too beholden to its original function as aristocratic divertissement to qualify as legitimate, ‘absolute’ musical fare in the modern concert hall. A program Hanslick encountered shortly afterwards, in December 1883, provides a crosssection of contemporary repertoire illustrating precisely the boundaries that the concept of absolute music was intended to police as it started to become an accepted critical tool. This program, conducted by Hans Richter, consisted of the premiere of Brahms’s Third Symphony, the Viennese premiere of Liszt’s symphonic poem Mazeppa, and an orchestral song-setting of Shelley’s ode ‘To Night’ (in German translation) by Robert Volkmann. Not surprisingly, Hanslick’s response to the Brahms symphony confirms how much the viewpoint of On the Musically Beautiful as well as Hanslick’s attitudes as a music critic (the two are by no means identical) continue to define what is still understood today as absolute music. Appealing to the topos of ineffability or music’s transcendence of language, he laments that ‘the critic’s eloquence diminishes in proportion to that of the composer’ and that only extensive score examples or, better still, repeated listening can truly reveal the aesthetic value of the work (Hanslick 1886, 361).13 He eschews the ‘poetic-picturesque’ method of ‘translating one’s impressions into a series of images, balladic motifs, or novelistic episodes’, since that runs counter to his ‘belief in the purely musical significance of an instrumental composition’. Still, he readily situates Brahms’s new Third Symphony with respect to the affective and topical associations of the Beethoven canon as well as of Brahms’s first two symphonies (starting from Richter’s sobriquet for the Third as Brahms’s Eroica). Brief verbal accounts the thematic material, dynamic contours and generalized musical attributes are offered (‘more concentrated in form, more transparent in detail, more plasticity of motivic ideas, richer instrumentation and more varied timbral combinations’ than the first two symphonies). Yet the music emerges as paradigmatically absolute precisely in defying adequate verbalization. It is not just the work’s structural, textural or rhythmic complexity, but also its situatedness within a network or discourse of ‘symphonic’ values that contributes to its quality as a meaningful artwork. (Hanslick’s final comment is simply ‘if only Schumann were still alive to hear it!’.) The Liszt symphonic poem and the Volkmann orchestral song on the same program both belong outside the pale of absolute music, clearly, but that does not principally determine Hanslick’s critical response to them. Comparing the general tone of ‘reflective, dignified, warm feeling’ in the Volkmann with that of Schumann’s Paradies und die Peri he groups them, together with Brahms’s and Beethoven’s symphonies, as ‘poetic musical works [Tondichtungen] that breath freely the atmosphere of musical beauty’, in spite of the ‘differences in content and form, as well as artistic value’ (Hanslick 1886, 366). The negation of those ideals in Mazeppa is not strictly blamed on the choice and role of the poetic program, although Hanslick is predictably dismissive of both. Rather, as with most of Liszt’s orchestral works, he objects to what he regards

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as noisy, pretentious, overwrought treatment of musically feeble materials (‘the lack of formative musical power applied to great ideas that grow and move from inside outwards is masked in all of them by showy orchestral effects and all sorts of portentous gesturing’) (Hanslick 1886, 367). Moreover, Hanslick himself points out the genealogy of this particular symphonic poem in a series of piano etudes, acquiring its official association with the poetic protagonist of Hugo and Byron only midway through the series. (‘It would not be unfair to call it a tenderly reared and groomed piano etude’, he concludes, alluding perhaps to Mazeppa’s horse, who in Hanslick’s view is the real protagonist of the story; Hanslick 1886, 368.) The genesis of Mazeppa as a symphonic poem illustrates a broad truism, even if Hanslick does not dwell on the implications in his review: Romantic program music is seldom ‘purely’ programmatic, any more than Romantic symphonies are ‘purely’ absolute, if the first means adhering closely to a preconceived verbal–narrative outline and the second means eschewing any referential dimension that might be construed as extra-musical. Symphonic poems no less than symphonies are often located ‘between’ program and absolute music, taken as heuristic ideal types.14 Two cultures of absolute music The German writer August Halm, whose critical advocacy of Bruckner’s symphonies is frequently referenced in discussions of the aesthetics of absolute music, is best remembered for his 1913 book Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (‘On Two Cultures of Music’) portraying Bach’s fugues and Beethoven’s sonatas as two paradigms of German instrumental, or absolute, musical tradition that also established a dialectic for later developments. The phrase, and to a certain extent the repertoires, might be adapted to organize a range of dichotomies that emerge repeatedly in talk about absolute music. The terms in which these dichotomies might be formulated do not necessarily map on to each other with complete consistency, and, as we’ve seen in the preceding section, determinations regarding the status of absolute music tend towards a wide spectrum of possibilities more than clear binarisms. Nonetheless, the dichotomies expressing what I am calling ‘two cultures’ or conceptual attitudes of the absolute music idea are aligned in parallel columns in Table 3.1, for ease of comparison. To orient ourselves within these related dichotomies we might start by thinking of examples from each of August Halm’s original ‘two cultures’ of German instrumental music, say the fugues in C major or C minor from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, on one hand, and Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor, Op. 111, on the other hand. Despite differences of mode, affect and perhaps tempo between the Bach fugues, both invite contemplation as purely musical objects exemplifying features of melody, harmony and counterpoint and a relatively clear set of Table 3.1 Recurrent conceptual dichotomies in the discourse of ‘absolute music’ Classical

Romantic

Empirical

Metaphysical

Denotative

Connotative

Formalist–analytical–positivist

Spiritual–metaphorical–hermeneutic

‘It’s just music’

‘It’s not just music’

Absolute (Feuerbachian)

Absolute (Hegelian)

Hanslickian

Schopenhauerian

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procedures understood by the term ‘fugue’. The two movements of Beethoven’s Op. 111 likewise exhibit contrasts of mode, character and tempo – indeed, more marked contrasts. While standard classical procedures of sonata organization, counterpoint, binary theme and variation play an essential role, commentaries on this work almost invariable press beyond clinical description of the notated materials to invoke some imposing expressive, imaginative, metaphorical dimension accessed by the music. The Bach fugues and the Beethoven sonata all engage with terms from either of our two ‘cultures’ of absolute music; but the fugues align more readily with the values in the first column of Table 3.1, while the sonata aligns more readily with those in column two. Wilhelm Seidl has described an aspect of these dichotomies in terms of a ‘classicistic’ orientation, more typical of philosophical approaches to the question of absolute music, versus a Romantic orientation in the tradition of such poet–critics as Wackenroder, Tieck and Hoffmann (Seidl 1994, col. 16). Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful speaks for the first group, while Arthur Seidl’s attempt to supplement that with a treatise on the ‘musically sublime’ (Vom Musikalisch-Erhabenen, 1887) represents a continuation of the Romantic tradition in the wake of Wagner, Schopenhauer and the New German School – the tradition that sought to elevate the significance of music above mere ‘sounding forms’ but without circumscribing it in overly concrete verbal or representational terms. The ‘classical’ or ‘empirical’ conception of absolute music is the simple, essentialist one I have also indicated as ‘denotative’ in Table 3.1 – that is, a usage that denotes merely the observable, audible phenomena of the music as a self-sufficient means of aesthetic pleasure. Although early (‘classical’ or neoclassical) aesthetic thought of the eighteenth century did remain largely beholden to theories of imitation, even extended to music, there was already some theoretical conception of absolute music in this simple empirical sense, appropriate to the large emergent repertoire of tonal instrumental forms. As John Neubauer has shown, French thinkers like Charles Henri Blainville (L’Esprit de l’art musical, 1754), Boyé (L’Expression musicale mise au rang des chimères, 1779), and Guy de Chabanon (De le musique considérée en elle-même et dans ses rapports avec la parole [. . .], 1779–85) clearly articulated an appreciation of music as an autonomous, non-imitative and non-referential medium (Neubauer 1986, especially Chapter 12, ‘Toward Autonomous Music’, 168–81). The pseudonymous Boyé expressed this succinctly: The principal object of music is to please us physically, without troubling the mind to search for useless comparisons in it. One must absolutely regard music as a pleasure of the senses and not of the mind. As soon as we try to attribute the cause of its impressions on us to a moral principle we lose ourselves in a labyrinth of extravagances. (Cited in Neubauer 1986, 169) By insisting on musical pleasure as a purely sensual, auditory phenomenon, however, writers like Boyé and Chabanon do not allow for the cognitive perception of melody, harmony, counterpoint or structural designs that would be necessary to a formalist aesthetic, properly speaking. The position of music in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the essential aesthetic treatise of the late Enlightenment, remains a matter of debate. Kant’s personal attitude probably resembled that of the French ‘sensualists’, but the broader framework of the Critique allowed for the appreciation of art on the basis of largely internal formal attributes. Kant’s Critique acknowledged the possibility of art that elicits a ‘free harmonious play’ of the understanding and imagination without reference to ‘concepts’, occupying a sphere of ‘free beauty’.15 His famous formulation

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of ‘purposiveness without purpose’, pointing to the objective character of artworks and our ‘disinterested’ pleasure in them, has always been particularly suggestive in relation to the dynamic flux and implicitly teleological character of tonal musical structures. At the same time, the very susceptibility of instrumental music to these ingredients of a formalist aesthetic of beauty aroused Kant’s suspicions as to its ultimate value, indeed its very status a ‘beautiful’ rather than merely ‘agreeable’ art (as it would be in the sensualist view), providing pleasurable sensory stimulation unrelated to man’s higher moral – and indeed conceptual – faculties. In this sense, Kant regarded music consistently within the terms of our ‘first culture’ of absolute music (classicist, empirical and at least proto-formalist), while ultimately condemning its lack of access to the terms of the second, Romantic culture: its inability to communicate ‘spiritual’ content by means of sign or metaphor. Between Kant and Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, at any rate, the conceptual foundations of a formalist aesthetic of absolute music begin to crystallize, an aesthetics that could underwrite the modernist practices of academic musical analysis, even if such practices would have been unintelligible to an Enlightenment philosopher such as Kant and alien, at best, to Hanslick, as humanistic critic and historian at heart. While modern-day scholars have been at pains to point out the Romantic, organicist, metaphysical premises of the analytical thought of Heinrich Schenker, the essential avatar of modern formalist analysis (see Cook 2007 and Korsyn 2009), he and his widespread legacy remain firmly aligned with the first column of our ‘two cultures’. The intellectual prestige of formalist musical analysis has usually depended on the aura of the other, ‘Romantic’ culture without genuinely sharing its metaphysical or hermeneutical postulates. The essential opposition between these two cultural attitudes is most immediately expressed in the two senses of ‘absolute’ circulating in German philosophical discourse in the early nineteenth century, both of which continue to cling to modern usage and to generate confusion within that usage. The adjective ‘absolute’ in Ludwig Feuerbach’s vocabulary, as adopted by Wagner in the Zurich writings, is merely denotative of the autonomy of a given cultural practice or branch of knowledge. In this, Wagner’s original sense, absolute music is just music, with no ambition to participate in other discursive realms. This we could call absolute music with a lower-case ‘a’, music in isolation (or ‘dissolved’) from verbal, conceptual or even any clearly specified affective considerations. However, starting with the German Romantic generation, the very purity of such autonomous music, its apparent transcendence of language, sign and emotional specificity was believed to open up a channel of communication with the Hegelian ‘Absolute’, a divine, metaphysical order of knowledge (however vaguely defined) of religious pedigree, redolent of the noumenal Platonic ‘ideas’ also adopted by Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. In this other ‘upper-case’ usage, autonomous instrumental music means more than an abstract play of sounding forms; it gestures towards some higher, supra-linguistic, and indeed supra-sensible reality without resorting to any prosaic, unequivocal sort of code. Whether it does so through the stark, austere forms of Bach’s Art of the Fugue or the more various, emotionally charged rhetoric of a Brahms or Bruckner symphonic adagio, the music is understood to mean more than a description of its notes on the page; it is more than ‘just music’. Hanslick himself, who, as we know, flirted with the idea of the Hegelian ‘Absolute’ before censoring it from later editions of his treatise, retained some commitment to both of these ‘cultures’. The figures of the sounding ‘arabesque’ and ‘kaleidoscope’, for example, that Hanslick suggested as a means of visualizing music’s abstract, formal beauty were much derided by Romantically inclined critics in his own day as demeaning, relegating music to the status of

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acoustic wallpaper (computer screen-saver images would be an apt modern analogue to Hanslick’s ‘moving arabesque or kaleidoscope’). Kant was generally inclined to accept such consequences, for, although he allowed that music might engage ‘the understanding and the imagination’ at some level, he assumed that it was essentially void of cognitive value. It offered nothing to ‘think about’ in any substantial way. Hanslick was at pains to refute this implication, as is most evident when he attempts to qualify his figures of abstract, formal pattern or design, the arabesque and kaleidoscope. ‘Let us think of this lively arabesque as the dynamic emanation of an artistic spirit’; the musical kaleidoscope ‘presents itself as the direct emanation of an artistically creative spirit’. The final result of these qualifications is the famous dictum: ‘Composing is a work of mind upon material compatible with mind’ (Das Componieren ist ein Arbeit des Geistes im geistfähigen Material; Hanslick [1854] 1986, 31; cf. Hanslick [1854] 1990, 79). The multiple iterations of ‘spirit’ and ‘mind’ (Geist in German) in these passages indicate Hanslick’s desire to bridge the ‘two cultures’ of absolute music, after initially grounding his arguments in the classical–empirical version. In Hanslick’s view, the aesthetic character of a musical theme and attention to its travels in the course of a composition, whether a Baroque trio sonata movement or the Franck D minor Symphony, do give a listener something to ‘think about’. Adherents of the second, Romantic culture believe that the semantic indeterminacy of instrumental music transports the mind to some purer, higher plane – vouchsafing intimations of the ‘infinite’ or Absolute. They would also assume (and Hanslick would not deny) that some works achieve this more effectively than others. For this school of thought, some music is, in fact, just music, but for that very reason, not upper-case ‘Absolute’. Moving from the sounding arabesque of the trio sonata towards the ‘spiritual’ heights and depths of the Romantic symphony is a historical process that requires the collaboration of composers and listeners. Composers agree to provide more to ‘think about’ in their compositions, and listeners agree to do the thinking. The historicity of absolute music and current perspectives In retrospect, we can say that the ‘idea of absolute music’ evolved gradually along with the development of a repertoire of tonal instrumental music in Europe, mainly from the early eighteenth century onwards. A ‘first culture’ of absolute music was firmly in place by the turn of the nineteenth century – otherwise, who would have been attending concerts or buying printed scores of sonatas, quartets and the like? More suddenly, around this time, a ‘second culture’ of absolute music emerged in response to the aesthetic refinements of Viennese Classicism (at least paradigmatically), but crucially enabled by epistemic shifts in contemporary culture: the rise of idealist thinking in philosophy and the related metaphysical turn in the Romantic literary-critical imagination, as emphasized by Mark Evan Bonds. The more emphatic claims of this second, Romantic-metaphysical culture contribute to the matrix that engenders a robust, visible discourse of ‘absolute music’ in the first place, by the middle of the nineteenth century, introducing the term still in use. The less emphatic, and potentially negative or at least selfeffacing claims of the first culture are reflected in its somewhat shadowy status, lacking any single conceptual banner before ‘pure instrumental music’, the ‘specifically musical’ and ‘absolute music’ began to enter the critical vocabulary later on. Both models continue to be available, depending on the sensibility of the user/listener and the character of the repertoire in question. If that roughly summarizes the genesis of the concept, according to the bifurcated model I have proposed, we might conclude this overview of absolute music as aesthetic issue by turning

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to a current perspective. Is absolute music a historically bounded phenomenon? Is the concept limited to a more-or-less fixed historical repertoire? Should it be cited by modern scholars and critics as a historical phenomenon rather than indulged as an inevitable, ongoing, harmless reality? Carl Dahlhaus viewed the second, Romantic–metaphysical culture of absolute music as the dominant, unifying paradigm of nineteenth-century German music – still in large part the model for the concert (or museum) culture of classical music today. However, his study of the idea trails off with reflections on the ‘musicality’ of French symbolism (Mallarmé) and the late-Romantic legacies of Wagner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Implicitly, with the collapse of a Romantic world-view after the First World War, the prestige of upper-case Absolute music also waned, even if the persistence of the Classical–Romantic musical canon still invites it as an appropriate aesthetic mindset for audiences and critics of that canon. For some time now musicologists, responding to the promptings of postmodern critical thinking of one kind or another, have been vigorously questioning whether absolute music does still represent an ‘appropriate aesthetic mindset’, even for our continued contemplation of the classical music canon. The question of the historical limits of the concept, then, can be put both to the conditions of new musical production and to the reception (in whatever genres or cultural spheres) and study of the Western art–music canon after the twentieth century. The first line of interrogation here would raise the question as to whether any music besides the Western art–music canon might also be considered absolute music – for example, styles of improvisatory modern (‘free’) jazz in the tradition of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, the electric guitar virtuosity of Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, some approaches to electronic composition, ambient or environmental music, ‘sound art’ or any other practice that primarily invites contemplation of a ‘pure’ musical sound-object. The answer should probably be a qualified ‘yes’, although the topic deserves separate study, taking into account the specific cultural environments of any one of these types.16 The second line of interrogation would direct us to the work of musicologists such as Susan McClary or Lawrence Kramer and its influence on musical scholarship over the last two decades. The large-scale reaction against modernist formalism in the arts – and more particularly in academic criticism of the arts as typified by mid-century ‘New Criticism’ that limited interpretation to ‘work-immanent’, preferably structural data – rapidly infiltrated musical scholarship after the 1980s. Decades of earlier philological scholarship devoted to the codification of authentic musical texts or formalistic analysis of canonic scores appeared to be predicated on a doctrine of absolute music reaching back, reasonably enough, to the late nineteenthcentury origins of the discipline. Rebellion against the doctrine and the modes of scholarship predicated on it took various forms, sharing the aim of revealing the cultural contingencies of many different ‘classical’ works. Gender roles and stereotypes, constructions of sexuality and desire, master narratives of self and other, politics of national identity, psychoanalytic programs, figurations of the body and much else were revealed as active subtexts of musical works long suppressed by the ideology of pure, non-referential music – subtexts of a canon whose very superiority resided in its supposed autonomy from the rest of human affairs. Much of the meaning that was teased out of the canon in the course of this postmodern critical turn can, in fact, be identified with the Romantic turn from ‘absolute’ to ‘Absolute’ music.17 When Susan McClary, for instance, reads in the first movement of Brahms’s Third Symphony the narrative of a tonally compromised Romantic-heroic protagonist (the Ab of the

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first subject providing a psychological catalyst analogous to the famous C# of Beethoven’s Eroica), negotiating the seductive wiles of melodic stasis and otherness while struggling to define himself in contrast to an overweening patriarchal structural order, she is supplying plausible metaphorical terms for what made this symphony ‘meaningful’ to Hanslick, in comparison to the merely pleasant diversion of the ‘Posthorn’ Serenade. Granted, Hanslick demurred to explaining the symphony in terms of ‘ballads or novels’, and his resulting critical impasse illustrates the initial, properly Romantic conception of music as ‘Absolute’ in the sense of conveying meaning that is detailed, densely textured, but inscrutable (McClary 1993). (Hanslick also fails to mention the Ab.) When Hermann Kretzschmar, a somewhat younger colleague of Hanslick, cited by McClary, identifies the second theme of the Brahms movement as a Delilah-like odalisque with dubiously narcotic power, he is betraying the code of ‘Absolute’ ineffability, but at the same time responding to the challenge of that code. The Romantic ‘Absolute’ continually dares the listener to interpret its secret language, while threatening that such an act may shatter the beautiful illusions he or she beholds in its shimmering mirage. Upper-case Absolute music, born as it were under the sign of Beethoven’s symphonies and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s criticism, has thus perhaps always gravitated towards a condition ‘between absolute and program music’. Attempts to uncover layers of semantic, social, political or gendered meaning in earlier instrumental music face different challenges. McClary’s reading of subversive behaviour in the concertante continuo part of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto profits from a clearly exceptional feature (the massive harpsichord cadenza), considered against the norms of the Baroque concerto. When Leo Treitler describes the expressive nuances of the Andante con moto of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in Eb, K. 543, in terms of a psychological narrative, he is also pointing out – in fact, explicitly so – that the transition to a Romantic culture of absolute (‘Absolute’) music was underway in Mozart’s late instrumental works (Treitler 1988). Recognizing an audible ‘staging of the body’ in Mozart’s late Divertimento for string trio, K. 563, Lawrence Kramer presses harder against the dividing line between autonomous musical ‘beauty’ and conscious expressive signification (Kramer 1995, 25–32). In this case, representative of many similar cultural interventions in absolute music on the part of modern scholars, the critical strategy permits us to distinguish between what is going on in the music itself – essentially absolute and self-sufficient? – and the critic’s licence to hear exemplifications of physical or cultural phenomena outside of the score. Rather than questioning the aesthetic autonomy of the music, the reading is a rhetorical performance that relies, as rhetoric, on the ability to persuade its audience to adopt a particular perspective. * * * As Roger Scruton rightly asserts, ‘the term “absolute music” denotes not so much an agreed idea as an aesthetic problem’ (Scruton 2013).18 The problem begins with ascertaining the degree of aesthetic autonomy that might plausibly be ascribed to a particular musical work or practice. Since no music exists outside of some cultural context, cultural contingency alone is not useful in establishing the boundaries of absolute music (unless it were to refute the concept altogether). For practical purposes, music involving any kind of a verbal text, beyond generic titles and performance directions, should be excluded from the category, although it is reasonable to make distinctions regarding the substantive role of the text in the production and reception of the music in question. It is certainly reasonable to distinguish between instrumental music

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that operates within a strongly circumscribed set of conventional musical procedures (Bach’s The Art of Fugue, a Clementi piano sonata) and that which invites, or requires, a range of specific, ‘real-world’ references (Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite). The term ‘absolute music’ emerged at a time when the need for such distinctions began to be felt more pressingly than before. It was also a time when the practice of culturally unmarked ‘absolute music’ was giving way to a more self-conscious, culturally marked conception of ‘Absolute music’. Aesthetic awareness of the earlier practice seems to develop during the eighteenth century, and continues alongside the emergence of the consciously elevated Romantic aesthetic and practice in the next century (say, a popular air with variations by Henri Herz alongside the ‘Diabelli’ Variations of Beethoven). The whole spectrum of ‘absolute’ musical attitudes and practices continued to accompany the accumulating canon of Western art music into the twentieth century, when the canon and the accompanying aesthetics became increasingly historicized.19 In scholarship of the later twentieth century, however, the two ‘cultures’ of absolute music yield a new division: the fixed musical text as the autonomous object of musical analysis, as opposed to the ‘open text’ of cultural-hermeneutic interpretation. Traditionally, the work of professional music theorists is performed on examples from the Western canon taken in the first sense, while increasingly the work of musicologists (if it still concerns that canon) is performed in the second sense. ‘Postcanonic’ Western art music, for its part, continues to cultivate both autonomous and heteronomous tendencies inherited from the Romantic era, though it is seldom inclined to forgo the prestige of the upper-case Absolute. In glossing a series of remarks from Igor Stravinsky, famous for his dismissal of the Romantic fetish of music as ‘expression’, Richard Taruskin draws attention to a characteristically highor late-modernist doctrine of ‘the music itself’. This certainly designates music as an isolatable aesthetic object worthy of close analytical scrutiny. Taruskin associates Stravinsky’s idea of ‘the music itself’ with his turn to serialism in the 1950s, asserting that ‘it has nothing to do with the nineteenth century’s “absolute music,” with which it is now often mistakenly interchanged’ (Taruskin 1997, 365–8). ‘For the absoluteness of absolute music,’ Taruskin continues, ‘as Wagner (yes Wagner) first envisioned it, was an absolute expressivity, not an absolute freedom from expression.’ The remark illustrates how completely the later Romantic-metaphysical sense of ‘Absolute’ music has come to dominate usage, even though Wagner himself used the term almost exclusively to designate musical practice divorced from the rest of culture – indeed, just ‘the music itself’. For late Stravinsky and the high-modernists of the generation of Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt and the Darmstadt school, the ‘first culture’ of absolute music had returned with a vengeance, or we might say, with an attitude. Music was now provided with a pithy retort to that impertinent question, Sonate, que me veux-tu?: ‘Nothing – who cares if you listen?’ Even if this is a contested caricature of musical high modernism, it suggests an extreme form of ‘absolutism’ that synthesizes aspects of both our traditional cultures, the empirical-formalist emphasis on pure sounding object and a belief in music’s elevation above quotidian human affairs. The strength of the term ‘absolute music’, despite the continual fluctuations of usage, lies in the way it forces some determination on the part of the user (listener) as to what range of things he or she brings to the music in question, and what range of things she or he is inclined to take away. Questions of musical expression, signification and value, the ontology of musical form, text and work will always be with us, and the variety of such questions is to be celebrated, not

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bemoaned. The concept of absolute music remains a necessary compass in navigating our bearings in relation to repertoire of all kinds, in deciding what it means to us as ‘just music’, what kinds of things we might add to or subtract from that figure, and in analysing virtually any of our beliefs about what music does. Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14

For the text of Hoffmann’s review, see Charlton 1989, 234–51; the later redaction published in Part 1 of Kreisleriana (1814) as ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ is also included, 96–103. The latter, as translated by Oliver Strunk, can also be found in Treitler 1998, 1193–98. Fontenelle’s famous question seems to have circulated as a timely bon mot after the middle of the eighteenth century. Its citation in the entry ‘Sonata’ in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique (Paris: chez la Veuve Duchesne, 1768, 444–5), where Rousseau contrasts the aesthetic claims of vocal and instrumental music, has probably most contributed to its canonization. (Rousseau mentions it as a conversational, rather than published, remark.) On this general argument in Wagner’s writings, and its parallels in contemporary critical thought on music, see Grey 1995, chapters 1 and 2. Nick Zangwill, to cite one example, speaks of Hanslick’s ‘purist stance against opera’, although this has no bearing on his project of remounting Hanslick’s case against ‘emotions’ as the content of music in terms of contemporary analytic-philosophical aesthetics (Zangwill 2004, 30). Even Carl Dahlhaus commits this error in Chapter 2 of The Idea of Absolute Music when he writes: ‘Hanslick, in appropriating Wagner’s term ‘absolute musical art’, did just the opposite [of Wagner], reverting to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s thesis that pure instrumental music was the ‘true’ music and represented the goal of the history of music’ (Dahlhaus 1989, 27). Moreover, the quoted phrase (‘reine, absolute Tonkunst’) is, of course, Hanslick’s version, not a version ‘appropriated from Wagner’. Neither Hanslick nor Hoffmann claim that instrumental music ‘represents the goal of the history of music’. On the deleted passage, see Dahlhaus 1989, 28; Bonds 1997, 414–16; and Bonds 2012. ‘Wer will nun auf Beethoven das sein, was dieser auf Haydn und Mozart im Gebiete der absoluten Musik war? Das größte Genie würde hier nichts mehr vermögen, eben weil der Genius der absoluten Musik seiner nicht mehr bedarf.’ A problem with Payzant’s rendition of this famous phrase is that the word ‘tonal’ in modern English usage connotes features of the major-minor diatonic ‘tonal’ system as codified since the seventeenth century, while the German word ‘Ton’ and its derivatives (‘tönen, tönend’) connote musical sound-material more generally (even if, for Hanslick and his contemporaries, such material was inevitably construed as ‘tonal’ also in the more restricted sense). In the original this passage reads: ‘Es ist ein specifisch Musikalisches. Darunter verstehen wir ein Schönes, das unabhängig und unbedürftig eines von außen her kommenden Inhaltes, einzig in den Tönen und ihrer künstlerischen Verbindung liegt. Die sinnvollen Beziehungen in sich reizvoller Klänge, ihr Zusammenstimmen und Widerstreben, ihr Fliehen und sich Erreichen, ihr Aufschwingen und Ersterben, – dies ist, was in freien Formen vor unser geistiges Anschauen tritt und als schön gefällt’ (Hanslick [1854] 1990, 74). Despite the many large and small emendations made to the text by Hanslick across the many editions that appeared in his lifetime (as indicated in Strauss’s edition), this whole passage notably remained unchanged. Schopenhauer does, in fact, distinguish between the justifiable use of music to set vocal texts (where the music provides an appropriate if not exclusively necessary ‘counterpoint’ to the text) and programmatic or ‘imitative’ music, meaning for him mainly musical imitations of natural phenomenon. These miss the point of music in trying to operate like poetry or painting, i.e. in representing the phenomenal world. Wagner’s original epithet (translated here) was ‘sinnlose Köpfe’. In the published version of the text Franz Brendel, editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, seems to have modified this to read ‘the advocates of an absolute music clearly do not know what they are talking about’ (Wagner 1887, Vol. 5, 191). ‘While applying a technique that had its origins in text setting’, the ricercare, by exhaustively exploring transpositions and permutations of a single subject, has ‘clearly and deliberately transcended those origins and has entered the utopian realm of abstracted technique’ (Taruskin 2005, 610). Excerpts of Michaelis’s essays in the Allegemeine musikalische Zeitung are translated in le Huray and Day 1988, 199–205. The discussion of the Third Symphony quoted from in this paragraph extends from 361 to 366. Gooley 2011, 313–15 cites this review of the Third Symphony premiere as an example of Hanslick’s methods of negotiating between establishing a consensus with his readership and at the same time instructing them in matters of taste and judgement, especially of new or challenging works. The phrase ‘between absolute and program music’ has been invoked in modern critical scholarship above all with reference to the role of topical-characteristic and narrative traits in the symphony from Beethoven to Mahler, as well as elements of generic and formal hybridity. See, for example, Wiora 1963, Finscher 1979 and Newcomb 1984. The aesthetic implications of these intersections are also discussed in Dahlhaus 1989, chapter 9 (‘The Idea of the Musically Absolute and the Practice of Program Music’): 128–40.

60 • Thomas Grey 15 16

17

18 19

For a summary of the terms of Kant’s aesthetics and music’s ambiguous position in the Critique of Judgement, see Ginsborg 2011, especially the section on ‘Kant’s alleged formalism’, 334–36, as well as Neubauer 1986, chapter 13, ‘Kant and the Origins of Formalism’, 182–92. Some preliminary considerations relevant to the question can be found in Davies 1999 and Gracyk 1999. Within the culture of Western modernist art music the experimental tradition from John Cage back to the Italian ‘futurists’ would have to be considered. Early in the twentieth century Feruccio Busoni invoked the term ‘absolute music’ (without necessarily envisioning later experimental let alone popular practices) to mean a new, improvisatory practice unfettered by conventions of scale, tonality, ‘textbook’ form, or the orchestral instrumentarium. ‘Absolute’ in this sense means absolutely free, unbounded. See Knyt 2012. Similarly, the musical meditations of Vladimir Jankélévitch, which have attracted renewed attention under a broadly postmodernist aegis, are strongly grounded in the second, Romantic-metaphysical culture of absolute music, inflected with a Franco-Slavic accent in place of the traditional Germanic one. See Jankélévitch, 2003, and the panel Gallope et al. 2012. Scruton’s otherwise useful resumé of the ‘aesthetic problem’ erroneously attributes the term itself to the Romantic critics of the 1790s and early 1800s, none of whom, of course, used it. Sponheuer 2005 outlines two directions the idea of absolute music has taken in ‘post-Romantic’ culture: contemporary art music adopts a formalist stance, relating to the ‘first culture’ described above, while the public at large remains committed to the Romantic-metaphysical view (although it seems unclear whether that can be distinguished here from the traditional ‘aesthetics of feeling’, as writers from Hanslick to Dahlhaus have been at pains to do).

Bibliography of works cited Bonds, Mark Evan. 1997. ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50: 387–420. ––––– 2006. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ––––– 2012. ‘Aesthetic Amputations: Absolute Music and the Deleted Endings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen’, 19th-Century Music, 36: 3–23. Charlton, David, ed. 1989. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, trans. Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 2007. The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davies, Stephen. 1999. ‘Rock versus Classical Music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (special issue on ‘Aesthetics and Popular Culture’): 193–204. Finscher, Ludwig. 1979. ‘“Zwischen absoluter und Programmusik”: Zur Interpretation der deutschen romantischen Symphonie’, in Über Symphonien: Festschrift Walter Wiora, ed. Christian-Hellmut Mahling. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 103–15. Gallope, Michael, with contributions also from Brian Kane, Steven Rings, James Hepokoski, Judy Lochhead, Michael J. Puri and James R. Currie. 2012. ‘Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 65: 215–56. Ginsborg, Hannah. 2011. ‘Kant’, in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. New York: Routledge, 328–38. Gooley, Dana. 2011. ‘Hanslick and the Institution of Criticism’, Journal of Musicology, 28: 289–324. Gracyk, Theodore. 1999. ‘Valuing and Evaluating Popular Music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (special issue on ‘Aesthetics and Popular Culture’): 205–20. Grey, Thomas. 1995. Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– ed. 2009. Richard Wagner and his World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hanslick, Eduard. [1854] 1986. On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. ––––– [1854] 1990. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, ed. Dietmar Strauss. Mainz: Schott. ––––– 1886. Concerten, Componisten und Virtuosen der letzten fünfzehn Jahre, 1870–1885. Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Literatur. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2003. Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1990. Music Alone: Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Knyt, Erinn. 2012. ‘Feruccio Busoni and the Absolute in Music: Form, Nature, and Idee’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 137: 35–69. Korsyn, Kevin. 2009. ‘Schenker’s Vienna: Nicholas Cook on Culture, Race and Music Theory in fin-de-siècle Austria’, Music Analysis, 28: 153–79. Kramer, Lawrence. 1995. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lamb, Charles. 1835. Essays of Elia. Paris: Baudry’s European Library.

Absolute music • 61 le Huray, Peter, and Day, James, eds. 1988. Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClary, Susan. 1993. ‘Narrative Agendas in Absolute Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony’, in Ruth Solie, ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 326–44. Neubauer, John. 1986. The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. Newcomb, Anthony. 1984. ‘“Once More ‘Between Absolute and Program Music”: Schumann’s Second Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 7: 233–50. Pederson, Sanna. 2009. ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’, Music & Letters, 90: 240–62. Schopenhauer, Arthur. [1818] 1969. The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover. Scruton, Roger. 2013. ‘Absolute music’. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Available at: www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/00069 (accessed 8 September 2013). Seidl, Wilhelm. 1994. ‘Absolute Musik’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Sachteil, Vol. 1. Kassel: Bärenreiter, cols. 15–24. Sponheuer, Bernd. 2005. ‘Postromantische Wandlungen der “Idee der absoluten Musik”’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 62: 151–63. Strohm, Reinhard. 2000. ‘Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical Work-Concept’, in Michael Talbot ed. The Musical Work: Reality of Invention? Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 128–52. Taruskin, Richard. 1997. ‘A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and “the Music Itself”’, in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 360–88. ––––– 2005. Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press. Treitler, Leo. 1988. ‘Mozart and the Idea of Absolute Music’, in Hermann Danuser, ed. Das musikalische Kunstwerk. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 413–40. Reprinted in Music and the Historical Imagination, 1989, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ––––– ed. 1998. Source Readings in Music History. New York: W. W. Norton. Wagner, Richard. 1887. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd edn. Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch. ––––– [1857] 2011. ‘Open Letter to Marie Wittgenstein on Liszt’s Symphonic Poems’, trans. Thomas S. Grey in The Wagner Journal, 5: 65–81. Wiora, Walter. 1963. ‘Zwischen absoluter und Programmmusik’, in Festschrift Friedrich Blume. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 381–88. Zangwill, Nick. 2004. ‘Against Emotion: Hanslick was Right About Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 44: 29–43.

4 Program music James Hepokoski

Chess does not tell stories. Mathematics does not evoke emotions. Similarly, from the viewpoint of pure aesthetics, music does not express the extramusical. But from the viewpoint of psychology, our capacity for mental and emotional associations is as unlimited as our capacity for repudiating them is limited. Thus every ordinary object can provoke musical associations, and, conversely, music can evoke associations with extramusical objects. (Schoenberg 1967, 93)

Schoenberg’s declaration in Fundamentals of Musical Composition affirmed an article of faith among certain elite sectors of European art-music composition and reception, at least from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Within that composer’s art world, heavy with the burdens of history and the imperative towards greatness, two contrasting ideas about musical content could be held in tension: the supremacy of music as a self-sufficient art (idealizable, pure soundstructure) and music’s capability of also calling up sensuous resonances or pictorial things beyond itself – emotions, moods, images, narratives. Here we have a perennial problem in the aesthetics of music: ‘formalist’ vs. ‘expressive’ (or sometimes, more controversially, ‘representational’) constructions. How were these to be reconciled? Was a reconciliation even desirable? On the one hand, in Schoenberg’s day, ‘from the viewpoint of pure aesthetics’, it seemed axiomatic for many Western art-music initiates to assert that instrumental music was to be revered as a language higher than words, set apart from everyday concerns. This tenet endorsed the aesthetic primacy and self-standing legitimacy of what had come to be regarded as the purely musical (das rein Musikalische), the specific tradition-world of the medium. Such was the polemical position of musical autonomy, music’s initially Romantic, proud claim to be both autopoietic (self-perpetuating within its own discursive domain) and untranslatable, exempted from any ‘corruption into the mundane’ or philistinish attempt to collapse its significance into a verbal explication or analytical description (Goehr 1998, 6–47; quotation from p. 30). In the hands of the master composers, it was sometimes believed, pure music, devotionally contemplated, could become an agent of disclosure, granting access to an otherwise ineffable experience. (That such ideological convictions arose in specific historical and cultural circumstances, caught in the swirl of particular interests and agendas, is self-evident.) On the other hand, the insistence upon music’s specialized, internal concerns was countered by an awareness of its broader impacts cross-culturally and across larger stretches of time. Most musical experience, perhaps all of it, is typically intertwined with extramusical (aussermusikalisch) factors or impressions: personal or social responses and functions, imaginative construals,

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sympathetic affective states, trances and rituals, or representations of non-musical images. For Schoenberg it was ‘the viewpoint of psychology’ that accounted for such ‘mental and emotional associations’. This was the other aspect of its content, the more traditional pole of music’s power. ‘Many composers have composed’, he continued, ‘under the urge to express emotional associations. Moreover, program music goes so far as to narrate entire stories with musical symbols. There also exist a great variety of ‘characteristic pieces’ expressing every conceivable mood.’ To be sure, as a latter-day adherent of the metaphysics of music, Schoenberg endorsed music’s sufficiency as the main thing, regarding these psychological qualities only as ‘secondary effects’ (Schoenberg 1967, 93). Within the European art-music tradition the terms illustrative music and program music refer to instrumental compositions that invite their listeners to attend to them with the aim of grasping their correspondences with (normally) pre-given external images, texts, sounds, situations, ideas, or narratives of varying degrees of specificity. Into such categories fall Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Strauss’s Don Quixote, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, and thousands of other analogously titled compositions. In its most restrictive sense, the term ‘program music’ is historical. From the mid-1850s onwards it was promoted by the Liszt Circle – the New German School – as what Carl Dahlhaus characterized as a ‘catchword for a thought-complex’ (ein Stichwort für einen Gedankenkomplex) accompanied by rebellious assertions of artistic progress, the merger of instrumental music with poetic images, and the right to bold, non-traditional musical and structural experimentation (Dahlhaus 1988, 372). While broader understandings of the term have been advanced to include all illustrative music, program music is most scrupulously regarded as that subset of representational music whose otherwise idiosyncratic formal structures or musical materials are most readily grasped by mapping the details of the music onto a governing external narrative or temporal sequence of images. A piece’s backdrop storyline, that is, plays a vital role in helping one to understand its ongoing musical processes and intended representational content. This is a distinction made influentially, among many others, by Otto Klauwell and his generation early in the twentieth century and insisted upon more recently, for instance, by Roger Scruton in the New Grove Dictionary (Klauwell 1910; Scruton 2001).1 Such issues vaulted into prominence in the nineteenth century, when exalted claims about the transcendental capacities of music were reaching their apogee. Contested versions of the claim split into the well-known partisan controversies that pitted the flamboyant Lisztians and Wagnerians against the Brahms Circle’s stern proponents of pure music, with their doctrinaire ‘crusade against musical infidelity’.2 Famously sympathetic with the Brahmsians was the critic Eduard Hanslick, promulgating his formalist view of music as essentially ‘sounding forms in motion’, a purist conviction downplaying the roles of emotion, expression, or representation. Those familiar battles need not be rehearsed here – Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx, Berlioz, Liszt, Ambros, Hanslick, Gurney, and all the rest. Musicologically oriented accounts of the issues once thought to be at stake are legion, and in this essay my interests will take different directions.3 Nonetheless, current considerations of these topics, found especially within philosophical aesthetics, proliferate in the aftermath of those once-towering controversies, fortified by the lingering status claims and academic perpetuation of the now-commercialized ‘great-music’ repertories. When one peers into the voluminous literature on the history, aesthetics, and practice of illustrative claims within Western art music (and for practical reasons the present discussion

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is limited to that repertory), one is immediately entangled in knotted debates and terminological tussles. ‘For one reason or another,’ Peter Kivy noted, ‘musical representation has been problematic ever since there has been musical representation at all’ (Kivy 1984, 123). Not only are the most basic terms vigorously interrogated—‘imitation’, ‘representation’, ‘depiction’, ‘evocation’, ‘denotation’, ‘expression’, ‘image’, ‘program’, ‘metaphor’, ‘symbol’, ‘topic’, ‘iconicity’, ‘indexicality’, ‘the purely musical’ and dozens of others – but they are also often laid out in writings designed to confirm or display pre-assumed aesthetic commitments. As Detlef Altenburg put it, public discourse on this topic has engendered ‘a Babylonian confusion of tongues’ (eine babylonische Sprachverwirrung) (Altenburg 1997, col. 1821). Nor is it easy to enter the fray neutrally. There has long been a sizeable component of cultivated musicians ready to cast a cold eye on art music that seeks to conjure up external images – battles, storms, bird-calls, sunrises, and so on. For some, such a practice was at best a symptom of the childish stage of the art, a debased or trivialized music incapable of rising above the level of a mere oddity or diversion. At worst, if taken seriously, it could lead less cultivated audiences away from a deeper regard for nineteenth- and twentieth-century music’s more purely expressive or formal claims. Positions along these lines generated persistent attempts to justify or recuperate such characteristic works as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – the usual touchstone in this debate – by marginalizing their pictorial invitations and appealing instead to their internal musical processes.4 These views were enhanced in influential sectors of anglophone music theory and history in the mid-to-late twentieth century, when the professionalizing concerns of the subdisciplines aspired to the scientism of positivistic fact or technical, syntactic analysis, regularly sidelining inquiries also into hermeneutics, musical meaning, affective content, or semantic connotation. Today, all of these and many more are restored as areas of intense exploration. The new musicology and music theory of the past two decades – more interpretive, more contextual – is sometimes characterized by its proponents, as Nicholas McKay has put it, as a season of generational renewal and thaw after ‘the harsh winter of the twentieth-century’s formalist discontent with [what were regarded as] “outmoded” expressive attitudes to music’ (McKay 2007, 160). With the thaw, pressing questions about musical representation and program music rise again to the fore. One aspect of this renewal directs attention toward the important role of the performer or listener in his or her interactions with instrumental music – dialogic acts of perception and construal. As I have elaborated in an earlier, more historical study, program music (like absolute music) is more productively viewed as a hermeneutic genre than as a stable, ontological property of any individual work. A hermeneutic genre is a familiar, pre-established category of (actual or anticipated) apprehension concerned with the interpretation of meaning. It is initialized by personal or cultural interests: how one elects to hear a specific work, influenced, as one wishes, by such clues as titles or written programs. As a consequence: The supposed opposition of absolute and program music is a false dichotomy, one forged in the heat of nineteenth-century polemics. . . . The seemingly mutually exclusive extremes— absolute versus programmatic understandings—are not our only choices. Between them lies a flexible middle ground, a vast zone of nuanced implication that may be tapped in various ways, depending on the desired point of view. Consequently, what we encounter is a spectrum of possibilities under which any single piece might be framed for understanding. . . . Nevertheless, in their interactions with the public, composers sometimes highlighted one or

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two of these meaning-strata while downplaying the others. Some works do invite richer speculation about representational allusion than do others. (Hepokoski 2001, 434–5) Considerations along these lines lead one to conclude that the traditional, philosophically posed question ‘is pure music (or this or that piece) actually capable of expressing or representing things outside of itself?’ is unproductive. In part, this is because of the record of historical evidence: much music of the past has been created and listened to under the belief that it can. (Schoenberg’s remark quoted at the outset of this chapter underscores that conviction.) The traditional question’s narrow framing can imply a search for a hardened, essential nature for ‘music alone’ – to draw upon Kivy’s term – an abstraction to be thrown onto the examination table and considered largely apart from issues of the historicity of such questions or the differing affective and imaginative experiences of those who interact compellingly, and in multiple ways, with individual works (Kivy 1990). Some discussions along these lines can strike musicians as disorientingly unmusical, caught up in a skein of philosophically in-house argumentation, where concerns to preserve a disciplinarily sterilized wording seem distant from a more imaginatively attuned musical knowledge and experience. The many varieties of art music, however, are typically engaged with by performers and listeners under variable social roles and conditions made available by broader cultural matrices. We may regard these experiences as total listening situations in which music is never experienced as isolated or alone – never heard free from the force-fields of expectation, habit, knowledge or external association. Nicholas Cook has made the same point, adding, ‘It is through the interaction of music and interpreter, text and context, that meaning is constructed. . . . It is wrong to speak of music having particular meanings; rather it has the potential for specific meanings to emerge under specific circumstances’ (Cook 2001: 180). Within the art-music culture of listening being considered here, aesthetic absorption and knowledgeable commitment (fired in part by Schoenberg’s ‘mental associations’) are familiar components of adequate participation. Listeners set these into motion by sympathetic acts of projection, identification and imagination. These are the terms in which the program-music question is most productively addressed. No brief treatment of such topics can do justice to the labyrinthine problems at hand. One is obliged to simplify, to filter out much that is relevant. What follows are mere glances at three of the many issues currently in play: titles and other paratexts; topic families; signs, metaphors and blended spaces. These issues are not conceptually separate. They intersect as complements, different ways of approaching the same theoretical problem. I conclude by touching on some practical problems of extramusical implication as confronted within the disciplines of music history and analysis. Titles and other paratexts Sometimes amplified by written programs or other verbal commentaries, evocative titles are regular features of illustrative music: Haydn’s ‘Representation of Chaos’ in The Creation, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Debussy’s ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ or ‘Reflets dans l’eau’. (Here we shall suppose that such verbal descriptors are ones sanctioned by the composer.) Defending the expressivity and charm of music qua music against the potentially delimiting aspects of this intermixture, advocates for the non-translatability of purely musical processes – formalists and anti-representationalists – downplay or disregard the aesthetic functions of these

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things. The standard observation is that music, unlike language or painting, is intransitive, incapable of unequivocally denoting non-musical objects or images, much less asserting propositions. In Suzanne K. Langer’s once-influential terms, music is an ‘unconsummated symbol’, lacking an unambiguous referent (Langer 1957, 240–1).5 One could not know from the music alone what its putative illustrative intent, if any, might have been. What if the piece had been given a different title? Or none at all? On this familiar view, while one cannot rule out the background sway or secondary effect of titles on our perception, aesthetically it is only the music’s inner coherence and expressivity that matter. In the final analysis, the title is not an essential part of the work, much less the key to a crass decoding of what the music really means. Instead, the poetic idea suggested by a title is at best an initial motivator for the composer, a point of departure or perhaps something fancifully concocted after the event of composition. One finds such convictions, for instance, in Wagner’s idea of the verbal, ultimately transcendible ‘form motive’, a conceptual forerunner of Mahler’s concept of an external program as only a set of descriptive ‘signposts’ or ‘milestones’ of service mostly to the otherwise mystified, naive beginner, unable to follow the higher reality of his music’s form, sequence of moods, and verbally inexpressible ‘inner program’.6 Dahlhaus’s discussion of programmaticism with regard to Beethoven’s Egmont Overture provides an ingenious (neo-Schoenbergian) suggestion along these lines. Quite apart from the piece’s potential associative references to the narrative storyline in either Goethe’s play or the political-historical background to it, Dahlhaus asserts that the music’s motivic logic effects an ‘aesthetic transformation’ in which extramusical connotations are transmuted into purely musical thought, leaving behind only minimal, perhaps negligible, residues of the original, literary subject. ‘Abstract musical processes gradually force the programmatic aspect into the background – admittedly without extinguishing it entirely. . . . [This is] the transformation of content into form [‘formal process as formalization’]’ (Dahlhaus 1991, 15).7 Similarly (though argued from a thought-world utterly separate from Dahlhaus’s), Scruton’s analytic-philosophical concept of musical understanding is limited to ‘its meaning as music’. He puts the matter point-blank: ‘We can have a considerable, even perfect, understanding of a piece like [Debussy’s] La Mer while being ignorant of, or dismissive towards, its representational claims’ (Scruton 1997, 131).8 This declaration seeks to strike at the heart of program music, whose grounding conceit is that of associative hearing – inviting experiences of intermedial delight or amazement by asking the listener to blend the ongoing musical ideas with pre-given external images or narratives. Such views tilt the scales in favour of a ‘musical purism’, postulated a priori, that belittles or brackets out non-musical aspects of the total listening situation, including the interpretive psychologies and historical knowledge deployed by style-competent performers or listeners. More sympathetic to exploring the workings of musical representation, Kivy, in Sound and Semblance (1984), crafts an appealing explanation for the persistent appeal of this stark ‘antirepresentational thesis’. Confessing that he too is ‘drawn strongly’ to the latter by his ‘musical nature’ – clearly, one that savours the wonders of the musical medium – he nonetheless concludes that, at bottom, it remains an extremely useful falsehood. For so strong is the urge, in the West, to give music a subject, a literary content, a philosophical message, that a proper mean can only be struck, it would seem, by aiming at the opposite, formalist extreme. Whatever its usefulness, however, a falsehood it remains. (Kivy 1984, 216)9

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Those willing to move beyond that falsehood will engage the important play of associative imagination and psychology as participatory aspects of the total musical experience. Kendall Walton puts his finger on the central issue: ‘Mere titles often suffice to make music patently representational; indeed I cannot imagine music which an appropriate title could not render representational. Music stands ready to take on an explicit representational function at the slightest provocation’ (Walton 1994, 47). Walton alludes here to the framing functions that, within literary theory, we can associate with Gérard Genette’s study of paratexts, features of presentation ancillary to the otherwise unadorned text: titles, intertitles, epigraphs, separate explanatory notes, dedications, and much more –conditioning mediations between the text and its readers (Genette 1997). Paratexts are also central to the repertory of music presently under consideration and particularly to the experience invited by illustrative or program music. Here the unadorned text is the bare notation (or its acoustic realization), though that text is surrounded and inflected by a panoply of ‘non-sounding elements’ –paratextual and cultural – necessary for a rich, historically adequate construal.10 In Lawrence Kramer’s terms, most musical texts (including seemingly non-illustrative ones) are accompanied by textual and citational inclusions, two types of ‘hermeneutic windows’ inviting robust interpretations from those who are drawn to pursue them (Kramer 1990, 9–10). Within the field of philosophical aesthetics Jerrold Levinson (1985) has laid out the case for titles with admirable clarity: Titles of artworks are often integral parts of them, constitutive of what such works are. . . . [They] are plausibly essential properties of them, in many cases. . . . The title slot for a work of art is never devoid of aesthetic potential; how it is filled, or that it is not filled, is always aesthetically relevant. (A work differently titled will invariably be aesthetically different.) . . . [Titles] serve as presumptive guides to perception of a certain sort. Most instances of explicitly illustrative music bear what Levinson designated as either a ‘focusing’ or ‘disambiguating’ title-type. The former guides the listener towards the leading conceptual idea of the work; the latter ‘can serve to fix or endorse one perceptual reading rather than another’, important ‘if the body of the work is representationally ambiguous [as often within musical works]’ (Levinson 1985, 23, 24, 35, 36; Kivy 1984, 40 also endorses the disambiguation function of titles). To this we need only add the obvious, namely, that all relatable paratexts may be considered under the same line of thought. These include: a composer’s (or authorized proxy’s) separate, sometimes detailed programmatic explanation of the music (as with Weber’s Concertstück, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, or the composer-approved, published Musikführer that lead us through the illustrative details of Richard Strauss’s tone poems); ongoing intertitles distributed throughout the score to indicate what is being currently represented here or there (as with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with its ‘demonstration-sonnet’ lines intercalated at relevant locations within the individual string parts, Liszt’s Schiller-based Die Ideale, Smetana’s Vltava or Bartók’s Kossuth); and suppressed programs that are later discovered and made public (as with Berg’s Lyric Suite). As I have written elsewhere, a titled character-piece for keyboard or a titled concerto, overture or symphonic poem participates in a tradition wherein the implicit game of intermedial association is presupposed to be aesthetically significant (Hepokoski 1992). In declining to play the associative game proposed by the composer one would be – following Levinson’s argument – listening to an ‘aesthetically different’ composition, even though it would ‘sound the same’.11

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Bracketing out the historically conditioned title of La mer in quest only of its ‘meaning as music [alone]’ is certainly possible and may be gratifying on its own terms. But it is nonetheless to construe the work in an aesthetically different sense from that of the more complete conception offered by the composer. Some listeners may not be troubled by this. From the standpoint of an enriched hermeneutics, though, titles and composer-intended paratexts – however we might learn of them – are essential for more thoughtful explorations of the layers of connotational and cultural implication that such works invite us to consider. Topic families Beyond verbal paratexts the question of musical representation extends into the individualized content and processes of the programmatic work – its succession of musical modules, most of which, while highly characterized, will not carry explicit labels. How might we interpret their potentially representational roles? When considering the possible semantic implications within Western instrumental music, philosophers have typically sought to elucidate the musical sign or figure not by examining concrete situations of historical practice but rather by interrogating the logic and persuasiveness of the various theoretical possibilities. Typical is the approach taken by Stephen Davies, hauling the program-music claim before the analytic-philosophical tribunal. ‘If music is representational,’ we are told, ‘it must satisfy the general conditions for representation.’ Davies posits four that are ‘necessary’: (1) the composer’s intention to illustrate; (2) a medium/ content distinction (the music should represent something other than music); (3) some sense of resemblance between the music and what is represented (possibly adapted from Richard Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in’ theory for pictorial art); and (4) the potentially clarifying role of conventions. Following an exhaustive review of philosophical positions and their complications, Davies pronounces the verdict: For the most part, the richness of music does not arise from its depictive powers. . . . [though] I allowed that there may be a degree of depiction in music . . . based on natural (but conventionally structured) resemblances. . . . Music’s power lies more with its expressive than with its limited representational possibilities. (Davies 1994, 51–121; quotations from pp. 52–3 and 121)12 A cleaner, more provocative path through all of this has been cleared in the past three decades within the discipline of music study proper, particularly (though by no means exclusively) in the subfields concerned with the historical identification and interpretation of musical ‘topics’. These are recurring, ‘conventional musical signs, or ‘commonplaces’ of style . . . familiar, expressive, rhetorical gestures encoded in referential musical patterns’ (McKay 2007, 160). None of this is news to music scholars, well aware that the study of musical topoi was proposed in 1980 by Leonard G. Ratner, who documented several late eighteenth-century types and subdivided them into topics and styles (Ratner 1980, 9–29).13 Most of them are readily recognizable: dancerhythm identifiers (gavotte, minuet, passepied, gigue, bourrée, contredanse), march, fanfare, musette, pastoral, hunt, Sturm und Drang, Empfindsamkeit, singing style, brilliant style, learned style, mechanistic clockwork, French Overture, and others as well. One of several strategies of that decade to encourage the legitimation of a historically responsible hermeneutics, topic theory helped the discipline, in Hatten’s words, to begin ‘to recover from the [midcentury] repression of expressive discourse fostered by a formalist aesthetics’ (Hatten 1994, 228; also quoted in McKay 2007, 161).

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Ratner’s original list of connotative signifiers opened the door not only to inquiries into the associative connotations and registers of such topics (Allanbrook 1983) or to a tabulation and modest expansion of the accepted eighteenth-century ‘universe of topic[s]’ (Agawu 1991, 30) but also to a broader array of shared, readily understood musical signs within the tradition, however creatively individualized these commonly shared signs (or types) might have been realized in any particular work (or token). One might imagine the vast set of such signs to be arranged on a continuum of musical ostension, ranging, on the one end, from more or less obvious or onomatopoetic instances (‘sounds like’) to, on the other end, less obvious figures of conventional or arbitrary association.14 (Zones within this continuous span might be regarded as correlates to Peirce’s famous distinctions between the icon, index and symbol.) The easy cases are the most obviously mimetic ones, musical analogues of actual sounds that in turn call up associated images: thunderstorms, rushing water, hunting horns, bagpipe drones, bells, bird calls, animal cries, battle-clashes. All such are the stock-in-trade of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century aesthetic of ‘imitation’: Farina’s Capriccio stravagante of 1627 (imitating cat, dog and hen); Biber’s Sonata violino solo representativa for violin of (c.1669: nightingale, cuckoo, frog, hen, quail and cat) and militaristic Battalia (1673); various storm interludes (symphonies) in French tragédies lyriques – and in Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ (along with birds and a barking dog); and so on. Moving along the continuum, one finds analogues of slow- or fast-moving actions or motions: light breezes, sunrises, rippling brooks, spinning wheels, pictorial ascents or descents, sunrises, rapid, energetic bustle, glistening sparkle, sudden surprises, bucolic placidity, and so on.15 Further along, these blend into motion- or contour-analogues of human emotions or affects, more or less standardized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: jubilant fanfare-like effects; ascending or descending contours with characteristic affective connotations; the major–minor, slow–fast dichotomies and their emotive implications; in minor, the well-documented lament or grieving figure (a descending-tetrachord bassline from tonic to dominant, sometimes chromatically filled in – a type of passus duriusculus – and produced as an ostinato bass); various standardized depictions of the demonic (or dance of death); accepted folkloric signs or other national style-identifiers of a people, nation or Volk; and many others. And on the far end, less unequivocally, one encounters characteristic signs of triumph or defeat, exultation or manic fear, struggle, despair, breakthrough, the heroic, the learned, the hymnic, the lyric, the ineffable, rapturous love, divine grace, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others – all standard topical effects of nineteenth-century music. Far from remaining semantically mute or ineffably cryptic, asking only for our rapt and reverent silence, much of the instrumental music within the European tradition is bursting with connotative implication historically inlaid into the style and waiting to be explored hermeneutically by the imaginative and responsible interpreter. Individualized topics have musical and cultural histories, spanning the centuries. These may be considered as topic families extended through historical time, within which they are subject to social and individual ramifications and modifications. One may trace the tradition of battledepictions, for instance, from Janequin’s program chanson, La Bataille de Marignan; La guerre (c.1520s) and William Byrd’s ‘The Battle’ (1591, from My Ladye Nevell’s Booke) through many dozens of subsequent works including Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, along with several pieces from the twentieth century. Or the topic family of bird-calls from Janequin through Biber, Vivaldi, Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Ravel, Delius, Respighi, Messiaen, Rautavaara (Cantus arcticus, 1972), and beyond; or storms; or bells; or mechanical clocks and other gear-and-lever gizmos; or the sea; or dreamlike or enchanted travel by boat

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(siciliana? barcarole?, e.g. Edgecombe 2001). Large-scale historical studies have been made of the musical signs of the pastoral (Jung 1980); of the structural and varied affective connotations of The Chromatic Fourth during Four Centuries of Music (Williams 1997); and even of musical depictions of such human gestures as questions (Jessulat 2000). In addition to providing sophisticated discussions of the historical background and intellectual structure underpinning topic theory, Raymond Monelle has produced historical and cultural studies of several topic families and their near-relatives. These include the 6/8, 9/8 or 12/8 galloping gait of the ‘noble horse’ from c.1800 through such exemplifications as Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and Sousa’s march, The Washington Post; the descending half-step pianto (the figure of tears, grief or wearied sigh); and a book-length historical study of ‘hunt, military, and pastoral’ (Monelle 2000, 41–80 and 2006). The potential list of such inquiries seems endless. Several points follow – and not a few caveats. First, it is clear that much, perhaps even most, Western instrumental music participates in a historically conditioned, shared semantic network, a significant portion of which is at least approachable by topic-family theory, broadly and flexibly construed. Even though irreducible factors of pure music’s systematic procedures and regulated traditions are also very much in play, the now stale argument that untexted music – much less program music or music with titles – is ipso facto incapable of pointing toward recognizable external referents or affects with cultural connotations is no longer tenable. Conversely, though, one needs to realize that topic theory, still in its raw and rudimentary phases, by no means answers all of our interpretive questions. Overplaying its cards can lead to breathtakingly naïve hermeneutic claims. Second, the universe of topic families, including their many shades and variants, is far larger and more varied than anyone has yet described. It also includes overlapping topics and individual figures capable of more than one topical reference. Third, selecting an appropriate (generalized) topic-label for a given figure is more challenging than might initially appear. A procedural risk of topic theory is that it can tempt the overconfident interpreter, with a presumed master-code-book securely in hand, to leap rashly into a quick, reductive labeling. To do so is to discredit what ought to be a more subtly tinged enterprise. We need to think through our descriptors critically, sceptically, weighing alternatives, problematizing what we might mean with such descriptions. Most of the entailments that follow rely on our initial decisions, and those decisions are often the weak links in the chain. (Let Ratner’s designation of the opening of the Eroica as a waltz stand as a caution to us all: Ratner 1980, 223.) Fourth, even when we think that we have identified the proper family of a given figure, we need to be attentive to the nuances and complications that any individual token of it can present. It may be that the manner of its realization is more noteworthy than the topic itself. Fifth, merely identifying a topic or series of topics is not enough. Topic-recognition must never be taken to be a simple translation of music’s meaning into words. It is only an initial step prompting further inquiry and careful interpretation, particularly with regard to topical inflection and the narrative journey through arrays of topical successions. Sixth, compositionally to illustrate or connote musically is, more often than not, to activate a pre-existing topical tradition of signification and then to tailor it to one’s own cultural and aesthetic purpose. To access a culturally available style is to channel the memory of its historical traditions, to draw on the potential of its past history of connotatively charged accumulations. Any topical study of a single work or set of closely related works should consider the matter both synchronically and diachronically. Individual evocations of birds, water, battles, storms, fanfares, hunts, and all the rest may plug more directly into the topical tradition than into the external referent itself.

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This last point questions the extent to which extramusical references are, in fact, extramusical at all. Monelle deals with the issue from the standpoint of a hard-line semiotics. ‘The status of a . . . semiotic entity [such as a musical topic] is not guaranteed by its relation to a real state of affairs, but by its interpretability within a code.’ Ultimately, the verbal designation for a topic (storm, pastoral, lament, and so on) can be best grasped as what Peirce called an ‘interpretant’, a conventional mode of connecting the signifier (or, for Peirce, the ‘representamen’) to the signified (or ‘object’). In short, musical topics, while codelike, ‘need not refer [directly] to a ‘world’ of extension’ [objective things in the world ‘out there’], and their meaning is not ‘referential’. On the contrary, they must refer to semantic values, defined and implied by the signs themselves. . . . The meaning of the musical sign is not to be sought in the world at all. It is to be sought within the [signifying] system’ (Monelle 2006, 20–32; quotations from 21 and 22). This is an aggressive claim. Encountering a historically advanced instance of the tempest topic – Beethoven’s ‘Gewitter, Sturm’ movement from the Pastoral Symphony, say, or Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 of Die Walküre – need not be regarded as an ad hoc, individual illustration of any particular, external storm, nor even of essential storminess, as grounded in the composer’s personal experience. Rather, on Monelle’s semiotic-absolutist terms, what would be conjured up is a new realization of the craft-inherited ‘musical storm’: a traditional, vividly imaginative convention available within the historical codes of music.16 Signs, metaphors, blended spaces What if, cutting free from turgid philosophical snarls, we were to take the obvious for granted, either observationally or on the basis of personal experience? What if we were to concede that the total listening situations of different listeners and different historical eras have experienced instrumental music as rich in a multitude of different connotations? Presupposing that we have an interest more advanced than that of projecting subjective cloud pictures on to the music, the more trenchant question, beyond the disambiguating functions of titles and topic families, becomes one of enquiring into the phenomenological or cognitive factors that enable associative listening in the first place: Schoenberg’s ‘viewpoint of psychology’. That question, too, has been of growing interest in the past three decades, both inside and outside the professional field of music study. Fundamental to all associative listening and relatable to the general, though somewhat different, question of musical signification is the operation of metaphor: one thing is heard as being like, or otherwise equated with, another, different thing. This is typically the situation claimed to be engineered by the musical signs encountered in illustrative music, one that was already an acknowledged experiential curiosity, a source of wonder, by the mid-eighteenth century: this stretch of musical sounds ‘is’ a storm (we are urged to hear it as a storm or even, cross-sensorily, to see it as one in an act of ‘pictorial listening’), even while its musical significance is by no means reducible only to a storm); another a love-declaration; a third an image of mourning; another a heroic countenance.17 Metaphor theory is currently a burgeoning field, one that is anything but settled. Consequently, one should speak rather of recent metaphor theories, in contestation not only with each other but also with other modes of approach to such issues. A number of these theories recast earlier concepts of metaphor and also claim to be informed, to a greater or lesser degree, by ongoing research in cognitive science, with its interest in the physiological embodiment of the mind. Only a small number of its relevant aspects (and even fewer of its intersubjective variants) can be touched upon here.

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George Lakoff’s influential ‘contemporary theory of metaphor’, developed also with Mark Johnson around 1980, marked an important early stage in this inquiry. Lakoff notes, for instance, that ‘metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not [merely] linguistic, in nature’. ‘The locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another.’ One can investigate metaphorical expressions in terms of mental processes that normally operate below the linguistic threshold, ‘mostly unconscious, automatic , and used with no noticeable effort’. Lakoff and Johnson write of a ‘source domain’ being mapped onto a ‘target domain’, now-familiar terms in metaphor theory. In one of their paradigmatic metaphorical expressions, ‘LOVE is [or as] a JOURNEY’ (as in ‘It’s been a long, bumpy road’), ‘ontological’ and ‘epistemic’ characteristics of the richly furnished source domain, JOURNEY, are being mapped on to the equally rich target domain, LOVE – which in turn is being understood in terms of sharable features from JOURNEY: ‘mapping knowledge’ about the one, journeys, onto knowledge about the other, love. Their study, then, deals with the common psychological activity of ‘cross-domain mapping’ (Lakoff 1993, 202–51; quotations from, in order, 244, 203, 245, and 206–12).18 For our purposes this is what happens when the domain of music is associated with that of the different domain of either a sung text (as with word-painting) or an external, verbalized image, narrative or other paratext. In The Way We Think (2002), Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner developed further their concept of ‘conceptual blending’, another way of construing this quasi-automatic cognitivemetaphorical process. Rather than being restricted to a two-domain model, Fauconnier and Turner propose a model capable of incorporating, then merging, four or more ‘mental spaces’, the final one of which is a ‘blended space’ of ‘conceptual integration’. (‘Mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action . . . connected to long-term schematic knowledge [that structure them] called ‘frames’’) (2002, 40).19 Figure 4.1, adapted from their work, presents a diagrammatic ‘conceptual integration network’ (CIN) of a generalized, elementary (four-space) version of their proposal. Partial, corresponding, and relevant structural aspects of two different input spaces (love and journey, perhaps; or a purely musical figure and an associatable verbal paratext) are to be blended into a third – represented below them – as a new, blended space of ‘formal integration’, ‘emergent structure’ or ‘meaning. In order to arrive at the blended space, the generic space deploys a system of selection that can capture or identify attributes, features, or structure that the two input spaces have in common and on to which it mapped. Additionally, the whole CIN process of metaphor production can be governed or organized externally, so to speak, by the application of a frame or set of general principles, accepted as relevant and appropriate, that govern the interests or procedures of the conceptual blend.20 Such a model has proven attractive to musicological and music-theoretical work on musical meaning and metaphor. Discussions and applications of it to music are found, for instance, in interdisciplinary studies by Nicholas Cook and Lawrence M. Zbikowski.21 The relevance of such a concept to music that seeks to be representational – as only one of its multiple facets – is clear. A pictorial or literary title or other paratext signals that a work is in dialogue with a historically situated genre (concert overture? programmatic symphony or concerto? characteristic piece for keyboard? symphonic poem?) within which, traditionally, we are invited to pursue various degrees of intermedial blending, even while few, if any, would be so narrow as to claim that that blending alone exhausts the aesthetic interest or meaning of the piece. Our awareness of the ramifications of the genre – above all, its historical placement,

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Generic Space (recognizes the concepts or structures belonging to both input spaces; perceives and defines the nature of the cross-space mappings to be undertaken)

Input Space 1

Input Space 2

(mental space 1: partial and relevant aspects of this are projected into the resultant blended space)

(mental space 2: partial and relevant aspects of this are projected into the resultant blended space)

Blended Space (‘formal integration’ and ‘emergent structure’: contains the generic structure of generic space but also blends (projects) relatable aspects of the more specific structures of the two input spaces)

Figure 4.1 Generalized conceptual integration network (adapted from Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 142–4)

its traditions, its community-shared directives for reception – can be regarded as providing a regulative frame for the enterprise. Conceptual acuity within the generic space realizes that we are invited to locate similar attributes within the two input spaces. We are then asked to correlate aspects of the ‘music alone’– phrase-to-phrase modular content and longer range structure – with the implications of the work’s evocative title (or other paratext) through an imaginative recognition of those topological or structural attributes that both input spaces are imagined to have in common. Cook refers to these as ‘enabling similarities’ or ‘homologies’. They can include shared specifics of motion, speed, repetitive gestures, precision, intensity, clash, turbulence, calm, affective posture, high or low cultural register, and many others.22

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Here is where the deployment of topic families or appropriately individualized, ad hoc gestures renders the situation more complex. From this perspective the ‘music alone’ (what one hears, the acoustic surface) can be recognized as pre-loaded with historically conditioned significations: hunt, march, storm, prayer, minor- or major-mode connotations, or any of a vast number of expressive or representational possibilities. Like dead or frozen metaphors, these seemingly natural associations of topic are long-established cultural products of earlier metaphorical blends. Hatten refers to them as immediate, stable and near-literal ‘correlations’ or ‘shared general meanings’, conventions that are ‘inherited from earlier styles’ and can encompass accrued expressive meanings (‘expressive genres’) broader than topics per se.23 What one might at first naively imagine to be a simple input of ‘music alone’ is not ‘music alone’ at all. It never is. Instead, even while we may not be cognizant of the underlying factors at work in these fluid moments of immediacy and transience, we experience music as a richly complex, affective space that is always already the outcome of several earlier, assimilative blends that can be (or have been) automatically set into motion in our own acts of listening. Held up to inspection, the ‘music alone’ turns out to be a generous aggregate of ready-made, previously blended spaces, historical accretions, standardized connotations –hyperblends of newer metaphors grounded in multiply accumulated layers of more elemental, prior metaphors – that are each themselves open to historical and stylistic inquiry. Bristling with interpretive potential, the rippling thicknesses of these connotative features afford a near-immediate cross-space mapping of the ‘music alone’ onto the non-musical implications suggested, in yet another stage of assimilation, by the provided programmatic title or paratext. The result of the mapping is a new entity, a conceptual hyperblend, understood as an emergent meaning made possible through the listener’s individualized, performative acts of absorption and imagination. The mutually correlatable tensions of the music and the analogue-image are brought together into a differing, unitary mental space of new signification, a newly created metaphorical meaning.24 An additional aspect of the encounter with any piece of music is the experience of its sonic/modular change through linear time: attending to the musical process in motion. This stream-of-change carves out a singular temporal space of affect and image. Changing from moment to moment as the piece scrolls through time, the processual flow of enacted blends can be construed, with the help of memory and anticipation (phenomenological retention and protention), as an impression of coherent, expanding spatiality. Enabling that impression is a cross-space mapping, in Lakoffian terms, of the common TEMPORALITY as SPACE metaphor, perhaps inflected also with such schemata as CONTAINER merged with JOURNEY (or even STORY). With such a realization (while I do not seek to oversimplify a complex matter) the problematics typically associated with the issue of musical narrative can be recast. When the impression of narrativity occurs in music, it is the result of the production of a different mode of conceptual integration. And again, it is one typically invited by the program-music composer.25 (I revisit the question of linearity in the final section of this chapter.) The common, spatial impression of the blended-space end-product has been noted in differing ways. For philosopher Kendall Walton, the ‘representational arts’ in general are characterized as fictional ‘work worlds’ built upon ‘props’ in ‘games of make-believe’. Even non-representational music is experienced as having ‘spatial perspectives’ construable as engrossingly subjective, intimate ‘game worlds’ of ‘imagined feelings’ (Walton 1990; 1994, 56, 59). For musicologist and cognitive theorist Eric F. Clarke, the final experiential product is a ‘virtual object that I hear as having a bodily character’, one with ‘virtual agency’ and ‘virtual motion’ readily attributed to it. The performer’s or listener’s willing absorption into an ‘environment’ of ‘virtual reality’

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encourages and rewards a close personal identification with these musical blends and processes (Clarke 2005, 182–8). Even more broadly, all of this resonates synergistically with music theorist Robert Hatten’s extended semiotic studies of the embodied nature and communicative potential, for style-competent listeners, of ‘musical gesture’, defined as an ‘energetic shaping through time’ and a ‘movement (implied, virtual, actualized) interpretable as a [conventionalized] sign . . . [and] marked as meaningful . . . biologically and/or culturally’ (Hatten 2004, 1, 93, 125). 26 And much of this, with some allowance for flexibility, can also be read as compatible with Lawrence Kramer’s recent insistence on the mutual, deeply subjective interaction of music and listener, with the latter ‘hearkening’ to the call of music and, in effect, lighting the music up (Aufleuchtung) with a sympathetic response, hearing music under an aspect. For the humanist Kramer, however, the semiotic route, aspiring to science and objectivity, misses the point: ‘Semiotic models suggest that expressions signify or symbolize feelings without requiring their presence in either sender or receiver.’ Instead, Kramer insists that we need to realize instead the indispensable role of participatory subjectivity, to understand that it is only ‘that openness, which coincides with the necessary mutuality of the expressive act and the reply that reexpresses it, [that] marks the point of theoretical sufficiency’ (Kramer 2012, 156).27 Beyond cloud pictures: historically aware hermeneutics Topic and metaphor theories remind us that music, as encountered in total listening situations, harbors a richness of potential implication that can be experienced and reflected upon in a variety of ways. The question of whether instrumental art music can be legitimately associated with cross-sensory images or deeply felt personal responses has been eclipsed by larger questions of how such commonly intuited associations happen and what we are to make of them. At first glance, the ease with which such associations can arise might suggest that the process is inevitably random or casual, uncontainable, merely personalized and arbitrary. But listeners vary in terms of interests and interpretive expertise. They differ in what they bring to the place of encounter and for which larger purposes that encounter is sought. For a more professionalized sector of listeners, particularly, though not exclusively, those invested in the disciplines of music history and music theory, the interpretation of musical texts in a historically and analytically responsible way is an issue of paramount concern. The interpretation of such texts is a fraught and multilayered affair. It involves attending to the problematics of negotiating between our own, limited horizons and the contrasting ones that, for specific purposes, produced the historical texts under examination. It can entail the generation of potentially persuasive reconstructions of an imagined compositional intention, itself a complex and methodologically charged issue. And it demands the adducing of reasoned arguments on behalf of the latent implications within the text, setting forth a proposed meaning beyond a work’s merely personalized significance-for-me. Even while we might be attracted to topic and metaphor theory as helping to bolster or legitimize our willingness to embrace the enterprise of hermeneutics, we also confront professionalized constraints that challenge our natural tendency to believe our first impressions of the recognizable pictures (emergent meanings, blended spaces) that we think that we see in the clouds. To get a sense of some of these issues within the question of illustrative music, we might do well to revisit some basic concepts, ones that will, in the end, drive us back into the realm of historical musical structures and technical processes: a necessary, disciplinary grasp of how compositions are crafted in the workshop.

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We recall that the term ‘program music’ can be restricted to those works with defensible narrative claims, to those pieces that invite us to map their presented temporal successions, with varying degrees of specificity, on to a presumed or given external narrative. Program music, that is, is a subset of the broader category of illustrative music. To be sure, all such distinctions are blurry, in part because several types of seemingly abstract works within a tradition –perhaps most notably, the sonata tradition – can also be construed as implicitly narrative in their pursuits of generic, cadential goals and, in most cases, of eventual resolutions (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, especially 250–4, 306–7, 312–16, 336–42). This was emphatically the case in the nineteenth century, when issues of illustration, program and structure were inflated into grand subjects of aesthetic debate, and when partisan compositional agendas increasingly claimed to be allied with musical progress. Most discussions of musical representation (or emotional resonance, for that matter) center on what I call the vertical dimension of an isolatable musical module: a single passage’s immediately experienced connotative significance, the illustrative moment considered apart from the role of its placement(s) within the larger composition. But program music additionally invites the listener to consider the narrative implications in the context of its horizontal placement within an environment of situational change from module to module. What is that moment’s role among the work’s formal processes? What does it mean to have this musical module situated there (as opposed to elsewhere) – and following, say, that module? In the case of sonatabased works, what is the way in which that or that module has been placed into a dialogue with that structure’s generic action-spaces? One complicating factor is that, quite apart from its representational ambitions, such music also has its own traditions and norms qua music to unfold within its own domain. With paratexted music we are asked to navigate between (at least) two sets of often-complex relational networks: (1) the music’s external framing under extramusical concepts (poetic ideas, implied representations, topic families, potential analogical narratives) and (2) the music’s simultaneous relation to the historical tradition of how this or that genre of music is to be crafted (the work’s dwelling within an ongoing, definable and relatively autopoietic musical world). The nineteenth-century program-music game explored the interaction of these two networks. While either can be conceptually isolated for heuristic purposes, the game’s larger purpose was to engage both of them dialogically and to encourage the listener to do so as well. The temptation to avoid is to overweigh either the one network or the other – or worse, imprudently to discard one of them illegitimate or negligible. Instead, we should strive to keep both sides of the binary continually in play – and in tension – even as we temporarily tip the balance this way or that, depending on the stretch of music that we are considering and the interpretive concerns at hand. This demands a constant nuancing, seeking always imaginatively to grasp a historically viable concept that could have been capable of generating a ground-plan for the details of what one hears within a musical work. This is a fundamental hermeneutic challenge: we need responsibly to imagine what broader network of ideas might have lain behind the compositional impulse that could account for everything that one encounters in the final product. Close music-technical analysis matters – a great deal. In cases where paratextual evidence is absent or incomplete, and where there is nonetheless a reasonable implication of a background poetic idea steering important aspects of the composer’s musical choices, we might put forward the cautious (albeit fallible) suggestion of a viable rhetorical analogue that functions productively, metaphorically, at the core of the music. Such an imaginative analogue proposes a generalizable concept under which what is presented to us on the acoustic

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surface would make sense – would cohere as a whole. Always challengeable and provisional in its status as a proposed reading (not an objective discovery), a viable rhetorical analogue is subject to a number of heuristic limitations. The analogue should be: (1) historically plausible (one could make a case that the conceptual analogue, broadly construed, was indeed part of the generalized culture and life-world of the composer; one could imagine the composer to have been aware of such ideas); (2) apt or relevant with regard to the work at hand (more locally, a reasonable connection might be found between this specific work’s range of concerns and the larger cultural world available at the time); and (3) homologous in close detail to the work’s musical processes (phrase-by-phrase mappable on to the work; supported by the local, ongoing musical details at virtually all points of close reading). While music and its claims inhabit a domain separate from words or images, in paratexted music we are asked to set up a topical or metaphorical relationship between them. One must be clear: music does not (and cannot) present ideas or images in the manner that words do. What it can do within its own domain, though, is to cultivate expressive musical analogues to those ideas or images. But how? Setting aside in this discussion the equally important issues of music’s political roles of affirmation or resistance – its ideological and social functions – music is a sensuous and temporal medium historically bound up with elemental human gesture and colorations of mood. As also noted by others, the sense of ‘mood’ suggested here may be relatable to such existential aspects of consciousness as Heideggerian Stimmungen (‘attunements’ of mood), which are not yet attached to intentional objects, as are emotions (Heidegger 1996, 126–34, 312–17).28 While any adequate consideration of music and mood would take us far afield, we might at least propose that what music can do (or at least what it was claimed to be able to do) is to light up the successive affects of a generalized or verbal paratext. It can do this by means of its own potential for being interpreted analogically, a potential that we as historical listeners are typically willing to project upon it in search of communicative wholeness and gestalt coherence – all as part of playing the game properly. Music can provide an experiential analogue to an implicit or explicit paratext. In turn this can be experienced as a heightened, interiorized richness accessible only within the domain of music. It remains an analogue to experience that nonetheless, and on its own terms, asks also to be grounded within the network of relations that it establishes with accepted musical practice. In Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance (where both Marx and the later Mendelssohn provided us with a guide to what each section of the piece had sought to illustrate – ‘the dance of the elves’, the court of Theseus, the hunting party, the wanderings of the young lovers, Bottom and the rude mechanicals, and so on),29 one is to imagine that the affective and topical experiences of the relevant programmatic concepts are lit up sensuously by extended paragraphs of music – by a succession of discrete musical tableaux that also operate dialogically (make sense) within their historical traditions of sonata-structure, harmony, form, orchestration, and so on. They remain experiential, representative analogues within an essentially musical experience, and it is only through that musical experience, historically grasped, that they can be adequately interpreted. So where does this leave us? Music can be relatable to an accompanying or implicit paratext in any number of ways. A composer’s musical choices are invariably made in dialogue with established musical traditions. These choices are not only piece-specific but also relational, since they put to work individualized tokens of readily recognizable families of community-shared signs, patterns, topics, expectations, and the like. A composer’s choices reach into the history of his or her materials, and as we explore a work’s acoustic content that history should be

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thematized, not bracketed out. Reflecting on a composer’s choice of musical material, we need to be aware of how and why, within a concrete historical situation that also bears exploration, the composer is accessing, inflecting, and sometimes even exceeding commonly encountered generic norms to produce particular expressive or illustrative effects. Among the musical strategies through which an impression of adequacy can be enabled and constrained are those that we have considered earlier, along with a few others: titles, topic or affect families (established historically and culturally within the tradition, and including such aspects as tempo, orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, dynamics and articulation), intertextual allusions to individual moments (or sounds) of past esteemed or canonic works within the tradition (such as Tchaikovsky’s rewriting in Francesca da Rimini of the mid-nineteenth-century ‘inferno’ topic – not to mention the contrasting love music – initially encountered in Liszt’s earlier Dante Symphony), ad hoc thematic identifiers (the contrasting Max and Agathe themes of Weber’s Freischütz Overture) and leitmotifs. All of these strategies are vertical in their immediate connotations. They ask for a sympathetic recognition of representation within the ongoing flash of the now. As such, they function as musical lightings-up of that now and its paratextual implications. For analytic and hermeneutic purposes we should construe these aspects not exclusively as individualized or unique expressions but rather as emplotted arrangements of generically standardized postures or conventions. When the eventual sonic product as a whole (the work) is allied to a complex paratext (as with the extreme case, say, of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra), all of this can become extraordinarily dense in its moment-to-moment layers of implication. This brings us once again to the final complicating factor: the sophisticated, ‘purely musical’ aspect of the horizontal; the linear and generic implications provided by the composer’s temporal arrangement of the vertical nows into a coherent musical shape – or form – usually construable as unfolding in dialogue, however loosely, with the flexible norms of a historically familiar musical genre. What is required of us here is an informed, historical knowledge of the generic conventions within which the individual work asks to be interpreted (or, in ambiguous cases, at least seems to ask to be interpreted). This implicates the basic principle of reading form dialogically, within the flexible norms and established models appropriate to the composition’s time and place. One needs to be aware of each potential genre’s acceptable range of conventions and deviations. In difficult cases we are obliged to decide what the relevant genre (or set of genres?) is with which the given work is most likely to be in dialogue.30 It seems clear, for instance, that sonata-form conventions, however loosely construed, are still ones operative in the backgrounds of such deformational works as the first movement of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie or Wagner’s Overture to Der Fliegende Holländer, while the ritornello- or rondo-like aspects of the episodic successions of Smetana’s Vltava declare early on in the piece that they are unfolding outside of the interpretive guidelines of sonata form. In sum: in all programmatic or illustrative works there is also, within the historical tradition, a purely musical dimension – horizontally. There is a dialogical musical narrative to be read within its own domain: forms, pattern-types, arrangements, resolutions, standard realizations or deformations thereof, and so on. In dialogue with historical genres that provide guidelines for interpretation, these narratives can be grasped only horizontally, in terms of strictly musical conventions. The analyst or commentator is then to place that musically illuminated horizontal process into a metaphorical dialogue with determinative features of the relevant paratext (or, as it is often characterized, the ‘description under which’ we are invited to apprehend it). Ultimately, both vertical and horizontal implications need to be merged with sensitivity and

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flexibility to produce a reading (not a solution once and for all) that is, at bottom, a viable rhetorical analogue to what is presented within any such individual piece.31 That said, the question of the specificity of one’s reading (not to mention its degree of certainty) still looms large. The practice of interpreting the connotations of illustrative music is not one in which the scientific-proof approach is applicable. Rather, it is an area for historically informed hermeneutics and analysis – individual readings of works, not discoveries of facts embedded in the fabric of the work. In such inquiries, where interpretive stumbles are all too frequent, one might do well to keep in mind the admonition of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (book 1, chapter 3): Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. . . . We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline. . . . It is the mark of an educated [person] to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits. Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

Klauwell 1910, v–vi: While other construals are defensible, program music, ‘in the strict[est] sense’, is that in which the form and content of the piece, in purely musical terms, would be ‘an unsolvable puzzle’ without the supplied program. Scruton 2001, 397: ‘Properly speaking . . . programme music is . . . music that seeks to be understood in terms of its programme; it derives its movement and its logic from the subject it attempts to describe.’ The all-too-familiar, negative variant of this construal asserts that a program is often offered to cover up defects in purely musical structure or logic. The characterization is that of Hatten 1994, 232. The opposing nineteenth-century arguments were more complicated and nuanced than might initially be imagined. For German-language readers, the extended historical summary of the whole question of program music in Altenburg 1997 is magisterial, providing a commanding overview of the changing concepts of the attendant issues and complications. See also Dahlhaus 1988, 365–85. For English-language readers, among the numerous brief treatments of the debate over music and representation in the nineteenth century are Dahlhaus 1982, 52–63 and 1989, 128–40; Goehr 1998, 6–47; and Hepokoski 2001. On this point (here considering Tovey’s defence of Beethoven’s Pastoral) Richard Will’s remarks are on the mark: ‘Like many of his contemporaries, [Tovey] assumes that programmatic music is based on ‘extramusical’ considerations such as the narrative structure of programs rather than the ‘musical’ principles that underpin absolute music, whose presence in the Pastoral, conversely, reveals that it is not an unusual mixture of music and language but a ‘perfect classical symphony’. . . . [But this leads to the position that] any work using a sonata or other familiar form . . . is [to be] considered absolute music with an irrelevant text. The works are thereby defended from the accusations of formal incoherence leveled at programmatic works by writers like Eduard Hanslick, Edward Dannreuther, or Tovey . . . but they are also put decisively in the realm of the ineffable’ (Will 2002, 19–20). (See again Klauwell 1910 and Scruton 2001.) Summaries of Langer are also readily located. See, for example, Åhlberg 1994. Foundational for any discussion of this issue, Mahler’s famous – and conflicted – comments from 1896, 1897 and 1902 on the utility of printed programs for his early symphonies may be found in Martner 1979, 177–81, 212–14 and 262. ‘Inner-program’ claims, insisting that his music’s ultimate content resides in a quasi-spiritual ‘mood’ or ‘residue of mystery’, are made in letters to Max Marschalk (20 March 1896) and Max Kalbeck (January 1902). Verbal ‘signposts’ and ‘milestones’ (preliminary aids within what is more truly a musical sphere of ‘obscure feelings, at the gate that opens into the ‘other world’) are adduced in a letter to Marschalk on 26 March 1896 and compared with ‘a map of the heavens, so that [the listener] can get a picture of the night sky with all its luminous worlds. But any such [programmatic] exposition cannot offer more. People have to have something already known to refer to if they are not to lose their way.’ A contextualized précis of Mahler’s views, along with a discussion of the term ‘form motive’ (from Wagner’s 1857 essay, ‘Über Franz Liszt’s Symphonische Dichtungen’), may be found in Dahlhaus 1989, 90–1. On Liszt, Wagner and the form motive, see Hepokoski 2001, 433–4. For similar historical issues and recent discussions, see also Hepokoski 1998. A helpful pathway leading beyond some of the program- and/or absolute-music snares in Mahler is provided in Micznik 2007.

80 • James Hepokoski 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17

18

19

20 21

22

For a discussion interrelating the Egmont story’s implied narrative action with the work’s musical structure, see Hepokoski 2002. Scruton’s anti-representationalist argument was initially laid out in his frequently cited, earlier essay, ‘Representation in Music’, Philosophy 51 (1976), 273–87. A telling reply to any such assertion about ‘musical understanding’ may be found in Kivy 1984, 148. ‘Musical purism’ is also a term associated with Kivy. Kivy’s book is a strong, extended defense of musical representation. See also the useful reply to it in Dempster 1994. Cf. Roman Ingarden’s argument that some ‘nonsounding elements’ belong to the ontology of the musical work: 1986, 83–115. This position is explorable through the classic philosophical question of the identity of indiscernibles: things are not identical if they do not have all of their properties in common. Cf. the famous exemplification of a different case of non-identical indiscernibles in Jose Luis Borges’s 1944 short story, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Scruton 1976 had postulated five similar conditions, one of which is particularly stringent and on whose terms, on Scruton’s view, music fails: ‘A representational work of art must express thoughts about its subject, and an interest in the work should involve an understanding of those thoughts . . . Sometimes we feel that a work of art is filled with thought, but that the thought cannot be detached from the work. It is impossible to put it into words (or into other words). Such cases, I should like to say, are cases not of representation but of expression’ (273–4). Or: ‘Thoughts have structure: they refer to objects, and predicate properties of them’, Scruton 1997, 127). For Wollheim’s influential ‘seeing-in’ theory – now discussed by most philosophers of music aesthetics – see Wollheim 1980. Also relevant are standard figures of rhetoric, potentially fruitful but not considered in the present essay. Ratner’s pioneering work is both acknowledged and subjected to a much-needed critique in Monelle 2000, 24–33. See also the similar ‘typology of musical illustrations’ laid out in Kivy 1984, 28–60. Richard Will’s close study of The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (2002) – of which Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is the most noted example – documents that that genre ‘is first and foremost a genre of pastoral idylls, thunderstorms, military conflicts, hunts, and political identities’, p. 2). In terms of tabulation: ‘Titles consisting of only one or a few words identify over 70 examples as pastoral . . . 15 as military, 15 as hunts, 10 as storms, and more than 30 as expressions of national or regional characters – in sum, nearly 150 symphonies or movements as representations of [these] five subject categories’ (p. 1). For a recent identification of the ‘sunrise topos’ in music, see Sisman 2013. Monelle’s example (2006, 28) is not a storm but the signification of a ‘noble horse’, previously discussed in Monelle 2000. See, for example, the recent discussion of the mid- to late-eighteenth century’s astonishment at the ready ability of the mind to visualize things within musical experiences as laid out in Loughridge 2011. One of several telling examples is provided on p. 214: ‘For the German composer Adam Hiller [in 1754] . . . the ability of musical imitations to bring to mind visual images seemed inexplicable – magical.’ Loughridge goes on to note that in that year Hiller wrote: ‘We often let one sense give the illusion of another or we let hearing represent things that otherwise would not be at all suitable for it. Things that should be grasped by means of an entirely different sense organ seem suddenly to have changed their nature: we believe we find them in tones, and we really do find them there, as vastly different as they otherwise are. Is this not a kind of magic?’ Here the translation is taken from Lippman 1992, 118. I take the term ‘pictorial listening’ in the decades around 1800 from the important comments on musical pictorialism, tableaux and ‘visual or quasi-visual experiences’ in Mathew 2013, 89–101. The article updates and summarizes the theory initially presented in Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and elaborated in numerous other studies of each author. More recently, Lakoff has welded his project to cognitive-science research – neural flows and pathways of the brain, cross-synapse firing, and so on, all of which led him to an even more emphatically ‘embodied’ concept of the mind – and has updated and redubbed his theory as ‘The Neural Theory of Metaphor’ (Lakoff 2008). For a summary, see Fauconnier and Turner 1995, 183–204, esp. 184. A related term associated with Lakoff is ‘image-schema’ (with an ‘image-schema structure’ characterized by a ‘cognitive topology’: Lakoff 1993, 214. Lakoff’s synoptic ‘Neural Theory of Metaphor’ (2008, 30) understands Fauconnier’s and Turner’s term ‘mental space’ as ‘a mental simulation characterizing an understanding of a situation, real or imagined’ and ‘blending’ as ‘neural binding’. The model in Figure 4.1, and the quotations in the text above, are derived from Fauconnier and Turner 2002, passim, and 1998, 133–87, from which I adapt wordings found on 134, 142–4. Cook 2001 takes us through many of the complicating issues at hand in helpful ways. Zbikowski has been interested in the applications of Fauconnier, Turner and recent metaphor theories to vocal music. Among his several discussions see Zbikowski 1999, 2002, 2008, 2009. Sceptical of the utility of applying language-grounded concepts of metaphor to the different conceptual world of music, Spitzer (2004) is concerned with developing historical, aesthetic and phenomenological constructions of the issue, calling upon the metaphor-theory frameworks, for instance, of Paul Ricoeur (itself indebted to that of Max Black) and several others. Cook 2001, e.g. 172–4, 181. Some of the attribute types listed here are taken also from Hatten 1994. Cook’s homologies and enabling similarities are what Lakoff would call the ‘ontological’ or ‘epistemological correspondences’ between the ‘image-schema structure[s]’ of each domain (Lakoff 1993, e.g. 214).

Program music • 81 23

24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31

Hatten 1994, 67–90 (expressive genres, topics, ‘frozen’ metaphors), 162–72 (‘The Role of Metaphor’), 255, 289; 2004, 12. From the latter, see also p. 297, n. 1, comments on Lakoff and Johnson, Fauconnier and Turner (judged to be ‘a richer model’) and Zbikowski. Monelle 2006, 22–3, also summarizes Hatten’s concept of correlation visà-vis topic theory. Here I have inflected Fauconnier and Turner with language from the tension-metaphor theory of Max Black, particularly as summarized and inflected by Paul Ricoeur in, e.g. Ricoeur 1976, 46–52, and 1981, 165–81. Within historical practice the multiplication of metaphors or hyperblends is typically extended beyond the individual work to be broadly applicable as grounding aesthetic axioms of certain types or schools of composition. Such metaphors may be understood as foundational guidelines for both composition and subsequent reception: compose works and invite performances and listenings to them as if such-and-such were the case. See Watkins’s recent provocative study of depth metaphors (2013). The importance placed on embodiment reaches back to Johnson 1987 and to Lidov 1987. For other issues of subjective identification within the world of music construed as signs, see Cumming 2000. Aufleuchtung, aspect and ‘hearkening’ occur repeatedly as central ideas throughout the book. Subsequent discussions of music and ‘mood’ (as opposed to object-directed ‘emotion’) are numerous. Some engaging samples include Berger 2000, 200–1; Savage 2009, 93–5, 101–2, 104, embedded within a Ricoeur-inflected approach; Carroll 2003, 521–5, and Kivy’s response to Carroll (Kivy 2009, 79–99), insisting that while music, contra Carroll, does not ‘arouse’ moods, it can be (in Kivy’s characteristic wording) ‘expressive of’ them. The programmatic intentions are laid out in Todd 1993, 12–13, 72. On the importance of this problem, see my discussions throughout Caplin et al. 2009, especially ‘Sonata Theory and Dialogic Form’, 71–89. I have sought to do this with such studies as Hepokoski 2006 and – extending the procedure to a composition with more ‘abstract’ claims – Hepokoski 2012.

Bibliography of works cited Agawu, V. Kofi. 1991. Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Åhlberg, Lars-Olof. 1994. ‘Suzanne Langer on Representation and Emotion in Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 34: 69–80. Allanbrook, Wye Jamison. 1983. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Altenburg, Detlef. 1997. ‘Programmusik’, in Ludwig Finscher, ed., Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, Sachteil, Vol. 7, 1821–44. Berger, Karol. 2000. A Theory of Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Caplin, William E., Hepokoski, James, and Webster, James. 2009. Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections, ed. Pieter Bergé. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Carroll, Noël. 2003. ‘Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures’, The Monist, 86: 521–5. Clarke, Eric. 2005.Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 2001. ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, Music Theory Spectrum, 23: 170–95. Cumming, Naomi. 2000. The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1982. Esthetics of Music, trans. William W. Austin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 1988. ‘Thesen über Programmusik’, in Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik. Laaber: Laaber Verlag. ––––– 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ––––– 1991. Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to the Music, trans. Mary Whittall. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dempster, Douglas. 1994. ‘How Does Debussy’s Sea Crash? How Can Jimi’s Rocket Red Glare?: Kivy’s Account of Representation in Music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52: 415–28. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. 2001. ‘On the Limits of Genre: Some Nineteenth-Century Barcaroles’, 19th-Century Music, 24: 252–67. Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 1995. ‘Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression’, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10: 183–204. ––––– 1998. ‘Conceptual Integration Networks’, Cognitive Science, 22: 133–87. ––––– 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Genette, Gerard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1998. The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Hatten, Robert S. 1994. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

82 • James Hepokoski ––––– 2004. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hepokoski, James. 1992. ‘Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss’s Don Juan Reinvestigated’, in Bryan Gilliam, ed., Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 137–75. ––––– 1998. Review of Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 51: 603–25. ––––– 2001. ‘Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition’, in Jim Samson, ed., The Cambridge History of NineteenthCentury Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 424–59. ––––– 2002. ‘Back and Forth from Egmont: Beethoven, Mozart, and the Nonresolving Recapitulation’, 19th-Century Music, 25: 127–54. ––––– 2006. ‘Framing Till Eulenspiegel’, 19th-Century Music, 30: 4–43. ––––– 2012. ‘Monumentality and Formal Processes in the First Movement of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.1 in D Minor, Op. 15’, in Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith, eds, Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 217–51. ––––– and Darcy, Warren. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-EighteenthCentury Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1986. The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, trans. Adam Czerniawski. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jessulat, Ariane. 2000. Die Frage als musikalischer Topos: Studien zur Motivbildung in der Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Studio Verlag. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jung, H. 1980. Die Pastorale: Studien zur Geschichte eines musikalischen Topos. Bern: Franke. Kivy, Peter. 1984. Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ––––– 1990. Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ––––– 2009. Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Klauwell, Otto. 1910. Geschichte der Programmusik von ihren Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Kramer, Lawrence. 1990. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ––––– 2012. Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lakoff, George. 1993. ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor’, in Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 202–51. ––––– 2008. ‘The Neural Theory of Metaphor’, in Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 17–38. ––––– and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langer, Suzanne. 1957. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism or Reason, Rite, and Art, 3rd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1985. ‘Titles’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44: 23–39. Lidov, David. 1987. ‘Mind and Body in Music’, Semiotica, 66: 69–97. Lippman, Edward A. 1992. A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Loughridge, Deirdre. 2011. ‘Technologies of the Invisible: Optical instruments and Musical Romanticism’, Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. McKay, Nicholas. 2007. ‘On Topics Today’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 4: 160. Martner, Knud. ed. 1979. Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser and Bill Hopkins. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Mathew, Nicholas. 2013. Political Beethoven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Micznik, Vera. 2007. ‘Music and Aesthetics: The Programmatic Issue’, in Jeremy Barham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mahler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 35–49. Monelle, Raymond. 2000. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ––––– 2006. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ratner, Leonard. 1980. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: The Texas Christian University Press. ––––– 1981. ‘Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 165–81. Savage, Roger W. H. 2009. Hermeneutics and Music Criticism. New York: Routledge. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1967. Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein. London: Faber & Faber. Scruton, Roger. 1976. ‘Representation in Music’, Philosophy, 51: 273–87. ––––– 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Program music • 83 ––––– 2001. ‘Programme Music’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan, 20: 396–400. Sisman, Elaine. 2013. ‘Haydn’s Solar Poetics: The Tageszeiten Symphonies and Enlightenment Knowledge’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 66: 5–102. Spitzer, Michael. 2004. Metaphor and Musical Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Todd, R. Larry. 1993. Mendelssohn: The Hebrides and Other Overtures . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ––––– 1994. ‘Listening with Imagination: Is Music Representational?’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52: 47–61. Watkins, Holly. 2013. Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Will, Richard. 2002. Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Peter. 1997. The Chromatic Fourth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zbikowski, Lawrence. 1999. ‘The Blossoms of ‘Trockne Blumen’: Music and Text in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Music Analysis, 18: 307–45. ––––– 2002. Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. ––––– 2008. ‘Metaphor and Music’, in Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr, ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 502–24. ––––– 2009. ‘Musicology, Cognitive Science, and Metaphor: Reflections on Michael Spitzer’s Metaphor and Musical Thought’, Musica Humana, 1: 81–104.

5 Beautiful and sublime Stephen Downes

Introduction The impact of the rediscovery of the treatise on the sublime ascribed to Longinus (1978), the importance of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ([1757] 1990) and Kant’s Critique of Judgement ([1790] 1952) have been summarized aplenty.1 However, although the sublime has generated voluminous, often adulatory critical commentary, the beautiful has tended to do so rather more surreptitiously.2 Theodor Adorno and Jean-François Lyotard famously declared the sublime to be the authentic aesthetic mode of modern art. The sublime size of the twentieth-century literature on the sublime reflects the widely held sympathy for this view, and also the ability of the term to generate seemingly unlimited variants or subtypes.3 The beautiful, by contrast, has frequently been considered to be a suspicious aesthetic choice for the artist of modern times. Beauty is often condemned as anachronistic, reactionary or fake, as lapsing too readily into kitsch through offering false, invidious perfections. In this way beautiful forms are often marked as the disreputable products of an ideological airbrush, from which we gain dubious pleasure because we are duped and fail to notice the exclusions or marginalizations that allow the construction of images of apparent flawlessness. When Lyotard famously stated that the sublime ‘is perhaps the only mode of aesthetic sensibility to characterize the modern’ (Lyotard 1991) he derived this stance from Adorno, who wrote in his Aesthetic Theory that adherence to a sublime aesthetic is necessary for authentic modern art: after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism . . . The ascendancy of the sublime is one with art’s compulsion that fundamental contradictions not be covered up but fought through in themselves; reconciliation for them is not the result of the conflict but exclusively that the conflict becomes eloquent. (Adorno 1997, 197)4 Lyotard concluded, in terms redolent of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, that the aesthetic and experience of the sublime lies at the heart of modernism’s characteristic preoccupations with the futile strivings of the ‘Will’ in the face of the powerlessness of the faculty of representation. Sublime moments are where ‘modern art finds its impetus’ (Lyotard 1984).5 Elsewhere Lyotard laid emphasis on the sublime effect of intensification: ‘intensity is associated with an ontological dislocation’, which tends towards the shock, liberation from the classical ideal of imitation, an attempt to represent the unrepresentable and the instability of form, in the modern move to the avant-garde (Lyotard 1991, 101–5).

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A more nuanced post-Adorno standpoint was developed in Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay on ‘The Sublime Offering’. This essay begins from an Adornian position in stating that the ‘motif of the sublime . . . announces the necessity of what happens to art in or as its modern destiny’. Art ‘shudders’; it suspends or interrogates itself; as it is ‘seized by the sublime’ the aesthetic is suppressed or rejected as art is given over to something other than the beautiful. If beauty slides into the agreeable, Nancy argues, it loses its artistic quality; artfully, the beautiful might, by contrast, be ‘suspended . . . transformed and transfigured’ in the sublime. More ambiguously, the beautiful might be found in an equivocal position between the sublime and the agreeable. Wherever it lies, Nancy writes, ‘all of modern aesthetics . . . has its origin and raison d’être in the impossibility of attributing beauty merely to beauty and in the consequent skidding or overflowing of the beautiful beyond itself’ (Nancy 1993). Nancy seems to be struggling to find an appropriate place for beauty in authentic art, his equivocations over its status manifesting a latent ambivalence that seeps into much twentiethcentury critical discourse. Beauty, Wendy Steiner has argued, ‘is certainly a magnet for the cultural anxieties of our day’. Steiner has observed that although modern artworks may often suggest profound beauty, this was a beauty characteristically fraught with the withholding of ‘pleasure, insight, empathy’ (Steiner 2001, xv–xviii; see also Gilbert-Rolfe 1999). Arthur C. Danto noted how beauty has more widely been ‘on the defensive’ since the concept of the sublime entered Enlightenment consciousness with the rediscovery of Longinus. In the twentieth century the ‘intractable avant-garde abjured beauty . . . as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma’ (Danto 2003, 7, 147). The notorious appropriations of notions of beauty that emphasize purity and perfection for political ideologies of the most inhuman kinds made standing up for the beautiful highly problematic. Famously, in his later work Paul de Man exposed the potential dangers in Schiller’s concept of beauty in the aesthetic state by citing its grotesque misreading by Goebbels. (Here we might recall Walter Benjamin’s identification of the need to politicize aesthetics, not aestheticize politics.) De Man’s motivation was in strong part driven by a desire to exorcize his now infamous early espousal of a fascist notion of ‘aesthetic totality’. Any counter to de Man’s rejection of the aesthetics of beauty as a dangerous fallacy must begin by developing a more nuanced stance on the claim that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’. Only if Keats’s famous poetic phrase is unquestionably accepted as a definition of the aesthetic do the pairs truth/beauty and false/ugly assume equivalence. If an aesthetic of the beautiful is to be sustained it must negotiate positions that are diverse, ambiguous and potentially subversive (see MacKenzie 1993). (There has long been literary debate over whether Keats’s line should be read ironically.) A response on behalf of beauty can be more defiant than defensive – for example, through promoting the recursive relationship of aesthetics and eroticism, extolling beauty as celebratory and polymorphous (see Davis 2010).6 If, in the later twentieth century, beauty was ‘back’, it should nonetheless not return as a familiar, comfortable refuge but rather as challenging and non-compliant (see Donoghue 2003, 11, 63; Mothersill 1984; Bérubé 2005; Wolff 2008). Post Paul Ricoeur, we might conceive an ‘aesthetics of suspicion’, which does not ‘obliterate’ beauty, but rather offers a context in which it might be ‘expanded, twisted, shifted and split’. In such a framework one might take the example of contemporary artists who ‘have taken pleasure and critical purchase from the confusion and collapse of the distinction between beauty and a vast range of its antonyms, such as ugliness, the banal, ideology, chaos, and so on’ (Beech 2009) – to which one should, of course, add the sublime. If during much of the twentieth century beauty seemed widely debunked or debased only to become revitalized towards the century’s end, then its aesthetic sibling the sublime similarly

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fell into a period of disrepute before returning to favour. However, it hardly emerged unscathed. The experience of the sublime was placed centrally in the construction of the modern subject in Enlightenment discourse (see De Bolla 1989) but in the sceptical modernisms of the early twentieth century the concept of the sublime and the subjective identity and power it seemed to promise was rejected (and often savagely parodied). As Judy Lochhead summarizes, the sublime was, however, widely reaffirmed in the second half of the century. It was found to be once more seductive because of its promises of freedom. Headlining post-structuralists fell under the sublime spell: for Derrida, its unboundedness facilitated deconstructive consideration of the problem of boundary, of the framing of the work of art; for Kristeva, it underpinned examination of the abject; for Lyotard, it was part of a postmodernism that eschews totality, grand narratives, wholeness and the comforts of good form. Other influential later twentiethcentury examples included Frederic Jameson’s notion of the technological sublime and John Milbank’s sublime as a modern transcendent, one not of beautiful, complete unity (as only found in the pre-modern God) but one that presents an unknowable void. Feminist theorists joined the sublime party and attempted to refashion the concept as a way of developing an empowering aesthetic or experience for women. For Lochhead, however, the sublime is irredeemably tainted by its associations with insidious cultural and political ideologies of power and gender. She argues, therefore, that the ‘resuscitation’ of the ‘once moribund concepts of the sublime and its twin, the ineffable . . . under the banner of postmodern thought’ is a regressive move, one, in particular, contrary to feminism (Lochhead 2008).7 The prominent valorization of the sublime through its identification with a ‘masculine’ subjectivity is almost matched by its historical identification with the ‘musical’. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth has discussed a specifically ‘musical’ sublime which questions the possibility of the final elevating or resolving moment that defines the sublime’s ‘legitimate mode’, as most famously proposed in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. At the turn of the nineteenth century the ‘musical’, considered as profoundly empty sign, came to denote the infinite or undecidable. The power bestowed upon the Kantian subject in the last phase of the sublime experience no longer seemed available; the final closing resolution was deemed unachievable. Tied with the rise in cultural value of instrumental music (which Kant notoriously derided as more pleasure than culture) ‘“musicality” materializes as the effect of philosophical and fictional representations of music as an instrument of the indefinite’. As a circular relationship develops between this notion of musicality and sublimity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the endlessly deferred or denied completion, felt in Sehnsucht (infinite longing), acquires an ‘elective affinity with the sublime feeling’ (Wurth 2009, 17 and passim).8 The most famous example of this sublime in musical criticism is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.9 Hoffmann describes how the symphony facilitates the contemplation of the infinite through the experience of its sublime effect, its potential to elevate the subject, to point to the absolute and to express endless longing (Sehnsucht des Unendlichen). As Bonds notes, Hoffmann’s essay is clearly indebted to Jean Paul’s notion of the sublime as ‘applied infinity’ (Bonds 2006, 45–50). Hoffmann’s emphasis on the sublime was to prove enormously influential, but the beautiful also had important contemporaneous advocates. August Wilhelm Schlegel held the beautiful to be a partial revelation of the infinite, so the contemplation of the beautiful is capable of generating ‘infinite striving’, as desire arises for higher, ideal forms of beauty; and Schlegel ascribed music a high place in his consideration of art for its incorporeal intimations of perfect harmony. The similarities with Hoffmann’s claims for the musical sublime are clear.10 As Bonds further notes, therefore, any distinctions between the sublime and the

Beautiful and sublime • 87

beautiful often seem prone to dissolution. Schlegel described how a work of art might shift or tilt between sublime and beautiful effects so that neither dominated the other. This ambiguity between the beautiful and sublime suggests the possible coexistence of two apparently contradictory paths towards the absolute. In this context irony can facilitate an affirmative mode through its ability to sustain a double trajectory. Bonds finds this powerfully exemplified in the late works of Beethoven, with their prominent ‘juxtapositions of the profound and trivial, great and small, the sincere and humorous’, and expressions of ‘a pressing demand’ for a ‘transcendent perspective’ which lies beyond a single point of ultimate reference (Bonds 2006, 58–60). The length of the shadow cast over the nineteenth century by Beethoven’s ‘sublime’ symphonies certainly means, as Richard Taruskin says, that ‘the history of music in the nineteenth century [up to the First World War] could be written in terms . . . of the encroachment of the sublime upon the traditional domain of the beautiful, of the “great” upon the pleasant’ (1997, 258). The next section begins, however, by putting some detail on the potentially ironic context for reconsidering the sustained but ambiguous coexistence of beautiful and sublime pathways. Beethoven and Wagner In a sophisticated interpretation of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, Stephen Hinton (1998) identifies the symphony’s ‘hermeneutic crux’ in the ambiguity produced by the music’s ironic relationship to the text at the famous lines delivered by the baritone soloist: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!

Oh friends, not these tones! Let us raise our voices in more pleasing and more joyful sounds!

One prominent aspect of this tonal complexity is the extensive melisma on angenehmere, which occurs over the transitional harmonic moment in the move from minor to major, and the change from emphasis on Bb to B n (and therefore suggests a move from negation to affirmation; see Musical Example 5.1). These melismatic extravagances, out of place in a recitative, far more likely to be found in an aria, might be heard as generating an ironic distance from the pleasures evoked in the text. In the Third Critique Kant notoriously applied the term angenehm to music in order to relegate its aesthetic status (see Kant [1790] 1952, 195–6). Beethoven’s musical excessiveness suggests ironic negation of this denigration of music as merely agreeable sensations (as Hinton notes, ‘agreeable’ or ‘pleasurable tones’ is almost a tautology in Kantian terms). Furthermore, in these melismas Beethoven invokes an operatic style, one ‘adequate to the kind of reception suggested by Kant’s term’. With Beethoven’s well-known antipathy towards Rossini in mind, the melismas are a cryptic allusion to the virtuoso dispenser of angenehmere Töne. For Hinton, the baritone’s preceding ‘not these tones’ rejects the instrumental variations that had earlier been cut off by the Schrekensfanfare (Wagner’s term for what many have heard as a sublime, terrible rupture) and thus rejects the ‘symphonic’, or ‘cultured’, treatment of the theme. After this rejection, the ‘Rossinian’ melismas ironically present the musically beautiful alternative. Thus, two possible versions of the finale to come are presented – one cultured, the other pleasant (Hinton 1998). For Hinton, this unresolved ambiguity can be heard as reflecting Beethoven’s awareness of the limits of his art. In the face of the obligations of the genre, the burdens of working through the finite towards realizing a vision of the infinite that is the goal of the ‘sublime’ symphony,

88 • Stephen Downes

2i6 Recitativo Bar. Solo O

Freun

de, nicht die - se To-ne!

223

Son - dem

laBt uns an

ge - neh-me-re an - stim-men,

colla voce

ad libitum.

230

etc.

und

freu

den-vol-le-re!

Musical Example 5.1 Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, Finale, mm. 216–36

Beethoven realizes the ultimate inability to supply symphonically the fullness of joy. The late eighteenth-century origins of the symphonic sublime have been traced by Carl Dahlhaus, who cites Schulz’s article on the symphony in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1794) as seminal. The article describes the symphony as ‘grand, noble, and sublime’ and compares it with the Ode through its characteristic combination of passion and reflection. This combination also informs Hoffmann’s critique of Beethoven’s Fifth which extols sublime effects but also Beethoven’s cerebral achievement in marshalling the ‘apparent disorder’, the

Beautiful and sublime • 89

rapturous and suddenness, the convulsions of the ‘grand style’, towards an order that is higher (or deeper, depending on which spatial metaphor is employed). Here Hoffmann echoes Sulzer’s article on the sublime in Allgemeine: When order is created out of disorder and confusion then, for those who discern in some degree the rightness of it, it is a sublime thought, that, out of all the apparent disorder in the physical and moral world, the most beautiful order is achieved in the whole. (Dahlhaus 1991, 68–72) Nonetheless, as Hinton’s reading of Beethoven’s Ninth suggests, the transcendent obligations of the sublime might leave the earthly artwork necessarily in a state of imperfection. As Andreas Eichhorn notes, the symphony’s difficulties and ambiguities are manifestations of Beethoven ‘composing out the idea of unrepresentability’ into the music. The sublime becomes identified with magnificent, heroic failure: subsequent retouchings of the symphony are, suggests Scott Burnham, in effect attempts to ‘beautify’ troubling aspects of the work. They partially iron out its ironic creases, smooth over its astonishing imperfections and thus diminish the work’s sublime quality (Eichhorn 1993; reviewed in Burnham 1996). The ‘beautification’ of the Ninth is identified by Robert Fink as part of a dominating disciplinary practice. Responding to Susan McClary’s notorious (often misrepresented) descriptions of sexual violence, Fink turns to Lyotard’s postmodern sublime: ‘McClary heard in Beethoven’s Ninth what I did: not the abstract comforts of Hanslick’s “musically beautiful” but an audible trace . . . of Lyotard’s postmodern sublime’ (Fink 2004, 111; McClary 1991, 128–30). As Fink notes, the famous moment of recapitulation in the first movement might be raised as paradigm of the romantic musical sublime (as influentially described by Christian Friedrich Michaelis11), but there is a deeply problematic violence in this passage (described by McClary) from which two strategies emerge. The ‘sublimating strategy, which attempts to focus on and interpret the music’s extremity, gives rise, dialectically, to the beautifying, which attempts to deny or minimize any disturbing aspects, usually by exalting technical description over exegesis’. In musicology this latter strategy, in which incoherence and ‘troubling, horrific excess’ are tamed through making formal sense, became the ‘default interpretative strategy for canonic music’, an ascendant tradition of ‘defense mechanisms’, until McClary and the ‘new musicologists’ that followed her blew away these repressions of the troubling sublime (Fink 2004, 113–20). Contra the ‘beautifiers’, Fink hears the recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth as offering no saving resolution. It is, rather, a ‘shattering irruption’, a ‘failure of form which is traumatic’. The Schrekensfanfare in the opening part of the finale is a ‘garbled attempt at the failed progression of the first movement recapitulation’ and the finale’s last Prestissimo ‘provides the orgiastic release we demand, no more decorously than the Rossinian stretta-finales whose shrill sound world . . . it so brazenly appropriates’. This material is, for Fink, ‘pure noise’. In Fink’s reading of the symphony in terms of the postmodern sublime, there is no formal resolution but rather the ‘violent noise of form-annihilating “success”’ (Fink 2004, 139–40). To hear the end of the symphony in this way is to question the success of the work’s ‘search for order’, to evoke Maynard Solomon’s now classic essay. Solomon noted that Beethoven’s ‘structural powers’ are severely tested by manifold disruptive elements; for Solomon, this search for order in the face of chaos is the composer’s ‘modernist contribution’. The quest is described in terms of sublime struggles and activity that promises freedom, by contrast with the shackling, enervating qualities of the beautiful Schiller described in his essay ‘On the Sublime’ (1801; Solomon 1986).12

90 • Stephen Downes

This image of the composer wrestling ‘heroically’ with the creative process and the demands of his sublime art is, of course, a crucial aspect of the construction of Beethoven as the very model of a modern male genius (see Pederson 2000). As Kivy notes, the precedent for the Beethovendian concept of genius was established by Longinus’s On the Sublime. The artist is portrayed as possessing powers that enable the writing of the sublime, with all its characteristic rule-breaking and hence its imperfections, and hence also of the artist rising to a position of deity, of giver of new rules, of originality. By contrast, the trope of the beautiful revolves around discussions of the genius myth of Mozart as the perennial child creating effortless perfections rather than Beethoven’s effortful imperfections: ‘Beethoven the sublime, Mozart the beautiful’ (Kivy 2001, 132). In seeking a contrast to Beethoven’s sublime Ninth, Solomon cites a letter from Mozart to his father (1781): Passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music. (Solomon 1986, 17) Mozart’s music hardly seems to require beautification, although it did get a dose of ‘sublimification’ through the romantic legacy of a preference for the Sturm und drang works in G and C minor, where if beauties are found they are conditioned by ‘strangeness’ (see Carruthers 1998). The long acknowledged special quality of beauty in Mozart’s music has recently been discussed in ways which begin to reveal a beautiful complexity that is far from passive or monochrome. Schiller considered the sublime to be a ‘mixed feeling’, a combination of ‘melancholy’, ‘joyousness’ and ‘rapture’ (Schiller [1801] 1966, 198). The beautiful might be similarly composite, ambiguous and, again like the sublime, tinged with irony. For Solomon, Mozart’s slow movements are paradigms of those works of the ‘greatest beauty’ which are ‘pervaded by heavy sadness, a knowledge of loss, a touch of fear, a sense of transience, a whiff of mortality’. Their formal returns act as repairing, healing, and a move towards an ideal fusion (Solomon 1996, 194–7). For Scott Burnham, Mozart, poised at the crossroads of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, offers ironic intimations at once revelatory and resigned, redemptive and melancholy. We hear the sound of these intimations as beautiful. The awe we experience in perceiving them is not overwhelming, not in the sublime manner. (Burnham 2013, 101) The beautiful in Mozart offers an alternative sense of self to that created in the Kantian sublime, one generated through access to an inner realm, one of transcendence but also involving a loss of innocence. In Burnham’s words this is a ‘melancholy’ yet ‘astonishing’ beauty of ‘ironic intimation’, one that in Così fan tutte goes so far as to problematize the equation of truth and beauty (Burnham 2013, 114–15). Hanslick judged the music of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, for all the ‘immensity’ of its subject and ‘grandeur if intention’, and ‘for all its [musical] brilliance’, to be ‘unschön’. This judgement comes in an extended footnote to discussion of the ‘harmful and confused’ attempt to understand music as a language – consequences of ‘disconnections’ and ‘interruptions’ which ‘signify nothing but ugliness’ (Hanslick [1891] 1986, 43). In his Beethoven essay, published

Beautiful and sublime • 91

in the centenary year 1870, Wagner described the Ninth as a highpoint in Beethoven’s achievement in ‘advancing’ music ‘far beyond the region of the aesthetically Beautiful, into the sphere of the absolutely Sublime’ (Wagner [1870] 2008, 32, 36). Such descriptions firmly place ‘advanced’ music in the sublime aesthetic category. Sections of Wagner’s essay are none-too-veiled critical responses to Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful. Though Wagner takes Schopenhauer as his starting point for the concept of the sublime in music, he departs from this to move into an anti-Hanslick polemic (see Kropfinger 1991, 136–9).13 Wagner argues, via Schopenhauer, that the ‘illusive surface’ (Schein) of art is a mere ‘semblance’. From the ‘principle of tranquillisation by sheer pleasure in the semblance’, he writes, ‘has come our term for beauty (Schönheit); the root of which word in our German language is plainly connected with Show (Schein) as object, with Seeing (Schauen) as subject.’ The beautiful is a dream-like illusion, or delusion. By contrast, Wagner describes the striking concept of the ‘scream’: From the most terrifying of such dreams we wake with a scream, the immediate expression of the anguished will . . . Now if we take the Scream in all the diminutions of its vehemence, down to the gentler cry of longing, as the root element of every human message to the ear . . . neither artistic beholding nor artistic fashioning can result from aught but a diversion of the consciousness from the agitations of the will. With the ‘scream’, at whatever level of intensity, no illusion is possible. And this is the basis of music’s sublime nature. Music’s true character is revealed as ‘the effect of beauty, the very first effect of music’s appearance, advances the most directly to a revelation of her truest character through the agency of the sublime’ (Wagner [1870] 2008, 7–8, 11, 13, 15).14 Music reveals that truth is sublime and sublime is truth. Wagner argues that the systematic ordering of rhythmic structure in periodic phrasing moves music closer to the beauty characteristic of plastic forms, but it is possible to pierce these beautiful musical forms through moments of rupture. These moments of formal disruption reveal music’s true, sublime essence. The complex intensifications of Tristan’s delirium scene in the final act of Tristan und Isolde are a sustained rupture of this kind, in which musical coherence is seriously imperilled. Tristan’s death at the end of this scene is a ‘critical moment’ followed, according to Thomas Grey, ‘naturally [sic] by a stabilizing catharsis’ provided by Isolde’s quasi-autonomous ‘Transfiguration’. This cathartic ending, Grey notes, also ‘picks up the thread of the Act II love duet so brutally broken by Brangane’s scream’ (Grey 1995, 337). The long-delayed closure of the cruelly interrupted Act 2 love duet in the final cadence of the Transfiguration is clear and familiar. The similarly belated closure of the musical ruptures at Tristan’s death near the beginning of Act 3, Scene 2 is more subtle. As Isolde takes the dying Tristan in her arms, the opening paragraph of the Act 1 Prelude is recapitulated (Musical Example 5.2). This is a potentially closing gesture of return to the work’s musical origins as well as a musical expression of the powerful force of memory. The recapitulation proceeds up to the beginning of the ‘glance motive’, but is broken at the moment Tristan expires. His final spoken word, ‘Isolde’, halts progression through pausing on the E–D appoggiatura. He dies as the rhythm and motive begins up again, but the music stops on a reharmonization of the melodic Bb. Grey notes that it is ‘severed with exquisite delicacy by a diminished triad [Eb—Gb–C] struck on the harp’ (Grey 1995, 357). Isolde gasps (‘Ha!’) on F#. (As Wagner says in his Beethoven essay, sublime moments of rupture need not always be screamed out fortissimo.) Subsequently, Isolde pleads that Tristan’s wound might be healed and she recalls the rapture of the lovers’ night with a momentary

92 • Stephen Downes S ehrallm ah lichn achlassend im Z eitm ass.

ISOLDE

(Tristan sinks slowly to the ground in Isolde's arms.)

tan!

Tris

dim.

[C c]

Ah!

nolto espressivo

P

3

3

3

3

3

3

S ehrlan g sam .

piu

V 3

TRISTAN

p

P

3

(raising his dying eyes to Isolde).

I

-

sol - de!

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P

ISOLDE.

(Hedies.).

p iiip

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Musical Example 5.2 Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act 3: Isolde, ‘Tristan! Ah!’

B ew eg t.

Ich

bin's,

ich

Beautiful and sublime • 93

adumbration of the B major resolution of her upcoming transfiguration music. Her final pitch at the end of the Transfiguration is the F# upon which her gasp had broken the musical form at the moment of trauma, now supported by the heavenly harp’s B major arpeggios, possibly a belated resolution of the harp’s rupturing diminished triad. The final recall of the opening of the Act 1 Prelude in the very last bars accomplishes the formal closure that the recapitulation during Tristan’s death scene had promised yet not fulfilled. It also completes a musical ‘frame’ for the piece, enclosing the opera’s sublime boundlessness with beautiful, formal control. Nietzsche noted the precariousness of Wagner’s artistic balancing act in Tristan. As is well known, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche expounded his theory that the Greek Apollonian culture of beauty ‘was based on a veiled substratum of suffering and knowledge’. This Apollonian beautiful illusion existed in a ‘mutually intensifying’ dialectic with Dionysian pain and contradiction, with an awareness of the ‘horror and absurdity of existence’, in which art turned to the sublime and yet also the beautiful in ‘the taming of horror through art’. For Nietzsche (of 1872, when his relationship with Wagner was at its most adulatory) the intensifications of the third act of Tristan produced effects so powerful that they are unbearable and shattering for the individual listener, who is on the verge of expiring as the ‘wings’ of their soul – to recall a poetic image of Plato’s – convulse. However, in the face of these sublime Dionysian forces the beautiful forms of the Apollonian were ‘aimed at the reconstitution of the almost fragmented individual’; they ‘emerge with the healing balm of a blissful deception’ as the listener identifies with the suffering, dying mythic hero Tristan and his beloved Isolde. Thus ‘the Apolline wrests us from the Dionysiac universality, and delights us in these individuals; to them it attaches our pity, through them it satisfies our sense of beauty, which craves great and sublime forms’ (Nietzsche [1872] 1993: 26, 40, 102). Nietzsche, of course, was soon to turn against Wagner. In The Case of Wagner (1888) his music is deemed a dangerous narcotic, an expression of neurosis; Wagner is the hypnotic master of hysterical, theatrical illusion or the dealer of musical dope. And in opera after Wagner it is possible to identify an anti-Tristan tradition in which the transcendent, redemptive aesthetic aspirations of Wagner’s opera, exemplified by what Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘impossible fantasmatic resolution’ of Isolde’s Verklärung, is denounced, debased or dismantled (see Žižek and Dolar 2002, 200).15 Across the divide? Žižek argues that the identity of love and death at the end of Tristan und Isolde should not detract from recognizing that ‘a striving to experience life at its excessive fullest is what Wagner’s operas are about’. He identifies two main musical versions of this vital excess: German (Wagner) and Italian (Rossini), distinguished by their reflecting two versions of Kant’s sublime; for Žižek, the ‘opposition of the Rossinian and Wagnerian sublimes perfectly fits the Kantian opposition between the mathematical and the dynamic sublime’ with the former ‘enacting the subject’s inability to comprehend the pure quantity of the demands that overflow him, whereas the Wagnerian sublime is dynamic, enacting the overpowering force of the one demand, the unconditional demand of love’ (Žižek and Dolar 2002, 105–10). In proposing this sublime dualism along national lines, Žižek provides a delayed aesthetic variant of a long-established division in writing on nineteenth-century music, one that has recently been closely interrogated. Benjamin Walton has observed that the reception of the 1828 performances of Beethoven’s symphonies in Paris shows they were often heard with ears attuned to Rossini’s operas. Beethoven’s sublime symphonic effects were found to be comparable with Rossini’s famous

94 • Stephen Downes

stretti and crescendos, even to the extent of employing the comparison to make the occasional gripe about tiresome noisiness. This kind of listening might be characterized (and disparaged) as revelling in the effects of a shallow sublimity rather than the kind of ‘deep’, hence profound, sublime which, as described by Hoffmann, is connective, developmental and synthetic. (If so condemned, then it pre-empts Adorno’s despair at those radio listeners who only attend to’ beautiful’ moments in Beethoven (Adorno 1998).) A. B. Marx’s strategy to exclude Rossini’s music from Berlin concert life was based upon denigrating the Italian’s music as merely sensual, as lacking higher spiritual quality and therefore not belonging to the great, Hegelian developmental line. Beethoven’s victory, based on the profound ‘depth’ ascribed to his instrumental music by contrast with the merely pleasurable superficiality of Rossini’s operas, marks his ascent to the dominant position in what is often called the ‘twin styles’ (Walton 2007, 218–27, 247–51).16 As Julian Johnson reminds us, however, the loftiest of Beethoven’s works often include shocking ‘intrusions of the worldly’ (the Turkish March in the last movement of the Ninth, for example) and are far from lacking examples of effects comparable with a ‘Rossinian theatricality’ (Johnson 2013). Such materials counter Hoffmann’s reading of Beethoven’s music as ‘not of this world’ (for a critique, see Rumph 1995). In Beethoven, the aesthetic of an apparently otherworldly sublime and an overtly worldly ambition come together in works that try to speak to the whole of humanity. The problem that Johnson explores is how to perceive and interpret the quotidian materials and their contrast to the ‘sublime’: is the artistic aim one of transcendence, ennoblement or emancipation? Or is it humorously subversive, exemplifying a modernity related to the ironic effects of Jean Paul Richter’s ‘inverted sublime’ (umgekehrte Erhabene) (of which more later)? Of course, Beethoven did not have the sublime all to himself. The reception of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) played an important part in the debate in 1830s Paris between the Rossinians and Beethovenians (sustained, in his own style and to his own ends, by Wagner in Opera and Drama, 1851). Beethoven’s symphonies, after François-Antoine Habeneck’s 1828 performances, were raised as fulsomely sublime rather than empty form, in short, as musical ‘high’ art rather than ‘low’ entertainment (or ‘deep’ rather than ‘shallow’ of course; see Ellis 2004 and Johnson 1995). Meyerbeer suffered critical attack from those subcribing to the depth model of the musical sublime. (Wagner famously decried the cheap, superficial thrills – ‘effects without causes’ – in Meyerbeer’s grand operas). But Meyerbeer’s musical effects evoke a sublime of substantial cultural significance, particularly through the way they subvert the sensual/spiritual opposition so crucial for Madame de Staël’s highly influential, post-Kantian valorization of spirit over matter and notions of ideal beauty, as well as for the ‘twin-style’ musical division. Music’s apparently double material and metaphysical significance is evoked through the possibility that mechanical wonders might produce spiritual effect because of the divine or diabolical potential of the new theatrical technology. French grand opera becomes a giant machine. Meyerbeer deployed a vivid array of machinery into generating sublime effects. In the final act of Robert le Diable the organ enters as a ‘sublime invasion’ on to the operatic stage; its music is physically imposing (its sound produced by the biggest musical machine around) yet also symbolic of a sublime, spiritual realm. The distinctions that lie behind the raising of German metaphysics against Italian sensualism are thereby complicated. However, the effect is also ambivalent and uncanny. The sublime is suggested by fantastic, mechanically produced musical effects that ‘take on a deadly, quasi-gothic power’ (Dolan and Tresch 2011).17 Walton places the continuation of the ‘twin-styles’ debate in the context of the rise of l’art pour l’art. Developed through simplified versions of Kant, in the tradition established by de Staël, l’art pour l’art amplified the metaphysical claims of high culture and belittled the low

Beautiful and sublime • 95

pleasures of mere entertainment. As John Wilcox put it, notions of l’art pour l’art emerged out of ‘fantastically careless and incompetent misreading’ of Kantian disinterestedness through garbled glosses of Critique of Judgement, with the terms beautiful and sublime thoroughly embroiled in the mix. After the influential work of de Staël and Benjamin Constant, Victor Hugo’s ‘Preface to Cromwell’ (1827), much admired by Théophile Gautier, was crucial in raising the cause and value of purportedly pure and free art. Gautier’s preface to his Premières poesies (1832) focused this debate on beauty and he developed this more fully in his Du Beau dans l’art (1847) through unsurprising invocations of Plato, Kant and Winckelmann (Wilcox 1953). That part of the story of the French beautiful and sublime, for which limitations of space do not permit exploration, would move from Gautier through Baudelaire to Mallarmé and the reflective, voluptuous, exquisite moment that is ‘libidinally-charged’ through a kind of sublime evasion, a slipping on the edge between idealization and consummation (Minahen 1999).18 Sublime and beautiful inversions: some examples from Poulenc After sublime invasion and sublime evasion another artistically productive variant lies in sublime inversion.19 We saw how irony in Beethoven emerged as a mode through which the aesthetic claims of the sublime and beautiful might be played against each other and their claims to truth be queried. The comic offered another mode through which these aesthetic categories might be reconsidered or sustained in variant forms. Raimonda Modiano has described how Friedrich Theodor Vischer was ‘the last major aesthetician in the tradition of German idealism who tried to rescue the sublime from the inferior status assigned to it by Hegel’. Vischer’s main claim in his Über das Erhabene und Komische (1836) was, as Modiano summarizes, that ‘the sublime had suffered too long at the hands of earlier aestheticians by being contrasted to the beautiful rather than seen as evolving from it’. Rather, the sublime should be seen as one of the two forms in which the beautiful manifests itself in its gradual unfolding from an original unity. The other form with which the sublime is intimately linked and which presupposes the sublime for its full effect is the comic. Vischer’s argument highlights the idea that both the comic and the sublime are based on a dismantling of the beautiful, ideal identity of the sensible and supersensible. In Vischer’s comic sublime, by contrast with the tragic sublime, after this negation there is no drive towards a final resolution or affirmation of order. However, although comedy brings the sublime down to earth, it needs its high aspirations to survive. The comic can bear no fake sublimity. The infinite longing for the sublime ideal remains, but the comic subject is not allowed to forget the life mundane and the limits of sublime possibilities. Modiano ponders whether a comic version of the sublime might be more likely to remain attractive in a sceptical, anti- or post-romantic age, in which hope for transcendence or subjective unity is denuded, even though it depends upon a sustained power of the absolute through requiring comparison of the finite and the infinite, a comparison which particularly flourished in the romantic era (Modiano 1987).20 Writing in the 1970s, Thomas Weiskel famously asserted that the sublime, as a tainted aesthetic, ‘must now be abridged, reduced, and parodied as the grotesque, somehow hedged with irony to assure us we are not imaginative adolescents’ (Weiskel 1976: 6). And Mondiano notes how ‘the moderns customarily turn the comic into the absurd and the sublime into the anti-sublime’; but there is much modern art in which the distinctions and rejections that Weiskel and Modiano describe

96 • Stephen Downes

1

i

are complicated by nostalgic remnants of traditional aesthetic concepts. The music of Francis Poulenc plays with such categorical ambiguities with particular subtlety. In so doing, it invokes variants of the sublime and beautiful in the guises of the comic, Gothic, sentimental and grotesque. Poulenc’s little piano Pastourelle (1927) at first presents a naive and carefree character – an idyll of gentle comfort and delights. In its final measures, however, this is thrown into doubt and disarray (Musical Example 5.3). _

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Musical Example 5.3 Poulenc, Pastourelle, close

There is a sudden eruption of pounding bass Bb—Db minor thirds, followed without transition first by the quiet, high-register reinstatement of the major third D n of the home key and then a surprise fortissimo, quirkily spaced final tonic chord. These juxtaposed, contradictory gestures subvert the character and function of formal closure and resolution that are so crucial for the traditional aesthetic of a ‘beautiful’ work of art. Instead of confirmation of a unified and discretely framed piece, the final succession of unpredictable, paradoxical figures creates a destabilizing, unsettling edge, which the throwaway final chord seeks to dismiss but only serves to further exaggerate. However, meaningful patterns emerge. It is possible, upon reflection, after the shock, to relate the Bb minor bass figure to the more melancholic, plaintive material in the middle section of the piece. Furthermore, the idyll–threat–humour succession suggests a psychological process. The passage closely parallels the Freudian model of humour where the return of the pleasure principle diffuses the dangers of the real for the purpose of the survival of the ego. In 1927 Freud wrote that humour tells us ‘Look! Here is the world which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children – just worth making a jest about!’ Expressive tactics might turn to Freudian pleasure-producing techniques of condensation, displacement and substitution (Freud [1927] 1964). Thus, Poulenc’s musical humour can express a vital strategy in the survival of a threatened subject. It might also be seen as a microscopic and comically transformed version of the Kantian sublime, in which humour displaces the role of reason, as the flippant displaces foreboding in the function of confirming the subject’s survival after the destabilizing experience of the sublime. The Freudian model proposes a mechanism involving depth psychology, but

Beautiful and sublime • 97

the humour in Poulenc’s piece, generated by comic juxtapositions characteristic of the surrealist poetry he greatly admired and often set (Jacob and Apollinaire), also raises the question of whether, by contrast with the modern subject constructed through linear development, reconciliation and synthesis or through the discovery of a core or origin, there might be no deep self to be uncovered (see Løvlie 1992 and Downes 2006). It seems to challenge notions of a consistent, sincere, unified self-expression. In this way the music problematizes the old binaries of depth and surface, unity and diversity. One wonders what motivates this succession, this disruption of a beautiful idyll; is it deep anxiety or passing whimsy? Jean Paul’s analysis of humour as the inverse sublime in his Preschool of Aesthetics (1804) is useful here. In Jean Paul’s model, ironic detachment results from the juxtaposition of details of a finite world with the idea of the infinite, provoking not a position claiming superiority over the world but a sympathetic response to the revelation of the whole world’s folly. It contains a serious element, ‘bearing the tragic mask, at least in its hand’, as Jean Paul puts it; for the greatest humorists, he said, ‘we have to thank a melancholy people’. ‘After each pathetic strain’, Jean Paul writes, ‘a comic relaxing’ is desired and this is achieved by a ‘reductive seriousness’, the pathetic sensation is scaled down, into sensuous, individualized particles that ‘cannot be gaudy enough in humour’ and that might be pursued ‘into trivial details’. Jean Paul argues that ‘laughing matter’ is ‘derived from the sublime’, although it annihilates the sublime and takes the place granted to reason in the Kantian model; the humour as inverted sublime, as it ‘revels in its own contradictions and impossibilities’ and a ‘predilection for the most vacuous ending’ rejects Kantian rationality. What we are dealing with, Jean Paul says, is a ‘humoristic subjectivity’, as all this is perceived by the subject ‘dividing [itself] into finite and infinite factors’ (Casey 1992, 246, 250–9). Destabilization resulting from the subversion of sublimity is also characteristic of the Gothic. As Avril Horner has discussed, Burke’s discussion of the sublime in his Philosophical Enquiry greatly inflected the discourse around English Gothic writing (Horner 2005).21 The Gothic sublime is closely related to Burke’s terror and Kant’s initial stage of the sublime experience, but it does not promise the mastery which follows, sharing something of the rupture, discontinuities and bursting of the artistic frame that has come to be called postmodern. Gothic writing characteristically subverts binary oppositions. (Typical examples are ‘the quick and the dead’; eros/thanatos; pain/pleasure; natural/supernatural; material/transcendent; human/machine; masculine/feminine.) In so doing it destabilizes cultural and supposedly ‘natural’ boundaries and intensifies anxiety concerning the sustained coherence and even survival of the modern subject through heightening fear of the Other. It presents disturbing embodiments of unspeakable horrors; it imperils the mastery of the dominant elements culturally established in such binary oppositions. The troubling invocations of Good versus Evil, material versus spiritual, life and death, raise religious questions in a manner highly attractive in a sceptical age. The Gothic points with a quivering finger to that which lies beyond the limits of Enlightenment knowledge, to dark corners unilluminated by the light of reason or the glow of angels. It is also often deliberately unsettling in its sudden, deliberately shocking changes of tone, its generic and allusive promiscuity and relish for rhetorical hyperbole. Critical work on the Gothic has often focused on the uncanny (with Freud as stimulus, of course). Scrutiny of the Gothic by recourse to depth psychology can fruitfully be complemented by addressing the play of surface effects – incongruity, juxtaposition, hybridity and malformation – which are characteristic responses to the loss of transcendence and threats to unity. This ludic quality is often overtly comic, but the comic turn in the Gothic is too often simply pathologized

98 • Stephen Downes

as hysterical laughter – a sort of carry on screaming. In the Gothic ‘comic turn’ – as in Jean Paul’s model of humour as inverse sublime – terror is suspended and horror is held in abeyance; it also ‘offers a position of detachment and skepticism’ towards the nostalgia for lost transcendence; it can be considered to be ‘the beginning of a deconstructionist turn inherent within modernity’. The Gothic deploys masks, deformity, exaggeration, the grotesque or diabolical to play upon mistaken identities, question notions of origin, and darkly twist the fortunes of fate. Gothic texts also often display their artifice through preoccupation with surface effect, intertextual allusion, simulation, stylization, self-parody and fakery. In flaunting with the ludicrous they push the relationship between sign and signification to breaking point. Authenticity or authority is thereby profoundly problematized. A common strategy in Gothic narrative is to include the discovery of an ancient text as source of lost truth or hidden ‘depth’, so that authenticity is ‘deferred’ to a secondary, embedded (faked) text which may be inscrutable but which when deciphered opens some portal to a realm of forbidden, often terrible truth (Mishra 1994).22 The opening gesture of Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings might be considered as presenting a ‘found musical document’. It brazenly raises from the dead Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV 542 (Musical Example 5.4).

Musical Example 5.4 Poulenc, Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings, opening organ solo

The infernal return to Bach can be heard as disturbing discovery rather than rappel à l’ordre. The chord in m. 2, a diminished seventh over a dissonant bass, is an harmonic deformation of rather macabre effect, after which it is impossible not to hear a ‘shiver’ or ‘shudder’ on the strings, again on that tawdry, favourite chord of uncertainty, the diminished seventh. The evidently borrowed nature of the opening immediately challenges the notion of artistic autonomy, and yet, at the motivic level the rest of the concerto can be shown to be one of Poulenc’s most ‘unified’, that is, self-derived or autonomous works. The concerto wears the motivic variations that tie the main themes together on its sleeve, so the one, penultimately placed exception to this motivic ‘family’ (an elegiac string theme) is especially telling. In the end, then, autonomy is again challenged by exoteric material. Before this, however, at the structural climax, the comic turn characteristic of the Gothic gives an unsettling twist to the anticipated moment of formal resolution and subjective synthesis. The opening paragraph of the concerto is in effect a slow introduction, leading in conventional fashion to a climactic dominant. What follows is a kind of double exposition, two parallel

Beautiful and sublime • 99

paragraphs based on subjective dualisms. A third allegro theme (fig. 37), derived from a jubilant subsidiary idea, sounds like a recapitulation as it marks the return to the ‘home’ key, G minor, and restores the allegro tempo of the first main theme. It also suggests summary or synthesis as it incorporates dissonant chords from the slow introduction (1 before fig. 38) and transformations of material from the second subject of the first expository thematic pair (fig. 41). This, however, is the most complex, ambiguous section in the concerto, characterized by multidimensional hybridity. It combines elements of the first two subjects, and in traditional formal terms, as recapitulation, it suggests a new, unified identity emerging out of previous contrast and dissonance, a restoration of beautiful form. However, for all those suggestions of roundedness, resolution and unification it is a comic turn, a character generated by the perky motivic repetitions and the registration of the organ, which unceremoniously takes the instrument out of the church and dumps it into the fairground. Through motivic transformation (or deformation) and timbral effect the jocular displaces the jubilant. There is a kind of doubleness (which the double structure of the work to this point also sustains) in that at once the moment suggests the aspiration to subjective unity or resolution in ‘deep’ structure, yet only to take an unexpected humorous turn to the frivolous, a light-heartedness not apparently ‘earned’ or anticipated, couched in tones of decidedly ‘low’ cultural value. One could read this as a Freudian comic displacement or substitution in the face of something terrible or fearful and thereby sustain the depth psychological strain of much Gothic criticism, but the moment’s effect depends also upon surface ambiguity and playfulness, achieved through apparent hybridity and malformation. After this the subsequent return of the opening ‘authentic’ musical relic sounds less a commemoration and more a bastardization. Mourning, through elegy, is the concerto’s last response, elegy as reparation and mode of utmost beauty, which seeks to ‘transform pain into something endurable’.23 In this elegiac theme Poulenc’s use of lower, muted solo strings rather than violins in full ‘throat’ might suggest distance or darkness. His great friend Jean Cocteau might well have gagged; he had famously demanded composers write for an ‘orchestra without the caress of the strings’. The string solo is an instrumental tone previously used in the second subject of the second thematic pairing, where Poulenc’s Concerto is at its most saccharine and hence seems to challenge notions of ‘good taste’ most strongly. The category invoked here is the ‘sentimental’, a kind of debased beautiful, evoked in the concerto as aesthetic complement to the debased sublime of the Gothiccomic. As Hans Keller noted, the romantic solo violin is the chief suspect as instrumental carrier of the sentimental. Keller identifies the inhibitions and defences against sentiment produced by the fear of feeling held most strongly by those in the ‘best society’, a society that calls sentiment ‘sentimentality’. Such defensiveness is often built upon ‘a chronic sense of humour’ (Keller 1994, 71). One of Poulenc’s artistic achievements is that humour and sentimentality are released from such a crippling bind through their central role in rethinking the traditional aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful. The sentimentalist is routinely denied a place at modernism’s high table. This is part of modernism’s ‘anxiety of contamination’, to use Andreas Huyssen’s phrase, the aesthetic barrier is erected to separate (and protect) ‘art’ from the trivial, banal, tawdry and the commonplace. Huyssens describes how this is notably exemplified by Gustav Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, a ‘sentimental’ reader of trashy romances, who stands for ‘woman’ as lover of inferior literature, confirming her place with mass culture on the low side of the ‘great divide’, a division excluding women and their sentimentality from high art. (And, by extension, their forms of beauty: Huyssen cites Max Horkheimer and Adorno’s figuring of mass culture as the evil queen seeking

100 • Stephen Downes

confirmation, in her own mirror, that she is the ‘most beautiful in the land’. Huyssen 1986, ix and 44–62; Horkheimer and Adorno 1982, 141).24) As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (2004) notes, the sentimental is condemned for its lack of subtlety or ambiguity, its transparent, manipulative and false expression, its wilful turn away from the darker ‘truth’ of the ‘real’. Aesthetically, the sentimental seems worthless. And ethically it seems, at best, dubious. However, Dillon argues that considering aesthetics as political practice reveals close links with sentimentalism, one that facilitates analysis of sentimentality’s prominence in the nineteenth century and its debasement in the twentieth. The eighteenth-century rise of modern aesthetics and the turn to liberal politics were both founded upon the freedom ascribed to the autonomous, aesthetically educated subject. Sentimentalism, by contrast, seems to offer no such autonomy, but rather anti-individualism, a consequence of its basis in consumerism, functionalism and domesticism (of women, of course). Dillon continues by noting that sentimentalism characteristically includes the moment of reflection on an emotion that is excessive and overtly cultivated. The characteristic use of established convention, the turn to well-worn tricks of the trade, also makes constructiveness manifest. Sentimentalism can therefore offer a critical aspect, one exposing the limits or problems underlying pretensions to aesthetic autonomy (and of liberal politics). Rather than be seen simply as aesthetic failure, the sentimental has the potential to expose both the possibilities and the limitations of the aesthetic: ‘one might locate aesthetic and political possibilities – conjunctions and disjunctions, negotiations between inside and outside – within rather than beyond the formulaic feelings of sentimental discourse’ (Dillon 2004; see also Tanner 1976–7). The sentimental also, of course, raises the wider issue of kitsch. The best analysis of this relationship is Robert C. Solomon’s discussion of ‘sweet kitsch’ (Solomon 1991).25 Kitsch’s fatal flaw can lie in its perfect execution, its unblemished quality, as well as in its lack of ambiguity, necessary in that it is overtly designed to illicit a predictable response, often through recourse to cliché. Kitsch exhibits a beauty that seems unrealistically pure, immaculate or simplistic, or lays its overt knowledge of traditional forms and techniques on with the thickest trowel around. The fake, moribund, morbid, mawkish, spurious and saccharine: these are the expressive reference points of kitsch and its enjoyment is often explicitly diagnosed as unwholesome, a symptom of malaise, indolence or indeed of effeminacy. It is excessive, its emotion is not sufficiently suppressed; it is childlike, naive, immature, its devotees are displaying an inability or lack of desire to cultivate the control of the adult sophisticate, the tastes of the true aesthete. Solomon offers a ‘qualified defence’ of sweet kitsch through rethinking and revaluing sentimentality. He notes, as did Keller, the modern suspicion of the more tender emotions, one based on the orthodoxy of ‘masochistic modernism’, which preaches algolagnic art, the pleasure of pain, or a modernist credo that ‘tis better to shock than to delight or sympathize. A key figure in the ethical degrading of the sentiment and sentimentality was Kant (again) for whom the aesthetic judgement of sentimentality was impossible or irrelevant, for he dismissed it on ethical grounds as deceitful, as manifesting a flaw in character, even as mark of decadence or degeneracy. Subsequent attacks on kitsch are often less aesthetic than political, or are focused on its problematic emotional content/character as apparently a mode of distraction or selfdeception whose aim is soothing catharsis through emotional manipulation which violates subjective autonomy and freedom, and is therefore humiliating (and hence also, of course, a potentially powerful tool of ideological indoctrination through propaganda). However, Solomon argues that ‘one of the purposes of art’ might be ‘to remind us of just those tender, outgrown sentiments’, perhaps even to disturb us regarding their loss. ‘Better yet, art can help us feel them again, and move us to action on their behalf.’ Vicarious emotion is not necessarily false; neither

Beautiful and sublime • 101

need be the apparently superficial or ephemeral. The venerable depth versus surface binary is a powerful metaphor which celebrates total, long term engagement and denigrates momentary diversions in which nothing appears to be at stake. All out depth, however, is the ‘province of a few self-destructive romantics’; ‘casual emotion . . . is the currency of everyday life.’ Of another pernicious binary divide, between pleasure and culture, Solomon challenges us to consider which is the more ‘self-indulgent’. Of the charge that sentimentality is a distortion of ‘reality’, well this could be a most valuable strategy. And, in any case, all emotions tend to distort; distortion is the norm, not the abnorm. To summarize, when we hear music as sentimental we might, after Solomon, look positively upon versions of sweet and possibly vicarious expression and so recuperate expressive and aesthetic types elsewhere too swiftly rejected. After Dillon, in sentimental music we might hear a rather sophisticated probing of the problem of aesthetic autonomy and the related issue of artistic sincerity through overt constructiveness and reflectiveness – building with old bricks and emoting on emotion. Some signals for a sentimental hearing of music would be overt borrowing; overt technique; legitimization of the apparently banal; a reflection on the problem of returning to very or over familiar forms of beauty. ‘Divertissement’, the second movement of Poulenc’s Sextuor, opens with an allusion almost as overt as that which begins the Organ Concerto. In this case it is to Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C major K545, a work which, perhaps for amateur pianists particularly, is iconic of Mozart’s ‘beautiful’ Classical style (Musical Example 5.5). The differences, though, are telling. In Poulenc’s first bars, by contrast with Mozart, the melodic third is absent. This allows it to be prominently present in the accompaniment, where it is subject to major–minor alteration. The ‘tenor’ line in the piano doubles the oboe’s dissonant C to expressive effect as the static tonic harmony means that the leading-note creates the major seventh dissonance, whereas in the Mozart there is passing harmonic support for the leading note B. This inner piano line foreshadows the turn in the oboe melody in m. 2. This is comparable with the inverted relationship between the bass and the treble lines in the Mozart. Poulenc replaces Mozart’s Alberti bass with an accompanimental figure of similar rise and fall, but now with falling sixth from the ‘sweet’ major third, a fall that will soon become melodically significant.26 After a contrastingly jocular middle section the closing part of the movement begins with the return of the opening theme in the fashion of ternary form. However, the returning theme is played in the dominant. Such tonal ‘misbehaviour’ is not unusual for Poulenc, but his tonal choices should not be lightly dismissed as inconsequential. The contradiction of traditional tonal expectation creates a return strongly tinged by a sense of loss. This is intensified as the dominant turns to minor, in an expansion of the major–minor fluctuation of the opening two bars. The recapitulation is condensed, but time is allowed for sighing descents over the dominant of Ab and a new descending chromatic figure (fig. 8). Sighs and laments seem the order of the day. This expressive quality combines with the lack of tonal closure, felt poignantly because the evocation of ternary design suggests a partial sense of lost formal beauty because the remnants of such closed formal ‘logic’ remain in play. As a result, we might hear the movement as sentimental in the familiar, elegiac Schillerian sense in which a return to Arcadia is recognized as impossible, but the urge to go forward to Elysium, which Schiller proposed, also seems absent. Instead, it proposes a form of expression in which a lost, beautiful (Mozartian) mode is evoked in deliberately excessive and sweet yet partial reconstruction, excessive because it really does lay on the material carriers of expression more thickly than in the ‘original’.

102 • Stephen Downes Andantino

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Poulenc’s opening melody is also a flagrant pilfering from the gavotte of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. He has pickpocketed a musical imposter; there’s no honour among compositional thieves. Stravinsky’s counterfeit is poised, cool and undemonstrative; Poulenc’s, in the best sentimental fashion, is indulgent, melancholy and effusive, yet pensive and self-reflective. Anything Igor can do, Francis can do more sentimentally, but Stravinsky, too, has his sentimental moments. In this aspect creative relationships with the music of Tchaikovsky are especially telling. In Tchaikovsky, Poulenc found a Mozartian ally in his pursuit of sentimental beauty. Tchaikovsky’s reverence for Mozart is often dismissed as nostalgic, as producing superficial, faked and fawning Mozartiana. This is part of the once critically commonplace dismissal of Tchaikovsky’s music as vulgar, sentimental and feminine (all terms Poulenc would eagerly embrace for his own music of course). By contrast with the assimilation of Mozart, starting with Hoffmann, into an invented tradition of the Germanic musical sublime, Tchaikovsky’s enthusiasm for Mozart plays an important part in his commitment to an aesthetic of pleasure, delight and enjoyment, related to preromantic discourse. This aesthetic is reflected in the preference for the theatrical or quotidian rather than ambitions towards the abstract or transcendent. Furthermore,Tchaikovsky’s overt eclecticism made him especially conscious of style, composing music ‘nonchalantly transparent to models and sources’ (Taruskin 1997, 249–53). The latter comment could equally apply to Poulenc or Stravinsky. Tchaikovsky lies transparently behind Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée (1928), of course. He lies more coyly perhaps in the first two movements of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind (1923–4) where the ‘sentimental’, Tchaikovskian ‘resonances’ of ‘stifled sighs’ reveal ‘the nostalgia, however mocked or squeamishly disguised, was real enough’ (Taruskin 1996, 1608). However repressed, these echoes of Tchaikovsky’s sentimental style suggest that beneath the brittle exterior of Stravinsky’s music lies a soft centre. In a radio interview, Poulenc declared that the main theme for the Adagietto of his 1924 ballet Les biches was inspired by a melody in The Sleeping Beauty (here he beats Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée by four years; see Poulenc 1954, 55.)27 An unacknowledged Tchaikovskian resonance lies in the chromatic swoon, which is the melody’s second idea. This might recall the chromatic inflections common as an expressive turn in Mozart’s melodies, especially through

104 • Stephen Downes

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the second-hand example of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo variations, Op. 33. In Tchaikovsky the chromatic material that brings his theme to a close (mm. 17–21) can be considered sentimental because it lies outside the controlled, ‘beautiful’ thematic form as an excessive, one might say, indulgent supplement (its pastoral resonances – pedal open fifth and woodwind scoring – add further qualities of a sentimentalized idyll; see Musical Example 5.6). It is also an expansive, delayed echo of the F n (flat sixth) which inflected the end of the horn solo line immediately prior to the theme’s presentation. The melodic emphasis on the flat sixth on the horn is a romantic sign of melancholy and seems to confirm the sense that the ‘Mozartian’ theme that follows is being recalled as a beloved lost object. The chromatic codetta to the theme offers sentimental reflection on this melancholic context (the pastoral idyll, then, is characteristically shadowed by elegy). In Poulenc, the excessive chromaticism is placed centrally within the main melody and is derived from the chromatic inner line in the accompaniment. They are sensual, erotic sighs, but the extension of chromatic descent to the enharmonic minor third emphasizes the melancholic character. The chromatic rise of the second half of the theme offers a counterbalance, peaking on the joyful major sixth (G) and leading to purely diatonic closure. It is this rising part of the theme that most directly relates to the melody of the Pas de quatre of Sleeping Beauty that Poulenc played in the 1954 radio program. In a 1948 radio talk called L’exquise mauvaise musique, Poulenc said: ‘In Tchaikovsky, between the pure and the sublime, there is room for this type of delicious music’ (Poulenc 1999, 67).28 The chromatic

Beautiful and sublime • 105

gesture in the Adagietto is a ‘deliciously bad’ musical idea: second or even perhaps third hand, sentimental, neither ‘pure’ nor ‘sublime’, but vicarious and vulgar, posing, in provocatively erotic fashion, as an alternative to the old binary opposition of beautiful and sublime. The evocations of the Gothic, comic, sentimental in Poulenc’s music are crucial to the compositional revaluation of aesthetic traditions of the beautiful and sublime. Poulenc’s aesthetic choices were often strongly driven by political imperatives. In the fraught political arena of early twentieth-century France, with prominent state investment in culture and manipulation of its public discourse, composers acutely felt the ‘pull’ between aesthetics and ideology. Against a circumscribed notion of French ‘classic’ style (Latin, pure, proportionate, well ordered, a beautiful style to be remembered and defended) Poulenc and others sought to include that which was excluded from this notion (the popular, the commercial, new alternatives to ‘authorized’ forms of beauty). It was a dissenting and demystifying impulse, a railing against reification and chauvinistic idealism.However, as Jane Fulcher notes, this was pursued through ‘respecting traditional cultural frames so that the internal, logical breaks would become more apparent’. Aesthetic norms and traditional hierarchies were invoked in order to be disorientated. Alongside this working from within, there was a desire to incorporate the exoteric, to construct a subjectivity not based on romantic inwardness but on collective experience. Satie, described in Le coq as one who ‘insouciantly abjures “the sublime”’ was a model, but one that each of Les Six took to different ends (Fulcher 2005, 15, 156, 165).29 For Poulenc, the end was to establish a repertory of strategies that facilitated new musical variants – inversions, subversions, one might even say perversions – of those aesthetic qualities traditionally assigned to the beautiful and sublime. Notes 1 2

3

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5 6 7

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A brief selection of recent secondary sources offering both persuasive overviews and interesting critical angles: Kirwan 2005, Shaw 2006, Prettejohn 2005, Scruton 2009, Zangwill 2001 and Eagleton 1990, who is especially trenchant on the sublime. Todd Gilman has noted, following Frances Ferguson, how the sublime tended to be discussed in detachment from the beautiful, as part of the marginalization of the latter. Gilman describes how the work of the English composer Thomas Arne suffered through being identified with denigrated notions of beauty by contrast with the increasing value placed on the ‘sublime’ music of Handel. Gilman 2009, Ferguson 1992, 44–5. On Handel and the sublime, see, for example, Shapiro 1993, Harris 2005 and Mathew 2009. The wide spread of considerations of the sublime in recent musicology can be indicated, for example, by Jaeger 2010 and Krims 2002. For an interesting pair on a ‘subspecies’ of the sublime in music, see Shreffler 2006 and Drott 2004. The discussion of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (first published 1854) shows no sign of slowing: important recent musicological enquiries include Petty 1998, Burford 2006, Titus 2008, Bonds 2012, and the essays in Grimes et al. 2013. Those who have followed the recent development of ‘ecomusicology’ (usefully exemplified by the essays collected in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64 (2), Summer 2011, might see, for example, Hitt 1999. In the wake of 9/11, there has been important work on the sublime, terror and trauma; see, for example, Ray 2005 and, more generally, Battersby 2007. This view has been highly influential in recent musicology. Max Paddison states that the shift from natural beauty to the natural sublime in the philosophy of Burke and Kant ‘is the mark of the modern age’ and concludes that ‘autonomous avant-garde music’ (a musical trend of wide cultural prestige, one characteristically complex, esoteric, iconoclastic and overwhelming) is the ‘epitome of the experience of the sublime’ (Paddison 2004). On Schopenhauer and the sublime, see, for example, Vandenabeele 2003, Trigg 2004 and Vasalou 2013. Also see Hickey [1993] 2009 which provoked something of a critical storm in the early 1990s. Lochhead’s essay elicited a playfully polemical response from James Currie (2008). On the gendered discourse of the beautiful and sublime, see Korsmeyer 2004, esp. 37–47 and 133–40; Yaeger 1989, 191–212; Mattick, Jr 1990; on the gendered discourse of musical beauty, see, for example, Head 1995. For a musicological essay indebted to Jameson’s ‘technological sublime’, see Richardson 2008, esp. 144–6. Kant’s ideas on music’s place in aesthetics have received much discussion. For recent analysis, see, for example, Parret 1998 and Weatherston 1996. Published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Leipzig). Hoffmann’s review is available in translation in Bent 1994, 145–60, and Charlton 2004, 234–50.

106 • Stephen Downes 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29

In the entry on ‘Schönheit’ and ‘Schön’ in Gustav Schilling’s Universal Lexicon der Tonkunst (1834–8), the beautiful is identified with a formal perfection achieved through unity in variety and a vitality given to pleasing form made possible through a higher spiritual power, ‘the faculty of the absolute’ and a ‘striving for the ideal’. For Schilling, beauty thus causes the infinite to be felt in finite forms. He identified contrasting ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities (such as strength–gentleness, sublime–naive), which ‘consort’ together to create ‘sublime beauty’. The sublime is thus merely one category of beauty and not diametrically opposite to it (for Schilling the opposition of beautiful and sublime has ‘destroyed the unity of art’). But such perfections, the highest forms of beauty, are striven for, desired, and only partially realized in artistic reflections of eternal beauty. Music, in its special substance, however, is the most brilliant foreshadowing of the transcendent. In le Huray and Day 1988, 313–17. In Berlinische musikalische Zeitung (1805); trans. available in le Huray and Day 1988, 202–4. Schiller nonetheless argued that we need the two, both the sublime sudden jolt of freedom and the refined sensuousness of beauty: Schiller 1966, 198–9, 201, 211. For Wagner’s explicit denigration of those who identify music’s essence with the ‘pleasure in beautiful forms’ (Hanslick hardly requires naming), see Wagner [1870] 2008, 14. On examples of the scream in Wagner, see Friedheim 1983. The public debate between Hans Werner Henze and Helmut Lachenmann in the early 1980s sustains this argument on whether ‘Tristanesque’ beauty remains relevant in twentieth-century music; see Lachenmann 1980 and 1997, Henze 1983, 345–6 (entry dated 13 October 1982) and Downes [1973] 2011. Dahlhaus constructs the ‘twin styles’ in 1989, 8–11, 56. This is critiqued by Kramer, 1995, 46–51. For an attempt to subvert the division of the beautiful into two through this Beethoven–Rossini opposition, see Downes 2003. For discussion of Rossini’s reported comments on music’s sublime and beautiful characteristics, see Fabbri 1994. More on the Gothic sublime below. Space does not here permit consideration of Berlioz’s important contribution to the debate on music as sublime. See, for example, Kolb 2009, esp. pp. 32–3. This is highly suggestive for understanding the music of Debussy. Parts of this section were presented at the conference ‘Rethinking Poulenc’, Keele University, June 2013, and at a research seminar hosted by the Music Department, University of Nottingham, February 2013. A stimulating and approachable essay on this topic is Brendel 1990. The following paragraph is greatly indebted to Homer’s study. On the relationship of the Gothic and sublime, see also Botting 1995, 25–8. On the sublime in the Gothic novel, see also Ferguson 1992, 97–113. For recent musicological considerations of the Gothic, see Esse 2009, Head 2011, the reading of Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, Op. 28, No. 20 in Kramer 2012 and Grey, forthcoming. Danto feels we ‘understand too little about the psychology of loss to understand why the creation of beauty is so fitting as a way of marking it – why we bring flowers to the graveside, or to the funeral, or why music of a certain sort defines the mood of mourners. It is as though beauty works as a catalyst, transforming raw grief into a tranquil sadness, helping the tears to flow and, at the same time, one might say, putting the loss into a certain philosophical perspective’ (Danto 2003, 111). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has highlighted how the homo–heterosexuality opposition marks many cultural binarisms, including art/kitsch and sincerity/sentimentality; the latter is associated with discredited or devalue notions – manipulative, vicarious, morbid, knowing, the arch. Sedgwick argues that, from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, the exemplary sentimentalist is not the woman but the ‘homosexual’, and the problematic rehabilitation of the sentimental is manifest in several guises, including the camp (2008, 143–6). For a thoroughly negative view, see Savile 2002: 315–19; and for a rejoinder in the same volume, Newman 2002: 320–31. Solomon’s work on sentimentality is also critiqued in Begbie 2007. There are many motivic derivations in Poulenc’s opening paragraph. Moore 2012, 11–15 shows the comparison with the theme from The Sleeping Beauty, which Poulenc played during the radio interview. entre le pur et le sublime chez Tchaikovski, il y a la place pour ce genre de délicieuse musique. In Poulenc (1954) used the similar phrase l’adorable mauvaise musique to describe the piano music of Anton Rubinstein (la célèbre Romance), Grieg and Borodin, which he heard his mother play alongside Mozart, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann. The other crucial context for these aesthetic choices, which cannot be discussed here, is the social milieu from which Poulenc’s commissions emerged; for discussion of examples, see Epstein 2013 and Kahan 2010.

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Beautiful and sublime • 107 Beech, Dave. 2009. ‘Art and the Politics of Beauty’, introduction to Beech (ed.), Beauty: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 12–19. Begbie, Jeremy S. 2007. ‘Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts’, in Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands and Roger Lundin (eds), The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 45–69. Bent, Ian, ed. 1994. Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century: Vol. 2, Hermeneutic Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bérubé, Michael. 2005. ‘Introduction: Engaging the Aesthetic’, in Bérubé (ed.), The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1–27. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2006. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ––––– 2012. ‘Aesthetic Amputations: Absolute Music and the Deleted Endings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen’, 19th-Century Music, 36: 3–23. Botting, Fred. 1995. The Gothic. New York: Routledge. Brendel, Alfred. 1990. ‘Must Classical Music be Entirely Serious? 1. The Sublime in Reverse’, in Music Sounded Out. London: Robson, 12–36. Burford, Mark. 2006. ‘Hanslick’s Idealist Materialism’, 19th-Century Music, 30: 166–81. Burke, Edmund. [1757] 1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnham, Scott. 1996. ‘Our Sublime Ninth’, Beethoven Forum, 5: 155–63. ––––– 2013. Mozart’s Grace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carruthers, Glen. 1998. ‘Strangeness and Beauty: The Opening Measure of Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, K550’, The Journal of Musicology, 16: 283–99. Casey, Timothy J., ed. 1992. Jean Paul: A Reader, trans. Erika Casey. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Charlton, David, ed. 2004. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, James. 2008. ‘Garden Disputes: Postmodern Beauty and the Sublime Neighbor’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 12: 75–86. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ––––– 1991. Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music, trans. Mary Whittall. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Danto, Arthur C. 2003. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago: Open Court. Davis, Whitney. 2010. Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. De Bolla, Peter. 1989. The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. 2004. ‘Sentimental Aesthetics’, American Literature, 76: 495–523. Dolan, Emily I. and Tresch, John. 2011. ‘A Sublime Invasion: Meyerbeer, Balzac and the Opera Machine’, The Opera Quarterly, 27: 4–31. Donoghue, Denis. 2003. Speaking of Beauty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Downes, Stephen. 2003. ‘Musical Pleasures and Amorous Passions: Stendhal, the Crystallization Process, and Listening to Rossini and Beethoven’, 19th-Century Music, 26. ––––– 2006. The Muse as Eros. Aldershot: Ashgate. ––––– 2011. Hans Werner Henze: Tristan. Aldershot: Ashgate. Drott, Eric. 2004. ‘Conlan Nancarrow and the Technological Sublime’, American Music, 22: 533–63. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Eichhorn, Andreas. 1993. Beethovens Neunte Symphonie: Die Geschichte ihrer Aufführung und Rezeption. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Ellis, Katharine. 2004. ‘The Uses of Fiction: contes and nouvelles in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–44’, Revue de Musicologie, 90: 253–81. Epstein, Louis K. 2013. ‘Toward a Theory of Patronage: Funding for Music Composition in France, 1918–39’, Ph.D. diss., Harvard University. Esse, Melina. 2009. ‘Donizetti’s Gothic Resurrections’, 19th-Century Music, 33: 81–109. Fabbri, Paolo. 1994. ‘Rossini the Aesthetician’, trans. Tim Carter, Cambridge Opera Journal 6: 19–29. Ferguson, Frances. 1992. Solitude and the Sublime. London: Routledge. Fink, Robert. 2004. ‘Beethoven Antihero: Sex, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Failure, or Listening to the Ninth Symphony as Postmodern Sublime’, in Andrew Dell’Antonio (ed.), Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 109–53. Freud, Sigmund. [1927] 1964. ‘Humour’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press, 159–66. Friedheim, Philip. 1983. ‘Wagner and the Aesthetics of the Scream’, 19th-Century Music, 7: 63–70. Fulcher, Jane F. 2005. The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. 1999. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth Press. Gilman, Todd. 2009. ‘Arne, Handel, the Beautiful, and the Sublime’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42: 529–50.

108 • Stephen Downes Grey, Thomas. 1995. Wagner’s Musical Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– forthcoming. ‘Music, Theatre, and the Gothic Imaginary: Visualizing The Bleeding Nun’, in Sarah Hibberd and Richard Wrigley (eds), Art, Theatre and Opera in Paris c. 1750–1850: Exchanges and Tensions. Aldershot: Ashgate. Grimes, Nicole, Donovan, Siobhán and Marx, Wolfgang (eds). 2013. Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Hanslick, Eduard. [1891] 1986. On the Musically Beautiful, trans. of 8th edn by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Harris, Ellen T. 2005. ‘Silence as Sound: Handel’s Sublime Pauses’, The Journal of Musicology, 22: 521–58. 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Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 71–82. ––––– 1991. ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde’, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. MacKenzie, Ian. 1993. ‘Terrible Beauty: Paul de Man’s Retreat from the Aesthetic’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51: 551–60. Mathew, Nicholas. 2009. ‘Beethoven’s Political Music, the Handelian Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Prostration’, 19th-Century Music, 33: 110–50. Mattick, Jr, Paul. 1990. ‘Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Constitution of Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48: 293–303.

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6 Dialectics and musical analysis Julian Horton

Introduction Prospects The Great Either/Or is the seemingly inescapable debate, familiar to all academically trained musicologists . . . epitomised in the question made famous by Carl Dahlhaus . . . the most prestigious German music scholar of his generation: Is art history the history of art, or is it the history of art? What a senseless distinction! What seemed to make it necessary was the pseudo-dialectical ‘method’ that cast all thought in rigidly – and artificially – binarized terms. (Taruskin 2010, xvii; see also Dahlhaus 1983) Richard Taruskin’s indictment of dialectical thought hardly bodes well for a chapter committed to explaining dialectics as a music-analytical tool. Taruskin’s argument fans out from a specifically methodological complaint about dualism’s pointless reductionism to encompass ideological objections about false notions of dialectical necessity, especially those claiming the musichistorical high ground in the wake of Schoenberg’s view of atonality as an imperative foisted on music by history. Laid to rest by postmodern critique in other disciplines as a remnant of modernism, dialectics has, for Taruskin, persisted anachronistically in musicology thanks to the sheer force of Theodor Adorno’s influence, buttressed by Dahlhaus’s popularity. Ironically enough, the historicism that Taruskin marshals as a working alternative furnishes the grounds for dialectics’ resuscitation. For although the mortality of Hegel’s philosophy has long been recognized – as Charles Taylor observed in 1975, ‘no one actually believes [Hegel’s] central ontological thesis, that the universe is posited by a Spirit whose essence is rational necessity’ – the intimate relationship dialectical thought enjoys with the post-Enlightenment history of Western music speaks to a need for an analytical approach that captures this relationship and unpacks its implications (Taylor 1975, 538). Consequently, although we can accept Taruskin’s suspicion of the idea that music history reflects a dialectically unfolding meta-narrative, it is entirely reasonable to argue that music written in the age of Hegelianism absorbs something of that epistemological context. This argument can be extended to encompass Adorno as well. Even if his elitist apologia for Second-Viennese modernism can be attacked as limited in time and place, that very historical and geographical circumscription underpins the terms of his work’s historicist defence. The convergent evolution of central European philosophy and a wide range of phenomena that have come to define the institutions of European art music supplies perhaps the most

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compelling justification for this attitude. Most overt in this respect is the historical parallel between the development of Hegel’s critical dialectic out of Kant’s system of antinomies and the evolution of high-classical practice into the music of the ‘Romantic generation’, as Charles Rosen describes it, a correlation to which Beethoven must inevitably be regarded as pivotal (see Rosen 1995; Rosen has specifically in mind the generation of composers from Schubert to Wagner). More generally, the close fit between philosophy and music in this time can be understood as the product of a post-revolutionary turn, which witnessed the emergence of philosophical and musical strands of idealist thought, as well as a complex of social, cultural and political forces, in which many of the structures of contemporary musical life have their origin (on this subject, see Weber 2008). In the history of ideas, the dialectical shift is a major element of the Sonderweg or ‘special path’ that German intellectual life arguably pursued from the later eighteenth century (on which, see Lepenies 2006). Fragmented politically and only belatedly affected by the forces of industrialization that transformed England or revolution that shaped France, the German lands fostered a strand of philosophy emphasizing cultural idealism over political or economic emancipation, which had tangible musical manifestations. Thus, when Robert Schumann, writing in 1839, opined that ‘Just as Italy has its Naples, the Frenchman his revolution, the Englishman his merchant marine, etc., so the German has his Beethoven symphonies . . . With Beethoven he has recovered in spirit what he lost to Napoleon’, he gave voice to a sense of shared cultural identity orientated around Beethoven, which is coeval with the idealist philosophy of Hegel or the poetry of Hölderlin (see Schumann 1965, 148; trans. modified). The primary aim of this chapter is to scrutinize the relationship between dialectical thought and musical analysis, paying special attention to close reading of the post-Beethovenian repertoire. I nominate three epistemic shifts as a broad historical framework. The first is naturally located around the turn of the nineteenth century, in the context that produced Hegel himself and Beethoven as his musical correlative. The second is signalled by the ‘sharper key’ of Germanic musical politics obtaining after the revolutions of 1848, driven by the reception of Wagnerian music drama and Lisztian instrumental music and apostrophized in Franz Brendel’s overtly Hegelian history of music, which delineated contemporary music in antithetical terms and lent new urgency to the need for compositional solutions that overcame keenly felt dualisms (Brendel 1852; see also Gur 2012). The debates raging around the symphony in the late nineteenth century, which found their epicentre in the stand-off between Brahmsian and Brucknerian variants in Vienna, signified a polarization of opinion that was in many cases (Brendel’s, for instance) consciously dialectical. The third shift encompasses Second-Viennese modernism up to 1914, a repertoire that furnished the musical ground zero of many of Adorno’s arguments, and which can be understood as a point of culmination for the idealist turn, notwithstanding later attempts at revival. These historical markers provide a structure for narrating a history of contact between music and dialectics (rather than a dialectical history) via analytical case studies of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata, Op. 31, No. 2, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5 and Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1 respectively. By way of establishing philosophical and methodological contexts, I provide a brief preparatory appraisal of Hegelian and Adornian dialectical mentalities, in so far as this is possible under the present constraints.

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Two dialectical models The Hegelian dialectic It is, of course, hardly feasible to encompass the history of dialectical thought here, or even to give a substantial account of its Hegelian formulation. The notion of the dialectic is at once sufficiently engrained in popular understanding as to obviate extensive consideration, and sufficiently evasive as to resist straightforward explanation. The following is consequently designed as a sketch of the critical problems attending Hegel’s idea rather than a systematic introduction. The notion of dialectic pervades Hegel’s mature writings; three sources are, however, prominent in attempts to define its nature and function – the Phenomenology of Mind, the Encyclopedia Logic and the Science of Logic – and it is these on which my outline primarily draws. The core debate surrounding the Hegelian dialectic centres on the extent to which he conceived it as a species of logic akin to (for example) syllogism, as a mode of reasoning analogous to deduction or induction, as a critical method, or indeed as a methodology of any kind. The dialectical idea is most commonly formulated in triadic terms, through the well-known sequence ‘thesis – antithesis – synthesis’; but scholars of Hegel have been quick to point out the inadequacy of this formulation. As Frederick Beiser writes: Although it is possible to talk about a dialectic, it is advisable to avoid the most popular way of explaining it: in terms of the schema ‘thesis – antithesis – synthesis’. Hegel never himself used this terminology, and he criticised the use of all schemata. In the Phenomenology Hegel did praise ‘the triadic form’ that had been rediscovered by Kant . . . ; but this is a reference to the triadic form of Kant’s table of categories, not a method of thesis – antithesis – synthesis. (Beiser 2005, 161) Beiser is no less suspicious of the view that dialectics is a kind of formal logic: ‘Another common misconception is that the dialectic is some kind of alternative logic, having its own distinctive principles to compete with traditional logic. However, Hegel’s dialectic was never meant to be a formal logic, one that determines the fundamental laws of inference governing all propositions, whatever their content’ (Beiser 2005, 161). In general, it can be argued that any attempt to render the dialectic in methodological terms is bound to fail, because Hegel’s philosophy is altogether opposed to methodology, in the sense of a structure of principles that is justified a priori and then applied to problems of ontology or epistemology. Hegel’s opposition both to the notion of philosophy as a methodology or system of a priori principles and to the idea of formal logic are evident in the introductory remarks to the Science of Logic: [W]hat logic is cannot be stated beforehand, rather does this knowledge . . . first emerge as the final outcome and consummation of the whole exposition. Similarly, it is essentially within the science that the subject matter of logic, namely, thinking or more specifically comprehensive thinking is considered: the Notion of logic has its genesis in the course of the exposition and cannot therefore be premised. (Hegel 1969, 43) Logic, in these terms, is not the form of cognition abstracted from its content; rather, Hegel locates it in the realm of ‘pure science’, in which context it is an absolute mode of thought,

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arising when the opposition of form and content has been overcome. In other words, it ‘is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature’; or as explained more succinctly in the Encyclopaedia Logic, it is ‘the science of the pure idea, that is, of the Idea in the abstract element of thinking’ (Hegel 1969, 50; 1991, 45). The view pursued here explains the dialectic in three basic ways: first, as a turn in the history of ideas, in which respect it responds primarily to Kant; second, as an a posteriori response to the ontology, or being, of the subject; and finally, as a model of the historical development of consciousness. In the first sense, Hegel’s dialectic is an attempt to rescue metaphysics in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy, and specifically of the system of antinomies developed in Part II of the Critique of Pure Reason, which forms a central component of what Kant termed the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’. In that context, Kant formulated four antithetical propositions (antinomies) as an elaboration of the ‘antithetic of pure reason’ (Kant 1991, 257–81). These together map out a terrain of assertions, arising in the application of pure reason, which generate contradictory but logically consistent forms. He explains: If we employ our reason not merely in the application of the principles of the understanding to objects of experience, but venture with it beyond these boundaries, there arise certain sophistical propositions or theorems [which] have the following peculiarities: they can find neither confirmation nor confutation in experience; and each is in itself not only self-consistent, but posesses conditions of its necessity in the very nature of reason – only that, unluckily, there exist just as valid and necessary grounds for maintaining the contrary proposition. (Kant 1991, 257) Kant nominated four such antinomies, each defined by a thesis and its antithesis: (1) the world either is, or is not, infinite with respect to time and space; (2) every ‘composite substance’ either is, or is not, irreducibly complex; (3) everything that happens either is, or is not, determined with respect to causality; and (4) there either does or does not exist an ‘absolutely necessary being’, which is the world’s primal cause. Kant’s objective was not reconciliation of the antinomies, so much as the development of a ‘sceptical method’, which policed transcendental propositions (Kant 1991, 258–9). Hegel praised Kant for elevating dialectic to the status of ‘a necessary function of reason’ [Hegel’s italics], but criticized Kant’s dualistic formulation on the grounds that ‘if no advance is made beyond the abstract negative aspect of dialectic, the result is only the familiar one that reason is incapable of knowing the infinite; a strange result for – since the infinite is the Reasonable – it asserts that reason is incapable of knowing the Reasonable’ (Hegel 1969, 56). In the Science of Logic, the notion of dialectic develops immediately out of this perception: it does not reside in antinomy in the Kantian sense, but in ‘the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative’ (Hegel 1969, 56). The ontological explanation of the dialectic posits it as the mechanism of the progressive self-understanding of consciousness (the Spirit or Geist). Tracing the progress of this is the task of the Phenomenology of Mind, in which, as Hegel described it, he had ‘exhibited consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowing’ (Hegel 1969, 48). As Hegel explains, this is related to a conception of logic, because logic as pure thought comes about through the agency of the dialectic, as a consequence of the

Dialectics and musical analysis • 115

action of overcoming, synthesis or ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung), which eliminates the distinction between thought as the object and the subject of consciousness.1 Ultimately, the Science of Logic is organized as a narrative of the dialectic through which the condition of logic ‘as pure reason’ comes about; as Taylor explains, ‘Hegel is going to offer us a transcendental logic which will also be an ontology’ (Taylor 1975, 227). Thus the Logic operates by scrutinizing the dialectical process through which grounding categories in our experience of reality are constituted. Hegel’s first category, ‘Being’, for instance, devolves into quality, quantity and measure, and each is dismantled into subcategories, which are defined through dialectical motion, beginning with the opposition of being and nothing, the synthesis of which produces the condition of becoming. Finally, the dialectic constitutes an historical model, because the progress of Spirit towards self-understanding is also the engine of human history.2 The ultimate goal of history in these terms is a situation in which the model of the state is in exact accord with Spirit’s self-understanding; and this is of necessity ‘a community which is in conformity with reason; or . . . one which embodies freedom’, since Spirit’s self-understanding as pure reason is also the condition of its freedom (Taylor 1975, 389). In these terms, world history is regarded as a progression of civilizations, which tend increasingly towards the unity of society and the self-conceiving Spirit, each dialectically superseding its predecessor. The dialectic is therefore the mechanism of a goal-orientated history, driven forwards by the actions of ‘world-historical individuals’, who access the condition of the Geist, or in Hegel’s terms ‘comprehend the substantial content which is the will of the world Spirit’, and so push society towards the next stage of its development (see Hegel 1955, 89–90; quoted in Taylor 1975, 392). Adorno and negative dialectics A detailed account of the reception of these ideas would require nothing less than an intellectual history of German culture from Feuerbach and Marx through Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School to Jürgen Habermas; in effect, a history of the philosophical context of ‘the moment of German music’, as Berthold Hoeckner has called it (Hoeckner 2002). Isolation of Adorno as a representative case is more realistic, and is useful for several reasons. His writing voices substantially the Central-European endgame of Hegelianism, while also displaying an investment in music that is unique among philosophers seeking to continue the Hegelian– Marxist line of critical thought. Moreover, the continued pertinence of dialectics in recent musical thought results overwhelmingly from his enduring influence, both directly as mentor for a body of sympathetic scholarship and indirectly through the impact of scholars working in Adorno’s shadow (above all, Dahlhaus). If Hegelianism in the nineteenth century maintained a conviction in historical utopianism (the nature of which varies depending on right- or left-orientation), then Adorno offers a characteristically twentieth-century variant, which mingles Marxist credentials with an elitist propensity to defend the bourgeois canon, a dedication to progressive composition, and a loss of faith in music’s capacity to express the overcoming of social antinomies. His overriding pessimism combines with critical theory’s admixture of philosophy, sociology and psychology to problematize straightforward classification; as Martin Jay has observed: The force-field of Adorno’s intellectual career . . . would thus include the generating energies of Western Marxism, aesthetic modernism, mandarin cultural despair, and Jewish self-

116 • Julian Horton

identification, as well as the more anticipatory pull of deconstructionism. Although at certain moments and in certain moods Adorno may have been attracted more to one of these poles than to another, his work as a whole can best be grasped as an uneasy tension among all of them. (Jay 1984, 22) Adorno pursues Hegel’s philosophy of history to the extent that he accepts the dialectic as history’s basic mechanism, and adopts its Marxian inversion by seeing in this process the reflection of an economic or sociological base rather than a transcendent World Spirit. In Adorno’s formulation, however, this process is deprived of its synthetic goal. The will towards overcoming constitutes a bourgeois aspiration, arising from the post-Enlightenment dialectical tension between the subject’s rational freedom and his or her subordination to the collectivizing tendency of society.3 If the achievement of the Enlightenment was to emancipate the individual by asserting the primacy of rational autonomy over social function or convention, then the question arises as to what kind of a society can be devised, which respects this autonomy while also preserving a notion of collective responsibility. The great bourgeois aspiration is the attainment of such a social order, the citizens of which could act freely in accordance with the dictates of reason and simultaneously fulfil their communal responsibilities; this, in effect, is Hegel’s state in unity with the self-conceiving Geist. Adorno’s historical model is in essence the narrative of this aspiration’s failure. The truth of the post-Enlightenment world is the looming impossibility of reconciling individual and collective; it is, in other words, defined by an antinomy that can’t be resolved, not by the escalating resolution of contradictions that drives Hegel’s model. The more individuals posit utopian solutions, the more acutely the inadequacy of these solutions is exposed. Worse, the political mechanisms of the bourgeois world have led either to the increasing subordination of the individual to the reproduction of capital (in market economies) or to the hubristic assertion of an individual will over an anonymous populace (in totalitarian societies). Adorno borrows the Marxian notion of alienation to characterize the results: the protracted experience of an unresolved conflict between the self-knowledge of rational freedom and its instrumental domination by society serves to accentuate the condition of social isolation. In brief, the individual’s authentic modern experience is alienation, the sense of a disjunction between self-knowledge and social circumstance that can never be reconciled. It is in this sense that Adorno’s philosophy of history is negative-dialectical; the fabric of society is defined by contradictions, the attempted synthesis of which is consistently negated.4 This view is given music-historical traction via another dialectical argument: the claim that music’s autonomous structures embed its social significance. Musical works, like all art, constitute ‘the unconscious historiography of their epoch’ (this idea is formulated in this way in Adorno 1984, 261). Their social ‘essence’ can therefore be read from their technical, structural components; the intra-musical embodies the extra-musical, because the former is the dialectical partner of the latter. Properly conceived, the task of music analysis is thus not simply to give a structural account of the musical work, but to unearth its ‘truth content’, since its social meaning unavoidably speaks through its technique (see Adorno 1982). More than this, a work’s structure is inevitably freighted with traces of its history, because the work’s individuality is always wrought from convention. The argument here turns on a dialectical definition of musical material, as that which simultaneously individuates the piece

Dialectics and musical analysis • 117

of music and defines the lingua franca on which the composer draws (see Paddison 1993, ch. 2). The main theme in the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 2, No. 1, for example, is unique to that piece, to the extent that its specific identity is shared with no other work. Yet every aspect of the theme is conventional: its initial motive comprises a Mannheim ‘skyrocket’ decaying to a turn figure; the partnering of tonic and dominant forms of this idea in measures 1 to 4 is a widespread device, as is the paraphrase of the same motives and harmonic progression in half the duration in measures 5 to 6; and overall, the theme’s sentential design relates it to thousands of other late eighteenth-century melodies. The theme, in brief, is simultaneously individual and conventional. Connecting this perception to the negative-dialectical concept of history allows the tension between tradition and innovation to be interpreted socio-politically as well as musically. The rational subject’s relationship to society speaks through the composer’s individuation of convention; the musical material’s task is in this respect the mediation (Vermittlung) of the creative subject and its objectified social other. And because this interaction is disposed in time across a work’s or movement’s overall form, the formal process takes on the character of a narrative of the subject’s social condition. Thus, Adorno explicitly stressed the analogy between Beethoven’s treatment of sonata form and the Hegelian dialectic, which was guaranteed by Beethoven’s treatment of the recapitulation as a locus of reconciliation (see Adorno 1957 and 1998). At least in Beethoven’s middle period, this relationship borders on synonymy: Beethoven expresses in music what Hegel expresses in philosophy. Adorno brought the negative-dialectical idea to bear on his own historical circumstances in the Philosophy of New Music, first published in 1949.5 The dialectical method is announced immediately in the Introduction’s recourse to Walter Benjamin, which cites Benjamin’s dictum in the Origins of German Tragic Drama that ‘Philosophical history as the research of origin is the form that, in the most remote extremes . . . reveals the configuration of the idea as the configuration of the totality, characterized by the possibility of a meaningful juxtaposition of these extremes’ (Benjamin 1977, 47, cited in Adorno 2006, 7). The vicissitudes of Adorno’s present, however, render inadequate any application of this idea that pushes towards Hegelian syntheses: At a historical hour, when the reconciliation of subject and object has been perverted to a satanic parody, to the liquidation of the subject in the objective order, the only philosophy that still serves reconciliation is one that scorns the illusion of reconciliation and asserts against universal self-alienation the reality of the hopelessly alienated for which the ‘thingitself’ scarcely speaks any longer. (Adorno 2006, 25) Adorno sees in these circumstances ‘the far limit of . . . immanent method’: new music can either express alienation as the authentic condition of the modern subject, or else sacrifice subjectivity to an ‘objective order’, which devalues the free individual before the musical analogue of false totality. Critical method cannot move beyond this dualism, but is instead bound to reveal either the truth of alienation or the lie of totality in any musical work. The book’s design nominates the governing music-historical antinomy of its time – progress and regression – embodied in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky as the extremes of these two poles. Its local organization remains true to critical theory’s anti-systematic stance, progressing

118 • Julian Horton

paratactically through the elaboration of dialectically argued concepts (23 in the Schoenberg essay; 27 in the Stravinsky essay), which form a constellation of ideas rather than a ramified, teleological thesis. In the technical domain, the defence of Schoenberg is founded on a defence of atonality, as the necessary outcome of a tendency inherent in the musical material. As Adorno argues: By no means do all tonal combinations . . . stand indifferently at the disposal of the composer today. Even the duller ear perceives the shabbiness and tiredness of the diminished seventh chord or of certain chromatic passing notes in the salon music of the nineteenth century. For the technically experienced ear, vague discontent of this kind is transformed into a canon of prohibitions. If all is not deception, this canon now demeasures the means of tonality, which is to say, the whole of traditional music. (Adorno 2006, 32) Schoenberg’s response to this imperative coordinates a radically dissonant language with a rejection of tonal forms; these together signify a collapse of the musical work, expressed through the increasing compression diplayed in his freely atonal pieces. If such music sits at the extreme limit of the material’s tendency, then it also sediments a social truth: ‘The critique of the temporally extensive schema is bound up with that of the content: phrase and ideology. Music, contracted to a moment, is true as an eruption of negative experience’ (Adorno 2006, 34). At the same time, Schoenberg’s preoccupation with concepts of material development anchors his radicalism in tradition. In particular, the pushing of developing variation towards a condition of ‘total development’, in which all syntactic norms are subordinated to motivic transformation, is prefigured in post-Beethovenian instrumental music, and especially in Brahms’s music, which emancipates thematic treatment (as a narrative of the rationally free subject) from formal convention (as analogues of an objective order): In Brahms, development, as thematic labour, had already utterly siezed possession of the sonata. Development, universalized, is to reconstruct the sonata’s problematic totality . . . . Within the framework of tonality he broadly rejects the conventional formulae and rudiments, and at every moment – so to speak – he produces the unity of the work anew, in freedom . . . . By assimilating Beethoven and Brahms, Schoenberg’s music can lay claim to the legacy of classical bourgeois music much as the materialist dialectic relates back to Hegel. (Adorno 2006, 47) Schoenberg’s technique is progressive precisely because it realizes this tendency at a new level of innovation, a characteristic that also guarantees its social authenticity: The cognitive power of new music . . . is legitimate only in that it . . . transcends – both annuls and saves – romantic differentiation on a technical level, and thus according to its substantiality. The subject of new music . . . is the real, emancipated, isolated subject of the late bourgeois period. (Adorno 2006, 47–8) At the antithetical extreme, Stravinsky is cast as an agent of restoration, who effectively sacrifices individuality to an objectification of musical materials, and in so doing subordinates

Dialectics and musical analysis • 119

the subject to a false totality. Where Schoenberg’s atonal music is intensely subjective, Stravinsky’s music renounces interiority in favour of a series of quasi-objective categories, from the preservation of tonal idioms and the rejection of expression to the neoclassical treatment of old forms as musical ‘found objects’. Thus, his preoccupation with ballet is for Adorno the product of an imagination ‘that is drawn to the place where music . . . functions intentionlessly and excites corporeal movement instead of being burdened with meaning’, an assertion that is given substance through comparison of Petrushka with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (Adorno 2006, 108). Whereas in Pierrot ‘everything rests on the solitary subjectivity, withdrawn into itself’, in Petrushka ‘the music identifies not with the victim but with the annihilating authority’ (Adorno 2006, 110). Such a retreat from subjectivity is most controversially expressed in The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s ‘virtuoso composition of regression’, the central theme of which is again ‘an antihuman sacrifice to the collective: a sacrifice without tragedy’ (Adorno 2006, 111). The Rite, however, goes beyond divesting music of the association between material narrative and empathy with an expressive subject, and embraces wholesale ‘identification with the collective’. The Rite’s sacrifice is devoid of tragedy because ‘there is no aesthetic antithesis between the one sacrificed and the tribe’ (Adorno 2006, 118).6 In neoclassical music, objectification is turned instead towards past forms and styles, producing a musical vocabulary amassed ‘out of putatively presubjective phases of music’. At its worst, this technique produces music that for Adorno courts incomprehensibility. In direct opposition to the organicism of Schoenberg, which seeks coherence even as it alienates its listener, Stravinsky’s neoclassical music masks incoherence with surface familiarity, to the end of enforcing a kind of musical authoritarianism: It is precisely the objective incomprehensibility, associated with the subjective impression of being somehow traditional, that unyieldingly silences any disputatiously questioning ear. The blind obedience that authoritarian music anticipates corresponds to the blindness of the authoritarian principle itself. (Adorno 2006, 152) In all, Adorno offers us a stark choice: if music pursues a notion of community, then it embraces a lie of collectivity that tends towards totalitarianism or submission to the culture industry; if music honours the material’s immanent tendency, then it forever condemns the composer to isolation. Three analyses Adorno’s work brings the association of dialectics and musical thought to an apex of sophistication. Its biggest lacuna is the absence of a correspondingly complex approach to analysis, a difficulty that has been addressed by Max Paddison: One cannot escape the feeling that, even though the analyses themselves tend to be irritatingly fragmentary, the real problem lies in the strange disparity between the sophistication and radicality of his aesthetics and sociology on the one hand, and on the other hand the lack of sophistication and the traditional character of his music-analytical method. (Paddison 1993, 169)

120 • Julian Horton

Numerous attempts have since been made to add more analytical flesh to Adorno’s philosophy (for example, see Chua 1995; Spitzer 2006; Agawu 2005). The three analyses offered here gloss some of these attempts, while also advancing novel dialectical readings. Central to each analysis is a preoccupation with the antinomies projected by the material on the one hand, and with the nature of the formal processes they compel on the other. The former are understood as the music’s generative elements, the latter as the means by which the struggle for reconciliation is realized in musical form. The embodiment of conflict is explored in a variety of parameters, from motivic and thematic considerations to topical discourse and its expressive consequences. Beethoven: Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, ‘Tempest’ Dahlhaus’s various commentaries on the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata constitute perhaps the most widely debated analytical applications of dialectical thinking. For Dahlhaus, the vital achievement of this movement is the collapse of thematic presentation into thematic process. The essential feature of the primary material is no longer melodic presentation as the articulation of key and topic, but the exposure of a formal idea, which is realized in the inception of a dialectical process of thematic development. This is achieved by decoupling the classical association between the presentation of material and the assertion of a formal premise. Eighteenth-century composers usually begin a sonata by establishing key and ‘affect’ within a conventionalized thematic form, the result being a statement of the theme’s identity (a Satz in the language of nineteenth-century Formenlehre). Any variation or inspection of the theme’s properties happens later, in parts of the form to which such activity is appropriate. In the ‘Tempest’, no such distinction is observed: development sets in immediately and is ongoing, and this calls into question the very existence of a Satz or the division of labour it supports. Comparison of the ‘Tempest’ Sonata’s opening with that of Mozart’s K 457, shown in Musical Examples 6.1 and 6.2, explicates Dahlhaus’s point. Mozart’s theme comprises an expansive sentence, which can be broken into statement and response (measures 1–8), continuation (9–16) and cadence (17–191). The theme is, to be sure, motivically pregnant, a property that Mozart exploits immediately in the transition, which begins with a retrieval of the statement’s head motive. At the same time, a clear distinction between a presentational phase of action (the sentence) and its consequences (the transition) is preserved; the form’s core idea and first-theme function are one and the same, as a result of which what happens next emerges as a development out of the movement’s initial premise. The opening of the ‘Tempest’ cannot be parsed so straightforwardly. To the extent that they divide into two units (measures 1–6 and 7–211), the second of which revisits the material of the first, measures 1–211 are loosely periodic, although various factors challenge this interpretation, not least of which is the phrase’s manifestly irregular length. As Dahlhaus points out, however, the alternation of Largo and Allegro material combines with the prevailing dominant harmony to lend the music an introductory flavour that thwarts identification of an unambiguously presentational first-theme function. The music after measure 21 does not compensate, but instead moves efficiently into a transition by sequencing the initial arpeggiated figure in the interests of modulating towards V/v. For Dahlhaus, there is no ‘theme’ here in the sense established in Mozart’s K 457. Rather the notion of a stable first subject collapses into a dialectic of preparation and continuation: The ‘theme’ is both an improvisatory introduction and a transitional pattern; instead of being presented in a standard exposition, it dissolves into an ante quem and a post quem: measure

Dialectics and musical analysis • 121 tr

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1 is ‘not yet’ and measure 21 is ‘no longer’ the ‘actual’ exposition, which in Op. 31, No. 2 does not exist. Nowhere does the thematic material take on a basic form; instead, it manifests itself in changing guises according to its location in the formal process, like variations without an explicit theme. (Dahlhaus 1989, 15) What imparts coherence to this music is, for Dahlhaus, not the procession of formal functions (first theme – transition) but the concept regulating material development, which is manifest in the processes in which the motives participate. The disposition of the harmony exacerbates this condition. The tonic’s grounding assertion is located at the start of the transition; in harmonic terms, measures 1–20 comprise an upbeat to the transition, which then honours its conventional tonal function by modulating. Dahlhaus associates this dialectical turn with Beethoven’s middle-period music in general, a shift that is coeval with the first maturity of Hegel’s philosophy (Op. 31, No. 2 dates from 1802; the Phenomenology of Mind was published in 1807). Its consequence is the emergence of a conception of form as the exposure and resolution of a problem: the opening of Op. 31, No. 2

122 • Julian Horton Largo

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Dialectics and musical analysis • 123

sets up a ‘problematic’ – the dialectic of pre- and post-thematic functions – to which the remainder of the movement is a response. The problem itself is the movement’s ‘underlying idea’, defined as the manner in which a specific association is made between the development of the thematic material, the disposition of the formal functions, and the succession of the aesthetic characters: a manner of connection which can be traced back to a problem, to which the finished movement is the solution. (Dahlhaus 1991, 145) The transatlantic reception of Dahlhaus’s analysis has crystallized around Janet Schmalfeldt’s article on the movement, which has spawned a rich secondary literature (Schmalfeldt 1995; reprinted and revised in Schmalfeldt 2011, ch. 2). For Schmalfeldt, Dahlhaus identified a core feature differentiating classical and post-classical practice, which is the shift from architectonic form to form as the embodiment of process. Classical form is concerned with the material’s ‘being’ (sein), expressed in the delineation of thematic presentation and variation. Romantic form rather concerns material ‘becoming’ (werden), under the influence of which presentation is no longer detached from development, but is indentured to it. The synonymy of Beethovenian sonata form and the Hegelian dialectic noted by Adorno is instantiated here; in Schmalfeldt’s words, ‘Beethoven’s techniques of development and variation are precisely those aspects of his treatment of form that so preoccupied Adorno in his critique of European music from late Beethoven to Schoenberg and beyond’ (Schmalfeldt 2011, 29). Beethoven is not content simply to allow his themes to exist as self-sufficient melodies. Instead, they are caught up in a process, which strives towards a moment of ultimate overcoming, where initial antinomies are resolved at a higher level of consciousness. Schmalfeldt contextualizes Dahlhaus’s analysis within the history of dialectical thinking from Hegel to Adorno, by way of A. B. Marx and Arnold Schoenberg, and also augments it by seeking a reconciliation of the dialectical reading with Schenkerian analysis. In so doing, she uncovers an additional process, which links the main and subordinate themes. This flows from the unassuming turn figure that embellishes the half cadence in measure 6. As Musical Example 6.3 shows, this figure (labelled ‘y’) gradually takes on motivic significance as the exposition progresses. It gains rhythmic stability in measure 23, as a new response to the germinal arpeggiation (which Musical Example 6.3 calls ‘x’). The next stage of ‘y’’s evolution arrives with the standing on V/v achieved at measure 41, where it now migrates into the texture, appearing in diminished form as the left-hand tenor voice. With the resolution on to v6–3 at measure 55, the exposition’s most stable subordinate-theme candidate is reached, conceived as a rhythmic reimagining of ‘y’’s inversion. The progress of ‘y’ across the exposition sets up an additional process, which is the effective antithesis of the germinal dialectic noted by Dahlhaus. Whereas ‘x’ initiates development, ‘y’ develops towards a thematic form, which is realized as the second subject. Beginning life as a purely ornamental feature, ‘y’ becomes a theme. Measures 6–55 therefore adumbrate the second theme at the same time as they posit the idea that underlies the first theme’s function. The two processes cross paths in the transition, where both ‘x’ and ‘y’ have equal motivic weight. After this convergence, ‘x’ temporarily recedes from the discourse, and ‘y’ is allowed to develop its thematic identity.

124 • Julian Horton Adagio I------------- 1

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Commentators responding to Schmalfeldt’s work have addressed the movement’s ambiguities from other directions: William Caplin has, for instance, emphasized its form-functional characteristics; James Hepokoski has viewed it from the perspective of sonata theory (Caplin 2009; Hepokoski 2009). One feature of the movement that has eluded substantial explanation is the first-theme recapitulation, quoted in Musical Example 6.4. The theme’s expositional form – its succession of basic and contrasting ideas within a loosely periodic design – is essentially preserved here. The basic idea is, however, attenuated in each statement by the addition of a free recitative prolonging the underlying harmony, and from measure 159, the Allegro contrasting idea digresses towards the remote key of F# minor and abandons any thematic correspondence with the exposition, beyond the retention of a chromatic ascent as voice-leading framework. We emerge by measure 171 on to the standing on V first heard in measure 41, here transposed into the tonic, and from this point the recapitulation proceeds in direct analogy to the exposition, with the addition of a brief dissipatory coda. The difficulty here is that the first-theme reprise has none of the features we commonly associate with stabilization or the overcoming of contradictions, a property that calls into question the straightforward synonymy of Beethovenian form and Hegelian philosophy. On the contrary, Beethoven exacerbates all the instabilities inherited from the exposition. Those elements most

Dialectics and musical analysis • 125 143

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126 • Julian Horton

redolent of an introduction – the slow tempo and non-tonic harmony – are given extra rhetorical emphasis; and the resolution of the standing on V on to i disappears completely, together with any delineation of first theme and transition. Moreover, the Largo’s harmonic provisionality now has additionally to be understood in relation to the retransition, the standing on V of which it effectively extends. The first theme is now problematic not only because it sounds like an introduction, but also because it sounds like a continuation of the development. In fact, as Musical Example 6.5 shows, there is no resolution of the dominant initiating the retransition in measure 121 until the return of the second theme over i6–3 in measure 185. All of this has three major ramifications. First, there is no recapitulatory synthesis of the initial dialectical ‘idea’. To be sure, the exposition complex returns in the tonic, but this alone cannot guarantee the resolution of its inherent contradictions; Dahlhaus’s point is, after all, that the form’s generative concept appears within the primary material, not in the tonal contrast between it and the subordinate group. Second, the relationship between the processes surrounding ‘x’ and ‘y’ changes fundamentally. The adumbration of ‘y’ now dominates the discourse, as if its tonic reprise could only be secured by dissolving the first-theme function into a kind of through-composed improvisation. The contest of ‘x’ and ‘y’ is therefore not resolved into a higher order; the former simply dissipates by way of clearing space for the latter. Finally, and most importantly, this imbalance provokes a radical reconception of where the form’s goal should be located. The ultimate resolution of the retransitional standing on V is the tonic perfect authentic cadence (PAC) closing the second group by measure 217. Hepokoski and Darcy would call this the Essential Structural Closure (ESC), an event that customarily has structural force retransition

first-them e recapitulation

121

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Musical Example 6.5 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first movement, mm. 121–217, bass progression

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Dialectics and musical analysis • 127

because it brings the second theme’s end cadence into tonal agreement with the first theme (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 232–3).7 Measure 217, however, supplies the first structural rootposition tonic since measure 21, which means that it simultaneously fulfils an expectation of tonic arrival normally attending the recapitulation’s start. The form is in consequence more negative-dialectical than dialectical. In a maneouvre that would become widespread in later music, it is not more than the sum of its antithetical parts, and so engenders a teleology that oversteps the movement’s end: we wait for a synthetic event to arrive later in the movement cycle, which the first movement has frustrated. Dahlhaus argued that the dialectical concept of form he found in the ‘Tempest’ apostrophized the ‘strong’ form of composition in its time, supplying one half of an overarching historical dialectic between Beethovenian instrumental music, the urgent teleology of which foregrounded the concept of ‘becoming’, and Rossinian vocal music, which maintained the primacy of ‘being’ in its preoccupation with a melody’s inherent quality rather than its structural potential (see Dahlhaus 1989, 8–15). Although we might baulk at such nationally grounded dichotomies (the ‘strength’ of Beethoven’s conception implies the weakness of Rossini’s), we can nevertheless accept that a dialectical reading of the ‘Tempest’ captures something of the work’s context in the history of ideas. The first movement’s unresolved antinomies also have strong Adornian resonances. The form’s subjective aspects – its thematic specificities and the ideas they embody – are not reconciled with the dictates of formal convention. Instead, the recapitulation sacrifices convention to subjectivity in key respects. The first-theme reprise is essentially a region of subjectification, which temporarily dissolves the notion of a ‘tight-knit’ main subject into a fantasia on its motivic content, an event from which the recapitulation’s synthetic function never fully recovers.8 The mediation of a social dialectic is tangible: the failure to contain the music’s subjectivity within sonata conventions parallels the failure to generate social and political order from rational individuality. In musical as well as political terms, the resolution of this conflict is deferred as an aspiration. Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale Although Adorno’s equation of Beethovenian sonata form and the Hegelian dialectic posits the relationship between expositional binary opposition and recapitulatory synthesis as inherent in the sonata idea, the analytical headaches posed by the first movement of the ‘Tempest’ reveal how grossly reductive it is to argue that Beethovenian sonata forms in general project synthesis as an expressively marked processual goal. It is more historically sensible to observe that narratives of dialectical overcoming are rhetorically, expressively and philosophically central to some genres in some contexts, and either present by negative implication or largely incidental in others. At the level of the movement cycle, dialectical synthesis is palpable as the mechanism of the Beethovenian symphonic struggle-victory plot archetype, which is the agent of symphonic idealism enshrined in his Symphony No. 5. Other strands of symphonism make expressive capital out of evading rather than accepting this archetype. The valedictory ending tracking back to Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony finds a nineteenth-century correlative in the notion of leave-taking as overcoming, expressed, for example, in the endings of Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 9; and negation as tragedy, expressed either in defiance or resignation, is basic to the narratives of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, Dvořák’s No. 7, Tchaikovsky’s No. 6 and Mahler’s No. 6.

128 • Julian Horton

One magisterial example of a dialectical process that works towards an expressive, structural and (arguably) socio-cultural synthesis occurs in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5. Completed in 1878, it represents the culmination of a sustained phase of compositional development beginning with the Symphony No. 2 (1872, revised 1877), to which the problem of the summative ending constitutes a central preoccupation.9 The Fifth’s synthetic character resides in its resolution of high-level formal problems, which its predecessor works engage but (arguably) fail to surmount. This sense of overcoming can be characterized in explicitly dialectical terms. On the largest scale, the work is organized into two nested cyclical units, which are conceptually opposed. The first movement and Finale are couched in an ambiguous but ultimately prevalent Bb major, and share material, harmonic and tonal properties, as well as topical and expressive commonalities. The inner movements are also related tonally (both tonicize D minor) and thematically (the main theme of the Scherzo is an accelerated variant of that of the Adagio). The paired movements are antithetically disposed in various ways. The outer movements embed minor-key aspects in a major-mode context, while the inner movements embed major elements within minor tonality. The movements’ topical contrasts are also clearly delineated.10 The Adagio focuses on the disposition of processional topics; the Scherzo cycles between scherzando and Ländler material; the first movement and Finale are rather preoccupied with march and chorale. These contrasts are anticipated in the first movement’s introduction, which begins with a slow processional overlaid with imitative counterpoint, and proceeds through fanfare and chorale to a peroration anticipating the main theme’s march topic. The Symphony’s topical discourse sediments social meanings in a way that resonates strongly with Adorno’s concept of unconscious historiography.11 The encompassing dualism of march and chorale signifies a dialectic of the sacred and the secular, the accommodation of which constituted a basic dilemma for Bruckner’s symphonic style. This issue finds its most compressed expression in the second-theme group of the Symphony No. 3’s Finale, which famously overlays a polka on to a chorale, an instance that is additionally interesting for the (possibly anecdotal) biographical evidence that attends it (on which subject, see Auer 1947, 426–7; trans. in Gault 2001). In general, it is reasonable to posit the contested status of faith in the post-Enlightenment world as an overarching social concern of Bruckner’s symphonies: the Beethovenian strugglevictory narrative becomes a vehicle for the justification of a Christian worldview over and above its secular alternatives. Typically, this dialectic is posited in the first movement’s sonata form as a premise for the entire work. The exposition’s contrast of first and second themes is a contrast of secular and sacred topics; as Musical Example 6.6 explains, the former is a march, the latter a chorale. Both themes, however, engender instabilities, which are formally generative on the largest scale. Despite the work’s encompassing major modality, the first theme is predominantly in Bb minor. This inflection imposes itself in the theme’s first measure, and is confirmed by the subsequent pull towards flat VI, the resolution of which causes the theme’s statement to lean heavily on its culminating dominant. The second theme is no less wide-ranging. Its initial phrase is framed by a motion from i–V in F minor, but passes through Cb and Fb on the way; the elaboration of this music in measures 109–116 concludes in a half cadence in Ab minor; and the last phrase unit of the theme’s first part begins on C minor and finally settles in Db by measure 131. In sum, the themes present their keys as provisional points of orientation with a chromatic environment, rather than as stable premise and contrasted counter-premise. The topical stability of both groups is comparably clouded by rhetorical uncertainties. The first group begins with a large sentential antecedent, the continuation phrase of which veers

Dialectics and musical analysis • 129 first theme (march)

(Allegro) 51

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Musical Example 6.6 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, first and second themes

away from the initial march through the introduction of a drooping chromatic figure from measure 71, and the theme’s martial nature has to be reconstructed hastily in preparation for the start of the consequent phrase at measure 79. Similarly, although the second theme’s chorale character is initially clear, the entry of the violin counter-melody in measure 109 complicates the picture, projecting the impression of an obbligato line pulling the music towards the topical hybridity of a chorale prelude. Both themes are in this way presented as expressively provisional; we await a situation in which their unadorned topical condition can be secured. The long closing theme steers a middle path between the duality of dance and song thus far engendered, beginning with a lyric theme in the winds accompanied by a dotted crotchet-quaver string rhythm, which as the section proceeds accelerates to recover the first theme’s march rhythm, engulfing its nascent lyric features in the process (Musical Example 6.7). The acceleration goes into reverse following the highpoint at measure 199, and the exposition closes with a calculated emptying out of the martial rhythm to the point of double augmentation reached in measures 207–8, from which the structural cadence ensues. Altogether, the exposition offers a threefold perspective on the dialectic of the secular and the sacred, overlaid with a conflict between dance and song, and disposed so that each perspective articulates a theme group, placing a different topic at its subjective core. The disjunct disposition of the material raises another issue, which is the music’s oft-noted block-like construction. Schubertian parallels are commonplace; similar habits in that context have been explained as instances of parataxis: the non-linear presentation of material associated with lyric rather than dramatic origins.12 In stark contrast to the subsumption of formal functions into developmental processes evident in the ‘Tempest’ Sonata, Bruckner accentuates formal divisions with caesuras, in advance of which the music seems drained of its developmental impetus. The result is a stratified texture more redolent of Stravinsky than Beethoven. In itself, this can be understood dialectically, because the antithesis of parataxis – the hypotactic continuity associated with

130 • Julian Horton closing group lyric theme

march rhythm at highpoint

161

199-

dissolution of march by augmentation 200

205

Musical Example 6.7 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, closing group, progression from lyric to march topics

Beethoven’s sonata forms – is not absent. Rather, Bruckner constructs developmental threads, which weave dynamic continuities through the paratactic design. On the largest scale, these continuities are the agents of synthesis: in the Finale especially, their convergence is central to the form’s teleological process. The movement’s design is explained in this way in Figure 6.1. Thematic units are disposed as self-contained boxes; instances of developmental continuity across the form are signified by connective arrows. The four ideas proposed in the introduction (processional, fanfare, chorale and martial peroration) are labelled I1–I4 successively; as the arrows explain, these ideas are gradually worked into the developmental discourse in the development and coda. Each expositional block then sets up material, which is later revisited. The first theme, labelled A, operates teleologically in the manner of an ‘heroic’ Beethovenian subject. Its properties are exhaustively explored in the development as a dramatic intensification of expositional instabilities, culminating in a detailed convergence with the introduction’s fanfare idea (I2) in measures 283–314. The retransition reconstructs A over a dominant peroration, but the recapitulation frustrates resolution of the theme’s instabilities, its modal ambiguities being preserved in a radically compressed design. Theme A ultimately prevails in the coda, which progresses from Bb minor to a triumphant tonic major, fusing the theme’s Hauptmotiv with features of the introduction’s processional. This triumphalism is, however, premature because it comes at the expense of the movement’s other thematic protagonists. Themes B and C play only peripheral roles in the development (C initiates the development, but quickly cedes to I1; B recurs in advance of the retransition, which retrieves I4) and they remain paratactically isolated in the recapitulation. Moreover, in both cases the reprise intensifies the material’s instability and truncates its formal design. The overall impression is of two antithetical trajectories: theme A works dynamically towards resolution in the coda; themes B and C persist as disconnected, static blocks, the designs of

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Dialectics and musical analysis • 133

which decay under recapitulation. The movement’s ending is expressively provisional, because the antitheses of the sacred and the secular, and of dance and song, are not brought together through the union of parataxis and hypotaxis. The daunting task of resolving these issues falls to the Finale. The form, appraised in Figure 6.2, revisits and augments the first movement’s topical postures, disposed paratactically in a way that again encourages the impression of a devolution of the social order into its antithetical components. The opening recovers the first movement’s introduction, but this now performs the opposite function; instead of adumbrating the movement’s discourse, the slow processional initiates a series of disjunct prior-movement reminiscences (measures 11–28), which briskly appraise the narrative to this point.13 As Figure 6.2 explains, the Finale’s sonata design builds additional complexities into the first movement’s dialectical scheme. The first group is unequivocally martial, but its fugal organization (it is labelled as ‘fugue 1’ in Figure 6.2) suggests the learned style, and this engenders a tension between two topics: the contrapuntal context lends the march an archaic flavour, which its firstmovement counterpart lacks. The second theme is a schnell polka and as such displaces the first movement’s thematic opposition of secular and sacred styles: here, both themes are secular, but represent secularity in its military and civilian spheres. The closing group comprises two topically and thematically distinct sections (C1 and C2 in Figure 6.2). The first dramatizes A-theme material through minor-mode inflection and embellishment with Sturm-und-Drang tremolando string figuration. This texture is perfunctorily dismantled in measures 159–174 and C2 follows as an unadorned chorale. Thus far, the Finale has, like the first movement, disposed its material paratactically, as a sequence of discontinuous blocks. The development, recapitulation and coda gradually and systematically allow developmental continuities to take control of the discourse. The entire span of the movement from the start of the development onwards is essentially one developmental arc, allowing for a single digression accommodating the return of the second subject. The key to this shift is counterpoint: following a perfunctory pre-core section based on the C2 chorale, the development comprises two fugues, the first (‘fugue 2’ in Figure 6.2) based on C2, the second (‘fugue 3’) combining the chorale with the first subject. This combination is announced at the outset of fugue 3, but its most assertive presentation occurs at the start of the recapitulation, measure 374, following a formidably complex exploration of the two subjects’ combinatorial properties (Musical Example 6.8).14 By foregrounding counterpoint, the Finale opens up synthetic m arch 374

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Musical Example 6.8 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination of march and chorale in first-theme recapitulation

134 • Julian Horton

522

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ff Finale main theme (free inversion)

first m ovem ent m ain theme

Musical Example 6.9 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination of first- and last-movement main themes in closing-group recapitulation

possibilities that are not available in the first movement. At a stroke, the development and firsttheme reprise reconcile two conceptual oppositions: the sacred and secular materials for the first time work collaboratively, and the conflicted relationship between dance and song starts to unravel. The closing-theme group and coda address two issues left unresolved at the first-theme reprise. The closing group rapidly abandons its correspondence with the exposition in favour of a secondary development section, which makes counterpoint a cyclical device by variously combining the first- and last-movement main themes (the most extensive combination is shown in Musical Example 6.9). The integrative effect of this combination is implicative as well as actual, because it reveals the Finale’s main theme as a mediator between the chorale and the first-movement march, that is, as a theme that can combine with both. The retrieval of the firstmovement theme is consequently more than a simple act of recall; it signifies a reappraisal of that theme’s meaning for the work’s governing duality in the light of the Finale’s contrapuntal solutions. The coda, in turn, rectifies an inadequacy in the contrapuntal strategy. In fugue 3, march and chorale are recast as partners rather than antagonists; the result is, however, not a new, higher-level premise, but a relationship of equals that secularizes the sacred as much as it sanctifies the secular. The coda reconceives this relationship in an entirely new light, by marshalling the two march themes as the basis of the accompanimental texture for a chorale prelude, the topical identity of which is magnificently exposed with the chorale’s entry as cantus firmus from measure 583. In a colossal instance of what in Baroque music might be termed Einbau technique, the martial music is drawn into the service of the chorale. It is hard to imagine a more compelling musical realization of dialectical overcoming: the coda posits the chorale as a new thesis, the agent of a social order in which the work’s secular elements submit to a now self-evident Christian truth. There is, of course, a great deal more to be said about the processes at work in this symphony; the analysis nevertheless does enough to clarify some essential points. Primarily, contrary to much popular discourse on the composer, there is very little in this music to support the view that it conveys a pre-modern religious worldview. In its own way, the Fifth Symphony is as radically teleological as its Beethovenian precedents; certainly, Bruckner absorbs wholesale a

Dialectics and musical analysis • 135

concept of the symphony as idealist narrative, even if he remained largely indifferent to the literature and philosophy grounding that narrative in the Bildungstrieb (the drive towards cultural perfection) or historical dialectic. The difference between Beethoven and Bruckner resides in Christianity’s function in this context. Whereas (in the Ninth Symphony at least) Beethoven wants to show us a humanist ideal, in which tribulation is banished by brotherhood, Bruckner envisions an ideal in which the verities of faith are reaffirmed in the overcoming of social contradictions. The contradictions themselves and the drama of their overcoming, however, remain expressively central to the concept of symphonic narrative. Consequently, and crucially for the present chapter, the notion of dialectic is pivotal to an understanding of this process, not because Bruckner consciously designed symphonies in a Hegelian way, but because he inherited a genre that had by the time of the composer’s maturity folded binary opposition into its conceptual premise. Berg, Piano Sonata, Op. 1 Berg’s Op. 1 furnishes a satisfying final example for various reasons. As a representative of the Second-Viennese twilight of tonal practice, which nonetheless clings to sonata conventions, it stands at the end of the dialectical historical turn nascent in Beethoven’s Op. 31, No. 2 and dramatized on the largest scale by Bruckner. The Sonata was, moreover, the focus of one of Adorno’s most substantial forays into musical analysis, and as such constitutes both an important precursor and instructive counterpoint to Dahlhaus’s dialectical reading of the ‘Tempest’. Adorno’s basic claim for Berg’s Op. 1 is that its objective, historically grounded material is not syntactic convention but ‘the idea of the sonata itself, its exclusive, exhaustive motivicthematic craftsmanship, which leaves nothing to chance and makes do with a minimum of given material’ (Adorno 1991, 42). Adorno’s ambitions have been glossed by Paddison, for whom ‘the aim of the analysis is to explore the “immanent dialectic of the musical material” within the structure of the work, as the mediation of new and old and, effectively . . . the dialectic of expression and construction’ (Paddison 1993, 161). Central to this intention is clarification of the ways that Berg mediates formal architecture as historical material and the generation of coherence through developing variation, which proceeds by the spinning out of new motive forms from a small motivic fund. In a less explicitly dialectical reading, Schmalfeldt has pointed to the division into tonal and post-tonal procedures that supports this dualism: the process of developing variation pulls the music from tonal events that coordinate with the underlying architecture towards post-tonal harmonic milieux that take hold when development is allowed free rein. The result is a ‘tension between background tonal plan and foreground harmonic language’, which is ‘initiated by the Grundgestalt’ stated in the work’s first four measures (Schmalfeldt 1991, 105). Although these tensions are vital to the sonata, I want here to explore, in dialectical terms, a related aspect of Schmalfeldt’s analysis, which stems from the formal implications of her syntactic parsing of the main theme, quoted in Musical Example 6.10. Schmalfeldt explains that Berg departs from convention by associating the work’s Grundgestalt, exposed in measure 1–42, with cadential rather than pre-cadential harmony, which means that measures 43–8 constitute a continuation ensuing from a cadence rather than preceding it. This confers a special pedigree on the opening, because it fosters the need to exchange its introductory quality for a thematic function as such; the Grundgestalt, in other words, begins the Sonata bereft of a thematic home. Subsequently, however, the Sonata’s pervasive chromaticism consistently subverts cadential

136 • Julian Horton continuation or response? (retrospectively small-ternary B?)

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progression, and this results in a dysfunction of harmony and form that becomes explicit when the closing section merges back into the exposition repeat, at which point it becomes clear that the Grundgestalt has total responsibility for the form’s tonal grounding: [W]hen the exposition is repeated, the cadential progression of the Grundgestalt – the only cadence within the entire exposition – has been placed in the service of closing the exposition. As a result, here is an exposition that breaks a fundamental sonata rule: the subordinate

Dialectics and musical analysis • 137

region, rather than confirming a new tonal centre, closes in the home key. In that the Grundgestalt provides the only phrase that unequivocally defines a key, it is the only true stable element against which Berg’s departure towards whole-tone and atonal elements can be measured. In this work the Grundgestalt thus comes to represent tonality itself: rather than juxtaposing a home key with a contrasting tonal centre, Berg verges on contrasting tonality with atonality. (Schmalfeldt 1991, 109) It is worth bringing Schmalfeldt’s observations into closer contact with Adorno’s reading. Taken together, they suggest that it is not only sonata form that is reified as historical material here, but also tonality itself, as the principle that form articulates. Berg achieves this by reconceiving sonata form’s thematic syntax, such that the Grundgestalt isolates rather than articulates the tonic within the Sonata’s design. The dialectic of convention and innovation is therefore contained with the first four measures, as a conflicted premise from which the form evolves: perceived motivically, the Grundgestalt is thematically generative; perceived harmonically, it is pre-thematic. Close scrutiny of the first-theme group clarifies some of the mechanisms of this dialectic. Its overall effect is to nurture form-functional ambiguity. Schmalfeldt has recognized the opposed tendencies for thematic functions to become transitional and for transitions to become thematic: measure 12 sounds like a transition, but the pitch-invariant return of the main theme at measure 18 converts the intervening music retrospectively into a small-ternary B section; conversely, although measure 18 initiates an A reprise, by the time we reach the highpoint at measure 25 this section has definitively transformed into a transition. Such bifocal ambiguities also colour the music’s local design. Schmalfeldt reads measures 42–6 as continuational, but we might also see them as a veiled response to an opening statement, notwithstanding the objection that measures 1–4 function as a cadence. Adorno has noted the use of what he calls ‘axial rotation’ in these measures: characteristics of earlier motive forms are retained ‘but their succession is altered’ (Adorno 1991, 43). Thus motives ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ as labelled by Adorno and Schmalfeldt, and bracketed in Musical Example 6.10, recur in measures 42–6 reordered as ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘a’. More than this, as Musical Example 6.10 also explains, the Grundgestalt’s underpinning chromatic bass descent, defined in Musical Example 6.10 as ‘d’, recurs here in inversion, and the phrase is rounded off in measure 6 with a twofold motivic counterpoint, which overlays variants of ‘a’ on to a transposition of ‘c’ that parallels the end of the Grundgestalt: the new form of ‘a’ appears in stretto between soprano and bass; and bass and alto effect a combination of ‘a’ and ‘c’. All of this means that these measures can be understood as a variation of measures 1–41 as much as a continuation phrase. The core dialectic embodied in the Grundgestalt is consequently reproduced across measures 1–6, which comprise cadence and continuation if harmony is given analytical primacy, or statement and response if motivic variation is taken as the dominant parameter. The Grundgestalt’s pre-emptive cadential function imposes a risk of tautology on the phrase ending, which is evaded by collapsing classical thematic syntax into a reassertion of the dualism of function and process. Measures 7–8 fragment the material in a manner typical of continuation functions, counterpointing ‘b’ and inversions of ‘c’, but the liquidation of ‘c’ in measure 8 is not coordinated with a cadential endpoint. Instead, ‘b’ and ‘c’ reappear in a T1 transposition in measure 9. The functional perspective shifts again: measures 42–8 now resemble the contrasting middle of a small-ternary theme, nested within the A section of the theme group’s overall ternary design, to which the Grundgestalt supplies the A section. The initial cadence has to be

138 • Julian Horton

reinterpreted afresh: rather than comprising a cadence abnormally preceding a continuation, it emerges as the closing gesture of a (very small) A section. The local A1 implied by measure 9 is, however, also denied closure, dissolving instead into the liquidation of ‘c’ in measures 10 and 11. The way these local dialectical tensions map onto the form’s large-scale divisions is evident through comparison of the expositional first theme and transition with the corresponding music in the recapitulation, which enters with the retrieval of ‘a’ as anacrusis in measure 1103 and ends with the second-theme reprise initiated in measure 137. Berg replaces the ternary features apparent in the exposition with a continuous span of music, in which thematic presentation transforms into transition without harmonic delineation. The first theme’s design is retained (with modifications that will be considered below) until measure 117, from which point a process of contrapuntal fragmentation takes hold, culminating at the dynamic highpoint of measure 129, which exhaustively developes the combinatorial properties of ‘a’, ‘d’, ‘c’ and latterly ‘b’. The music of the theme’s contrasting middle is now recast as an appendix to this intensification beginning at measure 131, serving to connect the climax to the second-theme entry. The most immediately striking feature of the recapitulation is, however, removal of the cadence that delineates the Grundgestalt, the phrase instead culminating on a half-diminished seventh chord (Musical Example 6.11 explains this). As a result, the first-theme recapitulation Recapitulation cadence removed

110

half-dim. chord

Musical Example 6.11 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, first-theme recapitulation

becomes entirely motivic; the Grundgestalt is denuded not only of its affiliation with the putative tonic, but also (extrapolating from Schmalfeldt’s reading) of its affiliation with the tonal system altogether. The dialectic of tonality and atonality is thus reproduced on a larger scale; rather than stabilizing the exposition first theme, the recapitulation displays its purely chromatic alternative. Yet even though the trajectory thus far has pulled away from a reconciliation of tonal and post-tonal media, the Grundgestalt yields two additional features, which supply the means of the tonic’s ultimate recovery. Returning to Musical Example 6.10, Schmalfeldt inteprets the overall progression in measures 1–4 as a ii7–V–i voiced as an imperfect authentic cadence (IAC), in which the soprano 6ˆ in measure 2 is conceptually resolved onto 5ˆ in measure 4. Yet one of the most notable aspects of the cadence is the fact that resolution of the surface soprano 2ˆ in measure 3 onto 1ˆ , which would confirm a PAC, is conspicuously absent. The unresolved 2ˆ–1ˆ

Dialectics and musical analysis • 139 as C minor:

5 8 84

5

3

b7

2 174

_

P

C minor? B minor

Musical Example 6.12 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, C minor/B minor duality in first theme and overarching cadential progression

becomes a structural issue for the entire Sonata. Its persistence is felt in the recapitulation, where, as we have seen, 2ˆ is reconceived as a suspension over a half-diminished chord; and the recapitulation of the second theme supplies no tonic PAC in the manner of sonata theory’s ‘essential structural closure’. As Musical Example 6.12 clarifies, resolution of this issue is reserved for the work’s closing measures. A tonic PAC is finally attained in measures 174–5 at the end of the closing theme, but 2ˆ is here commuted to n2ˆ. The Grundgestalt’s cadence finds an ultimate point of repose, but only once its soprano voice leading has been chromaticized. The closing cadence mediates tangibly the dialectic of tonal and post-tonal materials; the work’s tonality is secured by making a voice-leading concession to its chromatic antithesis. In fact, the seeds of this trade-off are embedded in the Grundgestalt itself. Musical Example 6.12 also points out its inherent tension between B minor and C minor. Prior to measure 3, one might easily imagine the second sonority of measure 2 as a C minor tonic seventh chord, to which the initial half-diminished chord is a chromatic prefix; and the soprano’s progress as far as measure 31 is readily construed as # 4ˆ –5ˆ –3ˆ – n7ˆ–2ˆ in C minor, an impression that is only scotched once B minor V9 has intervened by the end of measure 3. Thus the Grundgestalt implies two semitonally related keys, the relationship of which projects yet another perspectival dialectic: C minor is present as pre-cadential harmony in search of a cadence; B minor emerges as a cadence in search of pre-cadential harmony. The means by which C minor is ultimately accommodated within B minor is also the means by which the final cadence mediates its chromatic antithesis: alteration of 2ˆ allows a residue of C minor – its tonic scale degree – to persist even as the Sonata closes in B minor. In Berg’s Op. 1, the embedding of antinomies has progressed to a point of almost inconceivable density. The Grundgestalt itself is burdened with dialectical tensions to an extent that impedes their simultaneous comprehension, and the music thereafter accrues antithetical perspectives at every formal juncture, from the level of the phrase design to the overall form. The resulting kaleidoscopic excess of conflicted readings generates a feeling of disorientation that is both acute (because it pertains to each individual moment) and cumulative (because it is sustained across the Sonata). The ultimate sense that no overarching synthesis can draw all of these conflicts into a higher unity – in brief, the work’s negative-dialectical posture – is basic to its expressive trajectory, and it is this above all that locates it as one historical end-point to the manner of composition introduced in the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’. Unlike Beethoven, however, Berg supplies no finale that might take up his movement’s dualities and resolve them;

140 • Julian Horton

the Sonata’s manifold teleologies are simply left hanging with its closing chord. This is Adorno’s fractured totality in nuce: resolution persists here as an aspiration with no prospect of fulfilment. Conclusions Although these analyses offer evidentially grounded narratives of formal and material processes, the dialectical premise from which they proceed requires retrospective critical qualification. We might, in particular, reasonably ask whether music can ever truly embody contradiction. Dialectical thought is in the first instance conceptual; whether we regard it as logical or critical, the idea that the world necessarily responds to antinomic characterization is at base an observation about its conceptual structure. However, the application of this idea in musical analysis inevitably proceeds by metaphor or analogy, because musical material has no capacity to embody concepts as immanent properties. This point can be illustrated through consideration of the problem of formulating quality or ‘being’ in musical terms. In the Science of Logic, Hegel distinguishes three states of being, comprising the category of quality – ‘pure being’, ‘determinate being’ and ‘being-for-self’ (beingin-itself) – the succession of which is construed dialectically. Pure being is characterized as ‘equal only to itself’ and ‘not unequal relative to an other’; its antithesis is ‘nothing’, understood as ‘complete emptiness, absence of all determination and content’, which is ‘undifferentiatedness in itself’. Because both being and nothing are defined by the ‘absence of determination’, they are, however, in effect the same. The resulting ‘unity’ of being and nothing is called ‘becoming’: ‘their truth is . . . [the] movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming [italics in original], a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself’ (Hegel 1969, 81–3). The sublation that produces becoming generates a unity that is ‘determinate being’, the ‘simplest oneness of being and nothing’, which Hegel also calls Dasein (‘being in a certain place’) (Hegel 1969, 110). This also forms the starting point for a dialectic. The antithesis of determinate being is finitude, because ‘being in a certain place’ is constituted by limitation; the sublation of finitude produces the infinite, and this in turn supplies the basis of a third category, ‘being-for-self’, or ‘infinite being’, which is ‘absolutely determined being’ (Hegel 1969, 116–17 and 137). The process then begins again: ‘being-for-self as such’ is opposed by plurality, which is understood as the differentiation of the one and the many; and under sublation this creates attraction, which unifies being-for-self and plurality. Finally, this unity furnishes the basis for Hegel’s second overarching category, ‘quantity’, which altogether constitutes the antithesis of quality. How might such a mode of argument be brought to bear on music? The literal application of Hegel’s exhaustive derivation would court triviality, offering little more than a dialectical explanation of any discrete span of music’s condition as a phenomenon, an explanation it would necessarily share with any other phenomena possessing quality (if Hegel’s model is to have any philosophical credibility at all). To state that measures 1–20 of the first movement of the ‘Tempest’ are ontologically tractable because in their basic essence they overcome the dialectic of being and nothing is to say nothing of music-analytical value whatsoever. Of course, Adorno and Dahlhaus do not proceed like this. Instead, they rely on the assumption that musical characteristics can be understood conceptually in a way that is susceptible to explication via dialectical argument. The affiliation of material and concept comes first; the dialectical reading follows. The concept is not immanent to the music, however: the ‘Tempest’’s opening is not introductory because that concept resides within the music; such a reading is

Dialectics and musical analysis • 141

plausible because conventions mimicking the rhetoric and syntax of language allow us to make an analogy between the characteristics of measures 1–20 and prefatory rhetoric, and those of 21–41 with the continuation rather than presentation of an idea. In brief: convention facilitates analogy; analogy allows the marshalling of concepts; and the availability of a dialectical structure of argument allows those concepts to be disposed antithetically. Music, however, does not consist of concepts, but of sonorous formations that can be made to stand for concepts. None of this undermines fatally the project of analysing music in dialectical terms. The intertwining of music and the history of ideas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is sufficiently dense that any parallels drawn between dialectics and musical structure can be amply justified through recourse to the cultural milieu as common ground. And no music historian who is happy to accept the prominent role played by Hegel’s progressive notion of history in the formation of culture can reasonably argue that it has no relevance for the analysis of music. The looming danger – and Taruskin’s caution is well taken in this regard – is that dialectics becomes a species of false consciousness, an all-encompassing model of reality that all phenomena must reflect, rather than a tool enabling us to comprehend the interaction of music, philosophy and society in a historically sensitive way. The demise of Hegelianism has become a virtual first principle for those areas of the humanities and human sciences trading under the names of postmodernism and neo-liberalism in the last several decades. In political history, the collapse of the Berlin Wall has been taken as conclusive evidence of its absolute morbidity, a claim given perhaps its most well-known formulation in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which advanced the thesis that the triumph of late capitalism engendered the demise of any concept of history as an overarching imperative or metanarrative (Fukuyama 1992). Yet the global financial crisis has since cast considerable doubt on the security of Fukuyama’s confident assertions, and the manifest cracks in the neo-liberal architecture that the crisis exposed encourage us to find renewed value in an idealist philosophical mindset. This chapter has cast dialectics in explicitly historicist terms, but its day as a model of the political present may yet come again. Notes 1

The question of how to translate Aufhebung is perennial and seems to admit no universally agreed solution. The common options are sublation, synthesis, overcoming, resolution and reconciliation, none of which quite captures the German original. I treat these alternatives as synonyms throughout this chapter, in the absence of a definitive adjudication on the issue. For Hegel’s own explanation of the concept, see, for example, Science of Logic, 1969, 106–8. 2 For an overview of Hegel’s model of history, see McCarney 2000. 3 The groundwork for this model is laid out in Adorno [1932] (2002), trans. as ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, 391–436. For a commentary, see Paddison 1993, 97–106. 4 Adorno’s most substantial elaboration of the negative-dialectical idea is Negativ Dialectik (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), trans. E. B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), which includes a substantial excursus on the Hegelian dialectic, 300–60. 5 Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1949). I have throughout referred to Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), in view of the oftnoted problems with the other available English translation Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Sheed & Ward, 1973). For a penetrating analysis of the problems of translating this book, see Subotnik 2011. 6 For a counterpoint to Adorno’s reading, see Levitz 2004. 7 On the ESC in the first movement of the ‘Tempest’, see Hepokoski 2009, 203–5. 8 On the distinction between tight-knit and loose-knit thematic design, see Caplin 1998. 9 For a pertinent taxonomy of instrumental finale types, see Talbot 2001. 10 On the relationship between form and expression in this work and the Fourth Symphony, see Hatten 2001.

142 • Julian Horton 11 12 13 14

For a consideration of this topical discourse in the context of a general appraisal of the topic in nineteenth-century music, see Horton in press. On parataxis in Schubert’s music, see Mak 2006 and 2010. The model for this is, of course, the opening of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a richly suggestive allusion, but one that cannot be elaborated here. For a more extended consideration of the design of this movement, see Horton 2006 and 2013, especially 215–19.

Bibliography of works cited Adorno, Theodor. 1957. Drei Studien zur Hegel. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp. ––––– [1967] 1973. Negativ Dialectik. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, trans. E. B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge. ––––– 1982. ‘On the Problem of Musical Analysis’, trans. Max Paddison, Music Analysis 1: 169–87. ––––– 1984. Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt. London: Routledge. ––––– 1991. Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 1998. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ––––– [1932] 2002. ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1–2): 103–24 and 1 (3): 356–78, trans. as ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ in Essays on Music ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 391–436. ––––– [1949] 2006. Philosophie der neuen Musik. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor as Philosophy of New Music. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Agawu, V. Kofi. 2005. ‘What Adorno Makes Possible for Music Analysis’, 19th-Century Music, 29: 49–55. Auer, Max. 1947. Anton Bruckner, sein Leben und Werk. Vienna: Musikwissen-Schaftlichen Verlag. Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Hegel. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. London: New Left Books. Brendel, Franz. 1852. Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. Caplin, William E. 1998. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ––––– 2009. ‘Beethoven’s Tempest Exposition: A Springboard for Form-Functional Considerations’, in Pieter Bergé, Jeroen D’hoe and William E. Caplin (eds), Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata: Perspectives of Analysis and Performance. Leuven: Peeters, 87–126. Chua, Daniel. 1995. The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1983. Foundations of Music History, trans. J. Bradford Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ––––– 1991. Ludwig Van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Mary Whittall. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Penguin. Gault, Dermot. 2001. The New Bruckner. Aldershot: Ashgate. Gur, Golan. 2012. ‘Music and Weltanschauung: Franz Brendel and the Claims of Universal History’, Music and Letters, 9: 350–73. Hatten, Robert. 2001. ‘The Expressive Role of Disjunction: A Semiotic Approach to Form and Meaning in the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies’, in Crawford Howie, Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy L. Jackson (eds), Perspectives on Anton Bruckner. Aldershot: Ashgate, 145–84. Hegel, G. W. F. 1931. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie. London and New York: Macmillan. ––––– 1955. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. Hamburg: Hoffmeister. ––––– 1969. Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. London: Unwin. ––––– 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Hepokoski, James. 2009. ‘Approaching the First Movement of Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata through Sonata Theory’, in Pieter Bergé, Jeroen D’hoe and William E. Caplin (eds), Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata: Perspectives of Analysis and Performance. Leuven: Peeters, 181–212. ––––– and Darcy, Warren. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late EighteenthCentury Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press. Hoeckner, Berthold. 2002. Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horton, Julian. 2006. ‘The Symphonic Fugal Finale from Mozart to Bruckner’, Dutch Journal of Music Theory, 11: 230–46. ––––– 2013. ‘Cyclical Thematic Processes in the Nineteenth-Century Symphony’, in Horton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 190–231.

Dialectics and musical analysis • 143 ––––– in press. ‘Listening to Topics II: The Nineteenth Century’, in Danuta Mirka (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Musical Topics. Oxford: Oxford University. Jay, Martin. 1984. Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meikeljohn. London: Dent. Lepenies, Wolf. 2006. The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levitz, Tamara. 2004. ‘The Chosen One’s Choice’, in Andrew Dell’ Antonio (ed.), Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 70–108. McCarney, Joseph. 2000. Hegel on History. London: Routledge. Mak, Su-Yin. 2006. ‘Schubert’s Sonata Forms and the Poetics of the Lyric’, The Journal of Musicology, 23: 263–306. ––––– 2010. Schubert’s Lyricism Reconsidered: Structure, Design and Rhetoric. London: Lambert Academic Publishing. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosen, Charles. 1995. The Romantic Generation. London: HarperCollins. Schmalfeldt, Janet. 1991. ‘Berg’s Path to Atonality: The Piano Sonata, Op. 1’, in David Gable and Robert P. Morgan (eds), Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 79–110. ––––– 1995. ‘Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the ‘Tempest’ Sonata’, Beethoven Forum, 4: 37–71. ––––– 2011. In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Schumann, Robert. 1965. ‘Gottfried Preyer’s Symphony’, in Schumann on Music, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants. New York: Dover, 148–50. Spitzer, Michael. 2006. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 2011. ‘The Unwritable in Full Pursuit of the Unreadable: Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik in Translation’, Music Analysis, 30: 89–139 and ‘Supplement’: 397–466. Talbot, Michael. 2001. The Finale in Western Instrumental Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taruskin, Richard. 2010. The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. III: Music in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, William. 2008. The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7 Classicism/neoclassicism Keith Chapin

Introduction On 26 September 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote from Munich to his father in Salzburg about his work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail. As he explained his compositional choices, he voiced his respect for a principle of restraint. In his discussion of Osmin’s aria Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen, he first emphasizes the character’s excessive behaviour. Provoked by Pedrillo’s questions and look, Osmin demands that Pedrillo be first beheaded, then hung, then skewered on a hot spit, then burned, then bound and drowned, and finally, just to ensure a job well done, quartered. As Mozart wrote: For just as a man in such a towering rage oversteps all the bounds of order, moderation and propriety and completely forgets himself, so must the music too forget itself. But since the passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music, so I have not chosen a key foreign to F (in which the aria is written) but one related to it—not the nearest, D minor, but the more remote A minor. (Anderson 1985, 769) In part, the statement is a simple comment on the process of stylization involved in any mediated representation of the world. In much eighteenth-century music, sighs are decorous chromatic descents and fear never comes out as a scream. In part, the statement shows Mozart’s awareness of a primary social function of music in his time, to provide pleasure to those with the leisure and means to enjoy it. However, the statement is more still. It also shows Mozart’s desire to achieve a balance between expressive force and cultivated grace. Mozart wished to portray excess, but he worked with a normative notion of ‘music’ that demanded limitation. Although by no means a sufficient condition, such restraint is an essential ingredient of classicism at multiple levels. From ethical and political perspectives, it can be both a good and bad thing. Stylistic or formal restraint contributes to the capacity of certain musical works, genres, styles, as well as the musicians who produce them, to serve as classics for later generations, and thus as a means both to convey the wisdom of the past and to discipline or suppress alternatives in the present. For those of classicist persuasion, then, such classical models not only provide practical lessons but also demand an attitude of restraint and humility. Classicists

Classicism/neoclassicism • 145

do not accept as their sole standard the musical wonts of the day, which are ruts or fashions to them, even as they may be proper practices or exciting innovations to others. The critical or stultifying edge of classicism can also be turned inwards, to rein in received habits and thoughtless actions, as well as individual desires and passionate expressions. Finally, neoclassicism implies self-consciously respectful, nostalgic, or ironic distance with respect to classicism itself. Classicists take their bearing from classical models, neoclassicists from a classicizing tradition. In music, neoclassicism has come to be associated with the twentieth-century rejection of Romanticism (Messing 1988; Whittall 2001), but it is easy to espy neoclassicism in much of the classicism of the preceding centuries. The line is blurry at best.1 No matter one’s feelings about the phenomenon of classicism, one cannot deny its centrality as a historical force. While Mozart did not identify with self-styled classicists of his day, most of whom worked in literature, architecture or the visual arts, he showed his adherence to principle of restraint. Mozart’s letter indicates the precise point at which he felt that excess could be intimated. He drew attention to issues of metre and modulation plan. Mozart shifts from C to an impetuous ‘Turkish’ 3/4. And, as he pointed out to his father, he chose the mediant A minor over the closer key, the submediant D minor (Musical Example 7.1). These changes of metre and key pushed at the boundaries of eighteenth-century style, but not overly so. The mid eighteenth-century theorist Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1753, 99–104) distinguished between four degrees of distance in modulations, and the modulation to the mediant counted in the first, closest group – that is, to modulations proper (eigentliche Ausweichungen). Mozart respected the boundaries of his contemporaries’ expectations and thereby showed his sensitivity to a collective common sense.

^

3=

t§mm nimm

dich

PEDRILLO .

Was bist du fur ein grausamer Kerl, und ich hab dir nichts getan.

in Acht.

M

W

E rst g e-k o p ft,

P

fP

O SM IN.

\

-

dann g e - h a n - g e n ,

fP

Du hast ein Galgengesicht. Das ist genug.

W

Attacca.

dann g e-sp iesst

fP

Musical Example 7.1 Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, ‘Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen’

a u fh e is -s e n S tan -g en ,

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146 • Keith Chapin

Some two centuries later, Igor Stravinsky insisted with equally famous words on the restraint involved in his music, but he was far more radical. To pre-empt the surprise that he imagined his Octet (1923) would evoke, Stravinsky wrote in an American journal: My Octuor is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter of which it is composed. . . . My Octuor is made for an ensemble of wind instruments. Wind instruments seem to me to be more apt to render a certain rigidity of form I had in mind than other instruments – the string instruments, for example, which are less cold and more vague. The suppleness of the string instruments can lend itself to more subtle nuances and can serve better the individual sensibility of the executants in works built on an ‘emotive’ basis. My Octuor is not an ‘emotive’ work, but a musical composition that is based on objective elements that are sufficient in themselves. (White 1979, 574–5) Like Mozart, Stravinsky sees it desirable to limit emotion, but he goes far further than his eighteenth-century predecessor. Where Mozart presented restraint as necessary for the effective communication of the passionate state of Osmin, Stravinsky rejected emotion altogether. He too draws attention to the stylization involved in his composition, but goes so far as to present the work as a pure play of form. Formal restraint and the stylized utterance become formalism and self-conscious play of style. The letter of a composer speaking as a craftsman to an intimate is not the same as the ‘position paper’ (Walsh 1999, 375) of a composer speaking as a polemicist and propagandist to an anonymous public. A truer point of comparison to Mozart’s Entführung would be Stravinsky’s own opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951). Not only did Stravinsky self-consciously reference Mozart’s operas, in particular Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, but, even given three decades development of a multifaceted composer, the work serves as a better indication of the relationship of form to passion in Stravinsky’s music than the Octet. It is not that the music cannot be heard as emotive, but rather that form masks and changes the character of the emotion. Stravinsky makes one aware of the artifice involved in a character’s expression of a passionate state. In the brief duettino ‘Farewell for now’ (Musical Example 7.2) sung by Tom Rakewell and Anne Truelove, Anne is neither cold nor objective. Her music is touching. At the same time, it is artificial. The duet resembles a strophic song and owes some of its pastoral innocence to this cyclical form, though each strophe is highly manipulated. The instrumental introduction (the first strophe) places a blithe duet of interwoven melodies at odds with the accompaniment, as for example when a double leading tone in the two melodic voices clashes with the harmony beneath (m. 4). Then, when Anne enters, she sings two phrases, each one metrically akilter. The first sets up an anacrusis–crusis pattern (fare-well) that quickly swings awry as an anacrusis lengthens to a full measure. The second phrase places poetry’s weak syllables on music’s strong beats and vice versa. Such play of form and text emphasizes the staged character of the actions and passions presented in the opera. The staged character makes one aware of the artificiality of the production at the same time one feels the force of the drama. Indeed, the tragedy of Tom’s ‘progress’ owes its subtle but potent force to the fact that the tale is told with the light style and stage buffoonery of comedy.

Classicism/neoclassicism • 147

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148 • Keith Chapin

Definitions, philosophical stakes and historical scope The dialectic of restraint and expression is only one aspect of the phenomenon of classicism, though the one that perhaps touches most directly on listeners today. Some of the common planks in definitions of classicism are as follows (Heartz and Brown 2001, 924; Finscher 1994–2007, 230): 1

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disciplined posture or form, sometimes expressed as the maximal coexistence of radical opposites: restraint and passion, unity and variety, simplicity and richness, individuation and general comprehensibility, subjectivity and objectivity, etc.; a model of excellence; relation to an earlier age (i.e. Greek and Roman antiquity, though, as will be discussed, this aspect of the definition obviously required revision for music); opposition to mannerism or romanticism; the idealization of nature and the belief that certain styles and genres serve as its expression; and metaphysics of embodiment in which an ideal finds a perfect physical manifestation.

As this list attests, the concept of classicality straddles a philosophical spectrum that governs matters both mundane and metaphysical. While some aspects of classicality – those that stand at the beginning of this list – govern pragmatic issues of artistic production, organization and reception, others – those towards the end in particular, but potentially all of them – entail metaphysical commitments or, at the very least, intense attention to the difficult philosophical issues that beset the human interaction with the natural world. Definitions of classicality thus vary according to philosophical taste. Originally, metaphysics of perfection were essential to the phenomenon of classicism. Since the early nineteenth century, artists and critics have edged away from metaphysics. Scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have noted a discrepancy between Anglo-American empiricism (grounded in analysis) and German philosophically inspired approaches that emphasize reception history and critical theory (Webster 1991, 356; Finscher 1994–2007, 231). The stretch of the spectrum between the pragmatic and the ideal is the source of many of the controversies surrounding the concept of classicism. While it is relatively easy to argue that Mozart served later generations as a classic – a model – critics disagree as to whether Mozart’s position as a classic is due purely to his excellence (a value judgement with its attendant difficulties of substantiation – see the section on Attitudes and values on pp. 164–6) or whether it might owe much to nationalist ideologies. Haydn (who lived for the most part away from Vienna) and Clementi (who developed his career in London) were classics in their own day, far outshining Mozart’s light, but since then have required scholarly reminders to retain their classic status (Webster 1991; Gerhard 2002). At another level, Mozart’s approach to eighteenthcentury formal strategies may seem easy to capture in tight formal models, such as sonata forms, functions, styles and principles (Caplin 1998; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006), but the unifying impulse behind such music theory has also been challenged. Did Mozart really aim at or achieve synthesis (Allanbrook 2002; Schmidt 2002)? The ostensibly empirical analysis has a strong strain of idealism to it. In a way comparable to Mozart, Stravinsky has served as the measure of musical neoclassicism (Cross 1998). He has also attracted controversy. Critics call attention to his resurrection of

Classicism/neoclassicism • 149

eighteenth-century musical styles (‘classical’ styles), to his flippant attitude towards subjective expression, to his rejection of meaning accessible through words and to his mannerist deconstruction of formal synthesis. However, the controversy around Stravinsky has been of an entirely different sort from that surrounding Mozart. While critics contest the very ideal of classicality around Mozart, espying ideology in claims to perfected synthesis, they have fewer difficulties with the ideal of neoclassicism. The self-conscious attempt to resurrect past styles seems less metaphysically freighted and more mundane. However, Stravinsky’s ostensible nonchalance vis-à-vis metaphysics has itself troubled his waters. His avoidance of expressive utterance and formal synthesis has caused his fiercest critics, notably Theodor Adorno, to doubt his humanity: The renunciation of all psychologism, the reduction to the pure phenomena that appear per se, is to disclose a region of indubitable, ‘authentic’ being. . . . [It] is a matter of the chimerical uproar of culture against its own essence as culture. Stravinsky foments this uproar not only in his aesthetic flirtation with barbarism but also his fierce suspension of what in music is called culture, the humanely eloquent artwork. (Adorno 2006, 107–8) Classicism and neoclassicism are thus threatened by a double bind between the empirical and the ideal. The utopian dimension of the concept of classicality arouses suspicion that it serves as a cover for political ideology. At the same time, the rejection of these same utopian ideals has been taken as a sign of disbelief in the power of humanity to better itself. These weighty issues only gradually coalesced around the term ‘classic’. The term originated in ancient Rome, where the classicus was a taxpayer of the highest status. Eventually, the term was metaphorically applied to authors of high status as well (Curtius 1953, 247–51). However, ‘classical’ only came into its own after the twelfth century, once writers began to delineate and fret at a decisive split between things ancient, venerable and, in short, ‘classical’, and those things new and modern (Curtius 1953, 253–5). While any modern writer can become venerable with the passing of a generation, the concept of the classical depends on the decisiveness of the gap. Behind it lies a constantly retold tale of high civilization lost and regained. With this gap goes the peculiar status and function of the classic. The classic is not simply old. It is something old that retains its value in the present (cf. Girard 2008: 240). While classicism owed much to the power of ancient Greece and Rome to inspire new production, it could also be reconfigured around other perceived historical breaks, even those of a few short decades, as can be seen in the reception of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven as classics beginning early in the nineteenth century (Gruber 2002). While this basic historiographic structure of past models and present value stands at the origin of the concept of classicism, just as the principle of restraint runs through its various manifestations, it is best to approach the concept liberally. Classicism affords no single, simple definition, and even the component parts of the idea can contradict each other. This chapter will group these various components under three broad headings: practices, styles and attitudes. The practices spill from musical production into reception. The styles concern the musical results and the attitudes underpin the practices and resonate in the music. There are three other widespread uses of the term ‘classical’ that need to be acknowledged, although this chapter will not dwell on them. The term serves as a label to designate the music composed roughly between 1720 and 1815 (‘classical period’), although dates will vary (Webster 2004). It also denotes the genre or tradition of art music that originated in Europe and has since

150 • Keith Chapin

spread internationally (‘classical music’). The period and genre terms are, at best, but convenient monikers and, at worst, arid reifications and simplifications of complex mediations between past and present, model and emulation, and individual and society. The practices, styles and attitudes, by contrast, criss-cross history. Third, one finds the term applied to other traditions of music that have developed attitudes, styles and practices comparable to the Western art tradition, although they are also distinct (e.g. Indian classical music, Japanese classical music, jazz, etc.). To visit the term ‘classical’ on such traditions is to run the risk of colonizing them with terminology developed in a Western context, although to avoid comparison is to run the opposite peril of failing to engage in intercultural dialogue (Schofield 2010). Nonetheless, there is good reason to remember the specificities of the term within the Western musical tradition. As noted, since early modernity musicians have lived in cultures that were in thrall to the immense prestige and continuing presence of ancient Greece and Rome (Grafton et al. 2010). However, while musicians were affected by the unfolding and the fate of classicism at large, they at the same time faced a unique situation. Because musicians inherited information about ancient music, but no music itself, they were forced but also free to invent their classicisms to a far greater extent than their colleagues in the other fine arts. Practices Practices of reception, in particular ones motivated by a desire for education, lie at the heart of classicism. A person takes a cue from the past and uses it as a guide for current practice. Yet this practice of reception is not a simple matter, especially in music. Not only can musicians take various types of cue from the past – ethical, philosophical and stylistic – but they must decide what constitutes the canon of models, what sort of lessons should be learned from this canon of models and how new production should relate to old. While musicians generally focus on issues of style, the ethical and philosophical principles of antiquity were essential to the Western classical tradition and did play out in musical traditions. Musicians learned models of ethical behaviour through their readings of authors of antiquity, as well as through their readings of modern authors strongly oriented towards antiquity. To take one example, the first-century Roman author Plutarch passed through many hands in the eighteenth century. His Parallel Lives offered agreeably readable biographies along with moral commentary on the protagonists’ virtues and faults. Although a Platonist, Plutarch had integrated elements of Stoicism into his thought and writings, and the mix of ethical and quasi-religious contemplation went down well with later readers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, wrote in his Fourth Promenade: Of the small number of Books I still occasionally read, Plutarch is the one that grips and benefits me the most. He was the first I read in my childhood, he will be last I read in my old age; he is almost the only author I have never read without gaining something. (Rousseau 2000, 28) In 1801, a year before he penned the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven also called attention to Plutarch. To his friend Franz Wegler he confessed: I have often cursed my Creator and my existence. Plutarch has shown me the path of resignation. If it is at all possible, I will bid defiance to my fate, though I feel that as long as

Classicism/neoclassicism • 151

I live there will be moments when I shall be God’s most unhappy creature. . . . Resignation, what a wretched resource! Yet it is all that is left to me – (Anderson 1961, 1, 246; cited in Borthwick 1998, 269) On the side of indirect influence, one might cite Mozart’s appreciation of the novel Les Aventures de Télémaque. He read the book in Italian translation during his trip to Italy in 1770 (Mozart 2005, 5, 388 [8 September 1770]), and it later furnished the plot for his opera Idomeneo (1781). The book also influenced the Abbé Terasson’s novel Sethos (1731), one of the many sources for Die Zauberflöte (1791). The author of Télémaque was the Archbishop François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, a decided adherent of ancient literature in the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. The novel not only held up the loyalty, bravery and moral fortitude of its eponymous hero up for praise, but also offered many episodes that contrasted virtuous and lax behaviour. Idomeneo owes its plot to one such episode. The great gap between Rousseau’s simplicity of style and Beethoven’s sophistication indicates that ethical values can be transmitted musically in various ways. In both ‘Dans ma cabane obscure’ from Rousseau’s Le Devin du village (1752, Musical Example 7.3) and ‘Gott! Welch Dunkel hier’ of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805, rev. 1806 and 1814, Musical Example 7.4), the male protagonist sings of his desire for his beloved, evoking a drama of darkness and light to characterize current troubles and desired idyll. (Florestan’s vision of Leonore is not included in the musical example.) The contexts are different, though. Colin sings his romance in the final scene of Le Devin, after he and Colette have been reunited. Florestan expresses himself in a scena from the depths of the prison and without any knowledge that his beloved is literally on the doorstep. Dans ma cabane obscure Toujours soucis nouveaux; Vent, soleil, ou froidure, Toujours peine et travaux. Colette, ma bergère, Si tu viens l’habiter, Colin dans sa chaumière N’a rien à regretter.

In my dark hut Always new worries; Wind, sun, or cold, Always difficulty and work. Colette, my shepherdess, If you come inhabit it, Colin in his thatched cottage Has nothing to desire.

Gott, welch Dunkel hier! O grauenvolle Stille! Öd ist es um mich her, nichts, nichts lebet außer mir, o schwere Prüfung! Doch gerecht ist Gottes Wille! Ich murre nicht, das Maß der Leiden steht bei dir!

God, what darkness here! O horrible silence! It is desolate around me, Nothing, nothing lives except me, what a harsh trial! But God’s will is righteous! I do not complain – the measure of suffering is yours to determine!

The musical settings stand at opposite ends of their respective times’ stylistic spectrums. Rousseau offers a simple romance, rather than the virtuoso arietta that his audience might have expected at this point in a divertissement (Charlton 2012, 155). The simplicity of the melodic line stands for the simplicity of the soul that produces it. Beethoven, on the other hand, offers

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a fully developed scena, with orchestral introduction, accompanied recitative, cantabile and cabaletta. In his accompanied recitative, the dialogue between the gruff turn figures (lower strings) and plaintive rising figures (winds and first violins) emphasize the pathos of the situation, while the subsequent atmospheric string tremolo offer an appropriate backdrop for Florestan’s anguished response to the desolate cell. The shift from F minor towards Ab major accomplished over the course of this recitative reflects Florestan’s fortitude in solitude. He does not complain. While both composers wished to express strength and the ethical stance of the self-reliant man – appropriately supported by a wife – Rousseau found this expression of authenticity in moving simplicity, Beethoven in dramatic intensity.

Classicism/neoclassicism • 153 RECIT: FLORESTAN

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Most musicians showed less interest in the philosophical legacy of antiquity than in the ethical one, but they worked within a critical climate shaped by this legacy. There were many philosophies in antiquity, and thus musicians and music critics could draw diverse inspiration from their readings, from idealist thought on perfections to empiricist attention to sensory experience. The latter is less commonly recognized than the former. Stephen Greenblatt (2012) has argued that the Epicurean materialism of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (first century BCE) had a decisive impact on pleasure-oriented aesthetics after it was discovered in the fifteenth century. The philosophy of antiquity provided a counterweight to the teachings of the Church. To ascribe empiricism and appreciation of pleasure in later times solely to this ancient catalyst would surely be to exaggerate the weight of the classical heritage. Nonetheless, empiricist sensibility sat well with classicist leanings. For example, the Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith was attentive to ancient learning, penning an essay on ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of the Ancient Logics

Classicism/neoclassicism • 155

and Metaphysics’ (Smith 1795, 112–29). The materialism of his approach expresses itself in his approach to the arts. In the essay ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, written some time between 1751 and 1764, he writes: The mind being thus successively occupied by a train of objects [i.e., ‘a combination of the most agreeable and melodious sounds’], of which the nature, succession, and connection correspond, sometimes to the gay, sometimes to the tranquil, and sometimes to the melancholy mood or disposition, it is itself successively led into each of those moods or dispositions; and is thus brought into a sort of harmony or concord with the Music which so agreeably engages its attention. (Smith 1795, 163) The tutelage in technique, style and genre is the most complex aspect of musical classicism because of the peculiar situation of music already noted. Architects and visual artists could look back to the temples and statuary of antiquity. Writers could emulate the style and genres they recovered from libraries. Musicians, however, could only look back to descriptions, prescriptions and idealizations of music, such as Plato’s discussion of the modes in the Republic, Cicero’s Dream of Scipio or Boethius’s later synthesis of Greek music theory. The music itself was missing. This situation caused musical classicism to develop only gradually. One can define three stages, although the standard caveats about historical schemas apply. The first stage of musical classicism consisted in an emulation less of antique models than of the practices of antiquity, along with the practices of other humanists. This second-hand classicism began in the Renaissance, the time in which classicism first flourished. The establishment of a canon of classic authors and the reformation of practices of imitation and emulation was particularly important. In his Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477), Tinctoris famously wrote that ‘it is a matter of great surprise that there is no composition written over forty years ago which is thought by the learned to be worthy of performance’. Then, after listing Ockeghem, Régis, Busnois, Caron and Faugues, as well as their teachers Dunstable, Binchois and Dufay, Tinctoris remarked: Certainly I never listen to them or study them without coming away refreshed and wiser. Just as Virgil took Homer as his model in his divine Aeneid, so, by Hercules, do I use these as models for my own small productions; I have, in particular, openly imitated their admirable style of composition with regard to the placement of consonances. (Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 68) According to Peter Cahn (1989), Tinctoris drew upon Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria to develop his vision of artistic practice. The book had become a central text for Renaissance scholars after its first printing in 1470. Moreover, Rob Wegman (1996) has argued that this practice of canonization and imitation was essential to the emergence of a modern notion of the ‘composer’ – that is, an author in the strong sense of the word. The second stage of classicism emerged over the course of the sixteenth century as writers began to look more closely at the descriptions of ancient music and the values attributed to it. Had the pursuit of harmony and grace perhaps silenced the passion described in ancient texts? Did the sophisticated polyphony of the preceding hundred years have a proper pedigree? Did the polyphony perhaps forget the centrality of the human individual in the artistic endeavour? Always aware of Horace’s admonishment to poets to delight (delectare), to edify (prodesse) or

156 • Keith Chapin

to do both, humanists reasserted the importance of edification, using their close readings of antiquity as a source of legitimization. As Vincenzo Galilei wrote in the Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (1581): If the aim of modern practitioners is (as they say) to delight the sense of hearing with the diversity of the consonances, . . . let this goal of delighting with the diversity of their chords be left to these instruments, since being deprived of sense, motion, intellect, speech, discourse, reason, and soul, they are not capable of anything else. But let men, who have been given by nature all these beautiful, noble, and excellent abilities, seek by their means not only to delight but, as imitators of the good ancients, also to be of use, since they have the ability to do this. (Berger 2006, 311–12) As humanists rummaged through old texts and discussed their discoveries with musicians, the aesthetic principles of antiquity rose in importance. Most important was the principle of verisimilitude, or truth to nature. The point was not a realistic imitation of nature, but rather the creation of an artistic statement that had the force of nature. Although musicians by no means ignored delectation, they intensified their quest for efficacy in a musical presentation of a verbal utterance (e.g. a cantata) or of a musical action (e.g. an opera). The central question for verisimilitude was: Could one forget the artificiality of the artistic statement and believe in the represented passions or actions? Such classicism was fragile, as history was to tell. Opera may have been born from humanist discussions about ancient drama and the verisimilitude of passionate song, but it was easy for librettists and musicians to use music as an excuse to escape classical precedent, to cultivate extravagant, illogical and highly pleasurable spectacle (Rosand 1991, 34–65). Opera would forever after swing from spectacular profusion to classicist reform and back again. The third wave of classicism occurred in the eighteenth century, as musicians developed strategies of phrase construction in such a way that they might mimic the fluid phrases of classical rhetoric. This development can be traced through the efforts of music theorists. During this century, they turned from the description of rhetorical figures towards the elaboration of a system of phrase punctuation – that is, cadence (Bonds 1991; McCreless 2002, 872–6). In other words, they turned from an issue that addressed parts (the figure) to one that concerned wholes (phrase organization). It may have been medieval music theorists who first borrowed the term ‘period’ from rhetoric and baroque theorists who developed it into a music-theoretical term of independent standing. However, it was not until the 1780s that Heinrich Christoph Koch arrived at a sophisticated definition of the term that could be applied to phrases of variable length, harmony and character (Blumröder 1971–2006 [1996], 1–7; Burnham 2002, 881–3). This led to the development of a musical syntax that permitted the appropriation and successful application of classicist criteria of form, such as unity in variety. While musical and verbal rhetoric functioned differently (Vickers 1984; Hoyt 2001), musicians were inspired to develop fluid phrases that approximated those of classical rhetoric. Classicist formal criteria were not new, but for music to develop its own classicism it was important that the formal arrangement of musical phrases bore comparison to that of human speech, at the same time that they did not depend on the formal articulations of a text. This allowed the music to appear ‘human’, rather than divine, to contemporaries. In the 1780s, for example, Heinrich Christoph Koch justified cadences in psychological terms, as ‘resting points for the spirit’ (Ruhepunkte des Geistes), and developed a theory that matched form to the process

Classicism/neoclassicism • 157

of reception and compared it to necessary resting points to be found in language (Koch 1782–93, 2, 342). If, by contrast, one looks back to the Renaissance, when the premium placed on suavity also encouraged classicist formal criteria, one finds musical structures of sophistication, formal balance and great harmony, but these structures were considered divine, a manifestation of universal harmony. This remained true of other contrapuntal, formally integrated forms well into the eighteenth century (Yearsley 1998). Thus, musicians appropriated the elements of Western classicism in three stages, first developing the basic practices of canon formation and emulation, along with the necessary concept of the work, then appropriating the aesthetic principles of verisimilitude and attention to ‘nature’, in particular human nature, and finally the stylistic means to realize the formal criteria of balance and unity in variety, but in a way that bore a symbolic resemblance to human speech. Once these three elements were in place, it was possible for musicians to develop their own classical tradition, and it is perhaps no accident that eighteenth-century style and practice remained the foundation for later pedagogy. Grounded in a practice of canonization and respectful competition between generations, eighteenth-century style aimed to remain true to human nature even as it developed the artifice of fluid, variegated, yet also graceful musical utterances. Even when musicians challenged eighteenth-century styles or aesthetics, they nonetheless took them as a point of departure and as a standard by which their own efforts should be judged. In part for such reasons, Friedrich Blume (1970) characterized eighteenth and nineteenth centuries together as a ‘Classic-Romantic’ period. As they developed such canons of models and practices of imitation, musicians collected, idealized, abstracted and imitated, but in different ways. While musicians up until the eighteenth century imitated canons of styles, for example, thereafter musicians also increasingly paid heed to a canon of works (Dahlhaus 1984, 49–50). It was less Palestrina’s works than the style of music abstracted from it that served later generations as a model of classical vocal polyphony. It was a simplified style, one that had been accommodated to the vertical orientation favoured by thoroughbass polyphony and amenable to development in very different stylistic situations (Heinemann 1994, 64–5 and 101–17). By contrast, the classicism of the eighteenth and later centuries depended very much on the canonization of works, first the operas of Lully in France (Weber 1990), then the concerti grossi of Corelli and the oratorios of Handel in Britain (Weber 1992), then the operas, oratorios and instrumental genres cultivated by Haydn, Mozart and eventually Beethoven in Vienna (Gruber 2002), later to be joined by many others. Canons of styles abstract general characteristics of music, while canons of works point to particular characteristics. In other words, the former are canons of codifiable procedures that provide lessons to later generations, while the latter are canons of inimitable works that offer a standard of quality to be approached and hopefully matched, but that are also sui generis. Classicist modelling and imitation generally takes a middle position between these two poles. Thus, even nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists who sought the originality mined their predecessor’s compositions for tricks of the trade (cf., e.g. Cross 1998; Thorau 1999; Sisman 2000). Genre often mediated between the general and the particular. It was Corelli’s concerti grossi that contributed especially to the canon (Weber 1975, 75–89), Handel’s oratorios (Weber 1975, 103–42; Finscher 1987), Haydn’s string quartets (Krummacher 2005: 1, 147–77) and so forth. The mediating function of genre can be seen, for example, in the organization of Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style (1971), where the classical style (in the singular) of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven is broken down and analysed according to the three composers’ respective composition in various genres.

158 • Keith Chapin

Distinctions between the general (the codifiable) and the particular (the inimitable) point to a significant difference in practices of classicism. In his magisterial overview European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Robert Curtius (1953, 274) distinguished between ‘standard’ and ‘ideal classicism’. Standard classicism refers to the respect for regularity (or grammatical correctness in literature) and its canons are codifiable. Curtius defends the necessity of standard classicism: ‘It is of advantage to the economy of a literature if a large stock of such goods is available’ (1953, 274). Yet he also argues that such classicism can ultimately weigh down artistic production if differences in quality are ignored. Such differences of quality are often perceived as metaphysical differences, as Curtius notes. We feel the Classicism of Raphael and of Phidias as Nature raised to the Ideal. To be sure, every conceptual attempt to circumscribe the essence of great art is a makeshift. Yet the above formula would to some extent apply to what affects us as ‘classical’ in Sophocles, Virgil, Racine, and Goethe. (Curtius 1953, 273) As Curtius construes it, the binary distinction between standard and ideal classicism may be a metaphysical one, driving a wedge between ‘great art’ and the rest. It might be wiser to acknowledge differences of quality, but also to treat the two forms of classicism as two tendencies within practice, one now favouring regularity and strict control in the technical means, the other aiming more for the force of the end effect. Many evaluative terms used to regulate classicist practice (‘simplicity’, ‘harmony’ etc.) can apply to either means or ends (Chapin 2008, 167–71). Depending on how they are applied, they can guide practice towards either standard or ideal classicism. Such differences – between canons of styles and works, and between standard and ideal classicism – are related to the type of imitation taken up by an artist. An artist may relate to past works or styles in a continuum of ways, from exact copying to paraphrase, imitation, emulation, innovation and, at the vanishing point of the spectrum, utter originality. To differentiate between different ways of mediating between past and present, Martha Hyde has distinguished four different types of imitation of the past: eclectic, reverential, heuristic and dialectical. Reverential imitation layers modern ornaments over faithful transcription (Hyde 2003, 110). Eclectic imitation involves a montage of material of the past which is not subjected to a logically developed plan (102). Heuristic imitation subjects this montage of material to a plan that forefronts the self-conscious activity of the composer (114–15). Finally, dialectical imitation stages a dialogue between past and present in which both model and imitation critique and allow themselves to be critiques by the other (122). Hyde exemplifies the categories on neoclassical works, and thus ones that self-consciously play up the ‘anachronism’ between past and present. However, the four types of imitation could as easily be applied to classicist imitation, which in general aims to dissolve anachronism through an emphasis on what in the model is ostensibly timeless. Style and form If classicism involves practices of reception that could settle upon things of varying shapes and forms, from extravagant myths to grotesque sculptures, it tended to privilege grace, decorum, formal balance and integrity, or, especially in pedagogical practice, regularity and uniformity. Historically, grammatical correctness constituted one of the chief classical virtues and medieval

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writers recommended Latin forebears as models. Later, however, less quantifiable but no less normative aesthetic ideals supplemented these principles of regularity. They are the stuff of Curtius’s ‘ideal classicism’. Classical stylistic qualities can be exhibited in many aspects of musical practice, from the types of gestures favoured by performers and listeners, to the clothing chosen for proper performance, to the styles of architecture favoured for performance venues. Thus, for example, François Couperin recommended that keyboard players sit with their bodies turned slightly away from the keyboard and towards the performers. One must have a relaxed air when one is at the harpsichord. One should not fix one’s gaze too much on any object, nor leave it too vague, and finally one should not look at the company, if there be one, with a preoccupied air. (Couperin 1717, 5–6) However, despite the cultivation of classical style across musical practice, the issues of style have been most finely debated with respect to musical works. In most classicist practices there is a tension between what can be objectively ascertained and what is accessible only to subjective intuition. In the musical domain, this tension can be seen in the theories of phrase lengths. Music theorists, most famously Hugo Riemann, have idealized the priority of four and eight-bar phrases (Musical Example 7.5) and textbooks will begin harmony by teaching students how to swing suavely from tonic to dominant and back home again (e.g. Aldwell and Schachter 2003: 83–96; Kostka and Payne 2004: 102–3).

Musical Example 7.5 Riemann, Allgemeine Musiklehre (Katechismus der Musik), 2nd, revised edn, Leipzig: Hesse, 1897, 108

However, the power of a piece rarely lies in such regularity. In the first movement of Mozart’s String Quartet in F major K. 590 (Musical Example 7.6), the opening bars are strikingly irregular. In the first nineteen measures, a rising triad in half notes starts phrases four times, but metrical weightings and phrase lengths differ. First, all instruments participate in a unison exposition of the rising triad and descending scale, but dynamics and the three-bar phrase unit with metrically weak closure flaunt norms of phrase construction (mm. 1–3). Second, Mozart retains the length of three bars, but differentiates the voices and the harmony. The cadence is now clear, but the phrase nonetheless sits oddly. The rising triad motive is metrically ambiguous, part measure-long extended upbeat, part phrase beginning (mm. 4–6). Third, Mozart casts the rising triad motive as a measure-long upbeat, though one hears it thus only in retrospect, thanks to

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Allegro moderato

P

f

P

f

P

f

P

P P

P

P

f

f f

P

Musical Example 7.6 Mozart, String Quartet K. 590, Allegro moderato, mm. 1–18

f

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the regularity of the four measures that follow (mm. 7–11). Only in m. 16, the beginning of the bridge, is the rising triad motive seamlessly integrated into a harmonious phrase unit, if one only three bars long. And so the process continues. In other words, Mozart works with a constellation of gestures and phrase norms, but never allows them to coalesce into a formation that affords exact description. Too much of the effect depends on the metamorphoses, as well as such evaluative terms as ‘seamless’ and ‘harmonious’. In such cases, ‘unity’ may be too strong or too undifferentiated a word to capture the integrity of this ‘variety’. Matthias Schmidt (2002) has suggested ‘similarity’ [Ähnlichkeit] as a music theoretical category more appropriate to Mozart’s music. Rose Subotnik (1991, 107–9) has put forward ‘analogy’. The point is that it is hard to name Mozart’s game. ‘Constellation’, ‘similarity’ and ‘analogy’ lack the hard sobriety of ‘unity’. They leave it to aesthetic intuition (or psychological study) to divine the relationship of parts and the sense of the whole. To avoid the dangers of prescriptive or reductive definitions of classical style – standard classicism – musicians and critics can model their efforts or be moulded in three ways. The first is to describe synthesis as a meeting of extremes, even seemingly mutually exclusive ones – that is, to emphasize the variety that is held constant in a style or work. Historians might espy this in the meeting of styles – for example, in the Italian, French, Mannheim, Viennese, North German, English (Handelian) and various personal styles that influenced Haydn and Mozart (Finscher 1985a, 1985b). It is also possible to describe such synthesis at a conceptual or philosophical level, often as the cohabitation of opposites. In the eighteenth century, unity in variety was a popular catchphrase, but there have been others. In the early nineteenth century, Hegel and his followers enthused over the harmony of content and form, whereby the content was the Absolute and the form was the subjectively spiritual. Classic works have also been described as rich in content, and thus finely detailed and highly individual, but also generally comprehensible and thus utilizing conventions. Or they were supposed to be intensely personal expressions (and thus ‘subjective’), yet at the same time capture a common sensibility (and thus aspire to ‘objectivity’) (Schmidt 2002, 141–2). To describe balance by pointing to opposite extremes may seem to evade or mystify the midpoint. Yet the method has its advantages. Any aesthetic or style of balance, synthesis, regularity or unity that does not include imbalance, variety, irregularity and disruption is likely to bore through its very regularity. Indeed, regularity itself can be heard as a mannerism, a departure from good practice through overemphasis on evenness. Helmut Hucke (1990, 207) once pointed out that Palestrina’s even, euphonious polyphony could be seen as another manifestation of the mannerist urges of the late sixteenth century. A distinction between mannerism and classicism is a second way to circumscribe the intuitive aspect of balance, regularity and harmony. Rather than point out the incommensurables that are brought together and balanced, one points out that there is a contrast between balance and imbalance, that one can define classicality in part by what it is not. One can aim to make parts merge into a whole, or one can construct a whole in which parts seem out of place, underdeveloped or exaggerated – that is, are mannerisms. The method is attended by the same problem that besets the principle of balance: exaggeration is as much intuited as it is denoted. The difficulties of the situation can be exemplified on Mozart’s Symphony in C major, K. 551, ‘Jupiter’. The coda of the symphony contrapuntally combines the themes from the movement in what might be heard as a summation of the movement (Musical Example 7.7). By definition, the coda occurs after the main tonal argument of the piece has concluded (Caplin 1998, 179; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 281–2). Yet such is the excitement of the coda

162 • Keith Chapin tr

tr

FI.

Ob.

/ Bsn.

Hn.

/ Tpt.

/ Timp.

/ tr

Vln. I tr

tr

Vln. II tr tr

Via.

Vc.

Cb.

Musical Example 7.7 Mozart, Symphony K. 551 ‘Jupiter’, Allegro moderato, mm. 387–92

that it pushes at the balance of the piece. One may hear the contrapuntal coda as did Hermann Abert (2007, 1140), as an increase in tension that sets up the fanfare conclusion to the movement and symphony – that is, as something that allows the symphony to achieve harmonious closure, but one may also hear it as edging towards a different type of ending. While the coda does develop previously heardm themes, it also functions in part as accumulation. In other words, it rounds off the developmental counterpoint of the movement, but it also overcomes the preceding music through sheer sound and mass. The critical categories and formal analogies invoked by musicologists to describe the coda point to the fine line that divides classical balance and mannerist extravagance in such cases: Elaine Sisman describes the sublimity of

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the ‘mass of simultaneously writhing fragments . . . with the relentless background of the four whole-notes’. The coda ‘creates a cognitive exhaustion born of sheer magnitude’ (Sisman 1993, 79; cf. Subotnik 1991). Simon Keefe and Wye J. Allanbrook, by contrast, stress the connection of the work with literary conventions influenced by classical dramatic theory: denouement (Keefe 2007, 157–60) and ‘the lieto fine of an opera buffa’ (Allanbrook 2010, 268), though Keefe emphasizes the phenomenal flourish of the end and Allanbrook (2002) contests the category of unity. Splitting the difference between classicist and mannerist points of view, Stefan Kunze finds classical completion realized precisely through the degree to which the contrapuntal section of the coda does not fit in. The main motive is like a monad, inviting no continuation, he argues. Yet the ‘artfully constructed simultaneity of the main motives’ of the movement, precisely because the simultaneity does not sit well with normal procedures of closure in the style of the time, produce the ‘epiphany of the work character, suspended from time’ (Kunze 1988, 115). This issue of balance has been at issue since Mozart’s own day. In 1798 Carl Friedrich Zelter called the ‘Jupiter’ ‘tremendous’ but believed that Mozart ‘pushed things a little far’ (Zaslaw 1989, 530). A third way to describe the grace, harmony and integration prized by classicism appeals even less to objective criteria. It is to address directly the conflict between codifiable means and inimitable effect. A style or work should appear unstudied or ‘natural’, despite the thought and effort that lies behind it. Famously, the Renaissance courtier Baldasar Castiglione offered his readers the ideal of sprezzatura, or ‘a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless’ (1976, 67). The disappearance of artifice in art was a central goal of artists in many centuries, and would ultimately underpin a variety of classicist ideals and catchphrases. Verisimilitude, a watchword well into the eighteenth century, required artworks to have the semblance of truth, that is, to seem plausible as a representation of a human utterance or action, despite the fictional and consciously constructed nature of the work. The eighteenth-century concept of the galant was naught but a new word to describe sprezzatura (Sheldon 1975, 1989; Seidel 1994–2007). Sublimity and genius, which supplanted galanterie and verisimilitude in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved a process in which the end effect (the feeling of sublimity) subsumes the material production of the effect into it. One is taken by the experience. Just before Immanuel Kant described genius as the ‘talent (natural gift [Naturgabe]) that gives the rule to art’ (2000, 186 [§46]), he emphasized that art must appear as nature: In a product of art one must be aware that it is art, and not nature; yet the purposiveness in its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature. (2000, 185 [§45]) He thereby opened the door to yet another ideal for the classicist whole: organicism. If an art work were organic, it would appear as nature and even, when buttressed by a full metaphysics of genius, the work would be the product of nature (Solie 1980; Schmidt 1990). The survey suggests that a classical ideal of style and form inspires a variety of styles and genres, including many not normally associated with classicism. Even as musicians in the ‘Baroque’ seventeenth century pursued emotional intensity at the expense of polyphonic suavity, they sought to achieve verisimilitude. For their part, Romantics pursued the organic integrity of the musical work. Twentieth-century modernists could also profess similar ideals. For example,

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in 1927 Alban Berg discussed the formal design of his opera Wozzeck (1925), only then to take up the classicist position that technique is subsumed into the effect: No one in the audience, no matter how aware he may be of the musical forms contained in the framework of the opera, of the precision and logic with which it has been worked out, no one, from the moment the curtain parts until it closes for the last time, pays any attention to the various fugues, inventions, suites, sonata movements, variations, and passacaglias about which so much has been written. (Berg 1989, 153) Ideals of classical sheen are equally prevalent in performance. When visited by a pianist in Vienna, for example, Mozart noted that the man played ‘a lot’ but in a rough and laboured way, without any taste or sentiment. When the man exclaimed at Mozart’s facility as a performer, Mozart replied, ‘Yes, I had to work too, in order now to be allowed not to work’ (Mozart 2005, 3, 312 [28 April 1784]). In other words, Mozart hid the high artifice of his virtuosity, along with the work that he had put into it, behind a polish that made it all seem effortless. The account is prophetic of Mozart reception in general. Contemporaries and later generations have heard primarily the polish in his music, rarely the labour. The classical ideal of art-as-nature was challenged most radically in the twentieth century by neoclassical composers. Neoclassical composers might respect the ideal of artifice-as-art, as for example in Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin (1918). Many, however, consciously worked against the aesthetic illusion, often in the name of ‘objectivity’. Stravinsky, for instance, in arguing against the illusion of humanity that strings might produce in the Octet, also wished to exclude ‘all nuances between the forte and the piano’ (White 1979, 575). Not only do abrupt shifts in dynamics contribute to the sense of disjuncture between parts, but they also overturn the classicist model of synthesis at another level. Dynamics and other ‘performative’ nuances contribute to the appearance of artifice as art/nature. Attitudes and values Classicism and neoclassicism have been cultivated within a variety of political systems and causes – aristocratic and liberal, totalitarian and revolutionary, and reactionary and progressive. The fundamental attitudes can be directed towards diverse ends. While classicism and politics mix in many ways, one can nonetheless trace tendencies. Restraint, for example, comes in forms that reflect the difference between standard and ideal classicism. While restraint that prides itself on reason may aim at the establishment and cultivation of norms, codes and rules, a restraint grounded in good taste and judgement may draw back from these norms as themselves examples of excess. Restraint may be manifested in processes of reflection, in the maintenance of distance, in the practice of self-control, and many other types of attitudes and behaviour. While some people may actively practice restraint, others may cultivate it only in certain types of activity, strive towards it as an ideal, or defer its expression to the work they produce. For example, Mozart may not have had the control of his financial situation that his father or his later biographers would have liked. Yet Mozart describes a vicious work schedule in a letter to his father (Mozart 2005, 2, 198–9 [20 December 1770]). Although the letter certainly played for his earnest father’s approval, the composition, performing, teaching and concert organization that he did during a relatively brief life testify to his concentration and dedication to musical activities. Disorgan-

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ization in daily life was the flip side of the coin to extraordinary powers of concentration and organization in matters of music. Diversity of approach also runs through the various communities formed according to classicist values. The culture of restraint within classical traditions had two points of origin, the first in humanist circles and the second in the courts in which humanists moved. This dual orientation, at once centripetally disciplinary and centrifugally political, would also characterize later cultures of classicism, although they would often overlap. In one case, the group develops its classicism in one particular domain, in the other it develops it as a life style. The disciplinary practice of restraint arose from the scepticism of humanists and artists towards the scholasticism of medieval universities and the dogmatism of Church writers (Fumaroli 2001). To throw off these institutionalized patterns of thought, humanists looked back to antiquity for models and discussed their findings with each other. As they corresponded, they formed a self-image as a Republic of Letters, with codes of behaviour derived from their idealizations of ancient literary practice. This pride of a group in its own specialized practices, as well as the distance it would cultivate from other groups, would later be cultivated in intimate social surroundings such as the salon, but could also become institutionalized in academies, universities and other institutions of learning and artistic production. In such arenas, the classicist restraint could develop its own forms of pedantry – that is, tend towards standard classicism. Such standardization is the persistent peril of institutionalized classicism, but it is not its inevitable fate. The institutions depend as well on the refinement over time of specialized practices, the considered use of these practices, and the particular forms of sociability born of a shared love for sophistication, whether the sophisticated play of artistic technique or the refined handling of themes both weighty and light. One sees this pride in discipline and specialization in Mozart’s self-confident letter to his father of 1777: I cannot write poetically, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange styles of speech with such art as to produce effects of shade and light, for I am no painter. Even by signs and pantomime I cannot express my reflections and thoughts, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of tones, for I am a musician. (Mozart 2005, 2, 110–11 [8 November 1777]) When it inspires a community, the refinement of practice can be closely guarded and can be treated as a bulwark against other practices or communities of the time. In such cases, restraint expresses itself as a reticence to accept contemporaneous practices perceived as either compulsive or impulsive – that is, practices marked either by too much rigour or by too little. Both the self-confidence that derives from a long tradition and the ‘shock of the ancients’ (Norman 2011) felt by a look back to the distant past can provide people with the impetus to reject what had become comfortable in the present. Thus, classicist restraint can be directed against the rigour of the academic and pedagogue, but also against practices adopted without sufficient reflection from either the recent past (routine) or the present (fashion). Such restraint can promote rejuvenation through a fresh look at the distant past, as well as the refinement of technique over time, but also conservatism and resistance to change. In contrast to the cultivation of restraint found in the various disciplinary traditions of classicism, the political culture of restraint grew from aristocratic courts (Fader 2003). Castiglione’s sprezzatura was taught to an elite audience, and the manuals on etiquette, behaviour and conversation that followed often developed this elitism into critiques of the perceived faults of ‘lower’ social groups: the compulsiveness (i.e. the work ethic) of the bourgeoisie, the pedantry

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(i.e. rigour) of academics and churchmen, the lack of moral values (i.e. lack of aristocratic demeanour) of popular classes, the barbary (i.e. cultural alterity) of foreigners, and so forth. However, sprezzatura and the implicit critiques that went with it were also directed against the aristocracy itself, in particular against the feudal aristocracy and their warrior values. The process of civilization that spread the ideal of sprezzatura beyond the aristocratic milieu played out in many ways. As non-noble men of letters often played a central role in the education and entertainment of the polite aristocracy, the cultivation of grace opened the door to a degree of meritocracy within the political establishment, especially as courts required bureaucracies and thus attracted educated commoners into their orbits. However, the process of civilization also contributed to the hierarchical organization of society and to the regulation of open competition (Elias 1981). As restraint furthered the maintenance of political order even as it supported reflection, classicism has been the aesthetic of preference for many political regimes, as well as political players without power who hoped to install regimes of control. Thus, with the French monarchs leading the way, absolutist rulers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperialist nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and totalitarian regimes in the twentieth have all favoured classicism. For reasons of both professional expediency and political conviction, artists could find common cause with such regimes of control. Igor Stravinsky expressed his admiration for the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. ‘He is the savior of Italy and – let us hope – of Europe’ (Walsh 1999, 521). Yet classicism, as often as it buttressed politics of control, also provided the means to temper or subvert political authority. First, a person could always argue that the centre of power had cultivated the wrong form of control, a control based on formalized rules rather than good judgement. Thus, although artistic classicisms of good taste often participated willingly in political classicisms of strict order, they could also be a critical voice. Daniel Gordon has shown that French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conversation manuals could be oriented towards the royal court at Versailles or towards the decentred world of salons in Paris (Gordon 1994). The royal court and its politics were represented above all by large, official works, in particular the operas of Lully, and by calls for the order represented by genre purity. By the early eighteenth century, however, musicians often experimented with style and genre mixture. This was not so much a fall from classical aesthetics, which still dominated French discussion, as a tempering of norms that had become too rigid. These musical experiments had a political resonance, as they were associated with the circles around Philippe II, Duke of Orleans and Regent of France between the death of Louis XIV (1715) and the ascension of Louis XV to the throne (1723). Genuinely enthused by Italian styles, Philippe and those in his circle also found in them a symbolic critique of the regimentation of French politics that two centuries of absolutism had wrought (Fader 2005, 2007; Cowart 2008, 191–252). Hardly a revolutionary or far-reaching critique, to be sure, coming as it did from aristocratic circles and in the modulated tones of music, but a critique it nonetheless was. Conclusion: motives for classicism If musicians developed their classicism in part because of a fascination with the legacy of antiquity, in part because of a love of refinement and care for disciplinary skill, and in part in order to move within and live off of social elites, they may also have cultivated their classicism precisely because it provided a measure of balance to the world around them. In other words, classicism

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and neoclassicism may involve aesthetics of restraint and refinement, order and control, but their Apollonian fruits may have sprung from Dionysian seeds. These Dionysian forces could generate large social movements. Helmut Lethen, for example, has related the ‘cool conduct’ behind the German version of neoclassicism (New Objectivity) to the trauma experienced by Germans during and after the First World War (Lethen 2002). Dionysius could also operate on a more personal level. Before the development of modern medicine, physical ailment and the proximity of death were constants of life. Rüdiger Safranski relates that the doctors who performed an autopsy on Friedrich Schiller after his death in 1805 were amazed at the state of his organs: the lungs were like porridge, the heart without muscular substance, the gall bladder grossly swollen, and the kidneys substantially dissolved and deformed (Safranski 2004, 11). German literary classicism and philosophical idealism may owe a small debt to the intellectual fury of a man who experienced nothing but disorder in his body and could do nothing about it. One wonders how many musicians of classicist leanings were similarly driven, whether by physical suffering or by psychological turmoil. If classicism is at times a reaction to suffering, trauma and trouble, it may also owe its strength to these causes. Just as mannerisms contribute much to works informed by a classical aesthetic, so does the chaos of life provide energy to the classical attitude. Note 1

Other notable conceptual introductions and historical studies of classicism and neoclassicism in music include Heartz and Brown 2001; Finscher 1994–2007; Krummacher and Stephan 1994–2007; Danuser 1997; Gruber 2002; Taruskin 2005, 5, 447–598. See the extensive bibliographies in Finscher 1994–2007; Krummacher and Stephan 1994–2007.

Bibliography of works cited Abert, Hermann. 2007. W. A. Mozart, Stewart Spencer (trans.), Cliff Eisen (ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Philosophy of New Music, Robert Hullot-Kentnor (trans., ed., and introd.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Aldwell, Edward and Carl Schachter. 2003. Harmony & Voice Leading. 3rd edn. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Schirmer. Allanbrook, Wye J. 2002. ‘Theorizing the Comic Surface’. In Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen (eds), Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the 21st Century. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 195–216. ––––– 2010. ‘Is the Sublime a Musical Topos?’. Eighteenth-Century Music, 7: 263–79. Anderson, Emily (trans. and ed.). 1961. The Letters of Beethoven. 3 vols. London: Macmillan. ––––– 1985. The Letters of Mozart and His Family. 3rd edn, Stanley Sadie and Fiona Smart (rev. and ed.). London: Macmillan. Berg, Alban. 1989. ‘The Musical Forms in my Opera “Wozzeck”’. In Douglas Jarman (ed.), Alban Berg: Wozzeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 149–52. Berger, Karol. 2006. ‘Concepts and Developments in Music Theory’. In James Haar (ed.), European Music, 1520–1640. Woodbridge, VA: Boydell, 304–28. Blume, Friedrich. 1970. Classic and Romantic Music: A Comprehensive Survey, M. D. Herter Norton (trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Blumröder, Christoph von. 1971–2006 [1996]. ‘Periodus/Periode’. In Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (ed.), Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Bonds, Mark Evan. 1991. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Borthwick, E. Kerr. 1998. ‘Beethoven and Plutarch’. Music & Letters, 79: 268–72. Burnham, Scott. 2002. ‘Form’. In Thomas Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 880–906. Cahn, Peter. 1989. ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des ‘Opus perfectum et absolutum’ in der Musikauffassung um 1500’. In Klaus Hortschansky (ed.), Zeichen und Struktur in der Musik der Renaissance: Ein Symposium aus Anlaß der Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung Münster (Westfalen) 1987. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 11–26. Caplin, William Earl. 1998. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. New York: Oxford University Press.

168 • Keith Chapin Castiglione, Baldesar. 1976. The Book of the Courtier [1528], George Bull (trans.). Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books. Chapin, Keith. 2008. ‘Scheibe’s Mistake: Sublime Simplicity and the Criteria of Classicism’. Eighteenth-Century Music, 5: 165–77. Charlton, David. 2012. Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Couperin, François. 1717. L’Art de toucher le clavecin. 2nd edn. Paris: Author and Boivin. Cowart, Georgia. 2008. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cross, Jonathan. 1998. The Stravinsky Legacy, Music in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curtius, Ernst Robert. 1953. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Willard R. Trask (trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1984. Die Musiktheorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert: Erster Teil. Grundzüge einer Systematik. In Frieder Zaminer (ed.), Geschichte der Musiktheorie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Vol. 10. Danuser, Hermann (ed.). 1997. Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts: Internationales Symposion der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel 1996, Veröffentlichungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung. Winterthur: Amadeus. Elias, Norbert. 1981. Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. 8th printing, 2nd, expanded edn, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fader, Don. 2003. ‘The Honnête Homme as Music Critic: Taste, Rhetoric, and Politesse in the 17th-Century French Reception of Italian Music’. The Journal of Musicology, 20: 3–44. ––––– 2005. ‘The “cabale du Dauphin”, Campra, and Italian Comedy: The Courtly Politics of French Musical Patronage around 1700’. Music & Letters, 86: 380–413. ––––– 2007. ‘Philippe II d’Orléans’s “chanteurs italiens”, the Italian Cantata, and the goûts réunis under Louis XIV’. Early Music, 35: 237–49. Finscher, Ludwig. 1985a. ‘Haydn, Mozart und der Begriff der Wiener Klassik’. In Carl Dahlhaus (ed.), Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 232–9. ––––– 1985b. ‘Mozart und die Idee eines musikalischen Universalstils’. In Carl Dahlhaus (ed.), Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 267–78. ––––– 1987. ‘“. . . gleichsam ein kanonisirter Tonmeister”: Zur deutschen Händel-Rezeption im 18. Jahrhundert’. In Aleida and Jan Assmann (eds), Kanon und Zensur: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II. Munich: Fink, 271–83. ––––– 1994–2007. ‘Klassik’. In Ludwig Finscher (ed.), Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik. 2nd edn. Kassel: Bärenreiter and Stuttgart: Metzler, Sachteil, 5: 224–40. Fumaroli, Marc. 2001. ‘Les abeilles et les araignées’. In Anne-Marie Lecoq (ed.), La querelle des Anciens et des Modernes: XVIIe.–XVIIIe. siècles. Paris: Gallimard, 7–218. Gerhard, Anselm. 2002. London und der Klassizismus in der Musik: Die Idee der ‘absoluten Musik’ und Muzio Clementis Klavierwerk. Stuttgart: Metzler. Girard, René. 2008. ‘Innovation and Repetition’. In Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005, Robert Doran (ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 230–45. Gordon, Daniel. 1994. Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Grafton, Anthony, Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis (eds). 2010. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2012. The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began. London: Vintage. Gruber, Gernot (ed.). 2002. Wiener Klassik: Ein musikgeschichtlicher Begriff in Diskussion. Wien: Böhlau. Heartz, Daniel, and Brown, Bruce Alan. 2001. ‘Classical’. In Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan, 5: 924–29. Heinemann, Michael. 1994. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina und Seine Zeit, Große Komponisten und ihre Zeit. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. Hepokoski, James and Darcy, Warren. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoyt, Peter. 2001. ‘Rhetoric and Music, §II. After 1750’. In Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of Music. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 21: 270–3. Hucke, Helmut. 1990. ‘Zur Diskussion über den Manierismus in der Musikgeschichte’. In Heinrich Poos and Sander Wilkens (eds), Kunst als Antithese: Karl-Hofer-Symposion 1988. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 199–209. Hyde, Martha M. 2003. ‘Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism’. In Jonathan Cross (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 98–136. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.), Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keefe, Simon P. 2007. Mozart’s Viennese Instrumental Music: A Study of Stylistic Re-invention. Woodbridge, VA: Boydell. Koch, Heinrich Christoph. 1782–93. Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition. 3 vols. Leipzig: Böhme. Kostka, Stefan M. and Dorothy Payne. 2004. Tonal Harmony, with an Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music. 5th edn. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Krummacher, Friedhelm, with a contribution from Joachim Brügge. 2005. Geschichte des Streichquartetts. 3 vols. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag.

Classicism/neoclassicism • 169 ––––– and Stephan, Rudolf. 1994–2007. ‘Klassizismus’. In Ludwig Finscher (ed.), Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik. 2nd edn. Kassel: Bärenreiter and Stuttgart: Metzler, Sachteil 5: cols. 241–56. Kunze, Stefan. 1988. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sinfonie in C-Dur KV 551, Jupiter-Sinfonie. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Lethen, Helmut. 2002. Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1753. Abhandlung von der Fuge nach den Grundsätzen und Exempeln der besten deutschen und ausländischen Meister entworfen. Berlin: Halde und Spener. McCreless, Patrick. 2002. ‘Music and Rhetoric’. In Thomas Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 847–79. Messing, Scott. 1988. Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept throught the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. 2005. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen: Gesamtausgabe, Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto Erich Deutsch, Joseph Heinz Eibl and Ulrich Konrad (eds). Kassel: Bärenreiter. Norman, Larry F. 2011. The Shock of the Ancient: Literature & History in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosand, Ellen. 1991. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rosen, Charles. 1971. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York: W. W. Norton. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2000. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letter to Franquières, Christopher Kelly (ed.), Charles E. Butterworth, Alexandra Cook, and Terence E. Marshall (trans.), The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 8. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Safranski, Rüdiger. 2004. Friedrich Schiller, oder, Die Erfindung des deutschen Idealismus. Munich: Hanser. Schmidt, Lothar. 1990. Organische Form in der Musik: Stationen eines Begriffs 1795–1850. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Schmidt, Matthias. 2002. ‘Mozart und die Differenz des ‘Klassischen’: Überlegungen zur musikalischen Ähnlichkeit’. In Gernot Gruber (ed.), Wiener Klassik: Ein musikgeschichtlicher Begriff in Diskussion. Vienna: Böhlau, 141–75. Schofield, Katherine Butler. 2010. ‘Reviving the Golden Age Again: Classicization, Hindustani Music, and the Mughals’. Ethnomusicology: Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, 54: 484–517. Seidel, Wilhelm. 1994–2007. ‘Galanter Stil’. In Ludwig Finscher (ed.), Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik. 2nd edn. Kassel: Bärenreiter and Stuttgart: Metzler, Sachteil 3: 983–89. Sheldon, David. 1975. ‘The Galant Style Revisited and Re-evaluated’. Acta Musicologica, 47: 240–69. ––––– 1989. ‘The Concept Galant in the 18th Century’. Journal of Musicological Research, 9: 89–108. Sisman, Elaine. 1993. Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, No. 41 in C major, K. 551. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 2000. ‘“The Spirit of Mozart from Haydn’s Hands”: Beethoven’s Musical Inheritance’. In Glenn Stanley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 45–63. Smith, Adam. 1795. Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Dugald Stewart, Joseph Black and James Hutton (eds). London: Cadell jun. and Davies. Solie, Ruth A. 1980. ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis’. 19th-Century Music, 4: 147–56. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 1991. ‘Evidence of a Critical Worldview in Mozart’s Last Three Symphonies’. In Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 98–111. Taruskin, Richard. 2005. The Oxford History of Western Music. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thorau, Christian. 1999. ‘Richard Wagner’s Bach’, in Michael Heinemann and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (eds), Bach und die Nachwelt. Band 2: 1850–1900. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 163–99. Vickers, Brian. 1984. ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, Rhetorica, 2: 1–44. Walsh, Stephen. 1999. Stravinsky: A Creative Spring. Russia and France, 1882–1934. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Weber, William. 1975. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna. London: Croom Helm. ––––– 1990. ‘Lully and the Rise of Musical Classics in the 18th Century’. In Jérôme de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider (eds), Jean-Baptiste Lully: Kongreßbericht Heidelberg/S.-Germain-en-Laye, 1987. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 581–90. ––––– 1992. The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon. Webster, James. 1991. Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 2004. ‘The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?’. 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8 Romanticism/anti-romanticism Sanna Pederson

Introduction Like most other accounts of musical romanticism, this chapter centres on German thinkers and composers. It is not a comprehensive, descriptive overview of romantic music, but rather a narrative of how romantic ideology affected musical aesthetics over the course of the nineteenth century. It proceeds hermeneutically rather than empirically, attempting to define a romantic understanding of music rather than cobbling together a definition from musical characteristics of individual works. Let us orient ourselves within the vast literature on romanticism around three basic points. The first is the special relationship between music and romanticism, well expressed in Nietzsche’s words: ‘I fear I am too much of a musician not to be a Romantic’ (1921, 335). We can move directly from this conflation of music and romanticism to our second point, which can be seen as a reaction, an interrogation of the first: surely not all music is romantic? A chronological juxtaposition only muddies the waters; romantic theories of music, which arise in the 1790s, do not coincide with the nineteenth-century repertoire commonly referred to as ‘romantic’. While musicologists divide the music of that century into early and late romantic periods, placing the dividing line around 1850, scholars of German literature distinguish a ‘Jena romanticism’, occurring around 1794–1808, from a literary late romanticism that flourished during the first two decades of the nineteenth century (Prawer 1970). In contrast, composers of the so-called ‘romantic generation’ in music, which includes Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner and Chopin, were all born around 1810, after literary romanticism had reached its peak (Dahlhaus 1988; Eggebrecht 1996: 590). An appreciation of this chronological disjunction is necessary for my third point: romanticism is not merely a neutral descriptive term; it is a stance or position taken by those who were either very strongly for or against it. Therefore, anti-romanticism has had a major role in defining romanticism. For purposes of understanding romantic ideology, I will turn to an earlier generation, the poets and philosophers born around 1770 in Germany. These creative men and women reacted strongly against the Enlightenment’s belief in the rational design of a better world. Their most radical and anarchic response to the modernization and rationalization of society was proclaimed in the first decade of the nineteenth century by August and Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling and Novalis. However, the aesthetic writings of this ‘Jena circle’ centred primarily on literature, leaving it to Tieck, Wackenroder and E. T. A. Hoffmann to adumbrate a concept of musical romanticism.

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Weimar Classicism, especially as expressed by Goethe and the aesthetics of Hegel, forms the counterpart to this particular romanticism. These thinkers were the first to define romanticism in opposition to classicism and to draw the analogy of sickness as opposed to health. They thus inaugurated the polemical discourse that defines romanticism and also indicates how strongly it has always functioned as a value judgement. As Carl Schmitt, himself an important critic of romanticism, remarked, ‘The easiest thing to do would still be to follow Stendhal and simply say that romantic is what is interesting and the classical is what is boring, or naturally the other way around’ (Schmitt 1991, 4). By designating something as romantic, a critic often reveals ethical, political or moral values rather than strictly aesthetic concerns. These three points – the special bond between music and romanticism, the vagueness of a chronological definition and the value judgement implicit in defining the ‘romantic’ content of an artwork – go a long way towards explaining why it is so hard to pin down musical romanticism. Musicologists place its beginnings anywhere from 1780 to 1830 and often see it persisting well into the twentieth century (Samson 2001). For instance, a reader turning to Richard Taruskin’s comprehensive history of Western classical music can find romanticism invoked for music as early as Mozart and as late as Schoenberg (Taruskin 2005). Such an expansive view leads observers like Dieter Borchmeyer to complain about ‘the musical concept of romanticism, which denotes everything and nothing . . . and is applied to the entire development of music from Franz Schubert to Richard Strauss, and so, ultimately, does not mean anything at all’ (Borchmeyer 1994, 40). In response, rather than concentrating on defining the chronological boundaries of romanticism, we need also to fill in the comparatively neglected history of anti-romanticism. This reveals a different picture: a history of music over the last two hundred years that can be seen as cyclic. Instead of an undifferentiated ‘romantic period’, we observe a series of waves of romanticism, separated by periods of vehement reaction that also ebb away. After the first romantic era and a backlash to it around 1850, a second wave of romanticism, or ‘neoromanticism’, lasts until the First World War. The following period of anti-romanticism reaches its peak in the 1920s. The cycle repeats once more, with the period after the Second World War marking the most extreme version of anti-romanticism to date. From the current standpoint of the early twenty-first century, it appears that, despite repeated attempts to kill it off, musical romanticism lives on. A detailed description of this history is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I will illustrate this premise by discussing romanticism and anti-romanticism in their primary locus, the nineteenth or so-called ‘romantic’ century. I will also comment upon the question of the persistence of romanticism and anti-romanticism in the musical modernism of the early twentieth century. In the following section I will characterize the main themes of romantic ideology within the framework of modern society and how they are manifested in music. Romantic ideology in the first half of the nineteenth century: the dualistic mindset Real life versus art Our current understanding of early romanticism has been tremendously influenced by the critical theory of The Frankfurt School, a twentieth-century version of the dialectic method of Hegel and the ideology critique of Karl Marx (Kohlenbach 2009). For instance, Georg Lukács used the term ‘Romantic anti-capitalism’ to emphasize Romantic thinkers’ negative reaction to their

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specific economic and social circumstances, and to the increasingly competitive, market-oriented mentality that they perceived (Sayre and Löwy 1984). By responding to the increased differentiation of society and its consequent alienating effects, the Romantics took not only an anti-capitalistic position but also a more comprehensive anti-modern stance. From this point of view, romanticism is fundamentally about the relationship between art and life. They recognized that the aesthetic now functioned as a privileged sphere within modernity; that the realm of art had taken on the role of serving as the last refuge where one could experience the unity that was denied in a functionally differentiated society. They argued that the potential of art was being extinguished by its integration into this society, since it thereby functioned as a compensatory realm in cooperation with other spheres of work and society. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it in Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘[Art] is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again’ (1972, 137). The Romantics wanted to produce art that would not allow it to be used as compensation but instead give an idea of what life might be like outside the structure of society itself. They saw the aesthetic dimension as the way to access a higher truth, an alternate but just as legitimate reality. Consequently, romanticism is marked by dualism, the portrayal of the ‘real’ world and the imagined alternative. Of all the writers of this time, E. T. A. Hoffmann was the most vehement in depicting the ‘horribly infuriating contrast’ between the banalities of music making in polite society and his personal experience of music as overwhelming and indescribable. Perhaps more than any other romantic artist, E. T. A. Hoffmann lived the double life he portrayed in his writings. He was never able to decide in favour of the poetic or the prosaic world; he felt compelled to live in both (Safranski 1992). Rationality versus irrationality The philosophical tradition that considers music as dangerously irrational goes back to Plato. The Romantics challenged the assumption that knowledge is acquired only through rationality, mind and thought. They wanted to explore more subjective routes, through the senses and the emotions. They felt that the Enlightenment had dismissed supernatural, mystical, dark forces too quickly. One could say that they opened themselves up to both ‘normal’ thought and ‘pathological’ thought, as described by Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality’ (quoted in Prawer 1970, 5). The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, in his lectures on the Aesthetics of Art, aimed to counter the influence of romantic aesthetics. Consistent with Hegel’s general dialectical approach, his aesthetics presents a broadly historical narrative of three stages: symbolic, classical and romantic. The middle Classical age is equated with the Ancient Greeks, who stand for moderation, beauty and serenity; they attain the perfect balance of content and form. The subsequent Romantic age ends with Hegel’s own time period. The balance has shifted away from outward form and toward subjective inwardness. For Hegel, who was not a musician, music was the most extreme example of this imbalance between form and content. He described it as ‘sounds, as if they were feeling without thought’, and ‘expression without any externality at all’. As such, music exemplified romanticism more than any other art (Pederson 1996). The twentieth-century term ‘logocentrism’, which refers to an ideology that equates words with thoughts, is pertinent here. Hegel’s logocentric

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assumptions made it difficult for him to imagine that music could contain thought. Even if thought were somehow involved in music, Hegel viewed it as naturally subsidiary to subjective feelings. The fundamental basis for Hegel’s qualms about music was his difficulty with romantic art in general. Romanticism, for Hegel, signalled the end of art as the bearer of Spirit. The next stages for the Spirit were to be manifested in ways that were increasingly purified of materiality: in religion and ultimately philosophy. Hegel’s stature as a philosopher and his enduring influence have ensured that later critics continue to struggle with the questions posed by his critique of music. His elaborate philosophical framework does not need to be accepted or even understood to consider his fundamental assumptions about music as a romantic art. First, he distinguished feeling and thought as two completely separate processes. Second, he characterized music as subjective feeling without thought. That this was a negative value judgement was self-evident to him. Romantic aesthetics counters by asking: what is wrong with subjective feeling in art? Isn’t art by definition subjective? Doesn’t its value lie precisely in its aesthetic dimension, which imparts that which cannot be expressed abstractly or objectively? Eichendorff’s ‘The Marble Statue’ Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff’s literary fairy tale, ‘The Marble Statue’ (‘Das Marmorbild’, 1819) is a crucial example for scholars who deal with music and romanticism. From a literary perspective, Eichendorff is a latecomer to romanticism; his writings appear after the most radical ideas of the early romantics had proved unsustainable (Louth 2009, 80). ‘Late’ Romanticism is usually identified by its subject matter as well as a more conservative ideology. Eichendorff’s lyrical and narrative writings take place in vaguely medieval times, in a pre-modern society; the action usually occurs outdoors in a beautiful natural landscape of trees, flowers and birds. His narratives involve the pull of dark supernatural forces that are countered by Catholic Christianity. ‘The Marble Statue’ remains a favourite for literary analysis because of its ambivalence about these forces: while the ‘moral’ of the story is clear enough – the hero prevails – there is a remarkable blurring of seemingly stark binary oppositions (Hamilton 2009). Eichendorff typically portrayed two kinds of music in his stories and poetry: the music of dissolution, involving a loss of control, a loss of self; and the music of containment, which brings desires under control and helps define a character as an individual. ‘The Marble Statue’ pits these two kinds of music against each other. The story opens with the young protagonist Florio on the road, although he literally does not know where he is going or what he wants to do with his life. Innocent, vulnerable and emotional, he finds an outlet in song. There are nine songs interspersed in ‘The Marble Statue’, making up about 16 per cent of the entire text (Hanss 1989, 23). Florio is easily drawn into a state of intoxication by the music of a beautiful, mysterious woman. However, at the crucial moment when Florio is about to ‘lose himself’ to her, he suddenly hears ‘an old song of pious bent, one he had often heard in his childhood and had since nearly forgotten, with all the varied experiences and sights of his journey’ (Eichendorff [1819] 1983, 161). This song brings Florio ‘back to himself’ and the woman turns into a statue of Venus. Florio thus resists the seduction by the Greek goddess of love; at the end of the story he finds himself riding away with the pure young girl ‘Bianca’ and her father, symbolically on the path to integration and containment within the conventions of family and religion.

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Although the opposites are presented so clearly, with characters’ names hardly more than designations of their symbolic function, Eichendorff complicates the picture by also portraying them as doubles. For instance, Venus is the opposite of the ‘white’ Bianca, but Venus is also described as white: she rides a white horse, wears a white veil, and ultimately becomes a white marble statue. Florio has difficulty at times telling Bianca and Venus apart. The story has other thematic elements that are easily distinguished in many romantic musical works: nature and beauty, love and death, supernatural events and altered states of consciousness. Perhaps Florio’s most remarkable quality is the questionable state of his consciousness at any given time. His perceptions are frequently described in the subjunctive mode (‘it seemed that’, ‘it was as if’). Objective cognition is affected by his emotions, which are always close to the surface. His point of view is so erratic that the whole story takes on the irrational quality of a dream. Not only are his experiences described in a dream-like manner, Eichendorff also recounts his actual dreams. Other characters are frequently described as ‘lost in thought’, not fully present or conscious, as well. The attention given to such ‘altered states’ is a hallmark of romanticism. Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 38 ‘The Marble Statue’ helps us identify the romantic aspects of Robert Schumann’s setting of twelve selected poems by Eichendorff in his Liederkreis, Op. 38, of 1840. These poems were selected by Schumann from various sections of the 1837 edition of Eichendorff’s poems; they were neither in the same order nor grouped together by the author. Schumann’s himself asserted, ‘the cycle is my most Romantic ever’ (quoted in Thym 2004: 122). It appears initially that Schumann did not so much assemble a story as emphasize recurrent romantic themes of nature, darkness, loneliness and alienation, love and longing. However, the extensive secondary literature on this cycle has analysed its musical structure and unity, and familiarity with the narrative of ‘The Marble Statue’ helps fill in the gaps (Brinkmann et al. 1997; Ferris 2000). A basic emotional trajectory lends the work the sense of a story. Threats and dangers are depicted along the way, but the cycle ends happily with the beloved. Schumann also chooses poems reminiscent of the fairytale setting of ‘The Marble Statue’. There is a wooded landscape in nine of the twelve poems. ‘Mondnacht’, ‘Zwielicht’ and ‘Frühlingsnacht’ all take place in darkness. The first and eighth songs, both called ‘In der Fremde’, emphasize alienation or unfamiliar surroundings; the sixth song’s title is ‘Schöne Fremde’. Eichendorff was primarily a lyrical poet. In ‘The Marble Statue’ as well as the poems of the Liederkreis, descriptions of nature use onomatopoeia and invoke ‘natural music’: leaves rustling, birds singing and water rushing. As one commentator puts it: ‘A key word for Eichendorff is ‘lauschen’, meaning an intent, almost devout, listening, and it is answered by ‘rauschen’, a word that covers a greater range of sounds that any English word can, but denotes, as in the poem ‘Lockung’ (‘Lure’), the sensual rustling of the natural world’ (Louth 2009: 79). This ‘rauschen’ of nature, which appears in seven of the twelve songs by Schumann, will resurface in Nietzsche’s later romantic celebration of the ‘Rausch’ of a Dionysian musical experience. Wagner’s Tannhäuser ‘The Marble Statue’ also illuminates significant romantic aspects of Richard Wagner’s ‘grosse romantische Oper’, Tannhäuser (1845). One of the sources for Wagner’s opera was the

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Tannhäuser saga in the 1806 collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn; Eichendorff almost certainly knew this saga and incorporated features of it into ‘The Marble Statue’ (Hanss 1989: 14). Therefore, there are similarities between Wagner’s opera and Eichendorff’s story because they have a common source. However, there are deeper connections. Like the story, the opera is based on a stark dualism that is subtly undermined. Tannhäuser is an artist who is seduced by Venus, and unlike Florio, succumbs. However, he escapes Venus in Act I by calling out to the Virgin Mary. While Florio experiences a rite of passage and emerges ‘reborn’, Tannhäuser is torn apart by his inner turmoil; unable to live with himself, he dies, albeit redeemed by the saintly Elisabeth. Musically, the dichotomy is presented at the outset in the Overture: chorale-style music that is steady, predictable and traditional. The music of the Venusburg that follows is free flowing, chromatic and more colourfully orchestrated. Musical keys are also used symbolically to reinforce the opposition. The opera begins in E major with Venus in possession and ends in Eb major, with the redemption of Tannhäuser by Elisabeth. The two keys are audibly juxtaposed in the song contest, when Wolfram’s courtly love song is interrupted by Tannhäuser’s praise of Venus and physical pleasure. Although the portrayal of the powers in play is undeniably schematic, upon closer inspection Tannhäuser can be seen to manifest an ambivalence that blurs the division between good and evil (Dahlhaus 1979a: 25–7). Like ‘The Marble Statue’, the opposites also sometimes become doubles. In performance, the roles of Venus and Elisabeth are frequently performed by the same singer. Another way that Wagner departs from a strict bifurcation of good and evil is the presence of a third kind of music, ‘natural’ music. In Act One, after being returned to the ‘real’ world, Tannhäuser experiences several extraordinary minutes of ‘natural’, ‘diegetic’ music, meaning music that one could encounter in the real world, not in the theatre, but also sounds not made by humans (Abbate 2001, 123–5). The orchestra (the extra-diegetic ‘soundtrack’) is silent as a shepherd sings and plays his pipe, which overlaps with singing pilgrims passing by as they make their way to Rome. The only accompaniment is the sound of cows shaking their cowbells. In this opera about music, ‘natural’ music is portrayed and described; for instance, Tannhäuser’s first speech recalls church bells. This spontaneous music represents something different from the artful songs by Tannhäuser and his fellow musicians. The presence of a third, natural realm, set off against the supernatural realm of Venus and the realm of social convention represented by Elisabeth, lends some ambiguity to Wagner’s message. More romantic oppositions Masculine versus feminine Following a basic assumption of modernity, the real, rational world for Eichendorff is a world of men, while the irrational, subjective sphere is the domain of woman. Venus is not just a woman; she is eroticism incarnate and the supreme possessor of the power of sexual seduction. Florio is attracted by her beauty, but also by her music making. When her power over him is broken, he recognizes that she is dangerous and evil. Tannhäuser’s relationship with Venus goes further than Florio’s. She expands his horizons not only with regard to pleasure but also in respect to his musical creativity, since he now has first-hand experience with the love he sings about.

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Christianity versus the supernatural Religion is treated as a field of struggle between forces of Christianity and pagan gods from Greek mythology, or supernatural forces associated with evil, the Devil. In the ‘Marble Statue’, a specifically Catholic Christianity is referenced by the descriptions of Bianca as a Madonna. Her rival is the Goddess of Love herself, Venus. This opposition serves to articulate Florio’s warring attractions towards nature versus culture: safety and containment versus danger and dissolution. Tannhäuser is faced with the same choices. In Wagner’s opera, Catholicism takes the stage when the pilgrims pass by, making their way to Rome. Pagan myths are given their scene at the beginning with nymphs, sirens and bacchantes running wild. Venus again represents the danger of losing oneself: Tannhäuser literally disappears from his companions during his time in the Venusberg. As we shall see, Wagner’s last opera Parsifal also thematizes the pull of a supernatural, seductive world on the knights, whose Christianity is depicted through their celebration of the sacraments. The first wave of anti-romanticism The philosophical critique of romanticism stems primarily from socio-political considerations. Romanticism, in the view of these critics, shirks responsibility for improving real life by escaping into an alternative world. Analogously, music is understood as a rejection of rational language in favour of the enjoyment of beautiful sounds. Music unleashes emotions, which can hinder the pursuit of the ongoing goals of improving the mind through education and understanding others’ point of view. This kind of anti-romanticism either attempts to minimize music’s power or wants to add a political dimension to music. The years around the 1848 revolutions marked the first groundswell of anti-romantic sentiment in music criticism (Pederson 1996; Garratt 2010). Those who called for a realistic politically engaged music directly addressed the question of whether music was inseparable from romanticism. One radical proposal was to create a new kind of democratic music through democratic procedures. Another solution, at the other end of the political spectrum, advised a return to classicism. However, after the failure of the revolutions in Europe in 1848–9, plans for the future of music similarly collapsed. Eventually, two main attitudes emerged to address the anti-romantic critique. The first did not dispute that music was romantic and that it drew forth a response that was primarily emotional; realistic content could be introduced, however, by supplementing music with words and ideas. The contrasting attitude disputed the restriction of music’s content to moods and feelings, and argued that art music also embodied structures that needed to be perceived intellectually. Richard Wagner adopted the former stance in his Zurich writings from 1849 to 1852. His solution was not to question music’s essentially romantic nature, but to supplement it with what it lacked, namely, ideas and political engagement. His presentation of this argument was laid out most fully in his 1851 treatise Opera and Drama. Yes, music is only emotion, he declared, and opera needs more than that to be intellectually and philosophically viable. Wagner’s Zurich writings as a whole are the most extended anti-romantic polemic against music in the nineteenth century. Eduard Hanslick’s famous book On the Musically Beautiful (1854) exemplifies the other response to anti-romanticism. He repeatedly and emphatically insisted that when we are discussing music, we are not talking about feelings: ‘feeling is nothing more than a secondary

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effect’ (1854, 5). As proof he pointed out that ‘the connection between a piece of music and our changes of feeling is not at all one of strict causation; the piece changes our mood according to our changing musical experiences and impressions’ (1854, 6). Since they considered themselves enemies, it can be confusing to see similarities in the arguments of Wagner and Hanslick. However, in the 1850s, they were more in agreement than they realized. They both attempted to defend music while accepting the binary oppositions (rational/irrational, thought/feeling, masculine/feminine) that situated music in a negative space. Hanslick’s most notorious and judgemental chapter, on what he called ‘pathological listening’, repeats charges against music that had been introduced by politically committed, anti-romantic writers before the revolutions. He condemned the pleasurable response to music as ‘elemental’ – that is, as an undeniably powerful but uncivilized and uncontrolled release of emotion. He located habits of pathological listening in historically primitive cultures, savages in faraway places such as ‘the South Seas’ and in music enthusiasts who used music as a drug for physical pleasure. To counter this, he proposed that ‘contemplative hearing is the only artistic, true form; the raw emotion of savages and the gushing of the music enthusiast can be lumped together in a single category contrary to it’ (1854, 63). His description of contemplative hearing was less detailed and did not go much further than calling for an alert mind that appreciated music for its own sake, that took in its beauty by contemplation of ‘sounding forms in motion’. He insisted, however, that contemplative listening, along with a scientific approach to the music itself and not our response to it, would ward off ‘the oldest accusation against music: that it enervates us, makes us flabby, causes us to languish’ (1854, 61). Offenbach’s Orfeé aux enfers Polemical anti-romanticism could be expressed in music as well as in music criticism. Jacques Offenbach’s creation of opéra bouffe in the 1850s can be seen as such a musical critique, from an angle that could be called neoclassical as much as anti-romantic. Rossini recognized this classical aspect in dubbing Offenbach the ‘Mozart of the Champs Elysées’ and Offenbach himself claimed kinship with composers of French opéra comique c.1760–80, especially Grétry (Everist 2009, 72–98). The writer Max Nordau also associated him with the classical by dubbing him ‘The Parisian Aristophanes’, referring to the ancient Greek dramatist who specialized in political satire. One way to see how strongly Offenbach rejected Wagner’s approach is to compare his practice to the procedures proposed in Opera and Drama. Wagner’s solutions to romanticism are countered by Offenbach doing the opposite (Janik 1991, 361–86). Whereas Wagner sought to draw attention away from the music itself, Offenbach specialized in catchy tunes that could take on a life of their own outside the dramatic setting. Wagner banned chorus and ensembles because they detracted from the words. Offenbach’s operettas introduced choruses and ensembles purely for the effect of musical variety. While Wagner wanted his audience to be spellbound, to suspend disbelief, Offenbach’s musical style calls attention to the artificiality of musical and theatrical conventions, with his parodies of other composers. Wagner’s theory of ‘Stabreim’ or ‘Versmelodie’ resulted in long passages of alliteration, sometimes unintentionally comical. Offenbach’s operettas, in contrast, openly delighted in childish word play, including onomatopoeia and vocalizations, such as the imitation of flies buzzing in Orfeé aux enfers. Other famous examples include Hélène’s identification of ‘L’homme à la pomme’ in La belle Hélène, a silly-sounding phrase repeated in mock dramatic style, and the militaristic General Boum’s

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introduction of himself with words imitating gun fire, a ‘piff, paff, pouf, et tara, pa pa poum’ in La Grand-Duchesse de Gérolstein. Offenbach flouts Wagner’s serious and ambitious prescriptions most explicitly in his choice of subject matter. Whereas Wagner’s requirement for opera to be philosophically important meant that it should be based on myths, relevant for all times and places, Offenbach adapted myths to his time period in order to satirize both antiquity and contemporary society. A comparison of Offenbach’s breakthrough work, Orfeé aux enfers (1858), with Tannhäuser highlights some striking similarities and significant differences. One scholar has argued that in the 1861 revision Wagner intentionally made associations between Tannhäuser and the Orpheus myth in the opening tableau (Revard 2009). Both Orpheus and Tannhäuser are legendary musicians. Eurydice is dubbed in the operetta the ‘image of Venus’. Unlike Venus, however, Eurydice does not find her lover’s music seductive. Rather than a god-given power, Orpheus’s music making is nothing more than the job he goes to every day. Orpheus and Eurydice agree to split up in order to pursue extramarital affairs. In contrast, Tannhäuser breaks with Venus in order to recover his moral and religious integrity. Both works depict a bacchanale: it functions as the finale for Orfeé and the opening scene for Tannhäuser. In Orfeé, the destination is hell because heaven is boring and the gods want to try spicy food, wine and orgies. Tannhäuser begins in the Venusburg where a bacchanale is underway, but the hero is already tired of the sensual pleasures on offer and can hardly wait to leave. Wagner provided a detailed description of the bacchanale for the 1861 Paris ballet version: From the far background a train of Bacchantes approach, who rush in among the pairs of lovers, inviting them to wild delights. By gestures of rapturous intoxication the Bacchantes excite the lovers to increasing license. The revelers rush together with ardent love-embraces. Satyrs and Fauns have appeared from the rocky clefts and now force themselves in their dance between the Bacchantes and the pairs of lovers. (Wagner 1916, 414) Wagner represents the erotic frenzy and bliss musically by using extremes of orchestral colour, texture and harmony. In contrast, the description of Orfeé’s Fourth Tableau (finale) specifies merely: ‘The Underworld. As the curtain rises, all the gods of Olympus and the Underworld are gathered round a table. They are crowned with flowers and are drinking. Bacchanale’ (Crémieux 1936). Eurydice’s Hymn to Bacchus is set as a bouncy, cheerful strophic song with a chorus, sung by a coloratura soprano. The bacchanale culminates in the energetic cancan: a duple metre kick-step, regular phrasing, simple harmonic progressions and infectiously repetitive tune. Neo-romanticism In the second half of the nineteenth century, romanticism took on a new lease on life as a consequence of the failure of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe. The resulting defeatist attitude about making the world a better place easily crossed over into a desire to escape from reality into a subjective, inner world of feelings. This neo-romanticism acquired philosophical legitimacy in the 1850s with the discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of will and his evaluation of music as the highest of the arts that had been originally published in 1819. Musical metaphysics in the later nineteenth century were inevitably coloured by

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Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as filtered through the writings and music of Wagner. In 1854, after he had closed out the series of his politically engaged Zurich essays (1849–52), Wagner first encountered Schopenhauer’s writings. They became critically important to his artistic and philosophical development because they enabled him to break out of his anti-romantic view of music. Although the political and philosophical critiques of romanticism had certainly not been refuted, they receded enough in importance to allow a resurgence of musical romanticism, or as Carl Dahlhaus called it, ‘neo-romanticism’ (1979b). Schopenhauer also influenced the writings, as well as the music, of composers whom Dahlhaus would call modernist. This is perhaps because Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and others were all centrally engaged with Wagner. What was it about Schopenhauer’s writings that made them so relevant to musical thought after 1850, decades after they were written? Naturally, composers would have been attracted to his claim that music was the highest of the arts, but Schopenhauer went far beyond this, asserting that music was on such a different level that literally nothing else in the world could compare to it. Music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more exactly, of the will’s adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. Accordingly, we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will. (1966, vol. 1, 262–3) These claims for music exactly fitted the cultural mood after 1850; the very aspect of music that had traditionally been seen as problematic, its inability to represent through pictures or words, came to be exalted as the quality that made it superior to mere representation of the world. Instead of trying to change society, artists could escape into a philosophically defensible alternative world through music. Another particular passage in The World as Will and Representation transfixed composers in the later nineteenth century: The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. (1966, vol. 1, 260) Wagner quoted this sentence in 1870 in his long essay, ‘Beethoven’. It also appears in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Mahler referred to it in his letters and it plays a key role in the argument presented by Schoenberg in his famous 1912 essay, ‘The Relationship to the Text’ (1975, 141–5). Composers must have found this passage so compelling because, first, it told them that musical creation revealed the innermost nature of the world. Music does not merely express beauty or feelings; it expresses the profoundest wisdom. Second, this creative process is not a conscious act, but rather something that occurs in an alternative state of consciousness, akin to being put to sleep by being ‘magnetized’. Perhaps anxious to maintain their authority against

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the emerging disciplines of musicology and music theory, composers were attracted to a view of music as not something that can be theorized, analysed or evaluated by the reasoning faculty. Schopenhauer’s description confers on the composer the importance that can hardly be claimed by any other kind of person and relieves the composer of having to account for his importance, because there is no way his music can be rationally explicated. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde Schopenhauer’s theory of music as the most direct human experience influenced Wagner’s changing understanding of how opera comes into being. He now proposed that dramatic action was just a surface manifestation generated by music as emotion. Wagner thus directly challenged the Hegelian framework that put thought before feeling: feeling is now privileged as the origin, that which compels thoughts and action. In his 1860 essay ‘The Music of the Future’, Wagner pronounced that in Tristan und Isolde, Life and death, the whole signification and existence of the external world, in this work depend entirely on the emotions of the soul. The whole affecting action becomes prominent only because it is demanded by the innermost sentiment and comes to light as it has been prepared in the depths of the soul. (1873, 40) We might conclude that because of this inner emotional origin, not much takes place on stage in Tristan – in terms of duration, the ‘action’ sequences (sword fights at the end of the second and third acts) take only a few minutes, while the remaining four hours or so of the opera involves working through the characters’ feelings through monologues, confrontations and discussions. Tristan is romantic in other ways as well. All of these discussions of inner states concern love and death and other familiar romantic binary oppositions. The real world versus the alternative world is musically and verbally depicted as literally the difference between night and day. The most traditional romantic imagery occurs at the beginning of the Act Two: King Marke’s hunt is the occasion for off-stage horns making hunting calls, an effect Wagner also used in Tannhäuser. There is a reference to the ‘natural’ music of a water fountain and Isolde attributes her situation to the goddess of love, named ‘Frau Minne’ in the German medieval version. Even the supernatural plays a role in the plot, with the drinking of the ‘magic’ love potion. The dualistic framework of Tristan is just as strong as in Tannhäuser (love/death, day/night, public/private), but Wagner musically undermines these oppositions with a more sophisticated treatment that continues to elude definitive interpretation. One example is the vision/light metaphor in the libretto and its corresponding leitmotif in the music. Although the ‘day’ leitmotif obviously stands for the real world, it appears in other contexts that prevent us from understanding it so simplistically. Tristan und Isolde also departs from some of the regular devices of earlier romantic writings and from Tannhäuser. The power of music is not a theme here; no singing contest or artists are involved. Perhaps most exceptionally among all of Wagner operas, in Tristan redemption is not found in woman or religion, but rather in sexual love between man and woman. The radically new aspects of both the music and the libretto of Tristan und Isolde can be traced to Wagner’s understanding of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic theory of the will (Chafe 2005). As Schopenhauer described it,

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The nature of man consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so on and on; in fact his happiness and well being consist only in the transition from desire to satisfaction . . .. Corresponding to this, the nature of melody is a constant digression and deviation from the keynote in a thousand ways . . .. in all these ways, melody expresses the many different forms of the will’s efforts, but also its satisfaction by ultimately finding again a harmonious interval, and still more the keynote. (1966, vol. 1: 260) Here Schopenhauer equates musical cadence with satisfaction of desire or the will, so a musical composition that mirrors life should never end, just as desires never ends until death (Bowie 2009: 247–9). Wagner’s imaginative musical portrayal of the will in the form of sexual arousal constitutes the ‘sound world’ of Tristan. Wagner also puts into practice Schopenhauer’s theory that music can represent more directly than any other medium extreme mental and physical states. Especially in the Third Act, Tristan’s final stages of life are portrayed in music: going in and out of consciousness, delirium, hallucination, heart beats. Tristan’s music begins with reminiscences from Act Two, perhaps representing an unconscious dream state that re-enacts his momentous coming together with Isolde and his terrible loss of King Marke’s trust. Tristan refers to his time in another world (unconsciousness) to the point of ‘Urvergessen’ (total lack of consciousness of the real world); this is audibly depicted as a move to a remote key, here D major, and a soft-as-possible dynamic marking (ppp). After a moment of almost silence, however, the desire motive (at ‘Wie schwand mir seine Ahnung?’) returns for first time in this act; this leads to a build-up of chromaticism and the music returns to full strength until Tristan collapses (‘Das Licht, wann löscht es aus?’). The delirium that follows (at ‘Das Schiff! Das Schiff! Dort streicht es am Riff! Siehst du es nicht?’) momentarily retreats into another dreamlike reminiscence section (‘Muss ich dich so versteh’n, du alte, ernste Weise’) and a slow intensification of all parameters, until he imagines himself blinded and burned by the sun (‘O dieser Sonne sengender Strahl’). A second collapse (at ‘Verflucht, wer dich gebraut!’) is followed by an ominous silence (‘was je Minne sich gewinnt’) where Kurwenal believes that Tristan has died, and then the resumption of a heartbeat as the desire motif finally returns (‘O Wonne, nein’). Finally, Tristan’s next monologue, a full hallucination (‘Und drauf Isolde’), is portrayed in a distinctly different way than the previous two states of altered consciousness. Rather than steadily increasing in intensity, Wagner keeps the music slow and regular, but somehow eerily unmoored through orchestration and tonality, until Tristan turns from a hallucinatory vision of Isolde (‘Ach Isolde, Isolde, wie schön bist du’) back to Kurwenal. The importance of this opera and the third act in particular cannot be underestimated as a source of inspiration for Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), heavily influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner, presents some of the familiar themes of romanticism, such as the rejection of the ‘real’ world in favour of a fascination with dreams, intoxication and music. What Nietzsche added to the mix was a characterization of modernity as the fatal embrace of scientific, rational thought. Nietzsche put all his hopes in the Dionysian force of music, specifically Wagner’s operas, to overcome modernity. The Birth of Tragedy is based on the assumption of

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the downfall of civilization due to fragmentation of the individual, which itself was not a new idea but central to the German concept of Bildung. He attacked the standard narrative, however, by locating the ‘perfect’ era (i.e. before the fall) in archaic Greece up to the middle of the 5th century BC, which he deemed an aesthetic culture. For Nietzsche, the downfall began with the period that had hitherto been considered the peak of Hellenic achievement, the period of Euripides and Socrates. Socrates is scandalously portrayed as the beginning of the fatal ‘disenchantment of the world’ – initiating an unhealthy, overly intellectual approach to the central questions about the meaning of life. Rather than Socrates, Nietzsche chooses Dionysus as his hero. Dionysus, the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Semele, was the god of wine, worshipped by female followers known as Bacchantes and male followers including satyrs (half-man, half-goat). Worshipping Dionysus through music making and dancing resulted in frenzied intoxication, Rausch. For Nietzsche, the significance of Rausch went far beyond pleasure. It dissolves the individual identity, which involves unbearable pleasure and pain. It is made bearable through representation. In the 6th century BC in Athens, festivals of Dionysus featured hymns called dithyrambs, which had originally been sung and danced by choruses of men disguised as satyrs, wearing masks and goatskins. These hymns had been performed in a circular area called orchestra (literally, ‘dancing place’), and in about 535 BC a dramatic aspect was added to this choral performance by an Athenian named Thespis, the ‘father of the drama’; in this sense one can say that theatre was born out of the cult of Dionysus (Hatab 2001). Nietzsche identified Dionysus with a fundamental irrationality essential to art. Raymond Geuss characterizes this as acknowledging: ‘that destructive, primitively anarchic forces are part of us (not to be projected into some diabolical Other), and that the pleasure we take in them is real and not to be denied’ (Geuss 1999, xxx). He claimed that in his time, only music still had a connection to Dionysus, as it had not yet succumbed to science: Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen which, having nothing in common with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture, can neither be explained nor excused by it, but which is rather felt by this culture as something terribly inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile – German music as we must understand it, particularly in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. (Geuss 1999, 119) Nietzsche further argued that Wagner’s music—specifically Tristan und Isolde—drew upon the same Rausch as the forces that had brought Ancient Greek tragedy into being. This musical polemic mystified and outraged his philological colleagues, who could only understand it as inappropriate and off-topic. After its publication, Nietzsche’s career in philology was effectively over before it even began. In the following decade, Nietzsche resigned his position, became alienated from Wagner, and repeatedly announced that he had turned against romanticism (Del Caro 1989). His Preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, entitled ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, excoriated his first book as embarrassingly romantic. Indeed, the Preface explicitly contradicts his own book and warns against current German music, which is Romanticism through and through and the most unGreek of all possible forms of art; furthermore, as a ruiner of nerves it is in the first rank,

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a doubly dangerous thing amongst a people who love drink and who honour obscurity as a virtue, particularly for its dual properties as a narcotic which both intoxicates and befogs the mind. (Geuss 1999: 10) Decadence Nietzsche played a major role in the late nineteenth-century emergence of the concepts of decadence and degeneration. In the Preface to The Case of Wagner (1967) he claimed: ‘nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence’. He used the French word, décadence, but associated it mainly with Wagner (Borchmeyer 1983: 632). The relationship of Nietzsche’s accusation of decadence to his earlier critiques of Wagner and romanticism is difficult. One scholar recently summed up what many have concluded: ‘in Nietzsche’s conceptual world and vocabulary, the terms romanticism, pessimism, modernity, and finally decadence are related in such an intricate fashion that an attempt to define each term in its own right seems an impossible or even useless enterprise’ (Gogröf-Voorhees 1999: 143). In The Case of Wagner the emphasis again is on Wagner as a ‘sickness’ from which Nietzsche says he has recovered: ‘My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses’ (1967, 155). At this late stage in his writing, as the chronically ill forty-four year old was approaching his final physical and psychological breakdown, he phrased the issue as a series of emotionally charged exclamations: ‘Is Wagner a human being at all? Isn’t he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches – he has made music sick’ (1967, 164). Nietzsche presented a provocative alternative to Wagner in the famous first sentence of The Case of Wagner: ‘Yesterday I heard—will you believe it? —Bizet’s masterpiece for the twentieth time’ (1967, 157). Nietzsche had indeed attended Bizet’s Carmen several times, but he had also rediscovered his passion for operetta. He had seen Offenbach’s La belle Hélène during his student days and had planned to write an essay on Offenbach back in 1868 (Love 1979). Now French operetta, especially Offenbach, took on a new significance as the opposite of everything German, romantic, northern, serious, and turgid. One could argue that his epigraph, ‘ridendo dicere severum’ (through what is laughable, say what is somber) applies better to Offenbach’s satires than Bizet’s lurid drama. For Nietzsche, Offenbach also served as a classical alternative to romanticism. Nietzsche’s love for what he called a classical style of music included that of his friend Heinrich Köselitz, who composed under the name Peter Gast. Although this composer never achieved success in his own day and has been considered a mediocre talent ever since, Nietzsche valued him as a light, cheerful antidote to Wagnerian decadence. Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Gast reached its peak just before his breakdown in 1889. He lavishly praised Gast’s opera Der Löwe von Venedig as Italian music for Germans and compared him favourably to Mozart. Degeneration Nietzsche used both decadence and degeneration in his quasi-physiological critique of Wagner’s music. Degeneration can be distinguished as the more ‘medical’ term, defined as hereditary mental and physical traits that deviate from the norm. It was used quasi-metaphorically so that various kinds of social groups and their cultural products could be described in the same manner as an individual organism. From the perspective of biology, degeneration could be viewed as atavism – the reversion to origins. It represents a shift from a more spiritual romantic

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organicism to the many scientific and quasi-scientific theories of primitive origins that flourished in the nineteenth century. Even music aesthetics was influenced by atavism, adding anthropological theories of an Urmusik to its formerly purely historical interest in the origins of music. Pre-linguistic expressive sounds, such as screaming, moaning, sighing, were studied as kinds of Urmusik. From the perspective of romantic aesthetics, Urmusik was the one and only source to draw upon for authentic, powerful music. However, for anti-romantics, all this inarticulate moaning was regressive – ‘primitive’ rather than ‘primal’. As early as 1860 the music historian Ambros used the term degeneration in relation to the influence of Liszt and Wagner in the development of music, which he compared to symptoms of a sick, superannuated organism (Ambros [1860] 1865, 174). Thomas Grey suggests going back even earlier, to Hanslick’s 1854 description of ‘pathological listening’, as a precursor to theories of a degeneration of music (Grey 2002). Max Nordau’s Degeneration (Entartung) from 1892 was the most popular ‘biomedical’ book on the downfall of art and culture at the end of the century. A Jewish medical doctor who spent the most significant part of his career as a journalist reporting to Vienna from Paris, Nordau wrote several popular books besides Degeneration. Nordau blamed aesthetically reprehensible art on the degeneration of society. Individuals succumbed to nervous illnesses as a consequence of the fatigue that came from the increased pace of modern life and the increasing use of narcotics to deal with it. Nordau used and expanded on Nietzsche’s complaints about Wagner as increasing exhaustion, causing overexcitement and hysteria. Thomas Grey notes that Nordau’s book was so popular because, ‘like the related concepts of hysteria and neurasthenia, that of degeneration provided the satisfaction of labeling, with apparent medical-scientific precision, elusive but nonetheless very acutely felt anxieties over the modern condition’ (Grey 2002, 87). Nordau counted Nietzsche and Wagner as examples of decadent artists and thinkers, even though he drew on Nietzsche for his understanding of decadence. This was just one example of the paradox of critics of decadence being examples of decadence. As one writer recently put it, Nietzsche’s critique of decadence and modernity ‘rests on the unresolved and unresolvable paradox of being part of that which one condemns’ (Gogröf-Voorhees 1999, 139). In The Case of Wagner Nietzsche acknowledged: ‘I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is, a decadent’ (1967, 155). Wagner on decadence and degeneration Wagner also deplored decadence, although one could argue that his solutions only intensified the problems. His late theoretical writings on regeneration and his last opera, Parsifal, represent this aesthetic and moral quicksand. Wagner’s late writings appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter, a journal founded in 1878 for the ‘friends of Wagner’. The journal’s concerns went beyond the musical to advocate regeneration through a vegetarian diet to reverse the decline of nations due to the consumption of meat. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was restated in biological terms, as a call to prevent Jewish assimilation that would pollute so-called ‘Aryan’ bloodlines. Wagner claimed that Jesus was Aryan and that the Jewish race’s blood had become tainted by mixed marriages and meat. Wagner’s Jesus preached asceticism (renunciation of the will). At the same time, Wagner himself continued to eat meat and apparently deny himself nothing. In general, Wagner’s late works are typical of reactions to decadence; they had the effect of not correcting the problem, but rather intensifying it. It was the emphasis on health, for instance, that led to calls for racial purity and eugenics.

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Wagner’s understanding of the problem of degeneration explains to some extent the scenario for Parsifal. The ‘sickness’ in Parsifal is literal: Amfortas has a bleeding wound that won’t heal and his fellow knights are dying out; their vitality is at stake. The extraordinary music written for the character of Kundry represents and includes human pre-linguistic expressive sounds, such as the scream and groan that mark her entrance in the first and third acts, respectively. Wagner seems to have intended the end of the opera to point to the way to ‘redeem’ degenerate society. Nevertheless, this opera had for Nietzsche and many others all the characteristics of decadence (Dreyfus 2010). It also exhibits many traditional features of earlier romantic works. Cosima Wagner noted in her diary that Wagner believed ‘Tannhäuser, Tristan, and Parsifal belong together’ (quoted in Ashman 1988, 8). The traditional romantic aspects that these three operas share include: a basis in medieval legend, supernatural elements and the stark distinction of the world of man (represented by diatonic, rhythmically regular music) versus a world of seductive, dangerous women who cause men to betray ideals of honor and duty (musically more chromatic and free-flowing). Compared to Tannhäuser especially, further shared themes include the use of chorales, men’s chorus and marches; a connection of the world of men with organized religious communities; and a female character who serves as a composite of various qualities associated with the feminine, primal and the sensual. In terms of plot, furthermore, the most important ‘event’ in the opera occurs when Parsifal is ‘awakened’ by Kundry’s kiss. The kiss paradoxically has the effect of preventing the female’s sexual seduction from being completed, and in this sense is comparable to the ‘song of pious bent’ that saves Florio in ‘The Marble Statue’ and the miraculous effect of pronouncing the names of the Virgin Mary and Elisabeth for Tannhäuser. Late romanticism, decadence and the twentieth century The concept of decadence helps us sort out a musicological controversy. Has nineteenth-century romanticism run its course by 1890, with the works of Mahler and Richard Strauss ushering in a new era of musical modernism? Or should the period 1890–1914 be viewed as a continuation of late nineteenth-century romanticism in music? Carl Dahlhaus, the pre-eminent musicologist in postwar Germany, vehemently defended the first position (Dahlhaus 1979b, 103–5). Speaking from the perspective of a less Germanocentric musicology, Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music (2005), has recently spoken out in favour of the second. Dahlhaus downplays the importance of decadence while Taruskin uses it in only in a limited sense; he prefers the concept ‘maximalism’ for music often called ‘late romantic’ (2005, Vol. 4, 5). Certainly, within the terrain I have mapped out above, Taruskin’s representative ‘maximalist’ composer, Gustav Mahler, exhibits many romantic traits: a preference for romantic poets from earlier in the century and for the familiar themes of nature, religion, the power of music, love and death (Downes 2010, 194). Another romantic hallmark was Mahler’s commitment to the irrational source of musical creativity, which was manifested in many statements, such as this description of composing: ‘The inception and creation of a work are mystical from beginning to end; unconsciously, as if in the grip of command from outside oneself one is compelled to create something whose origin one can scarcely comprehend afterwards’ (Bauer-Lechner 1980, 30). However, we need to keep in mind that Nietzsche and Wagner also served as harbingers of modernism by laying bare the contradictions within romanticism. Although a passionate spokesman for anti-romanticism, Nietzsche confessed that he was incurably affected by the

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romantic worldview, and the same can surely be said for Wagner and Mahler. Taruskin may be hinting at these contradictions when he describes the maximalist project as an ‘ultimate failure’ and connects Mahler and his contemporaries to a decadent phase (2005, Vol. 4, 22). Decadence may therefore best be described as a double consciousness concerning the values and limits of romanticism. Two world wars, two waves of anti-romanticism Within the terminological boundaries I have sketched out, elements of romanticism persist over the entire twentieth century and into the present. On the other hand, the effect of the First World War in dramatically deflating the giant romantic bubble can hardly be underestimated. Modernism, neoclassicism and Neue Sachlichkeit can all be interpreted in varying degrees as reactions to a romantic ideology whose irrational mystical powers seemed to bear some responsibility for the war. Similarly, the Second World War produced an even stronger reaction against musical romanticism. Post-war serialism can be seen as an attempt to eliminate all perceived romantic elements of music. Anti-romanticism remained a strong force even through the Cold War. It has only been in the last twenty years that musicologists have been rewriting the history of the twentieth century and discovering a continuous tradition of romantic music that survived all of these backlashes. Romanticism, it appears, cannot be stamped out. It continues to spark debate as one of the foundational ideas in the aesthetics of music. Bibliography of works cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2001. In Search Of Opera. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ambros, A. H. [1860] 1865. Culturhistorische Bilder aus dem Musikleben der Gegenwart. 2nd edn. Leipzig: H. Matthes. Ashman, Mike. 1988. ‘Tannhäuser’ – An Obsession’, in Nicholas John, ed. Tannhäuser (English National Opera Guide 39). New York: Riverrun Press, 7–15. Bauer-Lechner, Natalie. 1980. Recollections of Gustav Mahler. trans. D. Newlin. London: Faber. Borchmeyer, Dieter. 1983. ‘Nachwort’, in Dieter Borchmeyer, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag. ––––– 1994. Weimarer Klassik: Portrait einer Epoche. Weinheim, Germany: Belz Athenäum. Bowie, Andrew. 2009. ‘Romanticism and Music’, in Nicholas Saul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 243–55. Brinkmann, Reinhold, ed. 1997. Schumann und Eichendorff: Studien zum Liederkreis Opus 39 (Musik-Konzepte 95). Munich: Edition Text + Kritik. Chafe, Eric. 2005. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. New York: Oxford University Press. Crémieux, Hector. 1936. Orphée aux Enfers. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1979a. Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. M. Whittall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––––– 1979b. ‘Neo-Romanticism’, 19th-Century Music, 3: 97–105. ––––– 1988. Klassische und romantische Musik Ästhetik. Laaber: Laaber Verlag. Del Caro, Adrian. 1989. Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Downes, Stephen. 2010. Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, Lawrence. 2010. Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich. 1996. Musik im Abendland. Munich: Piper. Eichendorff, Joseph von. [1819] 1983. ‘The Marble Statue’, trans. Frank G. Ryder, in Germany Literary Fairy Tales. New York: Continuum. Everist, Mark. 2009. ‘Jacques Offenbach: The Music of the Past and the Image of the Present’, in A. Fauser and M. Everist, eds. Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 72–98. Ferris, David. 2000. Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Romanticism/anti-romanticism • 187 Garratt, James. 2010. Music, Culture, and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, Raymond. 1999. ‘Introduction’ to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxx. Gogröf-Voorhees, A. 1999. Defining Modernism: Baudelaire and Nietzsche on Romanticism, Modernity, Decadence and Wagner. New York: Peter Lang. Grey, Thomas. 2002. ‘Wagner the Degenerate: Fin de siècle cultural “pathology” and the anxiety of modernism’, Nineteenth-Century Studies, 16: 73–92. Hamilton, John T. 2009. ‘Music on Location: Rhythm, Resonance, and Romanticism in Eichendorff’s Marmorbild’, Modern Language Quarterly, 70: 195–221. Hanslick, Eduard. 1854. On the Musically Beautiful, trans. G. Payzant, 1986. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Hanss, K. 1989. Joseph von Eichendorff, Das Marmorbild und Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts: Interpretationen. Munich: Oldebourg. Hatab, Lawrence. 2001. ‘Apollo and Dionysus: Nietzschean Expressions of the Sacred’, in Weaver Santaniello, ed. Nietzsche and the Gods. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 45–56. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming. New York: Continuum. Janik, Allan. 1991. ‘Saint Offenbach’s Post-Modernism’, in T. Steiert, ed. ‘Der Fall Wagner’: Ursprünge und Folgen von Nietzsches Wagner-Kritik. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 361–86. Kohlenbach, Margarete. 2009. ‘Transformations of German Romanticism, 1830–2000’, in Nicholas Saul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 257–80. Love, F. R. 1979. ‘Nietzsche, Madness and Music’, Music & Letters, 60: 186–203. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1921. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A. Ludovici. London: Heinemann. ––––– 1967. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Pederson, Sanna. 1996. ‘Romantic Music under Siege in 1848’, in I. Bent, ed. Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 57–74. Prawer, Siegbert. 1970. ‘Introduction’, in Prawer, ed. The Romantic Period in Germany: Essays by Members of the London University Institute of Germanic Studies. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1–16. Revard, Stella. 2009. ‘Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Dionysian Tannhäuser’, Ars Lyrica: Journal of the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relations, 18: 105–14. Safranski, Rudiger. 1992. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Eine Biographie. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Samson, Jim. 2001. ‘Romanticism’, in Sadie, S. ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan. Vol. 21: 596–603. Sayre, Robert and Löwy, Michael. 1984. ‘Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism’, New German Critique 32: 42–92. Schmitt, Carl. 1991. Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. ‘The Relationship to the Text’, in Leonard Stein, ed., Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. London: Faber & Faber, 141–5. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1966. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. trans. E. F. Payne. New York: Dover. Taruskin, Richard. 2005. The Oxford History of Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Thym, Jurgen. 2004. ‘Reconfiguring the Lied’, in J. Parsons, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Lied. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 120–41. Wagner, Richard. 1873. The Music of the Future, trans. E. Dannreuther. London: Schott & Co. ––––– 1916. Sämtliche Schriften, Vol. 11. 6th edn. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 414–19.

9 Jazz – avant-garde – tradition Kenneth Gloag

Introduction Jazz, since its first moments of emergence, has been intimately linked with, and described through, images of progress, radical change and new frontiers.1 Early forms of jazz were shaped by the encounters between an essentially oral musical culture and modernity as defined by the new technologies of recording. At various stages of the historical development of the music there have been profound shifts, marked transformations and, most notably, ideological conflicts around the tensions between the old and the new, tradition and innovation. The focus on innovation in jazz generates a close interface between this music and a concept of avant-gardism and poses questions about how the tradition of this unique musical context is both constructed and interpreted. In pursuing questions of the relevance of a concept of an avant-garde in relation to jazz this chapter will ‘improvise’ on some current literature on jazz and, more generally, existing theoretical reflections upon, and models of, avant-garde cultural practices. Three specific jazz musics that have been described as avant-garde – Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton2 – are invoked as reflections of the processes and problems involved in defining an avant-garde, a term that, when used in relation to jazz, ‘obscures as much as it reveals’ (Kelley 1999, 136). It is notable that some of the most meaningful attempts to outline a theory of an avant-garde came at a historical moment – the 1960s – at which some jazz musicians were producing some of the most intensely difficult and provocative avant-garde music imaginable as part of what very quickly became known as the ‘new thing’, a new music in an avant-garde moment.3 However, this literature was, in effect, not listening. I refer in passing to Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde, first published in English in 1968, and Peter Bürger’s similarly titled work originally published in 1974, neither of which deals directly with music, but both, in different ways, grapple with the problematic issues of defining any cultural practice or context as avantgarde. There is evidently some form of critical consensus as to what constitutes an avant–garde, with the aforementioned qualities of radical change and progress forming integral parts of recurring definitions based on what Jim Samson describes as ‘connotations of frontiers, leadership, unknown territory and risk’, all of which are implicit in the original military terminology of the advanced guard (Samson 2001, 246; see also van den Berg 2009). René Girard highlights ‘inconsistency’ as a ‘major intellectual virtue of the avant-garde’ and it is clearly feasible to substitute creative practice for intellectual virtue (Girard 2008, 237). The sense of the unpredictable that is implicit in Girard’s ‘inconsistency’, the element of shock, or at least surprise, is a common presence in most creative contexts that have been described as avant-garde, leading to an assumed

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rupture with the pattern of consistency implicit in tradition. This rupture can be interpreted as a ‘state of rebellion against the cultural mainstream, a state expressed in its dedication to provocation, controversy, and shock’ (Adlington 2009, 3). These descriptions outlined above ‘accompanied the term as it was appropriated for and by artists’ (Samson 2001, 246). The process of appropriation highlighted by Samson is generally seen to be located within twentiethcentury culture following on from strong precursors in the nineteenth century,4 with specific moments and movements such as, for example, Dada and Surrealism in the visual arts during and after the First World War, or the emergence of the post-Second World War avant-gardism of composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen through their association with Darmstadt, elevated as striking instances of an avant-garde moment in both theory and practice.5 While these moments, among others, share something in common through their provocative stance in relation to history and tradition, there are profound differences. In the case of Dada the essentially anti-art position it adopts becomes antagonistic towards art as an end in itself and suggests a desire for a point of contact between art and life, a desire upon which Bürger builds a great deal of his interpretation. In contrast, the high-art aspirations of an aesthetic autonomy as enshrined in the music and polemics of Darmstadt positions an avant-garde practice as effectively an end in itself. That the same terminology of avant-garde can appear to work for very different examples, such as Dada and Darmstadt, suggests something of the basic paradox that is situated at the centre of any attempted theorization of an avant-garde, a paradox that suggests that the concept is both more plural and pliable than is often suggested by the singular definition of the avantgarde and that the co-existence of several, often very different avant-gardes will begin to subvert the claims made by and for such a concept in both theory and practice. The polarity formed between these two admittedly different avant-garde ideologies and practices, Dada and Darmstadt, and the tension between the plural and the singular, is now available for reinterpretation through other cultural and critical contexts, including jazz music. How a construction of an avant-garde in either its singular or plural versions is situated in relation to other concepts, primarily that of modernism, involves a much wider set of issues. For Poggioli the avant-garde is effectively situated within modernism, using the terms almost interchangeably: his somewhat standard response sees the avant-garde as that which leads modernism but does nothing to critique the ideological essence of that concept.6 In contrast, Bürger makes a more complex and subtle move towards a differentiation between modernism and the avant-garde. For Bürger, modernism perpetuated the hierarchical distinction between so-called high and low culture and the ‘historically specific avant-garde’7 is therefore defined as an attack on the institutions and ideas that underpinned this distinction, effectively situating itself as a critical gesture towards modernism’s accommodation with prevailing ideological and institutional orthodoxies. It is also notable that through his exclusive focus on Dada, particularly the work of Marcel Duchamp, Bürger articulates a somewhat singular representation of avantgarde cultural practices. While wanting to resist falling into the trap of collapsing potentially different concepts – avant-garde, modernism – into a singular totality, in contrast to Bürger’s positioning of an avant-garde as a critical reflexive gesture towards modernism, the more seemingly routine view of an avant-garde as effectively the sharp edge of modernism remains a feasible interpretive strategy. This sharp edge helps give modernism its own sense of internalized difference and diversity, and therefore places limitations around the conflation of modernisms into the alleged metanarrative as claimed by some postmodern theory. This interpretation of the positioning of

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the avant-garde on the edge of modernism generates its own critical distance from the interchange of terms active in Poggioli’s account. However, this sharp edge, in itself, requires further comment. Richard Murphy’s description of the avant-garde serving ‘as the political and revolutionary cutting-edge of the broader movement of modernism, from which it frequently appears to be trying with difficulty to free itself’ is an effective summary and, as will become evident, one that lends itself directly to jazz music (Murphy 1999, 3). On this account, the avant-garde is again positioned on the edge of modernism. It may try to escape beyond the edge, but this is a move loaded with difficulties and may ultimately be conditioned by either failure or, alternatively, the ‘escape’ beyond modernism into a somewhat ‘uncritical’ postmodernism. The initial image of an avant-garde that struggles to free itself from modernism is a vivid reflection of the way in which jazz practices identified as avant-garde, particularly in the 1960s, are closely intertwined with images of freedom, with that concept of freedom defined in musical terms as the attempt to free the music from the conventions and expectations of a modern jazz.8 However, the distinction that Bürger seeks to draw between modernism and avant-garde needs to remain in play and will become relevant for jazz in that the critical noises made by some jazz musicians, particularly in the 1960s, appeared at the time as a culturally dissonant gesture that not only radically questioned its own musical practices but also critiqued the institutionalized economic frameworks around the music in the form of jazz clubs, festivals, record labels, etc. and looked to transcend that framework through wider notions of a cultural and musical freedom, a process of transcendence that was already active in the mobility of jazz music between ‘low’ entertainment and ‘high’ art form.9 Bebop: the ‘first jazz avant-garde’ The image that Murphy invokes, of an avant-garde practice that seeks, with great difficulty, to extend itself beyond a modernist context and aesthetic is compelling when placed in relation to jazz music, with the radical innovations of Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, articulating a sense of excess in relation to what had become recognized as a modern jazz in the form of bebop as defined by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s (see DeVeaux 1997). This suggestion of ‘excess’ in effect becomes the attempted move ‘beyond’. However, bebop was already situated as the foundational moment at which jazz becomes modern and, in most accounts, by extension, avant-garde, with the two terms – modernism and avantgarde – converging into the same interpretative process, a move that is, as will be clear from the discussion thus far, consistent with the work of Poggioli and others. In the words of Bernard Gendron, ‘it is bebop that gets credit in the jazz canon for being the first modernist jazz, the first jazz avant-garde, the first jazz form in which art transcends entertainment’ (Gendron 2002, 143). Bebop assumes this position on the basis of the new complexity and sense of departure that this music articulates and is extended through its influence on later musicians. The common, standard image of bebop is that of a music formed away from the public gaze within a context of closed, private experimentation during the early to mid 1940s. Jazz pioneers such as pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, drummer Max Roach, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, among others, redefined the harmonic essence and rhythmic intensity of jazz ‘in the hothouse atmosphere of no holds-barred competition’ (Gendron 2002, 143) during after-hours jam sessions in venues such as Monroe’s and Minton’s in Harlem, New York, resulting in a highly romanticized image that repeats recurrent stereotypical accounts of avantgarde performance moments and situations.10 There is also a certain mystique about this music

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that adds further to the construction of an image of this particular set of jazz practices as a moment of avant-garde experimentation that could only be fully comprehended and absorbed at some point in the future. Bebop can also be situated as a point of convergence between conceptions of avant-garde and autonomy. Jazz may be an essentially social music formed on human experience and defined by its search for freedom, but this apparently sealed, selfreflexive context and practice generates a contrary position, that of social isolation in conjunction with an introspective preoccupation with the radical transformation of form and content. Modern jazz is an instrumental music, at times casually referred to as ‘abstract’. In the case of bebop, and much of the music that comes after it, the titling of specific compositions is often rather random, bordering on the arbitrary, which suggests a certain lack of concern with external references and drives the attention towards the internal characteristics of the music. While Dizzy Gillespie would move into a mainstream jazz context, producing a modified, accessible form of bebop and repositioning himself as more of an ‘entertainment’ figure than avant-garde experimenter, it was Parker who sustained the aura of genius, one that was marked by tragedy,11 resulting in a personal identity that conspired with the complex nature of the music to construct this now generalized image of an avant-garde art form. However, if the progressive, boundary-pushing nature of Parker’s music suggests an avant-garde practice, this was always a music already deeply marked by tradition and would remain so. All the key bebop musicians were trained and developed within past and current jazz practices, and the dependency on existing forms – 12-bar blues and the 32-bar chorus – as recurring jazz archetypes rooted the music in the very conventions from which it seemed to be trying to break free. Any number of specific recordings could be used to illustrate these points, but one telling example is Parker’s ‘Now’s the Time’ (1945). This track features Parker (alto saxophone) with a young Miles Davis (trumpet) and the standard rhythm section. Following an interestingly dissonant exchange between piano and bass as introduction, it settles into a 12-bar formal pattern and is set in a relaxed swing-style tempo. While ‘Now’s the Time’ may be merely an interesting exception, it does effectively highlight the powerful presence of a set of conventions – formal and stylistic – that were already ingrained in a tradition of jazz music. However, other recordings from the same period articulate a more powerful dialectic between innovation and tradition, a process that begins to distance the music from any pure understanding of it as avant-garde while still continuing to pose provocative questions of the tradition. One of the most notable examples is Parker’s ‘Ko-Ko’, recorded at the same sessions as ‘Now’s the Time’ in November 1945. ‘Ko-Ko’, as is widely known, is based on the reworking of an existing song, ‘Cherokee’, a well-known jazz standard written by Ray Noble and successfully recorded by Charlie Barnet in 1939, with this process of reworking highlighting the bebop practice of radical reinvention of existing materials.12 In this process of reinvention the formal structure, which consists of a 64-four bar shape that is derived from the 32-bar chorus, is transformed through daring chord alterations and substitutions, and played by Parker and Gillespie at an intense and virtuosic tempo, with the original source reduced to a somewhat faint trace. ‘Ko-Ko’ is a recording for which great claims are made, with Garry Giddins, for example, describing it as ‘the seminal point of departure for jazz in the postwar era’ (quoted in DeVeaux 1997, 365). The point of departure as defined by the individuality and originality of this recording may be close to the essential avant-garde spirit of an intentional ‘inconsistency’ as claimed by Girard, but, while it does work through this process of radical reinvention, it also continues, through the now distant presence of the precursor, to situate both the material and the practice within the evolving parameters of the jazz tradition. The instrumentation on this recording:

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alto sax (Parker), with trumpet, rhythm section of piano, bass and drums, very quickly became a regular modern jazz (bebop) ensemble that allowed for the rapid interchange of ideas and heightening of intensity through a basic sequence of events defined as theme (‘head’) – solos – theme. This form, material and ensemble rapidly became standardized, an instantly recognizable framework that, rather than looking towards the continuing experimentation that is synonymous with an avant-garde art, was very quickly nailed down within its own generic boundaries. ‘KoKo’ may be a definitive example of bebop, but in providing that point of definition it also becomes the generic and stylistic marker. Of course, this in itself does not invalidate the resulting music, and many of Parker’s recordings still sound highly original, nor does it automatically deconstruct the aura of avant-gardism that accrues to it. However, if this was an example of an avant-garde music, then it was so for a remarkably short time, a brief moment at most. This music continued to exert a legacy of influence, a factor that has already been alluded to and which remains of significance, with this influence, it could be argued, shaping the future in a way that is consistent with most definitions of avant-garde. In exerting this influence, however, it also looked to the definition and perpetuation of a musical tradition; in doing so it formed a central part of the emergent jazz canon.13 In itself this moment would seem to suggest the possibility of an avant-garde art while resisting the teleological drive implicit within the ideologies that define and envelop the concept through the establishment of its own generic framework and stylistic identity that carried powerful traces and shaped future reflections of the evolution of this music as tradition. Free jazz Although it articulates interacting patterns of similarity and difference in relation to bebop, alto-saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s music emerged already different, complex, but also accessible through the immediacy of the recording process.14 Coleman himself seems to have been already marked by difference. His early musical experiences were scarred by a sense of failure and indifference, with only marginal contact with an older generation of jazz musicians or participation in regular performance situations. This ‘outsider’ status operates in a way that is similar to the figure of tragic genius as presented by Parker: Coleman as ‘other’. However, Coleman’s emergence at the end of the 1950s presented a music that is being formed with remarkable rapidity and results in an immediacy of impact. In fact, from a certain perspective, this was a music that, complete in itself, seemed to come from nowhere. Coleman’s New York debut performances at the Five Spot in November 1959 generated intense debate about this new music, much of it acrimonious, with musicians and critics divided over the merits of Coleman’s innovations. However, this impact was, for some jazz musicians, critics and listeners, highly positive. According to Gendron, to Coleman’s ‘proponents’, he ‘represented a muchneeded new development in jazz, opening a new field of activity, after the great innovations of bebop had turned into cliché (Gendron 2009, 211). The suddenness, the ‘inconsistency’ of the moment projected against the consistency of convention and tradition, generated an aura of avant-gardism, the shock of the new. One of the most significant critical voices in the debates about this music in its own time, and with a remarkable legacy, was Amiri Baraka, a radical writer and political activist whose antagonistic response to a white cultural mainstream can be defined as avant-garde. In his book Blues People, first published in 1963, and therefore providing an immediacy of response to recent developments in the music, Baraka describes these developments as ‘for lack of a more

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specific term, “avant-garde”’, and mentions Coleman as well as the pianist Cecil Taylor in this context. According to Baraka: The implications of this music are extraordinarily profound, and the music itself, deeply and wildly exciting. Music and musician have been brought, in a manner of speaking, face to face, without the strict and often grim hindrances of overused Western musical concepts; it is only the overall musical intelligence of the musician which is responsible for shaping the music. It is, for many musicians, a terrifying freedom. (Baraka 1963, 224–7) For Baraka, the free jazz of Coleman, and others, was a rejection of received notions about musical forms and content, not just from within the jazz tradition but projected against ‘Western’ concepts, a proposal that positions the debate on Baraka’s own political terms. However, in the context of this chapter, what is most immediately notable is his proposal that the resulting freedom is ‘terrifying’. I read this as a statement about avant-garde art as sublime, the movement away from normal modes of understanding and interpretation through the unpredictable yet intentional ‘inconsistency’ of a new creative force. Coleman’s music readily and quite deliberately identified itself with avant-gardist images of change and progress through titles such as The Change of the Century, Tomorrow is the Question and The Shape of Jazz to Come (all recorded in 1959), or project a declaration of otherness (Something Else, 1958) and otherness in relation to ownership (This is Our Music, 1960–1).15 Coleman clearly sought to define himself as engaging in a process of ‘making it new’. For example, in his liner notes to Change of the Century, he states: Some of the comments about my music made me realize . . . that modern jazz, once so daring and revolutionary, has become, in many respects, a rather settled and conventional thing. The members of my group and I are now attempting a break-through to a new, freer conception of jazz, one that departs from all that is ‘standard’ and cliché in ‘modern’ jazz. (Coleman 1960) However, while this may draw attention to the departure, or break, with the past, the fact that it comes in the form of a self-legitimizing, self-reflexive statement, seems to begin to draw attention to the highly constructed discourse around this music, a process of construction that record companies and musicians conspired in through promotional images (cover art), titles and descriptions (liner notes). While it sought to depart from all that is ‘standard’ in modern jazz and position itself on the sharp edge of modernism, Coleman’s music also still sounded as a meaningful reflection of an evolving jazz tradition, even if this was not fully evident to some at the time. Three specific tracks are now isolated for further discussion: ‘Lonely Woman’ (from The Shape of Jazz to Come), ‘Blues Connotation’ and ‘Beauty is a Rare Thing’ (both from This is Our Music). ‘Lonely Woman’, as the title already indicates, suggests a certain mode of isolation and distance, and the music articulates the dialogic relationship between past and present through its repositioning of the aura of alienation which envelops the blues, with the blues defined as the source from which tradition is both defined and departed. This track begins with the bass firmly grounding the music on D, and as the initial theme revolves around D minor it is possible to hear this as a reflection of the repetition of the past in the form of a recognisable tonality.

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However, the lines that Coleman and Don Cherry unfold across this bass give a very different perspective to the overall effect of the track. This is, through its apposite title and sound, a music that signifies its own sense of isolation, one that may be heard as an echo of the alienated subject of modernity. However, the reference to the blues as a historical and cultural source brings the problems of defining a jazz avant-garde back into focus. ‘Lonely Woman’ may form part of The Shape of Jazz to Come but it is clearly marked by what it is claimed to be seeking to depart from: tradition, in this instance, as defined as the source. This sense of origin is present, and perhaps more clearly defined, in other Coleman recordings from this period. For example, ‘Blues Connotation’ gives a clear indication of Coleman’s relationship to the blues and its position as a contributing source to his own evolving musical language, while ‘Bird Food’ (from Change of the Century) can, in contrast, be heard as Coleman’s appropriation of Charlie Parker as a precedent for his own project. Ajay Heble accurately interprets these titles as reflecting Coleman’s relationship to the past and his own sense of origin: Coleman has always been paradoxically rooted in the very traditions from which he seems to depart. This rootedness – exemplified in song titles such as ‘Blues Connotation’, ‘When Will the Blues Leave’, ‘Monk and the Nun’, ‘Bird Food’, and ‘The Legend of Bebop’ – problematizes any simple linear narrative of the music. (Heble 2000, 51) In other words, such retrospective glances prevent a straightforward positioning of Coleman as post-bebop and pre-whatever might come next within a neat chronological narrative of jazz history. The sound of ‘Blues Connotation’ is clearly within the jazz tradition, with the consistent tempo defined by bass and drums supporting the improvisations of Coleman and Cherry. The track begins with the initial theme played by both. The second, and defining, element is a long solo played by Coleman himself. Supported by Haden’s bass, this solo becomes increasingly fragmentary, brief ideas are repeated and expanded, and the impression is created of a developing fragility to the linear process. As the line develops, the absence of vertical harmony, a defining absence of Coleman’s music, becomes increasingly evident. The physicality of Coleman’s approach also comes more into focus as he explores the upper registers of the instrument. If the opening gesture seemed to repeat an essential jazz sound and substance, Coleman’s solo plays with the possibility of difference, or distance, to that essence. Coleman’s solo does not seem to conclude; rather it is replaced by a very short trumpet solo by Cherry. The brief duration of this solo adds to the fragmentary nature of the recording. Rather than developing or extending the material, this solo acts as a moment of contrast, perhaps interruption, following Coleman’s extended linear exploration. The sense of fragmentation and juxtaposition is heightened further by Blackwell’s drum solo, which emerges suddenly from the point at which Cherry’s trumpet line effectively disappears. The recording is completed by the return of the original theme, which now provides a thematic frame to the improvised solos of Coleman, Cherry and Blackwell. In doing so it returns the focus to the form and format of Parker’s bebop within which this return to beginning was a defining characteristic. It is notable that the improvisations on this track are individual rather than collective. Coleman is still operating within the recognizable boundaries of modern jazz as defined by the role of the soloist, while simultaneously representing difference through the interrogations of these boundaries, an interrogation that, on ‘Blues Connotation’

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is formed by juxtaposition, fragmentation and sonority. In other words, although it acknowledges its tradition it leaves that tradition estranged, defamiliarized. When considered within the album (This is Our Music) as a whole, the position of ‘Blues Connotation’ becomes more significant. It appears as the opening track on the album, with its references to jazz history perhaps positioned as a moment of relative accessibility. However, the power of contrast through juxtaposition active in ‘Blues Connotation’ becomes enlarged through the contrast formed between it and the second track ‘Beauty is a Rare Thing’. If ‘Blues Connotation’ projected a sufficient level of repetition to sustain a location within the recognizable boundaries of jazz while constructing a dialogue between past and present, ‘Beauty is a Rare Thing’ would seem to leave these boundaries far behind. In contrast, this track begins with what sounds like an already improvised solo by Coleman but within the overall shape acts as ‘theme’. This initial gesture is also free from any recognizable repetitive temporality. Blackwell’s drums are effectively textural rather than rhythmic, while Haden’s bass plays long sustained notes, thus suggesting a harmonic framework, but which also adds to the absence of any rhythmic consistency. During Coleman’s solo statement Cherry introduces some fragmentary gestures in the background, which then emerge as a dialogue with Coleman. This track has no real audible sense of structure. It does not follow any pattern of theme/solo; rather it is defined through its texture and dialogues. Ultimately what draws this music back into the context of jazz is timbre, with the sound of saxophone, trumpet (albeit estranged), bass and drums providing a certain timbral familiarity with the conventions and expectations of jazz music. ‘Lonely Woman’, ‘Blues Connotation’ and ‘Beauty is a Rare Thing’ are all marked by difference in the extent to which they represent varying degrees of distance to jazz as it was commonly conceived at the time. Although in each case the precedent is suggested, in terms of the musical material and its aesthetic stance, each example sounds and feels different, with the music perhaps heightening, revising, its own self-reflexive alienation into a certain difference, or otherness, to that which is actually repeated. In other words, there is still a clear signifying presence of jazz as a historical, cultural discourse but Coleman is doing something very distinctive with that presence, resulting in what can be defined as a music that, paradoxically, acknowledges the presence of the tradition from which, in echoes of Murphy’s description of an avant-garde, ‘appears to be trying with difficulty to free itself’ (Murphy 1999, 3). It was with the recording titled Free Jazz (1960–1) that Coleman’s music was most readily defined as avant-garde, with the absence of form, structure and thematic material creating a chaotic collage of sound while the album cover featured a Jackson Pollock painting, a move which said that this music was new, this music was art. If Coleman’s music up to this point had been an avant-garde gesture that was taking music to the edge of modernism, Free Jazz looked over that edge into the abyss. It is also notable that a major, mainstream record company, Atlantic, released this recording, which suggests that the cutting- edge innovations of this avantgarde music were already seen as having a potential audience and, by implication, could be situated in relation to the economic frameworks of a culture industry. It could also be argued that the presence of the Pollock painting, like the titles and liner notes of previous recordings, betrays its own sense of construction and appropriation of image. Free Jazz is subtitled a ‘Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet’. This double quartet consists of two ensembles effectively projected against each other, resulting in a dense, complex web of sound. There is no audible sense of form or pattern, rather ideas come in and out of focus, in a way that is a fitting parallel to the spontaneity and intensity of the abstract yet expressive visual art of Pollock.16 However, while there is no relationship to the

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theme – solo – theme form that Coleman inherited and reinvented, there is still some sense of organization that does give, at least, a direction to the musical texture. If this is a music that looks over the edge, it can be argued that it does not fall over it. It may, for its time, evince the maximum distance from its tradition, but there is still a residual trace that is again defined through the parameter of timbre: the sound of the instruments, individual and collective, position this in relation to jazz, rather than any other musical context. It is also the case that the musical experience of each individual musician is that of jazz and therefore their instinctive response to liberation is based on that experience.17 In relation to some of the more general ideas mapped out at the outset of this chapter, whether we hear this recording as the ‘revolutionary cutting edge of modernism’ or as an avantgarde that subjects the modernist nature of jazz, and the frameworks that surround it, to critical scrutiny clearly remains open to interpretation. Through its negative force, however, defining a musical practice through what it is not, it clearly articulates a critical stance in relation to what jazz was assumed to be. And yet, having appeared with difficulty to free itself from a jazz tradition it still projects, through its timbres and textures, a sound that continues to somehow signify jazz, even if this signification is at times a rather distant one. However, it is as much an end as it is a beginning in that it stands alone in the Coleman oeuvre, a project to which he worked towards but did not extend or go beyond, and although it may pose questions about the nature of jazz it does so from within the soundworld of that tradition, even if that position is now marginal and was not always recognized by some critics, either at the time or since.18 New jazz – in the tradition In both theory and practice the music of Coleman (in conjunction with others, such as, for example, the very different sound of pianist Cecil Taylor) might not have progressed towards some notional goal, but, in retrospect, it can be seen to have opened up a space for further developments in the 1960s and it is some of the music that came to occupy that space that is now of most immediate concern in this chapter. There are two simultaneously interacting and divergent paths that are pertinent here: one looks towards the better interaction of music and politics in sympathy with Bürger’s notion of a reintegration of the aesthetic (art) and the social (life), a proposal that originates from Bürger’s analysis of Dada as avant-garde practice, while the second seems to leave any engagement with a political reality behind and move into a condition that aspires to an aesthetic autonomy, an aspirational move that is consistent with other modernist and avant-garde contexts and practices. Of these two paths Coleman would seem to look towards the second – the aspiration towards autonomy – in that he has worked in relatively isolated contexts, making his own music that is constructed through its own hermetically sealed logic.19 The title, and label, of Free Jazz also suggests its own isolation in that it seems not to look beyond the music – free jazz – itself. It may be ‘free’ of past constraints and conventions but it is equally bound by its own concept of freedom that becomes potentially another stylistic and generic framework as reflected in the realization that numerous free jazz recordings contained high levels of similarity, suggesting that freedom did not necessarily mean the perpetuation of difference. The influence of Coleman and Free Jazz would become evident in the mid to later 1960s with recordings such as Albert Ayler’s Live in Greenwich Village (1965–7) and, most notably, John Coltrane’s Ascension (1965). This recording reflected the larger ensemble sound of Free Jazz and celebrated the breaking away from conventions of form and content. It was also the moment

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that Coltrane, ‘the ultimate post-bopper’, ‘crossed over to free jazz after years of hovering on the sidelines’ (Gendron 2009, 219).20 The black consciousness of the period did find a form of expression through the further development of free jazz as a stylistic label, with its notions of a musical freedom providing a correlation with the political aspirations of the period, resulting in a relationship that finds a voice through the work of musicians such as Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp, among others, with some musicians drawing a direct parallel between concepts of musical and political freedom. It is the trend towards artistic control (freedom from the institutional framework in both theory and practice) and the recognition of artistic ownership that becomes symbolic, with the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) seen to be a model for this process.21 Ronald Radano, in his book on Anthony Braxton, describes the early AACM as fitting ‘Bürger’s definition of “avant-garde” as a movement that sought to distinguish itself institutionally from the accepted social and aesthetic position of a dominant class’ (Radano 1993, 112). This description highlights the political nature of this particular context but also looks more generally to the essentially critical orientation of any avant-garde project, set in opposition to established social frameworks as well as cultural practices. However, in contrast, much of the music produced at this time articulates a high level of self-reflection that aspires to an aesthetic autonomy, a process that became evident through the division between developments in jazz music and the community from which it emerged and the audience to which it might once have connected. Anthony Braxton emerges as an interesting figure in this context, one whose music would seem to be able to mediate between these two positions defined broadly as, on the one hand, the reintegration of the aesthetic and social, and on the other as the aspiration toward an aesthetic autonomy. Coming from the politicized environment of Chicago and a black culture identified through AACM, Braxton could be seen to form part of a meaningful reflection of Bürger’s reintegration of art and life through the positioning within a collective identity and in relation to the specificity of place. However, although Braxton becomes a politicized figure through personal experience and social context, his early music could be heard as highly abstract, looking very directly towards avant-garde, European ‘art’ music and its ‘art for arts sake’ identity. This identity is in effect the representation of an aesthetic desire for self-reflection and reference that conspires with the primacy of form towards the construction of an aura of autonomy. Braxton’s first recording was the 3 Compositions of New Jazz, released on the specialist new jazz label Delmark in 1968. The most immediately notable feature in this context is the title, which self-consciously proclaims a ‘new jazz’, thus reflecting the presentational aspects of Coleman’s work from the late 1950s and early 1960s. But also worth further comment is the suggestion of composition. What had been ‘new’ in jazz was defined through the changing role of improvisation, with the emergence of a so-called free jazz based on the freedom from predetermined form and structure. Clearly Braxton’s use of this terminology in the title problematizes the status of improvisation, even though the compositional dimension may be essentially graphic, and is intended to suggest a convergence between a compositional practice (art music) and improvisation (jazz). The multi-dimensional sonorities that Braxton produces from a wide range of instruments – alto and soprano saxophone, clarinet and flute, as well as various percussion instruments – is enhanced by the contributions of the other musicians involved in 3 Compositions: Leroy Jenkins (violin, viola, etc.), Leo Smith (trumpet, plus percussion, etc.) and Muhal Richards Abrams (piano, plus cello and alto clarinet). From this wide range of instrumental timbres Braxton and his collaborators draw an imaginative spectrum of sound.

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The prevalence of saxophone and trumpet within this spectrum may always draw the music back into a recognizable jazz soundworld, but the absence of a ‘rhythm section’ of bass and drums, sonorities which, even if in a different role, were still powerfully present in Coleman’s music, is a significant absence that also generates a distance in relation to the standard expectations of what constitutes a jazz music. The first of the three compositions begins with voice, wordless, a sonority that is unusual in this context and which, for this listener, still sounds ‘strange’. It also seems to exist without shape or structure. In contrast, the second ‘composition’ has a much clearer audible sense of form, one that equates more directly to the jazz tradition. It begins with a collective statement that is fragmentary and disjunct but can act as ‘theme’. After this ‘thematic’ statement there is a sequence of individual statements (‘solos’) projected against the continuity of Abrams’s piano part before a return to the opening collective statement. This sequence of ‘theme’ –’solo’ –’theme’ may produce a set of sounds that are very distant at times to a modern jazz as defined by bebop, but as a structure this is a quite direct reflection of that earlier moment: a structural trace of an evolving tradition. Braxton, through recordings such as this, like Coleman, made a fairly immediate impact on the jazz scene, but, also like Coleman, sharply divided opinion, with some jazz critics describing 3 Compositions as ‘clinical’, ‘fragmented’, ‘Webernesque’ – often good descriptions, but mistakenly loaded with negative value judgements (as quoted in Radano 1993, 147). The shape of jazz to come: tradition(ing) In relating the music mentioned in this chapter thus far to a concept of an avant-garde – and it should be emphasized that this became the standard terminology for this music almost immediately – we are still left with some highly resistant problems. If they are all examples of an avant-garde jazz music, then does this suggest a succession of different avant-gardes, or are they part of a continuum, different parts of the same process? Does Coleman emerge as a consequence of Parker or is it a moment of rejection? Is the music of the 1960s an avant-garde repudiation of what came before or, alternatively, might it form part of its perpetuation? However one might choose to answer such questions, the implied teleological nature of any avant-garde project as defined through images of the ‘future’ and the fact that this music can now be conceived as historical, looks towards the question of where did this music progress to, did it reach some goal, assuming we can know what that was? By way of response to such questions, the music of Braxton again presents a useful case study. After 3 Compositions of New Jazz and other early recordings such as For Alto (1969) his music has changed, evolved, but in ways that might be seen to be not entirely consistent with this starting point. One perhaps surprising move was the rather short-lived one from specialized jazz record labels, such as Delmark, to a mainstream culture industry in the form of Arista records. Retrospective musical gestures also began to appear, although not necessarily as a consequence of that move. Some of Braxton’s recordings indicate a clearer recognition of a jazz tradition that was rather distant on 3 Compositions. If the title of 3 Compositions was thought-provoking, so equally is the recordings titled In the Tradition from 1974, versions of familiar jazz material played in a broadly recognizable jazz idiom. Tracks such as Mingus’s ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, Parker’s ‘Ornithology’ and Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Blues’ are played by Braxton supported by a standard rhythm section of piano, bass

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and drums. The thematic shapes, formal outlines and rhythmic drive of the tradition from which such material emerged is left intact with only Braxton’s use of contrabass clarinet as a potential point of difference from that tradition. Of course, this recording need not necessarily signify a retreat from the avant-gardism of 3 Compositions; rather it suggests a musician who wants to pursue different possibilities in relatively close proximity to each other. This sense of difference becomes potentially significant. Braxton maintains a singular voice through many different projects, although the resulting music can always be situated at the difficult, complex, edge of jazz and related improvised and composed musics. However, it does also suggest a resistance to the straight line of progress implicit within any avant-garde project and its related contextualization. Braxton’s music may indicate this difference then on a relatively small scale but the larger picture begins to broaden in a myriad of unpredictable ways. Coleman’s music of the late 1950s and early 1960s might have been constructed as ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’, but what did come was in effect many different things, including the perpetuation of bebop and other, earlier jazz styles, processes that have become increasingly intensified in more recent times through extensive reissues and rediscoveries of recordings and performances, processes that articulate a historicizing gesture. One element of this image is the continuation of free jazz, improvised musics, and the continuing influence and legacy of what was perceived as an avant-garde jazz music in the 1960s. There may be many interesting musicians now working within and in relation to jazz who acknowledge the power of Coleman, for example, and both Ken Vandermark and John Zorn are relevant examples here, both of whom could be described as avant-garde (and in the case of Zorn this description is used routinely).22 This acknowledgement of Coleman does not signify radical change or progress, however; rather it suggests legacy and influence, reflecting Bürger’s claim that avant-grade art ‘continues to exert influence precisely in its failure’ (Bürger 1998, 188) in that the utopian aspirations of any such project are effectively beyond realization, or, alternatively, and perhaps more accurately, the recognition that the now historicized avant-garde is a potential source of musical material that is available for interpretation and reinterpretation. The willingness of musicians such as Vandermark and Zorn to play with that past can be positioned as a reflection of the postmodern condition that surrounds more recent developments in jazz music, a condition that is partially formed around our incredulity towards the utopian nature of an avant-garde and might, in some contexts, redefine the avant-grade as an object of nostalgic desire and loss. However, Bürger also claims that ‘that which has failed has not simply disappeared’ (Bürger 1998, 188). The active presence of a tradition, against which an avant-garde projects itself in protest or within which it is now assimilated, is central to much of what has been outlined thus far. Just as the term jazz itself has been contested, so is the construction of its tradition – and there is a degree of familiarity with the carefully constructed, ideologically driven view of jazz history presented to us by, for example, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and virtuoso jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. This version of the jazz tradition seeks to exclude avant-garde forms of jazz in favour of a highly essentialized set of ‘core’ values.23 But clearly the avant-garde aspirations of jazz music have ‘not simply disappeared’ but have now become part of a tradition, a tradition of innovative, progressive boundary passing musics – Parker, Coleman, Braxton, among numerous others – a process that may reflect David Ake’s terminology of ‘traditioning’. This proposal brings the hermeneutics of Gadamer into the context of Jazz studies (Ake 2002, 174).24 Commonly received notions of tradition may imply a permanence, continuity becoming

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conservation and the survival of past values. This is pertinent in the jazz context through notions of ‘preservation’, while the description of Marsalis’s own aesthetic stance as ‘neoclassical’ further enforces the negative implications of tradition (see Walser 1999, 334). However, the recognition of what was once defined as an avant-garde music as now tradition need not see it as a frozen, solid entity. Gadamer reminds us that tradition ‘is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves’ (Gadamer [1960] 2003, 293; see also Ake 2002, 174). On the basis of this proposal, we might hear various different jazz musics from bebop onwards as part of an evolving, meaningful engagement between the momentary, immediate avant-garde nature of this music and the construction of a tradition that is formed through an essentially performative, mutable, experience. Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6

7 8

9 10

11 12

I would like to thank Sarah Hill for comments on earlier versions of this chapter. The focus on these three musicians is based on their centrality within this particular discourse. However, I acknowledge that this is in itself problematic, potentially being perceived as excluding other musicians or, through its exclusively North American-centred context excluding relevant musics from other regions (Europe, for example), within which these issues can be seen to have a continuing significance. However, the selection is based on the argument of a powerful presence of a jazz tradition, of which all three selected musicians are part, whose significance will be considered in part of the conclusion to this chapter. The use of the term ‘new thing’ is evident in a number of different ways, including the titling of albums, the most notable example being New Thing at Newport, featuring one side from John Coltane and the other by Archie Shepp. This recording was released in 1965 on the Impluse label, which became heavily associated with the new music. For further discussion of the ‘new thing’, see Monson 2007, 262–3. See also Gendron 2009. For a neat synopsis of the nineteenth-century origins of the term in relation to the emergence of Dada and other art movements, see Hopkins 2004, 2–4. This somewhat routine account of Darmstadt has been questioned. See, for example, Attinello 2007. In an extended forward to Bürger’s book, Jochen Schulte-Sasse states: ‘Poggioli’s “theory” is at best a theory of modernism that explains certain basic characteristics of artistic production since the middle of the nineteenth century . . . Yet, in his tendency to equate modernism and the avant-garde – and to subsume both under the label “modernism” – Poggioli typifies the Anglo-American tradition’ (Schulte-Sasse 1984, xiv). Schulte-Sasse goes on to give examples of how the terms are conflated through reference to Weightman 1973, the title of which makes this interchange transparent. He also refers to the work of Irving Howe in this context. However, although SchulteSasse’s initial response to Poggioli as prelude to Bürger is notable, it will not be pursued further in this immediate context. I use the term ‘historically specific’ in that the avant-garde artwork exists in the specificity of the moment, which is now distant, and is perhaps both shaped by and definitive of that moment in time. For a useful summary of Bürger’s work in relation to history, see Schulte-Sasse 1984, xxxii–xxxix. Of course, the interrelationships between how the term modern jazz may be constructed and what is commonly understood as modernism are formed and interpreted are clearly problematic. However, the general association between jazz and modernism can be formed around the impact of technology (recording) and the fact that the chronological emergence and development of jazz as an art form coincides with that of modernism through the twentieth century. This aspiration of freedom has more direct political and social dimensions. On the issue of jazz in relation to a concept or concepts, of freedom, see Saul 2003. This mobility forms a central part of Bernard Gendron’s examination of such engagements: ‘in the history of high/low engagements, jazz is the music in between, the music of passage, the link between the earliest (cabaret music) and the latest (rock)’ (Gendron 2002: 10). However, the significance of this process and context is questioned by Alyn Shipton: ‘I remain skeptical about the degree to which the jamming at Minton’s and Monroe’s genuinely moved jazz forward, beyond consolidating the changes to the role of the rhythm section’ (Shipton 2001, 463). If Shipton is correct in questioning this significance, it may also look towards a questioning of the mythology that has evolved around this particular aspect of bebop. The description of Parker as tragic genius is based on his early death in 1955 at the age of only 34, a death that was the result of a long period of heroin addiction and alcohol abuse. For a summary of this recording, including background and debates about who actually accompanied Parker on it, see Shipton 2001, 475–6.

Jazz – avant-garde – tradition • 201 13

14 15 16 17

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Gendron effectively captures the passing of the moment and its role in the act of canon formation: ‘Although dead as a movement and a fashion, bebop would soon acquire a new life as perhaps the most venerated component of the jazz canon and performance repertory. Indeed, the emergence of a jazz modernism initiated by bebop, and thus of a jazz “art music,” helped legitimatize the subsequent construction of a jazz canon in the 1950s’ Gendron 2002, 157. For a good overview of Coleman and free jazz, particularly in relation to tradition as defined by a jazz canon, see Anderson 2007. For an account of Coleman’s career in general, see Wilson 1999. Avant-gardist images of future, progress and change were also evident in the titling of recordings by other jazz musicians. Notable examples include Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Advance (1956) and Lennie Tristano’s Descent into the Maelstrom (1953), both of which predate the emergence of Coleman in 1959. The specific Pollock painting that was used is titled White Light (1954) and forms part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art New York. All musicians involved worked within a jazz context. However, there is some degree of difference of background and experience among the musicians. For example, Eric Dolphy (bass clarinet) was already engaged in a radicalization of jazz while Don Cherry (trumpet), Charlie Haden (bass) and both Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell (drums) were familiar with Coleman’s music and the direction it was taking. In contrast, Freddie Hubbard (trumpet) and Scott LaFaro (bass) were less familiar with this new music, with both coming from more immediately accessible jazz contexts and this may be reflected in their contributions to the collective improvisation. For contrasting examples of the reception of this recording, see Walser 1999, 253–5 and 395–400. It is notable that Coleman’s discography consists exclusively of his own recordings. Although he has worked with regular collaborators, this has always been on the basis of his own leadership, with this authorial presence, in the context of a ‘collective improvisation’, being potentially problematic. The suggested association between Coleman and autonomy is further reinforced if mention is made of Coleman’s harmolodic system, his own private, technical lexicon, the details of which are not directly relevant to the present discussion, but the extent to which it suggests a highly personalized perspective underlines the interpretation that is being offered here. Coltrane’s acknowledgement of the importance of Coleman is evident through his recordings of Coleman compositions with musicians who were most directly associated with Coleman – Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell. Originally recorded in 1960, the resulting album was not released by Atlantic until 1966 under the bold title of The Avant-Garde. For a wider discussion of the significance of AACM, see Lewis 2008. The development of AACM as a forum of self-organization had been preceded by the Jazz Composers Guild (JCG), led by trumpeter Bill Dixon, and coexisted with similar organizations in other locations, including the Black Artist Group (BAG) in St Louis. Interestingly, Gendron in his discussion of the JCG situates this trend within what, paradoxically, had become an avant-garde tradition of organization: ‘The Jazz Composers Guild (JCG) followed in a long tradition of avantgarde self-help and self-advertising organizations in the art world, dating at least as far back as Zürich Dada, the Italian Futurists, Bauhaus, and what for [Bill] Dixon was the most salient model, the artist-run galleries on 10th street in the East Village’ (Gendron 2009: 213). For further discussion of JCG and the issues of avant-garde organization, see Piekut 2011: 102–39. Relevant recordings include The Vandermark 5, Free Jazz Classics Vols 1 & 2 (2000), on which Vandermark and his collaborators interpret ‘classic’ material from Coleman, Braxton, Cecil Taylor, among others; and John Zorn, Spy v. Spy (1989), on which Zorn leads a series of reinterpretations of Coleman material. Both projects could be seen to effectively repeat Braxton’s In the Tradition, but now it is Braxton who is, among others, positioned historically in relation to a tradition as interpreted retrospectively by other, younger musicians. See Ward and Burns 2002 and Jazz – A Film by Ken Burns (dir. Ken Burns, DVD, 2001). The point here is that the highly accessible version of jazz history presented by Burns, particularly in the TV/DVD format, deliberately marginalizes what was perceived as avant-garde jazz practices from its representation of a jazz tradition. This exclusive view of the jazz tradition has been perpetuated by Marsalis in a number of different contexts, including his role in the Lincoln Centre Jazz program, which was a source of cultural power, and in his own music. Ake’s discussion is based on the use of ‘standards’ – recurrent, familar material within a jazz context. The point of comparison is between Wynton Marsalis’s use of recognizable standards such as Gershwin’s ‘Embraceable You’ and Cole Porter’s ‘What is this Thing Called Love?’, among others, on his Standard Time Vol. 2: Intimacy Calling album (1991) as an attempt to effectively solidify the tradition into a singular construct and Bill Frisell’s use of material from an eclectic range of sources, including Ives, Copeland, Madonna and Bob Dylan on his Have A Little Faith album (1993). If Marsalis can be seen to present a reductive, singular view of a tradition, then Frisell’s pluralistic approach can be seen to continue to ask pertinent questions about both the performance of standards and the tradition within which such practices evolved. See Ake, 2002, chapter 6.

Bibliography of works cited Adlington, Robert. 2009. ‘Introduction: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties’, in Robert Adlington (ed.), Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties. New York: Oxford University Press, 3–14. Ake, David. 2002. Jazz Cultures. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

202 • Kenneth Gloag Anderson, Iain. 2007. This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Attinello, Paul. 2007. ‘Postmodern or Modern: A Different Approach to Darmstadt’, Contemporary Music Review, 26: 25–37. Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow. Bürger, Peter. [1974] 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. (Originally published as Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974.) ––––– 1998. ‘Avant-Garde’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 185–9. Coleman, Ornette. 1960. Liner notes to Change of the Century. LP album. Atlantic. DeVeaux, Scott. 1997. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. [1960] 2003. Truth and Method, 2nd revised edn, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York and London: Continuum. (Originally published as Wahrheit ünd Methode. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960.) Gendron, Bernard. 2002. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ––––– 2009. ‘After the October Revolution: The Jazz Avant-garde in New York, 1964–65’, in Robert Adlington (ed.), Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211–31. Girard, René. 2008. ‘Innovation and Repetition’, in Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism 1953–2005. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heble, Ajay. 2000. Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice. New York: Routledge. Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelley, Robin D. G. 1999. ‘New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde’, Black Music Research Journal, 19: 135–68. Lewis, George E. 2008. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Richard. 1999. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piekut, Benjamin. 2011. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Poggioli, Renato. [1962] 1968. The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally published as Teoria dell’ arte d’avantguardia. Societa editrice il Mulino, 1962.) Radano, Ronald M. 1993. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Samson, Jim. 2001. ‘Avant-Garde’, in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, Vol. 2, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 246–7. Saul, Scott. 2003. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. 1984. Foreword to Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, xii–xivii. Shipton, Alyn. 2001. A New History of Jazz. London: Continuum. van den Berg, Hubert F. 2009. ‘Avant-garde: Some Introductory Notes on the Politics of a Label’, in Robert Adlington (ed.), Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties. New York: Oxford University Press, 15–33. Walser, Robert, ed. 1999. Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, Geoffrey C. and Burns, Ken. 2002. Jazz: A History of America’s Music. New York: Knopf. Weightman, John. 1973. The Concept of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism. London: Alcove Press. Wilson, Peter Niklas. 1999. Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books.

10 Narrative Nicholas Reyland

A campfire story The histoire is the what and the discours is the how but what I want to know . . . is le pourquoi. Why are we sitting here around the campfire? (Le Guin 1981, 188) Once upon a time, a very long time ago now – about 1990 – an intermittently fiery debate ignited around the question of whether music could tell stories. With so much of the world’s music employed at least partly in the service of storytelling – from songs, operas, ballets, programmatic symphonies and musicals to films, plays, video games, music videos, sacred rites and other social rituals – musicologists asked whether it was also possible to conceive of instrumental music from traditions such as Western art music (i.e. music without voices, lyrics, programmatic texts, illustrations, dramatic accompaniments, dance, explanatory titles, etc.) as being somehow, at least some of the time, some kind of a narrative. Could music – just music – tell stories? Fiery debates are rarely spontaneous; indeed, they are rarely that original. Like the seven basic plots Christopher Booker identifies as underpinning the entirety of human storytelling (Booker 2004), academic discussion in any given field often replays familiar concerns, albeit filtered through contemporary issues. Furthermore, discursive campfires were flaring up everywhere in musicology around 1990, with interest in narrative taking its place alongside the ‘admixture and dissemination of new or borrowed methodologies, ideologies, and buzz-words’ during the period of theory transfusions which invigorated music criticism in the 1980s and 1990s – the ‘New Musicology’ later caricatured by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist as a ‘curiously serial process in which theoretical positions were taken up and cast aside’ (Cook and Everist [1999] 2001, ix). Geertzian thick description, narratology, Annalisme, and the Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’ were all explored and then discarded in turn. Multivalency – the acknowledgement of the possible equal validity of multiple interpretations . . . – itself seems to have emerged as a passing phase, to be replaced by the next critical position. (Cook and Everist [1999] 2001, ix) Yet Cook and Everist’s summary discarded some of these positions too hastily. For instance, narratological approaches to music, rather than being cast aside by the community at large,

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have developed into a stable feature of the musicological landscape. Today, narrative approaches offer a broadly coherent body of methodologies blending music analysis (practised in ways that productively blur boundaries between formalism and hermeneutics) and broader historical and cultural concerns aligned with the once ‘New’, now firmly established, critical-theoretical musicology. One reason for the survival of music narratology beyond the 1990s was that it rekindled a longer standing tradition. The quest to read music as narrative, Joseph Kerman has noted, is ‘one of music criticism’s most persistent and persistently controversial projects’ (Kerman 1999, 47). The controversy stretches back to nineteenth-century flashpoints concerning the value of programmatic music versus absolut Tonkunst, but its roots go much deeper. Consider, for instance, Byron Almén’s critique of Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny’s 1805 analysis of Handel’s ‘Fugue’ from the Harpsichord Suite No. 6 in F# minor (Almén calls it ‘an important historical attempt to supplement a descriptive structural account of an instrumental work with an interpretative account of that work’s expressive features’), which surveys Momigny’s reading of the piece as the representation of a three-way argument between a love-stricken daughter, romance-forbidding father and ever-loving mother (Almén 2008, 16–20, citing and translating Momigny 1805). ‘The two-part canon’, Momigny wrote (mm. 63–6; see Musical Example 10.1), ‘is a portrayal of mother and daughter lamenting their inability to soften the heart of the wrathful father’.

Allegro

Musical Example 10.1 Handel, Suite No. 6, Allegro (fugue), mm. 63–66

Yet actually – indeed crucially – this is not, as Almén notes, precisely the story that Momigny claims the music is telling or otherwise representing. In framing his interpretation, Momigny becomes prudently provisional: ‘This, or something like it, is the range of feeling that we believe Handel might have experienced, or the image that he might have had in mind, as he composed this fugue.’ For reasons explored below, it might be better to reformulate this statement along the following lines. This, or something like it, is the type of story that this particular musical discourse’s intimation of a plot of events invites suitably predisposed listeners to call into mind; the final interpretive result of that process may or may not relate to the creative intentions of a composer; the emplotment and interpretation, however, will probably broadly resemble interpretations by other listeners within the same cultural community, while contributing to the tales that the music is telling about when it was created, those who have played it, and how it has been received. For musical narratives have an intriguing quality: any particular telling or representation (discours) of a plot of musical events (i.e. any live, recorded or imagined performance) can tell a markedly different story (histoire) to different interpreters; collections of those different stories, though, tend to form productively fuzzy networks of interpretive

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coherence. Some scholars consider this ambiguity to be the great failing of musical narrative; for others, it is le pourquoi. Fred Maus has described how explorations from the late twentieth century onwards of the possibility of narrativity in non-texted, non-programmatic music from European concert traditions . . . [lay] at the intersection of many disciplines, not just narratology and music criticism, but historical interpretation, technical music theory, philosophical study of expression and representation, and semiotics. (Maus 2001, 642) Musicologists reignited their enquiry into music and narrative with sparks borrowed from narratologists, linguists, philosophers and semioticians specializing in literature, film and history. Hayden White, for instance, had recently suggested that a narrative possesses ‘a certain content prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing’ (White 1987, xi); before him, Roman Jakobson had explained that it is possible to translate a narrative poem like Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune into ‘music, ballet, and graphic art’ because ‘certain structural features of [its] plot are preserved despite the disappearance of [its] verbal shape’ (Jakobson 1960, 350). As the music and narrative debate began to generate heat, scholars gathered around the campfire, excitedly sharing fresh stories about music and the new theoretical perspectives from which one could tell such stories, and thereby participating in the wider ‘narrative turn’ pirouetting through the arts, humanities, and beyond (see Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005, 1–16). Adaptation was a common initial approach. A number of musicologists pursued the question of whether music could express narrative via theoretical approaches adapted from literary narratology – an understandable starting point, but not without its problems. For example, Anthony Newcomb, influenced by Vladimir Propp’s work on folk tales, argued for paradigmatic plot archetypes in Schumann and Mahler’s music (Newcomb 1992); Patrick McCreless searched for contrapuntal-harmonic enigmas in Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio, Op. 70, welding Roland Barthes’s codes from his theorizing of narrative to a Schenkerian analytical framework (McCreless 1988); Maus identified how the agents and actions suggested by the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Serioso’ String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 express the qualities Aristotle deemed central to the success of a well-made play in his Poetics (Maus 1988); Robert Hatten explained how Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and heteroglossia in the novel help make sense of disruptive moments in Beethoven (Hatten 1991); and Eero Tarasti adapted A. J. Greimas’s semiological approach to the grammar of narrative in an analysis of Chopin’s G minor ballade (Tarasti 1992). Broadly construed, these efforts illuminated two models of musical narrativity that drew on literary narratology’s approaches to the play and the novel. One might call these two models the mimetic and diegetic hypotheses. The mimetic hypothesis considers music’s capacity to represent agents and their activities in the manner of a play or other narrative text that unfolds as a real-time imitation of events. The diegetic hypothesis considers music’s capacity to project a narrator to recount a plot involving agents and their activities in the manner of a novel or epic poem. In time, a synthesizing hypothesis emerged, positing musical narratives as representations of the experiencing consciousness of a persona (see, for example, Karl 1997 and Klein 2004). The experiencing consciousness hypothesis had the benefit of linking back to a wellspring of much work on music and narrative, Edward T. Cone’s influential The Composer’s Voice, which explored the notion that some music induces listeners to posit ‘a musical persona that is the experiencing subject of the entire composition, in whose thought the play, or narrative,

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or reverie, takes place’ (Cone 1974, 94). As the experiencing consciousness model was a synthesis of the other two, however, it remained vulnerable to doubts raised about both the diegetic and mimetic hypotheses by scholars less enamoured with the idea of musical narrativity. The most instructive objections were presented by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Carolyn Abbate, who arrived like fire wardens to dampen the flames of the music narratology campfire, just in case it was about to get out of hand (see Nattiez 1990 and Abbate 1991; see also Abbate 1989). It was Nattiez who bluntly pointed out that ‘it is not within the semiological possibilities of music to link a subject to a predicate’ (Nattiez 1990, 244). In other words, instrumental music cannot unambiguously signify, describe or interconnect representations of agents and their actions; such interpretations are only possible if the listener is guided by an extra-musical prompt, like a program note or interpretive predisposition. This bids farewell to overly literal applications of the mimetic hypothesis. For instance, Nattiez writes of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche that ‘with the help of the title, I can readily agree that it concerns the life and death of a character. I certainly hear that he moves, jumps, etc. But what exactly does he do? I don’t know’ (Nattiez 1990, 244). Music can hint – through gestures, style topics, iconic and indexical semiotic conventions, and other means – at types of action, mood and atmosphere; instruments and ensembles can approximate different agents (e.g. a clarinet as a lusty prankster); listeners primed to listen for concretely signified agents and actions via a program note or evocative title can fill in the gaps. Music alone, however, cannot specify the fine grain of narrative detail. The gap to be traversed by the interpreter’s imaginative input in such ‘narratives’ therefore appeared, to Nattiez, prohibitively wide. Abbate’s wet blanket stressed, in turn, an upshot of music’s semiological limitations with ramifications for the diegetic hypothesis: music cannot posit a past tense. In terms of the classical distinctions, what we call narrative – novels, stories, myths, and the like – is diegetic . . . It is a tale told later, by one who escaped to the outside of the tale . . . Music’s distinction is fundamental and terrible; it is not chiefly diegetic but mimetic. Like any form of . . . temporal art, it traps the listener in present experience and the beat of passing time, from which he or she cannot escape . . . (Abbate 1991, 53) This, in turn, bade farewell to overly literal claims about music based on the diegetic hypothesis. As Nattiez and Abbate’s objections still register regarding the experiencing consciousness model, the issues raised can profitably be explored through a discussion of Gregory Karl’s narratological analysis of the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Piano Sonata, Op. 57 (see Karl 1997). Karl’s interpretation of the role of the movement’s insistent Db–C motif pivots around perceiving this musical idea as an antagonist interrupting the reverie of a protagonist represented by Beethoven’s more voluble opening theme (see Musical Example 10.2). How, though, can one identify when those intrusive notes do or do not represent the antagonist? The first few appearances of the motif, for example, tally neatly with this reading; the composing out of the motif in the ensuing transition seems to call for alternative strategies. Yet this is actually a creative misreading of Karl’s argument. Viewing the work through the experiencing consciousness hypothesis (i.e. as a fictional representation of a persona’s mental life), he suggests that the musical discourse is akin to an intellectual reverie (the opening idea) on which a darker thought (the Db–C motif) intrudes. The composing out of the motif during the transition might thus

Narrative • 207 Allegro Assai

PP

Musical Example 10.2

Beethoven, Sonata, Op. 57, No. 1, ‘Appassionata’: Allegro assai, opening

be recovered for a narrative reading as some kind of mulling over of ideas en route to the persona’s next significant thought (the second subject group). A crucial point for Karl is the dramatic function of these ideas within a wider system of primarily oppositional relationships: the idea that the Db–C motif antagonizes the main theme, not that it represents an actual antagonist. Even so, Nattiez’s basic objection remains unresolved. It is not within the semiological capacity of music explicitly to say when the Db–C motif represents an antagonist or an intrusive thought, nor specifically to state who or what that antagonist or thought might be. Yet the possibility emerges that this is not so much a theoretical problem as an analytical opportunity. Slightly more generally construed, the movement might be conceived as an allegorical tale about antagonistic or intrusive events or ideas, and how they might be dealt with, rather than about a more specific antagonism or character – in turn bringing to mind, perhaps, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s depiction of music as ‘myth coded in sounds instead of words . . . and provid[ing] the comforting illusion that contradictions can be overcome and difficulties resolved’ (Lévi-Strauss 1981, 659–60; cited in Nattiez 1990, 241). Yet reading the Beethoven transition as a narrational gloss on preceding events raises the specter of Abbate’s objection to the diegetic hypothesis. How is a musical persona being projected to present events, direct the perceiver’s attention towards salient details, or encompass those details within a narrational commentary? Vera Micznik has argued that there is no need ‘to

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appeal to external agency’ and posit a narrator outside of some musical texts because ‘narrational knowledge’ is communicated, ‘the “possible story” is enacted and at the same time told by its own materials’ (Micznik 2001, 243). Narrative music, in other words, enacts both a tale and its telling, like a film or a play. This neat idea echoes Adorno’s notion that ‘music recites itself, is its own content, narrates without narrative’ – a concept to which this chapter returns below (Adorno [1960] 1992, 76). Yet the argument that one can talk of narrative in music if only one recognizes, as William Kinderman discusses, the correct ‘configuration of audible elements inherent in the work of art’ (Kinderman 1992, 143) (these signify the story, say, and these the narration) imposes a dangerous circularity of logic. Prior to having formed an interpretation of a piece as a particular narrative (i.e. as a telling or representation of a specific story), it may prove tricky to differentiate between the elements representing moments in a story and elements narratorially framing those moments, due to the semantic imprecisions outlined above. It would be a mistake, however, to read too much into these counter-arguments. For a start, they were not countering claims that scholars interested in musical narrative had ever made – at least not with much force or so simplistically. Maus’s discussion of music as drama in Beethoven’s Op. 95, for instance, is certainly an example of a scholar thinking through the diegetic hypothesis, but the results are light years away in theoretical sophistication and critical nuance from Momigny’s assertions about Handel’s family drama. Brazen attempts to read narrators into instrumental music are also few and far between, with most scholars reflecting Abbate and Nattiez’s most valuable shared objection: not to the idea of musical narrativity per se but rather to the idea of music narrating (i.e. speaking or otherwise concretely signifying) through instrumental or other untexted musical means, the semantically specific utterances of the teller of a tale. Where scholars have engaged productively with the possibility of a musical narrator, it has been in sophisticated work like Hatten’s adaptation of Bakhtin to Beethoven analysis, or John Rink’s historically contextualized discussions of the performer as narrator (see Hatten 1991 and Rink 2001). Those gathered around the musical narratology campfire have thus been overheard muttering to each other that the fire wardens’ objections, ultimately, seemed ‘slightly weird – who needs to be told such things?’ (Maus 2005, 467). Rather than abandoning intuitions of commonality between, for instance, the way in which ‘the sequence of musical events in a composition . . . invites comparison to the unfolding of a narrative plot’ in a play or novel, some scholars have chosen to consider ways in which musical narratives deploy ‘special means’ to achieve related yet distinctive structural and symbolic goals (Maus 2005, 467–8). When music adopts a narrative register, it is not seeking to become a simulacrum of the novel or the play (or a film, a comic book, etc.). Music has its own ways and means of being narrative, some of which imply the types of plot central to many acts of musical analysis. Recall, for instance, Heinrich Schenker’s assertion that, in music as in life, the reversals, disappointments, delays and obstacles represented by a voice-leading reduction’s middleground and foreground form an almost dramatic course of events (Schenker 1979, 5). Crucially, however, once one considers, as Almén urges, music’s relationship to other narrative media as sibling rather than descendental (see Almén 2008, 12), new connections emerge, while highlighting each medium’s unique contribution to storytelling. Novels, for instance, can posit a past tense; films concretely link subjects and predicates; music does neither convincingly. However, neither film nor the novel has the means to invoke embodied responses mirroring an agent’s physical travails akin to music’s powers in this domain – to feel, to adapt Roland Barthes’s words, the bodies that beat in the text (Barthes [1982] 1985, 299). For in musical

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narratives, perhaps more than in any other narrative form, Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘telltale tingle’ is felt, not in the brain or the heart, ‘but with [the] spine’ (Nabokov 1980). Distinctive narrative media perform narrative distinctively, requiring perceivers to bridge the gap between discourse and story in different ways. So the well-meaning intervention of the camp authorities only briefly dimmed the music narratology flames, which in the main were already being carefully tended by those gathered around them. Rather than fleeing in the manner of Cook and Everist’s serial theorists, many scholars had remained at the fireside, bringing together the glowing coals of parallel ideas to build a self-sustaining fire; a number of these reliable theoretical constants inform the discussions in this chapter. As the campfire regained strength it also began to function, once more, as a beacon. New scholars, attracted by the glow, arrived to offer assistance with the fire’s tending, but also seeking answers to tough new questions. What about narrativity in rock and pop music, or non-Western musical repertoires (Nicholls 2007; Negus 2012)? What about Western art music after common-practice tonality (Meelberg 2006; Klein and Reyland 2013)? Do other repertoires with primarily instrumental music, such as jazz, have distinct forms of narrativity (Harker 2006)? And how might these new questions and repertoires shed light, reflexively, on music narratology’s critical concerns? The investigation of music and narrative is clearly an unfinished tale. The remainder of the present chapter explores aspects of the story so far by examining interconnected ways of speaking about musical narrative and offering a couple of new perspectives. Some of these tales are my own; others are tales I have heard around the campfire and found useful to retell elsewhere, especially when considering musical narrative with my students. Both the tales and the accompanying analytical sketches are therefore offered as toasted marshmallows – not a substantial meal, for sure, but hopefully enough to tempt the reader closer to the campfire, to toast a few new ideas herself. After all, something similar to this invitation – to play, to imagine, to create – lies at the heart of music’s offer when it takes the narrative register. Synecdoche narrativity It is not that music wants to narrate, but that the composer wants to make music in the ways that others narrate. (Adorno [1960] 1992, 62) Scholars responding to objections to the idea of music as narrative have often advanced music’s lack of linguistic specificity as a positive. Maus, for instance, has stressed the role of perceivers in hearing ‘musical successions as story-like because they can find something like actions, thoughts, and characters in music’ and are therefore tempted to imagine those moments as going ‘together to form something like a plot’ (Maus 1991, 6). He also eschews the idea of music signifying a finely detailed story, stating that ‘there is no single determinate underlying story to be recovered from a text’; subsequently, ‘retellings or paraphrases’ of compositions (i.e. interpretive narrativizations) ‘are constructed by readers or hearers in the service of various interests they happen to have’ (Maus 1991, 7). For Maus, this is not a problem but an opportunity: analysing those different interpretations offers a window on to the performative stories people tell about themselves. A musical plot thus permits, indeed encourages, ‘the play of different interpretations’ (Maus 1991, 33). Kerman, similarly, argues that music bears its narrative potential ‘as a mnemonic field with markers rather than a preset matrix for narrative’ (Kerman 1999, 47)

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and, for Karl, music’s plot-like structures are coherent not ‘because [a musical narrative] embodies a specific meaning or tells a particular story, but because its abstract dramatic plan possesses an inner logic capable of suggesting any number of stories of a particular type without telling any of them’ (Karl 1997, 32). The key phrase here is ‘stories of a particular type’. When music can be interpreted as narrative, the plot of events presented bear what Cone termed an expressive potential: ‘the wide but not unrestricted range of possible expression’ opened up by a composition’s temporal succession of sensuous, congeneric and extrageneric signifiers (Cone 1974, 166). Other ways in which listeners may experience music as narrative, however, involve alternative ways of hearing music, some of which eschew the kind of structural listening required if musical emplotments are to shade into narrativizations of a piece’s expressive potential. White asserted that narratives have some kind of essence independent of their specific iterations (White 1987, xi). What is the nature of music’s relationship to that essence? One way to think of musical narrative – an approach that may chime with a broad range of listener experiences – is to consider music’s putative plots as the representation of narrativity’s essence, i.e. of the experience of narrativity itself, rather than specific stories. Given that humans spend so much time imagining, listening to, performing and decoding a form of organized sound – i.e. language – that narrates, it is unsurprising that music, with its similarly expressive flow of sonic ideas, can often be heard as something like a narrative: a narrative simulacrum. Picture the following scene. A musicologist is working through her e-mail inbox first thing in the morning. As on many previous occasions, she complements that dull yet stressful task with the second disc in a 1991 CD reissue of Alfred Brendel’s early 1960s Viennese recordings of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas for the Vox label. The CD begins with the first of the last five sonatas, the A major, Op. 101. Around the music narratology campfire, the musicologist has heard persuasive tales about this composition’s story. Hatten, for example, long ago persuaded her that the first movement’s ‘progress from pastoral through the threat of tragedy and back to pastoral affirmation’ is not only a valid interpretation of the Allegretto ma non troppo’s specific plot of events, but is also ‘replicated at the level of the four-movement sonata as a whole’, when ‘the triumphant affirmation of the heroic topic elevated to a transcendent plane’ is signified by music that repairs potentially catastrophic breaches and, in doing so, raises ‘the pastoral to a spiritual level’ (Hatten 1991, 85–6). Perhaps the musicologist briefly indulges her ego by imagining that, in Brendel’s realization of Beethoven’s musical narrative, one can hear a synecdoche for one scholar’s struggle towards the transcendent goal of no unanswered emails. The truth, though, is probably less fanciful. The musical narration is keeping the musicologist company; its musical voices comfort her with the spirit of human communication, but not with the demands of specific conversation. Clearly, even musicologists who remain committed to the irreplaceable productivity of what Eric Clarke calls the ‘vanishingly rare’ experience of structural listening are usually doing no such thing when listening to music (Clarke 2005, 144). Some of music’s functions in everyday life, however, may still involve notions of narration. Like Nipper the dog listening intently to His Master’s Voice emerging from the horn of a gramophone, the voices of Brendel and Beethoven function, in this imaginary but familiar instance, as a calming influence. As the first two measures shape a gestural rise and fall – so ‘emblematic of the pastoral’ (Hatten 1991, 82) should the musicologist care to pay attention to such things (which she does not, presumably, unless unconsciously she is associating the pastoral, as topos, with the maternal, and so indulging

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in dubiously gendered fantasies of music as quasi-parental protection) – she may, at most, catch herself demonstrating the verifiability of Arnie Cox’s ‘mimetic hypothesis’ (Cox 2011). The musicologist’s breathing in and out, mirrored in the slight raising and then drooping of her head, mimics the contour of the musical gesture, as if her body is responding to another person’s utterance with an intimation of interest. The overall gesture is a gently affirmative nod. ‘How interesting, Brendel-Beethoven’, she seems to be replying: ‘Do go on.’ Yet is this really where music’s relationship to narrative ends? Nattiez certainly suggested that music only imitates ‘the outward appearance’ of narration (Nattiez 1990, 251). Moving from general similarities between music and language (as alluded to, for instance, by the Greek designation for lyric poetry, mousikê) to the work of recent phoneticians, he argued that, because ‘music and language share the linearity of discourse and the use of sound objects . . . [m]usic is [only] capable of imitating the intonation contour of a narrative’ (Nattiez 1990, 251). As an example, Nattiez suggests that ‘it is not necessary to have read the motto which heads the finale, ‘Muss es sein? Es muss sein’, in order to recognize from the outset’ of the last movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op. 135 ‘that we are in the presence of a question’ (see Musical Example 10.3): the ascending fourth connotes a question, the descending fourths a pair of responses. ‘And from then on’, Nattiez claims, one can interpret the movement as ‘a musical transposition of a dialogue’ in which we do not know what is being said; instead, ‘Beethoven depicts the character of the exchange, rather as if we catch the inflection of it from the other side of the wall’ (Nattiez 1990, 251). Yet because one might be tempted to fill in the gaps with speculation – as when one strains to catch specific words in an argument happening in a nextdoor household – this is the type of moment at which listeners make the ontological mistake of believing that ‘since music suggests narrative, it could itself be narrative’ (Nattiez 1990, 245). And listeners should resist that impulse, Nattiez admonishes, lest they stoop to superfluous metaphor. Grave

Muss

Allegro

es sein?

Es

muss

sein!

Es

muss

sein!

Musical Example 10.3 Beethoven, String Quartet in F major, Op. 135, fourth movement: motto

Adorno’s ostensibly similar claim (cited in Nattiez’s essay) that music is ‘a narrative which relates nothing’ arises from a concern, in his Mahler monograph, to explain how that composer created music ‘emancipated in novel-like fashion from fixed schemata’, as in the Third Symphony’s liquidation of the recapitulation in its sonata form first movement (Adorno [1960] 1992, 83). Yet this is not merely an issue of creative or even ethical intentions. Mahler’s music ‘often sounds’ as if it is seeking to call to mind ‘the great novel’: ‘The curve it describes is novelistic’, Adorno writes, ‘rising to great situations, collapsing into itself’ (Adorno [1960] 1992, 69). In a manner Nattiez later paralleled, Adorno therefore argues as follows: The ear is carried along on the flow of the music as is the eye of the reader from page to page; the mute sound of the words converges with the musical mystery. But the mystery is not solved. To describe the world to which epic music alludes is denied to it: the music

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is as clear as it is cryptic. It can make the ontological category of objective reality its own only insofar as it screens itself from objective immediacy; it would remove itself from the world if it tried to symbolize or even depict it. (Adorno [1960] 1992, 70) This elegant statement reminds one that Adorno’s desire to protect the cryptic in music was motivated by something more profound than Nattiez’s theoretical objections. Elsewhere, Adorno rejected the ‘false impression that the world outside is such a well-rounded whole’ as those created, for instance, by pre-modernist novels, and also the notion that music might reproduce that false impression, as in Lévi-Strauss’s perspective on music offering the ‘comforting illusion that contradictions can be overcome and difficulties resolved’ (Lévi-Strauss 1981). Such texts offer ‘the existing world a kind of solace’ but in doing so shape a form of false consciousness that one should seek to resist, not least through encounters with music that respect music’s otherness – its imperviousness to concrete storytelling and other forms of interpretive specificity – and which thereby celebrate music’s ‘power to resist society’ (see Adorno 1970, 2, 73, 321). Such objections lend a heroic air to attachments to the idea of music’s anti-narrativity. Yet it is difficult to square such a view with the possibility that, surfacing even momentarily from her overflowing inbox, our Brendel–Beethoven-admiring musicologist might respond virtually mandatorily to the intimations of the pastoral style topic and also to its subsequent troubling by the tragic (see Musical Example 10.4). She might thus begin emplotting, with little more conscious effort than it takes to read an e-mail anecdote from a friend, a reading of the music that, while ultimately impervious to the literal, leads her towards an abstract but not hopelessly unspecific story told at the broad-brush level of a series of moods or states of being. Such hearings might even go a little further.

Musical Example 10.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101, Allegretto ma non troppo, mm. 35–40

Returning to Mahler, for instance, consider the manner in which those grand novelistic curves traverse the ‘symbolic landscape’ mapped by Constantin Floros in his three-volume study Gustav Mahler, and the ‘primary role’ of these abundant and varied ‘cultural symbols . . . in shaping and maintaining [Mahler’s] musical discourse[s]’ (Almén 2006, 135; see also Floros [1977] 1994). Hence, in Almén’s readings of the Wunderhorn symphonies, which pair narratological close analysis with interpretation of the mythologies surrounding iconic symbols in Mahler’s music, the first movement of the Third Symphony is not merely an audacious sonata deformation. Pairing the work with the Fourth Symphony, it becomes the beginning of a tenmovement ‘ascent through . . . layers of being or self to an experience of the divine’ (Almén 2006, 165).

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Extrageneric symbols, though, are not the only way that music beads its narration-like threads with somewhat less ambiguous content. Music can also articulate plots of congeneric ideas. As Barthes argued, echoing Nabokov’s ‘telltale tingle’ but further evoking the interconnectedness of affective, emotional and intellectual responses to a plot’s ‘veritable ‘thrilling’ of intelligibility’: ‘suspense’ accomplishes the very idea of language: what seems the most pathetic is also the most intellectual – ‘suspense’ grips you in the ‘mind’, not in the ‘guts’. (Barthes 1977, 119) Sensuous, extrageneric and congeneric signifiers braid together in musical discourse, and once one begins to attend to how the ideas they articulate follow and relate to one another – particularly if one is then moved to consider the structure thus emplotted in terms of its potential revelation of an overarching pattern – one may swiftly find oneself tingling all over in response to music that can profitably be investigated as narrative because, put boldly, aspects of that music are narrative. Listening for the plot In the end we are all of us in a sense experts on stories, because nothing is closer to us than to see the world in the form of stories. Not only are our heads full of stories all the time; we are each of us acting out our own story throughout our lives. (Booker 2004, 701) Like many approaches to music analysis, reading pieces as narrative involves segmenting a musical experience into a hierarchy of more or less significant moments and then interpreting the relationships between them. Unlike some approaches to music analysis, narratology engages with the transformation of ideas over time, rather than the gradual revelation of an essentially static unity. Narratives, after all, present stories, and stories are temporalized disunities. Frank Kermode spoke of a narrative’s tick-tock, Aristotle of a drama’s beginning, middle and end, and Tzvetan Todorov of plot’s movement from stability to disruption, recognition, repair and, finally, a new form of stability (Kermode 1967; Aristotle 1996; Todorov 1971). In every case, the essential narrative component is change over time. So what changes in a musical narrative? Different music scholars have focused on different parameters in order to codify different aspects of musical narrativity. The following discussion introduces three such approaches to listening for the plot (archetypes, agency and enigmas), all of which can be considered, in turn, in relation to an overarching quality of most musical narratives: transvaluation. All four topics, furthermore, reveal the interpretive proteanism manifested by analyses of music as narrative, which render explicit or even promote the slippage between observation and interpretation, analyst and text that is present, albeit sometimes unacknowledged, in acts of musical analysis. * * * Given narratology’s focus on change over time, it is unsurprising that musicologists have sought to define it as the sine qua non of musical narrativity. An early pioneer of music narratology, Jann Pasler, argued that the ‘ultimate reason narrative events are directed and connected is that they undergo or cause transformation, which is probably . . . narrative’s most important and

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most illusive characteristic’ (Pasler 1989, 241); Vincent Meelberg’s more recent theorizing of musical narrativity, which draws on the work of narratologist Mieke Bal, is founded on the notion of narrative as ‘the representation of a temporal development’ (Meelberg 2006, 39); and for Almén, James Jacób Liska’s concept of transvaluation is the most productive expression of this concept. A transvaluation is a significant change of state that occurs over time and alters the ranking of different components in a narrative’s system of values. Obvious non-musical examples include the changing fortunes of characters in a story. Given the centrality of conflict to its storytelling, for instance, George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire might almost have been retitled Game of Transvaluations on its adaptation for television (HBO, 2011–). A memorable peak in season one of Game of Thrones occurs when a young and twisted king, Joffrey, orders the shock public execution of one of his lords and servants, Ned Stark, in front of members of Stark’s own family. It is not merely the unexpectedness of the twist, or the violence, that creates this scene’s affective charge: there is a nauseating lurch in character rankings as Joffrey usurps symbolic power by ruthlessly killing Ned. Transvaluation, though, is just as central to the everyday power struggles of soap operas like Eastenders as it is to prestige television dramas like Game of Thrones. Transvaluations are everywhere in narrative, Liszka writes, ‘playing out the tensions between the violence of a hierarchy that imposes order and the violence that results from its transgression’ (Liska 1989, 133; quoted in Almén 2008, 65). In music, Almén clarifies, ‘transvaluation involves reversals that either upset or reaffirm the prevailing order, leading to a variety of outcomes’ (tragic, comic, romantic or ironic) through the victory or defeat of the hierarchy or transgressor and the manner of its achievement (see also Almén and Hatten 2013, 75–82). Chopin’s G major Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, the first example of transvaluation provided in Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative, offers a conflict that is subtle, its ‘violence’ conceptual rather than visceral. The piece unfolds as ‘a gentle dialogue, a dance of possibilities’ between musical elements, with ‘an initial hierarchy of relatively distinct motivic elements’ being succeeded by an act of integration (Almén and Hatten 2013, 77). The first melodic phrase of the prelude divides into two subphrases (see Musical Example 10.5a), which Almén’s close reading identifies as motives setting up an ‘opposition between the potential for relatedness and the potential for separateness’ (Almén 2008, 5) through their articulation of various similarities (e.g. shared intervals), differences (e.g. contrasting registers) and continuities (e.g. an interconnecting melodic descent across the registral divide). Almén suggests that one might interpret the motives as agents: dramatis personae sharing kinship but prevented from fully realizing their interconnection. The possibility of sensing familiar (or even familial) narrative trajectories, a degree of suspense and even sympathy or empathy is thereby glimpsed: will the second motive’s individuality flourish, transgressing the hierarchical dominance of its predecessor, or will their kinship be more fully revealed, leading the music back towards order? The overall ‘harmony-with-nature’ expressive context established for this dialogue by the accompanimental ostinato’s allusion to the Romantic Spinnerlied means that ‘the listener might be inclined to prefer’, or at least to expect, ‘a synthesis or mediation’ (Almén 2008, 7). And that is what the Prelude’s narrative duly supplies. In measures 20–7, after various attempts at conciliation, ‘the longest unbroken melodic span of the piece’ forms a ‘melodic descent combin[ing] the rhythmic profiles of [the two motives] into a single, extended line’ while ‘an active return to [the] tonic’ finalizes the resolution of any sense of conflict (see Musical Example 10.5b). The shift in values, following Almén, could be read to blend irony with romance: the

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Musical Example 10.5a Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, opening

Musical Example 10.5b Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, mm. 20–7

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closing synthesis replaces the initial hierarchy (irony), while preserving aspects of its diversity of elements and style (romance). A tragic post-tonal transvaluation, by contrast, can be heard in Witold Lutosławski’s Fourth Symphony. Like the hero of all good tragedies, the materials of this music (considered from the experiencing consciousness perspective) seem set to escape into order inverting ‘comedy’. The hierarchical dominance of gloom, created by the first subject area’s rhapsodic melodies and minor-third saturated chromatic harmonies, is twice interrupted by glimpses of transgressive ebullience – the fizzingly inventive second thematic area. In the music’s developmental phase, ebullience and inventiveness then dominate, and it seems as if the music is on the cusp of a permanent transformation for the better, with the transgressor materials emerging as victor – until, that is, the sorrowful opening material returns with unmistakable violence and tragedy strikes. The reversal proves fatal, executing hopes of longer range transvaluation: the piece’s tragedy resides in the transgression’s defeat by the order-imposing hierarchy. To speak of different types of story, however, is to begin slipping beyond a relatively objective ranking of musical values and into interpretive classification – and a topic, plot archetypes, which has intrigued many music narratologists. In a musical world far removed from Lutosławski’s galling catastrophe, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony begins with pastoral D major rustlings, its first subject area extending its melodic sinews like a cat stretching in a sunbeam. As a narratological account of the piece by Newcomb has demonstrated, however, instability is then introduced (Newcomb 1992). The Bb in measure 13, the score’s first chromatic alteration, tilts the music towards the D minor development of the theme at Fig. 2. The modal destabilization is then recognized, recalling Todorov’s plot phases, when the music convulses, as if in shock, two measures later. What follows is an attempt to repair the situation by working through the chromatic problems afflicting D major: for instance, a melodic line for violins and violas (see Musical Example 10.6) presses the transgressive F n and Bb back into their ‘proper’ places (forcing them into the conventional role of chromatic neighbour notes to the F# and B n necessary for modal stability in the home key), before the original thematic statement returns, now back in the ‘correct’ mode. This is not, though, an entirely convincing restoration of the order of the opening hierarchy. Bucolic rustling has given way to nervous restlessness, as signified through the busier texture at the a tempo from Fig. 3 and the thickened scoring of this redeclaration of thematic intent. The robustness establishes a new period of equilibrium, but its show of strength undermines the melody’s original charm. Like a cat settling down after a shock to its system, the symphony’s hackles stay up. This analytical story is not, of course, the entirety of Mahler’s Ninth – it represents just the opening series of plot events in the first movement – but it is arguably a presentation, in miniature, of the broadest brush strokes of the composition’s novelistic curve: corruption and the struggle to return, for Newcomb, are the essence of the entire symphony. And while this struggle relates to archetypal tensions between order and transgression like those theorized by Almén, the symbolic charge of the music demands, from Newcomb’s critical perspective, another type of story. Thus Newcomb connects the Mahler to the archetypal plot of the Bildungsroman (a story of early life and education), citing the example of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. In that novel, the young Pip is corrupted by Magwick, an escaped convict who terrifies Pip into helping him evade rearrest. Pip tries to put the shocking episode behind him and return to his simple (if hardly idyllic) pastoral life, yet remains unsettled. Further waves of instability then arrive, and the trajectory of Pip’s life reveals a relationship between the opening shock and a larger scale structure. Once stability is unsettled, change proves inevitable; ultimately,

Narrative • 217 R it.

20 Vln. 11

¥

ff

ff

3

ff

sfjf

3

sf

ff

Vln. II*

Via.

& Vc. 3

3

3

3

3

3

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3

trem. Db.

ff

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Musical Example 10.6 Mahler, Symphony No. 9, first movement, Andante comodo: Fig. 3, mm. 20–4 (detail)

Pip cannot return. So it will prove in the Mahler, too. Newcomb was not arguing, of course, that Mahler modelled his music on Dickens, or any other specific novel. His carefully contextualized reading nevertheless highlights how listeners can embellish the experience of musical transvaluation by linking it to the symbolic resonance of story types assimilated through their broader cultural experience. Alongside tragedy and comedy, for instance, Booker’s seven basic archetypes have other obvious musical analogues, revealing aspects of narrativity in fundamental compositional processes. The voyage and return plot – in which heroes and heroines ‘travel out of . . . familiar, everyday ‘normal’ surroundings into another world . . . where everything seems disconcertingly abnormal . . . [before] (usually by way of a ‘thrilling escape’) they are released and can return to the safety of the familiar world where they began’ (Booker 2004, 87) – could be identified as a plot archetype lending meaning to experiences of pieces exploring the basic dynamics of tonality. It may not be the story of Chopin’s G major Prelude, for instance, but it is certainly a contender in readings of Scriabin’s response to Chopin, his Prelude No. 3 in G major, Op. 11. The Chopin remains closely moored to G major; the Scriabin’s voyage takes a spin around the harmonic harbour before returning to its moorings, having experienced several ‘abnormal’ harmonic waves en route; Bach’s opening prelude in the Well-Tempered Clavier makes an understated epic of its departure from and eventual return to C major, via music including wholly logical (in terms of harmony and voice-leading) yet sensuously ‘abnormal’ measures of chromaticism (mm. 22–3) which, marvellously, also prepare the ‘thrilling escape’ of the dominant pedal beginning a measure later; and some pieces, such as Steve Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboard, set sail and never return, revelling in ‘the strangeness’ of each new wave of a harmonic process and its diverting ‘freaks and marvels’ (Booker 2004, 87) – but then, the problematizing of narrativity in modernist and postmodern music is often predicated on breaking with the archetypal expectations instilled in listeners by music and other narratives dating from, or indebted to, earlier epochs and practices. One of the origins of narrative approaches to music – the reception history of the Andante con moto from Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58 – further demonstrates

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how listeners make intuitive, or rather culturally conditioned, links between musical plots and narrative archetypes. As Kerman has documented, associative interpretations of this movement’s opposition between stern string statements and calmer piano refrains have often alighted, independently, on the story of Orpheus trying to quell The Furies (Kerman 1992). Booker’s theories suggest why this should be unsurprising. His ‘Overcoming the Monster’ archetype – a tale concerning a ‘terrifying, life-threatening, seemingly all-powerful monster whom the hero must confront in a fight to the death’ – is another storytelling constant, with examples ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Dr No and including, arguably, many concertos in which the soloist is pitted against powerful orchestral opposition (Booker 2004, 22). It is thus within the expressive potential of Beethoven’s particular plot of events to sound generally orphic to any listener whose cultural experience includes tellings of the Orpheus myth or similar stories of monsters challenged and, perhaps, overcome. Yet such associations are not merely picturesque diversions from the search for the ‘truth’ of abstract musical structures and neither are the two forms of enquiry unrelated. Archetypal and other forms of cultural association enable listeners to access both the ‘easy’ (in Kerman’s term) content of Beethoven’s concerto and the representation of a changing relationship between different musical parameters writ large in the interactions of soloist and orchestra. Scott Burnham makes a similar point regarding the insights of programmatic readings of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. Where Schenker reduced away the famously transgressive horn call before the recapitulation as a cadential trifle, for instance, Burnham meticulously charts how the ‘syntax of the passage’ brings about ‘the unanimous programmatic response that something both momentous and mysterious is afoot’ (Burnham 1992, 14). To a Schenkerian, the horn call is not a significant plot event; to narrativizing interpreters, it is a turning point. Burnham encourages rapprochement: [P]ractitioners operating from a range of critical and analytical standpoints notice similar things in this music and express them in the different languages available to them. There remains, however, a fundamental aspect of the Eroica Symphony that is addressed exclusively through programmatic criticism. (Burnham 1992, 18) For some interpreters of the Eroica, the horn call represents the summoning or return of the music’s hero. In such readings, the movement’s main theme represents a protagonist or, in the term generally favoured by music narratologists, an agent. Important studies of musical agency have included accounts exploring musical genres in which characters are explicitly represented, such as the concerto (Kerman 1999) or the mid twentieth-century genre Philip Rupprecht calls instrumental drama (Rupprecht 2013). In most music, however, such as the Eroica, agency is less explicit because soloists are less prominent. There may be a general sense of agency (as when one speaks of ‘the music’ doing something, such as ‘the Eroica’s main theme returning’) but no clear-cut agent (recall Nattiez’s objections to overly literal applications of the mimetic hypothesis). In other cases, musical agency may be more like a secret agent, slipping in and out of the shadows cast between musical lines, performers and interpreters, with its identities, locations and disguises exploring a range of combinations. Whatever one’s sense of a musical experience’s agents or agency, that sense may be central to one’s subsequent experience of empathy, sympathy or music-induced emotions (Robinson and Hatten 2012).

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An important examination of this aspect of musical agency – Maus’s aforementioned essay on the first seventeen measures of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 – grapples with these theoretical challenges. In the course of his analysis, Maus also identifies a pitchorganizational issue that, following a different strand of music narratology, one might identify as a plot enigma: a mystery that the quartet’s agents enact and then seek to resolve. Maus argues that the opening two measures of the quartet do not solely invite reduction to the backdrop of an implied i–V–i progression in F minor. The metrical placement of what might otherwise be an unproblematic passing tone (Db) on a strong beat – its accentuation intensified by the melodic unity of the quartet voices and expressive commitment of their forte gesture – transgresses the basic harmonic order. Maus writes of the awkward incompleteness of this figure, which, following McCreless’s work on Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio, one might also conceptualize as a musical enigma. How will the piece solve the problem of this transgression? The enigma in the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio is certainly presented with theatrical flair. While other Beethoven movements and indeed pieces revolve around chromatic enigmas and their overcoming (such as the ‘antagonistic’ Db Karl discusses in the ‘Appassionata’), the process rarely begins quite so brusquely (see Musical Example 10.7). McCreless describes as ‘the most arresting moment in the opening of the first movement of the ‘Ghost’ Trio . . . the arrival of the chromatic F n in m. 5 and the ‘subposition’ of the Bb in the following measure; all the rhetorical features of the music draw this moment to our attention’ (McCreless 1988, 17).

Allegro vivace e con brio V iolin

ff

stacc.

ff

stacc.

C ello

Allegro vivace e con brio

P ian o

ff

stacc.

p

Musical Example 10.7 Beethoven, Piano Trio No. 5 in D major, Op. 70 ‘Ghost’, opening enigma

McCreless’s article identifies the similarity between the goal-directedness of contrapuntalharmonic tonal structure, as theorized by Schenker, and Barthes’s theorizing of plot as an irreversible sequence of functional and catalyzing (i.e. transitional) events, the most important of which present questions to be resolved over the course of a story (e.g. who bequeathed Pip’s great expectations?). Both the general goal-directedness and specific plot of a story’s events help to generate the ‘suspense’ that, for Barthes, grips one in the mind when engaging with a narrative. Hence, in the ‘Ghost’, ‘given the strong tonal orientation of the work, we know that ultimately the rhetorically emphasized enigma of the F n and Bb will be recuperated into the background

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tonal structure’ (McCreless 1988, 21) – just as, in the Op. 95 quartet’s Allegro con brio, the conventions of common-practice tonality dictate that the chromatic knot around Db and C must somehow be disentangled. The first response to Op. 95’s Db enigma is a firm yet ineffective attempt to overpower the problem. Maus stresses the rupture and repetition of the increasingly manic V–i cadences that follow the three beats of rest in measure 2: the high Cs in measure 3 and accelerating density of cadences in measures 4–5 create a sense, he suggests, of ‘hysteria’. The emphasis on V here, as if mm. 1–2 had merely been an unproblematic tonic prolongation, is music that doth protest too much. However free of chromatic impediments these Cs may be, the accentuated Db cannot simply be forgotten: its transgression was too significant. Measures 3–5 thereby turn a moment of musical drama into a full-blown structural crisis; reinstalling the hierarchy will take a larger scale process of reasoning. Yet who is doing the reasoning and responding in this music, and to whom or to what? As Maus explains, most music embodies ‘a pervasive indeterminacy in the identification of musical agents . . . [and] as the listener discerns actions and explains them by psychological states, various discriminations of agents will seem appropriate, but never with a determinacy that rules out other interpretations’; instead, every ‘listener’s experience will include a play of various schemes of individuation, none of them felt as obligatory’ (Maus 1988, 122–3). The expressive trajectory interconnecting those discriminations, though, may be less problematic to identify (like the generally orphic quality of the slow movement of the Op. 58 concerto). Indeed, Maus’s judgement on agency echoes the manner in which musical narratives invite acts of emplotment and imaginative engagement that liberate perceiver creativity while injecting each narrativization with a degree of indeterminacy, the experience of which is part and parcel of the pourquoi of musical narrativity. Measures 6–17 are the Serioso’s first well-reasoned attempt to resolve its enigma. Gesturally, the music’s body language feels calmer, and so veering into Gb does not feel like another rupture. Instead, it suggests a way of rethinking Db (as V of Gb), which permits the enigma its moment in the sun (m. 16) before, rather like the passage from the start of Mahler’s Ninth, tonal progressions and voice-leading press the chromatic transgressors back into their proper place in the hierarchical order (Gb resolves to F, and Db to C, as the music arrives on the dominant before a developmental reprise of the opening). This is not, however, the full resolution of the enigma. Rather, one might hear the passage as a point conceded in a longer range process of arbitration: ‘If Db is permitted space to be, eventually it may cease to be’, or even, ‘Db muss sein’. While not the type of detail that leads some to listen for a nascent musical plot, for music narratologists this is the kind of specificity that grounds the suggestiveness of musical narrativity. Indeed, one could even make such a case in relation to the opening of the finale in Beethoven’s Op. 135 and the gesture Nattiez dismisses as naught but a muffled intimation of discourse. As Michael Spitzer has suggested, by way of Christopher Reynolds, ‘Eb is so salient’ both to local dramas in Op. 135 (such as ‘the farcical interruptions in the Vivace’) and that quartet’s longer range processes (such as its working through of a tetrachordal F–Eb–Db–C pattern) ‘as to suggest that the finale’s famous ‘Muss es sein’ conundrum is a pun on the German word for Eb’ (Spitzer 2006, 180, citing Reynolds 1988, 190). In Op. 95, to move beyond the measures covered by Maus’s analysis, the enigmatic Db becomes the key of the second thematic area and, in the recapitulation (m. 129), even takes a turn as the key of the first theme. Its problematic nature is further neutralized, en route, by nuances such as mm. 121–2’s transposition of mm. 41–2’s

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Bb–A–Ab motif – a ‘marvel’ permitted by the movement’s voyage towards Db, but which, when later transformed into D–Db–C, assists in normalizing the aberrances and achieving a secure return. The vanishing echoes of the opening two measures at the movement’s close, however, remind one of the seriousness of the breach (niggling Dbs remain in the cello line as the final cadence is approached). This forestalls a more triumphant arrival, not least because, by this stage, a deeper enigma has emerged: F minor now sounds strange, as if the movement’s forces of order have been duped into adopting the role of transgressor by the music’s Game of Tones. * * * When certain plot types pile up in a creative oeuvre – Beethoven’s chromatic enigmas, Dickens’s Bildungsromane, the concerto genre’s multitudinous monsters – the temptation to interpret the broader biographical, cultural or historical significance of their recurrence can be overwhelming. It may seem appealing, for example, to consider whether overcoming transgressive chromatic enigmas, not by rhetorical force or charm alone but also with the full weight of musicdevelopmental intellect, is a token of Beethovenian heroism, and thus of his music’s embodiment, as decreed by broader processes of reception, of Romantic notions concerning mastery and subjectivity. Yet as Nicholas Cook and Lawrence Kramer have argued regarding music and meaning, albeit from rather different critical perspectives, the shift from the suggestive indeterminacy of a piece’s signifying structures to the specificity of social context will be actualized differently, if also potentially interconnectedly, by different interpreters (see Cook 2001 and Kramer 2004). As Maus has demonstrated in a sensitive exploration of the synergistic relationship between analytical narratives and the respective personalities, institutional positions and intellectual concerns of the scholars who proposed them, narratological actualizations heighten the degree of performativity already inherent in the act of reading music as a plot (Maus 2005). Should one therefore seek to disentangle the theoretical and musicological strands of such an enterprise? Not necessarily. Spitzer argues, after Adorno, that ‘a musical-critical theory attends both to [music’s] implicitly social character and to its adequacy to the irreducibly musical part of musical experience’ (Spitzer 2006, 263), or what Max Paddison calls the ‘dual-character of music: as self-contained, self-referential structure and as social fact’ (Paddison 1996, 23). Musical narratives, by emerging at the intersection of compositions, performances and interpretations, all of which are shaped by historically and culturally situated agents, demand attentiveness to music’s dual-character and thus to the development of critical-analytical approaches to music akin to James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s call for an analytically grounded ‘hermeneutic understanding of music as a communicative system, a cultural discourse implicated in issues of humanness, worldview, and ideology’ (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006). Together with the focus that music narratology invites on the actualization of meaning as a temporalized phenomenon in music – a vital annex to recent theorizing of musical meaning – this may, in fact, be the approach’s most significant contribution to musicology, and one of the most important sites for future investigations in this area. The stories we tell about music are functions of the only meaningful tale most of us will ever participate in telling around the campfire – the one that we tell about ourselves.

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Bibliography of works cited Abbate, Carolyn. 1989. ‘What the Sorcerer Said’, 19th-Century Music, 12: 221–30. ––––– 1991. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Adorno, Theodor. [1960] 1992. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ––––– 1970. Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge. Almén, Byron. 2006. ‘The Sacrificed Hero: Creative Mythopoesis in Mahler’s Wunderhorn Symphonies’, in Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (eds), Approaches to Musical Meaning. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 135–69. ––––– 2008. A Theory of Musical Narrative. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ––––– and Hatten, Robert. 2013. ‘Narrative Engagement with Twentieth-Century Music: Possibilities and Limits’, in Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland (eds), Music and Narrative since 1900. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 75–7. Aristotle. 1996. Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin. Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, in Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. ––––– [1982] 1985. ‘Rasch’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. R. Howard. Oxford: Blackwell. Booker, Christopher. 2004. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum. Burnham, Scott. 1992. ‘On the Programmatic Reception of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony’, Beethoven Forum, 1: 1–25. Clarke, Eric. 2005. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cone, Edward T. 1974. The Composer’s Voice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cook, Nicholas. 2001. ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, Music Theory Spectrum, 23: 170–95. ––––– and Everist, Mark, eds. [1999] 2001. Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, Arnie, 2011. ‘Embodying Music: Principles of the Mimetic Hypothesis’, Music Theory Online, 17. Available at: www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.2/mto.11.17.2.cox.html (accessed 8 July 2013). Floros, Constantin. [1977] 1994. Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon Wicker and Jutta Wicke. Portland, OR: Amadeus. Harker, Brian. 2006. ‘“Telling a Story”: Louis Armstrong and Coherence in Early Jazz’, Current Musicology, 63: 46–83. Hatten, Robert. 1991. ‘On Narrativity in Music: Expressive Genres and Levels of Discourse in Beethoven’. Indiana Theory Review, 12: 75–98. Hepokoski, James and Darcy, Warren. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the LateEighteenth-Century Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 350–77. Karl, Gregory. 1997. ‘Structuralism and Musical Plot’, Music Theory Spectrum, 19: 13–34. Kerman, Joseph. 1992. ‘Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Concerto’, Representations, 39: 80–101. ––––– 1999. Concerto Conversations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kinderman, William. 1992. ‘Integration and Narrative Design in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat Major, Opus 110’. Beethoven Forum, 1: 111–47. Klein, Michael L. 2004. ‘Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative’, Music Theory Spectrum, 26(1): 23–55. ––––– and Nicholas Reyland, eds. 2013. Music and Narrative since 1900. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kramer, Lawrence. 2004. ‘Music, Metaphor and Metaphysics’. The Musical Times, 145: 5–18. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1981. ‘It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire?’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 187–95. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1981. Mythologieques IV: L’homme nu (1971), trans. J. and D. Weightman as Mythologies IV: The Naked Man. London: Jonathan Cape. Liska, James Jacób. 1989. The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. McCreless, Patrick. 1988. ‘Roland Barthes’s S/Z from a Musical Point of View’. In Theory Only, 10: 1–29. Maus, Fred E. 1988. ‘Music as Drama’. Music Theory Spectrum, 10: 56–73. ––––– 1991. ‘Music as Narrative’. Indiana Theory Review, 12: 1–34. ––––– 2001. ‘Narratology, Narrativity’, in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, eds. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, Vol. 17. London: Macmillan, 641–3. ––––– 2005. ‘Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative’, in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 466–83. Meelberg, Vincent. 2006. New Sounds, New Stories: Narrativity in Contemporary Music. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

Narrative • 223 Micznik, Vera. 2001. ‘Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler’. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 126: 193–249. Momigny, Jérôme-Joseph de. 1805. Cours complet d’harmonie et de composition, d’après une théorie nouvelle et générale de la musique, Vol. 2. Paris: Momigny. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1980. Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115(2): 240–57. Negus, Keith. 2012. ‘Narrative, Interpretation and the Popular Song’. Musical Quarterly, 95(2–3): 368–95. Newcomb, Anthony. 1992. ‘Narrative Archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony’, in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Stephen Scher, 118–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicholls, David. 2007. ‘Narrative Theory as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Popular Music Texts’. Music and Letters, 88(2): 297–315. Paddison, Max. 1996. Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music. London: Kahn & Averill. Pasler, Jann. 1989. ‘Narrative and Narrativity in Music’, in J. T. Fraser, ed. Time and Mind: Interdisciplinary Issues. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 233–57. Phelan, James and Rabinowitz, Peter J. eds. 2005. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Reynolds, Christopher. 1988. ‘The Representational Impulse in Late Beethoven, II: String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135’. Acta Musicologica, 60: 180–94. Rink, John. 2001. ‘Translating Musical Meaning: The Nineteenth-Century Performer as Narrator’, in Rethinking Music, Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds, 217–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Jenefer and Hatten, Robert. 2012. ‘Emotions in Music’. Music Theory Spectrum, 34(2): 71–106. Rupprecht, Philip. 2013. ‘Agency Effects in the Instrumental Drama of Musgrave and Birtwistle’, in Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland (eds), Music and Narrative since 1900. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 189–215. Schenker, Heinrich. 1979. Free Composition, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. Spitzer, Michael. 2006. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Tarasti, Eero. 1992. ‘A Narrative Grammar of Chopin’s G minor Ballade’. Minds and Machines, 2(4): 401–26. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1971. Poétique de la prose. Paris: Editions du Seuil. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

11 Music and the moving image Jeremy Barham

Introduction: once more between ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic’ It is arguable whether the theoretical and aesthetic study of screen music1 has come of age. If it has, that moment perhaps could be dated to the appearance of Rick Altman’s special issue of Yale French Studies entitled ‘Cinema/Sound’ (Altman 1980) to which Claudia Gorbman contributed the article ‘Narrative Film Music’ as well as a bibliography listing over 160 existing items on the screen music topic alone; or it might date from Gorbman’s own subsequent ground-breaking investigation (Gorbman 1987) and the contemporaneous anthology Film Sound: Theory and Practice (Weis and Belton 1985), or to the English translation of Michel Chion’s L’Audio-Vision and the contribution of Royal Brown (both 1994), or to a range of collections and monographs that emerged around the beginning of the new millennium (Buhler et al. 2000; Donnelly 2001; Kassabian 2001). It might yet take place thanks to the recent appearance of two substantial edited compilations: David Neumeyer’s The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies and The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson et al., both of which offer wide-ranging theoretical coverage. Locating such a moment of scholarly ripening may not be possible, important or necessary, but part of what interests me here is the way in which the supposed development towards maturity in screen music studies has been preoccupied, diverted and sometimes driven by the theoretical issue of diegesis (and more specifically the diegetic/non-diegetic music classification2), from the time of its first serious appropriation by Gorbman in 1980 to its possible, final dismantling in 2013 by Annahid Kassabian in the face of new media. While this concern has been voiced and explored at length in screen music scholarship, I believe that there remain important areas and ramifications to be considered. It is well known that the labels ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic’ are not industry terms, but rather theoretical constructs arrived at after the fact. This in itself is not problematic unless an attempt is made to retro-fit the terms inflexibly into a discussion of the practicalities of screen production, or conversely to extrapolate analytical or aesthetic critique directly from industry processes, both of which approaches tend to result in terminological and technological confusion.3 As one industry commentator put it: ‘In the thirty years of conversations I’ve had with co-workers on feature films in the USA and Britain, nobody has ever used the word diegetic except to deride it as an academic term of little practical use’ (Thom 2007, 1). He goes on to make a much more radical claim: ‘the question of whether a sound in a given scene is diegetic or not is often irrelevant to the effect the story has on its audience’ (ibid., 2), coining the phrase ‘acoustics of the soul’ to suggest that most screen music, however it is classified, is an embodiment of some

Music and the moving image • 225

kind of profound emotive affect, whether obvious, hidden, congruent, incongruent, determined or undetermined in relation to the represented scenario. If, in the interests of aesthetics, I am thus advocating for screen music studies something of a separation between issues of technical production and critical-analytical understanding (which I suggest have a highly compromised relationship), I do not recommend the same between issues of the public-facing presentation and the critical-analytical understanding of the received product. This is because the manner and environment of screen consumption since the silent era have been integral to the development of screen music as creative art form, and in many respects closely determine how we may formulate its aesthetic, and especially how we may scrutinize the notion of diegesis. Relationships of continuity or discontinuity in the passage from silent to sound film between, for example, music that is live/recorded, improvised/fixed, constant/intermittent, holistic/fragmented, sympathetic/indifferent, synchronous/non-synchronous, visibly sourced/invisibly sourced, coupled with contexts of theatrical presentation, are crucial to how a represented world is creatively established, in other words to the construction and experience of a diegesis. No sooner had Gorbman proposed the aforementioned framework than it was subjected to repeated critical assaults for its inflexibility and its over-determined rigidity, which did not seem to reflect the reality of the aesthetic perception of screen music.4 To be fair to Gorbman, however, right from the outset she acknowledged that music, almost uniquely among the elements of a screen work, ‘freely crosses the boundary line’ between nondiegetic and diegetic contexts, and that it would be completely wrong to ascribe expressive capabilities only to music belonging to the former (1980, 196, 198). Similarly, it was more the case that the adoption of the binary structure without the nuance that Gorbman always bore in mind or without doing anything significant with it, were justifiable targets of critique (let alone the ignoring of the idea completely).5 All that said, certain philosophical problems have been left lingering by Gorbman’s model, and these centre on its implicit acknowledgment of the subservience or secondary nature of music within the screen context, and a certain lack of clarity about the very nature of diegesis, its relationship to narrative, music’s role in determining either, and its perceived or assumed aesthetic location therein.6 The dialectical problem Over the years, it seems to have been hard for commentators on screen and screen music, unwittingly or not, to resist invoking the paradox that the latter is completely indispensable but at the same time inevitably subordinate – necessary, even defining, but ever contingent. In 1930 Béla Balázs distinguished between Begleitmusik (accompanying music) in film as a ‘new form of programme music’, and an organic fusion of ‘pure music’ with film, in which ‘music would not be an accompaniment to the images, but the images would appear as accompaniment to the music’. In this context ‘music would be the reality, images their subconscious resonance. Not sound film, but filmed sound’ ([1930] 2001, 134, 135). To some degree Balázs may have been responding to contemporary experimentation in so-called ‘visual music’ genres, but similarly Eisler’s and Adorno’s subsequent modernist repudiation of commerce and cliché, at times drawing critically on Eisenstein’s montage theories, on the one hand took it as a ‘fundamental postulate’ that ‘the specific nature of the picture sequence shall determine the specific nature of the accompanying music’ (Adorno and Eisler [1947] 1994, 69),7 while on the other hand held that ‘[screen music’s] aesthetic effect is that of a stimulus of motion’ (in other words, one that is active, determining) (ibid., 78). They further claimed that while screen music ‘should not

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behave indiscreetly with regard to its object’ (ibid., 129), nevertheless ‘[i]ts whole structure . . . must become visible’, for ‘renounc[ing] its claim that it is there . . . is . . . its cardinal sin’ (ibid., 132, 133). Almost identical arguments about the ‘inaudibility’ of screen music have been conducted ever since. Such contradictory impulses with regard to the ontological status of screen music can be found across much of the more recent literature, to the extent that one might diagnose a pervasive sense of voluntary or involuntary misreading impelled by the forces of both industry and academia alike. It was a ‘cardinal rule’ for Prendergast’s utilitarian screen composer, for example, that ‘the visuals on the screen determine the form of the music written to accompany it’, and yet frequently, film music – for Prendergast a ‘neglected art’ – ‘can imply a psychological element far better than dialogue can’, indeed ‘music can and does serve just this function better than any other element of film’ (1977, 215, 204, 205). For David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, non-diegetic ‘mood’ music ‘has no relation to the space of the story’ (1985, 199), and yet for Ron Mottram, writing in the same volume, ‘music is part of the whole fabric of expression, more expressive than words alone, and far more than merely a background for the dramatic action. It actually becomes a second level on which the narrative develops meaning’ (1985, 223). Though such music ‘is never supposed to compete for our attention’, in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958; music by Henry Mancini) ‘our awareness of music is so intense that it takes on an ideational quality’ (Mintz 1985, 294). In relation to sound in general, music in the Hollywood film ‘is usually of subsidiary importance’, and yet that sound of which it is a part ‘fills the space of the theater, while the image . . . remains confined to the rectangle of the screen’, and the spectator/auditor is ‘always aware of the disparity between the limited space of the image and the “unlimited” space of the sound’, according to Fred Camper (1985, 371).8 Though sanctioning the composer Leonard Rosenman’s idea of music’s ability to establish ‘a different kind of reality than what is apparent . . . a “supra reality”’, George Burt denies that the ‘subtle, abstract, and symbolic’ voice of music ever attains primacy over the film (1994, 7, 8). In a quasi-reversal of this formulation, Russell Lack contends that while music ‘by itself has no content, no entailment’, nevertheless (calling on Eisenstein) ‘the musical soundtrack . . . becomes a vital element in the construction of the narrative’ (1997, 68, 72; my emphasis). Even Michel Chion’s notion of music’s ‘added value’ in screen works inescapably inscribes an aesthetic hierarchy in which music is contributory, secondary. Problems of this nature remain evident in writings of the last decade, where, for example, Kevin Donnelly can claim that ‘the celestial voices of film music . . . are not “substantial” or do not constitute part of what audiences cognize as important in the film’, while for him certain aspects of scoring practice such as ‘synch points’ suggest that ‘screen music should no longer be conceived as simply the “accompaniment” to the unerring primacy of the image’ (2005, 8, 11). In recent histories we read that screen music is ‘an outside element . . . not part of the story itself’, and though it plays a ‘powerful and often critical role’, its presence is often ‘secondary to dialogue and sound effects’ (Hickman 2006, 35). James Wierzbicki’s study is predicated on the belief that screen scores ‘almost by definition are responsive, subordinate and derivative’ – factors which nevertheless ensure their ‘rich semiotic content’ and ‘subtle power’ – a conviction for which Wierzbicki enlists the support of no less an auteur than Fellini, for whom ‘in a film, music is something marginal and secondary, something that cannot occupy the foreground except in a few rare moments and . . . must be content to support the rest of what’s happening’ (2009, 2, 3, 4), an opinion that seems more than a little ironic coming from the director of the

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musically rich and evocative La Dolce Vita (1960; score by Nino Rota).9 Most recently, Buhler’s critique of neo-Lacanian theory in application to the screen soundtrack suggests a beginning and endpoint of discussion: Without a frame to contain it, the soundtrack both simultaneously embodies the diegesis in its entirety and denies the possibility of its appearing. The soundtrack is the point at which the impossibility of sound film’s diegesis assumes positive form . . . the soundtrack cannot serve to guarantee the image’s fantasy of completion. (Neumeyer 2014, 409)10 The questions raised by this brief survey are presumably similar to those that prompted three direct interventions in what might be termed the ‘Gorbman protocol’: Kassabian (2001), Stilwell (2007) and Winters (2010), along with some other follow-up discussion in Davis (2012), Winters (2012) and Yacavone (2012). The first, larger question might ask whether it would be beneficial and indeed possible to resolve or escape from this apparent dialectic cul-de-sac (screen music as part of/separate from the diegesis; screen music as non-narrational in a predicative sense/screen music as constructing narrative; screen music as inevitably subordinate mode of response/highly powerful determining agent in the context of screen works) and, if so, how this could be done. The answer may come in stages. Prior to the interventions named above, Royal Brown provided a critically sophisticated, if ultimately ambiguous, perspective while at the same time retaining the diegetic/non-diegetic framework. With reference to the films Duelle and Noroît by Jacques Rivette (both 197611) and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958, music by Bernard Herrmann) he posited the ability of non-diegetic screen music to become ‘another form of fiction’ whose mythic qualities allow it somehow to transcend synchronically the diegetic time of the film, and even the cultural-generic frame of cinema itself, partly because audiences ‘confuse . . . narrative and diegesis’, where the latter is the perceived reality of the film and the former is its story structure that Brown suggests operates in a similar way to music (1994, 71, 84) – fabula and syuzhet in David Bordwell’s formulation (1985). Brown insists that in such cases, music offers a parallel narrative (thus external to the film, and with ‘metacinematic’ potential – a term that remains undefined, but seems to be a stronger version of Gorbman’s meta-diegetic, extra narrating voice), which, in the case of Vertigo and Bernard Herrmann’s score, the main character Scottie can inhabit (or even produce) while in a state of obsession and psychological neurosis. The way that such a parallel narrative or fiction (defined by Brown as ‘the illusory permanentization and essentialization of a set of structural relationships’ (71)) is inserted into the diegesis gives this film its peculiar expressive power. We can perceive here a tentative and somewhat tortuous attempt to redefine the nature of a represented diegesis by identifying additional layers of musical ‘fiction’ (problematically both external to and within the screen diegesis) and yet determinedly holding on to the Gorbman model, and allowing characters to traverse the cinematic ‘fourth wall’ in a kind of eternally regressive set of nested illusions. The flipside of this type of complex aesthetic argument is exemplified in David Neumeyer’s extreme taxonomic approach, which attempts to account prosaically for every conceivable type of music and sound in the world of a screen work (1997). Here, the diegetic/non-diegetic pairing takes its place among a range of other categories of what he calls ‘cinematic musical codes’ (see his figure 3, n.p.), in a detailed parsing of screen sound components. Extremely useful though such an approach is in a lexical sense, it is of less immediate benefit to the present discussion since Neumeyer consciously

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demotes the issue of diegesis so that it appears on the same operational level as, for example, ‘vocal/instrumental’, ‘musically closed/open’, and ‘thematic/motivic referentiality’, a ploy that I would argue unduly divests it of its ontological and aesthetic significance.12 The first substantial theoretical challenge to the Gorbman protocol came from Kassabian who, at least to begin with, seemed wisely to divorce considerations of aesthetic value and function from processes of production in screen works. In addition to her protest, shared by several scholars, against the reductive nature of the binary, more importantly she reiterated and expanded on Lack’s view: ‘[t]he distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music . . . obscures music’s role in producing the diegesis itself’ (Kassabian 2001, 42; my emphasis). This crucial step was nevertheless somewhat hampered by then falling back on Hagen’s tripartite industry-led model (see fn. 4) and attempting to map it on to the diegetic/non-diegetic framework. Robynn Stilwell (2007) operates firmly within the Gorbman model, but focuses on the points of strain that it can barely contain. Referring to a variety of films, including René Clair’s Sous les Toits de Paris (1930; music by Raoul Moretti and Vincent Scotto ), King Kong (1933; dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack; music by Max Steiner), The Wizard of Oz (1939; dir. Victor Fleming; music by Harold Arlen, George Stoll, Herbert Stothart, and Robert W. Stringer), Lifeboat (1944; dir.Alfred Hitchcock; music by Hugo Friedhofer), Casablanca (1942; dir. Michael Curtiz; music by Max Steiner et al.), The Killing Fields (1984; dir. Roland Joffé; music by Mike Oldfield), The Silence of the Lambs (1991; dir. Jonathan Demme; music by Howard Shore) and The Insider (1999; dir. Michael Mann; music by Pieter Bourke and Lisa Gerrard ), she examines more directly than most the fluid interface between the two poles of the binary, and importantly, if only in a preliminary sense, proposes what she calls the ‘metadiegetic sublime’, a Romanticidealist philosophical epigone at work when screen music, ‘soaring above the diegesis’, ‘takes the foreground’ and can ‘literally and metaphorically, seem to spill out over/from behind the screen and envelop the audience, creating a particularly intense connection’ (2007, 197), rather like Brown’s extruding yet affecting metacinematic fiction. Ben Winters takes a more theoretically robust approach, and, calling on Daniel Frampton’s ‘filmind’ neologism (a film’s own ‘organic intelligence’, the ‘film itself’; Frampton 2007, 7, cited in Winters 2010, 233), attempts to restore the Gorbmanesque category of non-diegetic screen music (which after all, is the most widespread of screen music types) to the ontological fold of films’ narrative space, coining for such music the term ‘intra-diegetic’. There are problems with Winters’s intervention both terminologically (the proposed use of ‘intra-diegetic’ while retaining ‘diegetic’ seems uncomfortable and open to confusion), and conceptually (the higher level duality he proposes between ‘extra-fictional’ (overture and intermission screen music) and ‘fictional’ (all other screen music) is somewhat underdeveloped and again open to misunderstanding in terms of where the boundaries of the screen work’s fictional space lie (vis-à-vis opening and closing credit sequences, for example) and how these relate to narrative and diegesis). Nevertheless, the greatest value of Winters’s contribution lies in his persistent differentiation between the act of narrating and the narrated act, between music as producer and as product of narrative: ‘To assume that music functions primarily as a narrating voice in a narratological sense, rather than as an indicator and occupier of narrative space, is perhaps to misunderstand the broader nature of cinematic diegesis’ (2010, 225).13 Given the highly problematic notion of ‘the film itself’, which is dangerously reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s semiological chimera ‘neutral level’ or ‘material trace’ in music (1990, 28), it would be relatively simple, and might indeed be necessary, to reconceive the ‘filmind’ as an amalgamation of Jerrold Levinson’s ‘implicit fictional presenter’ (1996) or the ‘implied

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filmmaker’ (discussed in Carroll and Moore 2011) (after all, the film has to have been created by someone), and the individual consuming subject who for Gorbman (with reference to the ‘Kuleshov effect’) ‘infer[s], reconstruct[s] the diegesis’ (1980, 15) and who for Winters ‘construct[s] cinematic diegesis . . . with reference to the conventions of film’ including ‘“background music”’ [which] plays a constitutive role in shaping our construction of the diegesis’ (2010, 243). However, does this, and the attendant transference of narrative agency to the ‘filmind’, do enough to account for/legitimize the difference between music as ‘narrating voice’, from which Winters is keen to distance the debate, and music as an ‘indicator . . . of narrative space’? If the ‘filmind’ inevitably combines both poietic and aesthesic agencies of narrative construction (and it should be remembered that the latter is just as external as, if not more than, the former), can or should that difference be sustained? Winters’s argument hinges on asserting a distinction between, and indeed the complete independence of, narrative (the constructive process) and diegesis (the product that just ‘is’) in screen works, and in understanding the (as-yet-undefined) ‘broader nature of cinematic diegesis’. As he notes, this distinction – or rather ‘the relative autonomy of the narrative and diegetic principles’ – was proposed by film theoretician Noël Burch who inferred it in a preliminary sense from, on the one hand, the difficulty uninitiated audiences have identifying with the diegesis of silent films, but, on the other hand, the ease with which they cope with the ‘standard narrative codes’ of the same films (1982, 18).14 Burch, however, toes the standard line contra Winters that music (of the type commonly classified as nondiegetic) has an ‘essentially narrative role’ and ‘remains an extra-diegetic signifier’ (26), and he also crucially suggests that in the ‘iconic hegemony’ of the sound film, ‘narrative and diegetic processes tend to fuse, causing . . . frequent heuristic confusion between them’ (20; my emphasis). Moreover, where Roland Barthes, according to Burch, identified ‘the apparent fusion between connotational and denotational levels of signification in the still photograph’, Burch himself claims that ‘[i]n the talking cinema the (con)fusion between these two levels is far more complete’ (ibid., fn 7). In the light of this, as an alternative to prising open and maintaining a distinction between screen music as narrator (mostly denied by Winters) or as narrated, I am more interested in exploring this fusion or collapse of narrative and diegesis, denotation and connotation, even diegesis and mimesis (and the resultant breakdown of the dialectic outlined previously), a process in which music is fully implicated, or which music may even embody. Aesthetic models from Weimar Germany Findings from recent archival research I have undertaken into the earliest sound films in Weimar Republic, Germany, 1928–33, may serve to illustrate some of what I am suggesting here.15 A body of well over 500 generically diverse sound films was produced during this period, one of the most fertile in German cinema’s history, between the decline of the silent era and the installation of the Third Reich. This was the time not just of notable socio-politically trenchant works such as Der blaue Engel (1930; dir. von Sternberg, music by Friedrich Hollaender) and Kuhle Wampe (1931; dir. Dudow; music by Hans Eisler), but also a plethora of adventure films, dramas, thrillers, historical films, comedies, film noir, romances, literary adaptations, sport films, musicals, so-called Tonfilmoperetten, documentaries and experimental films. This repertoire is doubly significant given the complex relationship between the two cinematic powerhouses of the period, Hollywood and Germany. Detailed discussion will not be possible here of, on the one hand, cultural and technical influence and cross-fertilization, or, on the other hand, resistance and protectionism, between the two entities. Suffice it to say that the post-First World War

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influx of Amerikanismus into Europe on the back of US economic expansion coincided with Germany’s development of its domestic film product. Despite increasing American control and infiltration of the German film industry, as Thomas Saunders writes ‘[a] significant indigenous alternative to Hollywood survived throughout the Republican era’ (1994, 5) and this was characterized not so much by works related to expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit but by the range of populist genres just mentioned. In an ambiguous cultural, economic and personal game of borrowing, rejection, bans and boycotts, the German film industry, primarily through UFA and the Tobis-Klangfilm company, took the arrival of sound as an opportunity to compete successfully for domination of its own markets. However, despite a reputation for earnestness and angst largely bequeathed by the writings of Siegfried Kracauer ([1947] 2004) and Lotte Eisner [1952] (1969), it arguably produced just as much kitsch as its American counterpart. Among feature films, for example, by far the most prevalent genre was the light-hearted Musikspektakelfilm with its two subgenres, the Operettenfilm (film versions of operettas and comic operas) and, most common of all, so-called Tonfilmoperetten – that is, original films combining comedy and performed music in differing proportions. Through their generic dexterity, films of this last category significantly challenge screen music ontologies. For example, the 1930 film Die vom Rummelplatz (directed by Carl Lamač; music by Jára Benes) contains virtually no singing but partially aligns with the film musical aesthetic by including excerpts of a ‘live’ vaudeville stage performance within the represented story (concerning the rise to fame of a lowly family of musical entertainers). Although, significantly, the characters in the film do not break into song as in the standard genre of the musical, they are embedded in: 1 2

3

their world of music, since they are entertainers and take part in a stage act; the musical world supplied by the implied filmmaker, since they move, act and gesture (often theatrically) in time to: a music, performed in the story, that they are not participating in, and/or that occurs in a different physical location; b music that cannot be related to any live or recorded performance in the story; c music of an ambiguous ontological nature that can be heard by them (and viewers) backstage during the live performance, but to which they ‘impossibly’ move at times in complete synchrony, or which seems aesthetically to veer away from the live performed music to provide an emotive contour for human interaction; by extension, the world of music constructed by the viewer.

Traditional models would describe 2 (c) above as a case of diegetic music shifting into fulfilling a non-diegetic function, with suspension of disbelief, or perhaps the ‘filmind’, obviating any need for realistic points of reference, as the music helps to construct the film’s narrative space. Neumeyer’s recent categorization (2009b), as far as it is possible to ascertain, would take this music to be (1) narratively plausible, (2) realistic, (3) musically closed, and (4) off-screen, but arguably would not be able comfortably to situate it as diegetic or non-diegetic. These descriptions do not do justice to the level of pervasive ‘musicalization’ in evidence here in a screen work that cannot securely be categorized as a ‘film musical’. Backstage romance and intrigue become the ‘front-of-stage’ performance by means of the relatively seamless continuity and ebb and flow of off-screen stage music. At one point, for example, the troupe exit the stage after a performance, and the continuation of the music (perhaps into what Neumeyer calls a ‘quasibackground “limbo”’; 2009b, 51), as well as the ongoing physical interaction of the characters

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with it backstage, together with a cutaway to stage hands, reinforce the sense that the boundary between backstage and onstage is dissolved; and, if all the world is a stage, then poietically derived acts of narration, aesthesically received narrated acts, denotation and connotation, diegesis (telling) and mimesis (showing) tend to fold into one another to form a musicalized über-diegetic totality.16 That this distinctive aesthetic was not confined to Musikspektakelfilme is demonstrated in the better known drama Abschied (1930), the first UFA-made sound film. A serious, slice-oflife film, Abschied boasts an impressive line-up of co-creators: director Robert Siodmak, scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger, cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, music by Erwin Bootz. The story, set in a Berlin ‘hostel for homeless bourgeois people’, concerns the misunderstanding between a young couple (Peter and Hella) that over the course of one evening leads them unnecessarily to part company. Knitting the whole series of events together is the intermittent piano music (a mixture of popular dances, the poignant title song and some pre-existent music), performed, sometimes visibly, by another resident of the hostel played by Erwin Bootz, the composer of the original music. After the opening credits (during which the title song is heard), the premise is set up very early and obviously in the film that its piano music is ‘diegetically’ legitimated through visible performance. However, on many subsequent occasions this music apparently is narratively motivated in ways that counter its ‘realistic’ basis, and this ontological tension generates a highly ambiguous and expressive musicalized screen aesthetic. At times the piano (being played elsewhere in the building) ‘impossibly’ responds to hesitant looks and pregnant pauses in dialogue at moments of melancholy between the two main characters (Peter is about to leave to take up a job in another city). Elsewhere it helpfully ‘drops out’ during phone calls, or Hella ‘impossibly’ starts singing to it at exactly the moment it reappears. In Neumeyer’s terms it might be said of this last case that she could be singing to off-screen diegetic music as ‘onscreen non-diegetic music’, in ‘an expression of [her] subjectivity’, perhaps not even knowing that she is performing (2009b, 46). However, it might be much easier for us to accept that, suspending the ‘rules’ of a normative realism, and accepting a form of musicalized diegesis that circumvents diegetic legitimation and aligns in part with the film-musical aesthetic, the Hella character somehow just joins in naturally and fully consciously with the diegetic piano playing because this is the magical fictional world that such musicalization engenders. Moments of affection are sometimes directed by changes in musical style or sound level, as when the couple begin to dance a slow waltz to the title music, which seamlessly emerges, now much louder, from previous popular dance music heard very faintly. Right on cue, the piano music ends at an awkward moment in the conversation when Peter asks Hella if she has been unfaithful to him, and the dance ceases. At one point Peter’s frustration and suspicion are musicalized in the pianist’s obsessive practising of successively shorter parts of the Animato section from the opening movement, ‘Preambule’, of Schumann’s Carnaval Op. 9 (1834–5) – a work which, rather like the hostel, is populated by a ‘cast’ of imaginary characters mediated through music, and, in relation to the couple, calls upon the trope of the masked ball where hidden, secret or mistaken identities are the order of the day. The ever-tightening spiral of the Schumann excerpt finishes at exactly the moment when Peter finds what he wrongly takes to be conclusive incriminating evidence of Hella’s infidelity, the name and address of another man hidden in a book. After Peter has left the hostel, Hella eventually at the end of the film finds the engagement ring he was going to give her which bears the engraving: ‘Wear it always; forget me never’, whereupon a slow track around the now-empty room begins, and the principal theme returns now augmented by strings and voice, which sings ‘Everything in life ends like a song,

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fades and flies away when you say farewell’. This turn to what would traditionally be termed non-diegetic underscore for the first and only time in the film does several things: it adheres to the convention of supplying ‘outro’ music at the end of a film; it expressively and sonically enhances the principal musical theme for greater emotional impact and audience involvement; it fuses or collapses narrating and narrated modes, telling and showing, ‘knowing about’ and ‘being there’ to allow the deepest audience immersion in the physical and mental space of the film world; and it lends a clinching coherence to the entire integrating musical fabric of the film, an aestheticized state intimated in the evocative song lyric. The music that has been organically permeating through the walls of the hostel and temporally through the scenes of the film (via the pianist both as character and as the film’s real-world composer) as an aesthetic embodiment of the mutual collapse of narrative (space) and diegesis, is now revealed to have pervaded, even incarnated the entire inner consciousness of the character Hella all along: to have been the ‘acoustics of her soul’. Abschied’s aesthetic contests the Gorbman protocol since its music becomes the film’s fictional space of integrated fantasy in such a way as to be inseparable both from any narrating mechanism and from what is narrated. It takes on the imaginative character and function of their conjoined identity. An aesthetics of psychosis To an extent, my thinking here aligns with recent investigations of screen music ontology in the context of philosophical analysis and/or more wide-ranging repertoire. Among many other things, these investigations have pointed out the misapplication to film of the original Greek term ‘diegesis’ (the relating of a story in the teller’s own voice), when ‘mimesis’ (the acting out of a story) is more appropriate (see Taylor 2007 and Yacavone 2012). Winters talks of characters in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946; dir. William Wyler, music by Hugo Friedhofer) ‘moving not just through a narrative space, but a musicalised narrative space’ (2012, 48). Yacavone posits for screen works an ‘aesthetic world-space’ that is ‘beyond narrative’ (2012, 35),17 and, using the model of the Klein bottle to build on Winters’s argument, Nick Davis holds that ‘it is distinctly unhelpful to treat “story” and “discourse” as if they were formally separable for purposes of analysis’; that in conjunction with other screen elements, music ‘becomes simultaneously “story” and “discourse”’ and is thus able to ‘generate narrativity by forming part of narrative’s characteristic troping without being, qua music, narrating action’ (2012, 14, 10, 18). Alessandro Cecchi reminds us of the subjectively mediated nature of both narration and diegesis, the latter all the more so because it is ‘the result of a (subjective) act of inference based on a construction which has itself been mediated from a subjective viewpoint’ (2010, 5). These levels of mediation render it impossible to distinguish at an ontological level between either the purportedly ‘objective’ contents and ‘subjective modalities of the narration’ (ibid., 4), or the diegetic and non-diegetic, including the case of music whose function remains ‘broadly independent of its topology’ (ibid., 5), which at best remains peripheral to the aesthetic experience of audio-visual media. While it is true, as Winters points out, that it would be unreasonable to consider screen music as ‘the creator of all the narrative we experience’ if this idea is used as an explanation for how it might form ‘an extra-diegetic layer of narration’ or how it might ‘narrate the events of the diegesis’ (2012, 43), this does not preclude music from having the extremely powerful capacity to usurp, subsume or embody the very dissolution of the dialectic previously outlined. To talk of an entirely musical or musicalized diegesis might nevertheless be a step too far (even in the genre of the screen musical, though perhaps not in some experimental contexts) since

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for one thing it conjures up a late-Wagnerian operatic aesthetic of only partial applicability to screen works, and is exclusive to the point of risking aesthetic blindness. In any case, it is an inaccurate way of describing the process, for which the solidity of concepts and their dialectic frame have become perilously insecure. Though addressing screen sound rather than music specifically, James Buhler suggests: A profound uncertainty follows from the attempt to substitute the continuity of the soundtrack, which has no formal limit, for the image as the ground of diegetic representation. In many films today, sound takes the place of the establishing shot, and it loses the promise of plenitude that had always been the opening of desire marked by the frame edge. (Buhler 2014, 411) Citing Žižek, Buhler perceives a sense of deep psychological disturbance in this: The soundtrack gives us the basic perspective, the ‘map’ of the situation, and guarantees its continuity, while the images are reduced to isolated fragments that float freely in the universal medium of the sound aquarium. It would be difficult to invent a better metaphor for psychosis . . . we have here the ‘aquarium’ of the real surrounding isolated islands of the symbolic. (Žižek 1991, 40, cited in Buhler 2014, 411) However, the world of screen works (including the documentary genre and especially the ‘reality TV’ genre) has always been predominantly one of a fantastic, magical detachment from reality. In this sense, then, ‘psychosis’ seems a perfectly apt term for a medium which does not strictly obey the rules of logic or of physical time and space, despite – or perhaps because of – the emergence of classic continuity editing. Far from this being a new phenomenon, however, I suggest that it is as old as the screen medium itself, and something that we as viewers naturally accept. If, for Žižek, screen sound by the 1990s had become the ‘“aquarium” of the real’ in which symbolic images float as isolated fragments, in the silent film era the presence of live musical accompaniment, coupled with that musical repertoire’s denotational-connotational malleability, had already both wedded the fictional with the real, and at the same time highlighted their ontological separation: the ‘real’ of the ‘unreal’ screen images is less accessible than the ‘unreal’ of the ‘real’ music. If there was any historical and aesthetic continuity between the silent and sound eras, then I suggest it lay somewhere within this perceptual quandary of yet further mutually collapsing tendencies. Although I took two little-known early European examples to illustrate my thinking, the mutual influence of American and German filmmakers in the vital formative years of the medium and beyond, is a topic worthy of more detailed examination.18 I contend also that even the most commercial of mainstream Hollywood repertoire partakes of the same kind of ‘mass-psychotic’, dialectic-overcoming aesthetic. To take one example: the opening of the first Star Wars film (1977; dir. George Lucas, music by John Williams), perhaps unusually has no credit sequence beyond the two logos of ‘20th Century Fox’ and ‘Lucasfilm’.19 There is thus minimal framing of the screen work. The following intertitle ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .’ is an unproblematic narrating act, lying exterior to the world of the film as story, but inside the film as created work. The film title and scrolling explanatory text receding into the distant black of space appear approximately two seconds later together with Williams’s music. It is arguable that without the stirring score, this textual element could also be taken as an exterior narrating

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device (although it also has strong connotational content).20 In the final moments of its disappearance and for a further ten seconds, overwhelmingly black screen is gradually populated by faint stars before the first substantial image (of a small planet) appears, the most obvious visual signal of the mimetic beginning of the films’ story. However, I would claim that the presence of music throughout this passage – and music that is initially replete with militaristic, heroic, emotively striving and wild-west-pioneering allusions21 – has the effect of shifting the mimetic beginning of the film’s story earlier to the appearance of the title ‘Star Wars’ on screen. It is from this point that perception of a work being narrated is strongly encouraged to dissolve into a much less resistant identification with, and immersion in, an unfolding ‘performed’ story that for the time being is predominantly musical. The boundaries between the film as work and as story, between diegesis and mimesis, and between narrating and the narrated are collapsing through the presence of music that would traditionally be described as separate from the diegesis, and by implication an exterior narrative voice, but which adopts a mimetic function. If one accepts Aristotle’s classification of diegesis as a subset of the overarching mode of poetic creation – mimesis – then here the music as ‘showing’ or ‘enacting’ completely overwhelms the scrolling text as ‘telling’ and dominates the minimal visual content emerging at the end of this as well. In this paradoxical sense, while not narrating, it nevertheless creates or embodies narrative. Although the genetically secondary status of the music in relation to the image in the process of production might elicit corresponding kinds of aesthetic evaluation, I maintain that the music assumes primacy here as a determining screen agent both expressively and structurally: during the period of primarily black screen the downward semitonal shift from the diatonic major home key to minor and to unstable chromatic decoration, coupled with the thinning of orchestral texture to high-tessitura sonorities in woodwind and celeste, and the less marked metrical identity, serve to blend mimesis with diegesis (if not to subsume the latter) by lending expectancy to our interpretative experience of the neutral void of distant space and by opening out a structural space within which the film’s first substantial visual element appears. Such a ‘katabasis’, or downward trajectory of intensity, is common in, for example, the symphonic music of Mahler where it often signals a structural or expressive turning point.22 In these two minutes of screen time at the opening of an audio-visual experience that in many ways epitomized a historical turning point in the socio-cultural relationship between viewer and sound film spectacle, the binary oppositions of (1) music’s inevitable separation from/essential implication in screen diegeses, (2) its non-narrational/narratively constructive function, and (3) its responsive/directive activity, are dissipated, and continue to be so to varying degrees throughout the film. We live in an increasingly musicalized screen world as Kassabian explores in her diagnosis of the ‘end of diegesis as we know it’ (2013). In current hyper-mediatized ipod, music-video and public as well as online environments, either by choice or imposition, non-musical portions of human existence are becoming gradually scarcer. Whether this is a symptom of the final psychotic, dialectic collapse (between screen worlds and real worlds) or whether it is just another case of life imitating art for all our collective enrichment, remains to be seen and heard. Notes 1

A field variously referred to as film/screen music (studies), film/screen musicology, studies of music (sound) and the moving image, musical multi-media, or the audio-visual. In this discussion I will generally use the terms screen work or screen music for the object of study, and screen studies or screen music studies/screen music scholarship for the practice of this study.

Music and the moving image • 235 2

3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17

18

This classification, derived by Gorbman from the 1950s/1960s narrative theory of Gérard Genette and film theory of Étienne Souriau, divides screen music into that which can be heard by the characters within the represented scenario (diegetic) and that which cannot (non- or extra-diegetic). A third category, meta-diegetic, was adapted by Gorbman to label music that seems to be projected by the inner psychological state of a character who thus ‘“takes over” part of the film’s narration’ (Gorbman 1987, 23). The term meta-diegetic has since been applied more widely to any diegetic music that can only be heard in the imagination of one character in the scenario. David Neumeyer has usefully explored the interaction between production process technology and theoretical understanding of film music (Neumeyer 1997 and 2009b). See Winters 2010, 225 for a summary of this critique, to which should be added Neumeyer 1997, 2009b; Cecchi 2010; Davis 2012; Winters 2012; Yacavone 2012. See, for example, Kalinak 1992, Burt 1994, Lack 1997, Timm 1998, Hickman 2006 and Kalinak 2010. Perhaps unsurprisingly, authors of theoretical books on screen music that pre-date Gorbman, or of practice-based/industryled guides from any era, do not use the terms diegetic and non-diegetic (see, for example, Hagen 1971, Bazelon 1975, Evans 1975, Prendergast 1977, Sonnenschein 2001). Hagen’s tripartite formulation of source music, source scoring and pure dramatic scoring is among the most nuanced of categorizations in the industry sector (1971, 190–206), and was, in fact, taken up by Annahid Kassabian in her critique of the diegetic/non-diegetic binary (2001, 42–9). There is disagreement about the latter, even in discussions of silent-era music. For Rick Altman, the producers of sound or music operate ‘implicitly within the space implied by the image’, sound is not ‘a rhetorical addition to the image’ but ‘a form of ventriloquism’ (Altman 2004, 92 (original emphasis); see also 370). Donnelly by contrast suggests that ‘the music of silent cinema . . . was . . . predominantly “non-diegetic”: emanating from outside the world constructed by the film, as if appearing from heaven’ (2001, 6). The reverse is also acknowledged but regarded as ‘today largely hypothetical’ (Adorno and Eisler [1947] 1994, 70). It was this, according to Camper, that inspired experimental film maker Stan Brakhage to make silent films, ‘because sound tends to dominate image’ (1985, 378) Citing Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini (New York: Dalacorte, 1976), from Nat Shapiro (ed.), An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (New York: Doubleday, 1978), p. 319. I am very grateful to James Buhler for allowing me access to pre-publication versions of parts of this volume. Duelle has a team of composers: Jean Cohen-Solal (composer: effect music), Robert Cohen-Solal (composer: effect music), André Dauchy (composer: improvised music (as Dauchy), Roger Fugen (composer: improvised music), Daniel Ponsard (composer: effect music) and Jean Wiener (composer: improvised music) Noroît also has a team of composers: Original Music is credited to Jean Cohen-Solal, Robert Cohen-Solal and Daniel Ponsard. A related taxonomy had been earlier proposed in Percheron and Butzel 1980, while extensions, glosses and differing perspectives on this approach have been subsequently offered in Neumeyer 2009a, 2009b and Smith 2009. This distinction is re-emphasized by Winters in a more recent article, of which it forms the basic premise (Winters 2012). The deciding factor for Burch was the absence of lip-synch sound in the silent era. I am grateful to the British Academy and DAAD for funding three research visits to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, and the Friedrich Murnau Stiftung in Wiesbaden during 2013. In technological terms, Neumeyer notes that ‘before 1932, when post-production re-recording was first generally used, background music was more likely to be employed in a musical than in a dramatic feature’ (2009b, 43–44), quoting Kathryn Kalinak’s adherence to established nomenclature: ‘In The Love Parade (1929), for instance, diegetic music in the production numbers spills over as nondiegetic music for ensuing scenes’ (Kalinak 1992, 68). The precarious generic affiliation of German Tonfilmoperetten at this time, of which Die vom Rummelplatz is a particularly challenging example, does not necessarily invalidate, but certainly complicates these observations. For example, outside of any performed music in the film, simple acts such as knocking on an office door, are integrated rhythmically with music. I would argue that the musically dominated aesthetic context clearly favours this mode of understanding over the theoretically more conventional one in which the music would be described as having been synchronized to the image/action. Though Yacavone’s model of nested phenomenological ‘wholes’ existing as ‘parts’ within that film world is at best unclear. His aim, with regard to ‘the represented, fictional world of a film’, contra Winters, is to ‘reconfirm its distinct denoted character, and . . . fully recognise and chart, to the extent possible, the irreducible symbolic, aesthetic, and phenomenological whole within which this represented world of characters and their lives and stories (together with the represented space and time as a setting for these) is itself contained as but one part of a film’s presentation’ (2012, 36). Existing, primarily historical, studies in this area include Erich Angermann, ‘Die USA in den “Goldenen Zwanziger Jahren”’, in George Eckert and Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf (eds), Deutschland und die USA, 1918–1933, Braunschweig: Albert Limbach, 1968, 53–64; Douglas Gomery, ‘Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperialism: Europe Converts to Sound’ in Altman 1980, 80–93; Eric Rentschler, ‘How American is It? The U.S. as Image and Imaginary in German Film’, German Quarterly, 54 (1984), 603–620; Anton Kaes, ‘Mass Culture and Modernity: Notes Toward a Social History of Early American and German Cinema’, in Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (eds), America and the Germans, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, 317–31; Frank Trommler, ‘The Rise

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19 20 21

22

and Fall of Americanism in Germany’, in Trommler and McVeigh, 332–42; Victoria de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920–1960’, Journal of Modern History 61 (1989), 53–87; Jan-Christopher Horak, ‘Rin-Tin-Tin erobert Berlin oder Amerikanische Filminteressen in Weimar’, in Walter Schatzberg and Uli Jung (eds), Filmkultur zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik, Munich: Saur, 1992, pp. 255–70; Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign. The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Thomas Saunders, ‘Comedy as Redemption: American Slapstick in Weimar Culture’, Journal of European Studies 17 (1987), 253–77; Saunders 1994; and the essays in Laurence Kardish (ed.) Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Given the narrative/diegetic ambiguity of opening and closing screen title sequences, investigating why they almost invariably involve music would seem an important project. Such sequences are beginning to be explored further in the literature, for example, Stanitzek 2009, Davison 2013a and 2013b, Powrie and Heldt forthcoming. Although it imparts information (however negligible), the denotation of the text is complemented by connotational content through its movement, its perspective, and its cultural allusions to adventure serials of many types from a bygone era. For the last of these one could point to the distinctive harmonic progression at the end of the first phrase – tonic – flattened 7th – dominant – tonic – (itself a collapsing in of a modal/diatonic harmonic dialectic) that can be found in various earlier scorings of cinematic and TV Westerns, for example Jerome Moss’s theme from The Big Country (1958), Harry Sukman’s theme to the TV series The High Chaparral (1967–71; this theme extends the progression with intervening chords on the flattened 3rd and flattened 2nd before the perfect cadence), and Williams’s own score for The Cowboys (1972) which features related tonic – subdominant minor -– tonic, and flattened 6th –flattened 7th – tonic progressions. Interestingly, Williams and Sukman shared the scoring for the TV spin-off series which aired in 1974. See Adorno [1960] 1992, 45, where such episodes are described as ‘collapsing passages’, and Schmierer 2005 for application of the term katabasis in a discussion of the first movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.

Bibliography of works cited Adorno, Theodor. [1960] 1992. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ––––– and Eisler, Hans. [1947] 1994. Composing for the Films. London: The Athlone Press. Altman, Rick. ed. 1980. ‘Cinema/Sound’, Yale French Studies, 60. ––––– 2004. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press. Balázs, Béla. [1930] 2001. Der Geist des Films. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bazelon, Irwin. 1975. Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music. New York: Arco Publishing. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. New York: Routledge. ––––– and Carroll, Noël, eds 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ––––– and Thompson, Kristin. 1985. ‘Fundamental Aesthetics of Sound in Cinema’, in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 181–99. Brown, Royal. 1994. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Buhler, James. 2014. ‘Psychoanalysis, Apparatus Theory, and Subjectivity’, in David Neumeyer, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 383–417. ––––– Flinn, Caryl and Neumeyer, David, eds. 2000. Music and Cinema. Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press. Burch, Noël. 1982. ‘Narrative/Diegesis – Thresholds, Limits’, Screen, 23: 16–33. Burt, George. 1994. The Art of Film Music. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Camper, Fred. 1985. ‘Sound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinema’, in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 369–81. Carroll, Noël and Moore, Margaret. 2011. ‘Music and Motion Pictures’, in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. New York: Routledge, 456–67. Cecchi, Alessandro. 2010. ‘Diegetic versus Nondiegetic: A Reconsideration of the Conceptual Opposition as a Contribution to the Theory of Audiovision’, Worlds of Audiovision, 1–10. Available at: www.worldsofaudiovision.org (accessed July 2013). Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, Nick. 2012. ‘Inside/Outside the Klein Bottle: Music in Narrative Film, Intrusive and Integral’, in Ben Winters, ed. ‘Music and Narrative’. Special Issue of Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 6: 9–19. Davison, Annette. 2013a. ‘The Show Starts Here: Viewers’ Interaction with Recent Television Serials’ Main Title Sequences’, Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 3(1–2): 6–22. Available at: www.soundeffects.dk/article/view/15633 (accessed 8 March 2014). ––––– 2013b. ‘Title Sequences for Contemporary Television Serials’, in John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 146–67.

Music and the moving image • 237 Donnelly, K. J. ed. 2001. Film Music: Critical Approaches. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ––––– 2005. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: BFI Publishing. Eisner, Lotte. [1952] 1969. The Haunted Screen. London: Thames & Hudson. Evans, Mark. 1975. Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies. New York: Hopkinson and Blake. Frampton, Daniel. 2007. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press. Gorbman, Claudia. 1980. ‘Narrative Film Music’, Yale French Studies, 60: 183–203. ––––– 1987. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press/London: BFI Publishing. Gracyk, Theodore and Kania, Andrew, eds. 2011. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. New York: Routledge. Hagen, Earle. 1971. Scoring for the Films. New York: Criterion Music Corp. Hickman, Roger. 2006. Reel Music: Exploring 100 Years of Film Music. New York: W. W. Norton. Kalinak, Kathryn. 1992. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ––––– 2010. Film Music: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Kassabian, Annahid. 2001. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. New York: Routledge. ––––– 2013. ‘The End of Diegesis As We Know It?’, in John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 89–106. Kracauer, Siegfried. [1947] 2004. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lack, Russell. 1997. Twenty-Four Frames Under: Buried History of Film Music. London: Quartet Books. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. ‘Film Music and Narrative Agency’, in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 248–82. Mintz, Penny. 1985. ‘Orson Welles’s Use of Sound’, in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 289–97. Mottram, Ron. 1985. ‘American Sound Films, 1926–1930’, in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 221–31. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Neumeyer, David. 1997. ‘Source Music, Background Music, Fantasy and Reality in Early Sound Film’, College Music Symposium, 37 (October), n.p. ––––– 2009a. ‘Diegetic/Nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model’, Music and the Moving Image, 2/1, n.p. ––––– 2009b. ‘Performances in Early Hollywood Sound Films: Source Music, Background Music, and the Integrated Sound Track’, Contemporary Music Review 19: 37–62. ––––– ed. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Percheron, Daniel and Butzel, Marcia. 1980. ‘Sound in Cinema and its Relationship to Image and Diegesis’, in Rick Altman, ed. ‘Cinema/Sound’, Yale French Studies, 60: 16–23. Powrie, Phil and Heldt, Guido, eds. Forthcoming ‘Titles, Trailers and End Credits’. Special issue of Music, Sound and the Moving Image. Prendergast, Roy. 1977. Film Music: A Neglected Art. New York: W.W. Norton. Richardson, John, Gorbman, Claudia and Vernallis, Carol, eds. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press. Saunders, Thomas. 1994. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schmierer, Elisabeth. 2005. ‘The First Movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde: Genre, Form and Musical Expression’, in Jeremy Barham, ed. Perspectives on Gustav Mahler. Aldershot: Ashgate, 253–60. Smith, Jeff. 2009. ‘Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music’, Music and the Moving Image, 2/1, n.p. Sonnenschein, David. 2001. Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Publications. Stanitzek, Georg. 2009. ‘Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Générique)’, Cinema Journal 48: 44–58. Stilwell, Robynn. 2007. ‘The Fantastical Gap Between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’, in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert, eds. Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 184–202. Taylor, Henry. 2007. ‘The Success Story of a Misnomer’, Offscreen 11/8–9 (Aug.– Sept.), n.p. Available at: www.offscreen. com/index.php/pages/essays/soundforum_2/ (accessed August 2013). Thom, Randy. 2007. ‘Acoustics of the Soul’, Offscreen 11/8–9 (Aug.–Sept.), n.p. Available at: www.offscreen.com/index. php/pages/essays/soundforum_2/ (accessed August 2013). Timm, Larry. 1998. The Soul of Cinema: An Appreciation of Film Music. Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing. Weis, Elisabeth and Belton, John, eds. 1985. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press. Wierzbicki, James. 2009. Film Music: A History. New York and London: Routledge. Winters, Ben. 2010. ‘The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space’, Music & Letters, 91: 224–44.

238 • Jeremy Barham ––––– 2012. ‘Musical Wallpaper? Towards an Appreciation of Non-narrating Music in Film’, in Winters, ed. ‘Music and Narrative’. Special Issue of Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 6: 39–54. Yacavone, Daniel. 2012. ‘Spaces, Gaps, and Levels: From the Diegetic to the Aesthetic in Film Theory’, in Ben Winters, ed. ‘Music and Narrative’. Special Issue of Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 6: 21–37. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

12 Irony Julian Johnson

Introduction: how can music be ironic? Since music says nothing definite, as philosophers from Kant to Kivy have argued, it surely does not have the capacity for the semantic double-take of irony – to say one thing while meaning another. Such sophisticated play would presume a precision of denotative meaning that, philosophers tell us, music simply does not possess. But consider a sad waltz – such as Chopin’s Waltz in A minor, Op. 34, No. 2, whose opening inverts the usual associations of the waltz by turning its collective and up-beat nature into something solitary and downcast. Or take a piece like ‘The Royal March’ from Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat, displaying the musical signs of a grand ceremonial march but undermined by its threadbare instrumentation for seven instruments and its constant play with the pattern of metrical accents. In both examples, the expected sense of the music is inverted by presenting the familiar conventions of a genre (waltz, march) but conspicuously deformed. A familiar example of the same technique can readily be found in the horror film cliché in which the innocence of a child’s song jars against a situation of malign threat. The powerful expressive effect arises from the cognitive dissonance of normative meaning in a non-normative context.1 While literary irony has a long history stretching back to ancient sources like Longinus and Socrates, the idea of musical irony is not obviously significant either to composers or the aesthetics of music until the latter part of the eighteenth century. Only with the development of the idea of instrumental music as a kind of wordless language did music come to be thought of as possessing the discursive and semantic properties that make irony possible. The use of irony in music since has certainly had much to do with the aesthetic preferences and disposition of individual composers: Mahler’s music is readily associated with an ironic voice, but Bruckner’s hardly ever; Stravinsky’s music often foregrounds the idea, while Webern avoids it completely. However, if a composer’s use of irony is partly a question of individual character and background, it is also a product of the cultural positioning of different musical repertoires and includes a strong historical dimension. On the whole, irony tends to be precluded by all-encompassing belief systems, which may be religious (as in the Catholicism of Bruckner, Webern or Messiaen) but elsewhere is simply a faith in the adequacy of musical language to fulfil its presumed purpose (as the expression of emotion, for example, or the representation of a dramatic situation, or the working out of a formal and technical idea, such as a fugue). By contrast, irony is generally found in music that adopts a position of cultural or self-critical questioning – as in Mahler, Schoenberg, Prokofiev or Shostakovich. It tends to arise from a self-awareness of the gap between musical language and the task to which it aspires – as in the bitter irony of Pierrot’s attempts at self-expression in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.

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One position does not preclude the other; musical irony is often found in close proximity with music that exhibits no ironic deformations. Mahler provides powerful examples of this, not only juxtaposing ironic and non-ironic movements (like the Rondo Burleske and the Adagio Finale of the Ninth Symphony), but also placing apparently sincere and ironic versions of the same material side by side within a single movement. In the Rondo Burleske, for example, the hectic tempo and succession of diverse materials is interrupted by a slow, expressive theme that anticipates the Finale (Musical Example 12.1a). Almost immediately, the apparently authentic expression implied by the trumpet version (m. 352), taken up ‘with greater expression’ by the violins (m. 394), is parodied by a deformed version in the clarinets, given at double the speed, in raucous tone, and with the last two intervals of the original (a falling fourth and ascending octave) painfully stretched to a diminished fifth and a major ninth (Musical Example 12.1b). 352

Trumpet in F

p subito poco espressivo Musical Example 12.1a Mahler, Symphony No. 9, third movement, mm. 352–5 (trumpets)

444 Clarinet in Eb f

f

t i ­

Clarinets in A

ff Musical Example 12.1b Mahler, Symphony No. 9, third movement, mm. 444–5 (clarinets)

This chapter explores the idea of musical irony as a historical phenomenon, rather than merely a matter of individual composers’ taste. In doing so, it suggests that irony might be understood as part of the broader musical modernity of the post-Enlightenment age, stretching from the eighteenth century to the present. Notwithstanding the fact that many significant composers had little interest in irony, this longer view shows irony to be not just a symptom of musical modernity but also a key device through which music expresses a critical awareness of its own conventions and aesthetic status; as Lawrence Kramer suggests, in modernity ‘nothing can be read without irony, or at least the possibility of irony’ (Kramer 2011, 231). That said, compared to the numerous explorations of irony in literature, there are remarkably few studies devoted to musical irony; of those there are, almost all are written in relation to individual composers.2 Perhaps the lack of any overview tells its own story: until quite recently, it seems, discourse about music has been unwilling, to the point of denial, to treat music as anything less than a form of sincere, authentic and direct expression. Yet music itself, from Mozart to Mahler, Schumann to Stravinsky, and Haydn to Ligeti, has proposed a far greater degree of self-critical

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and reflective awareness of its own expressive capacities. It is this history of musical self-reflection, highlighted in musical irony, which forms the focus of the rest of this chapter. Music as language: irony in the Classical style The first great musical ironist was undoubtedly Joseph Haydn. During his own lifetime he was compared to the author Laurence Sterne, whose novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen (1759–67) was one of the key texts of literary irony in the eighteenth century. Jean Paul Richter singles out Haydn as an example of musical irony in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804): something similar to the audacity of annihilating humor, an expression of scorn for the world, can be perceived in a good deal of music, like that of Haydn, which destroys entire tonal sequences by introducing an extraneous key and storms alternately between pianissimo and fortissimo, presto and andante. (Richter [1804] 1973, 93) Today, we might not hear Haydn as expressing ‘scorn for the world’ but commentators have often remarked on the capacity of Haydn’s music to subvert listeners’ expectations, playing with the possibilities of sudden changes of musical direction in ways generally heard as humorous. This became possible in Viennese Classicism because of its imitation of the grammatical and rhetorical patterns of language, an idea explored in eighteenth-century music theory as well as musical composition.3 By establishing a sense of musical grammar and syntax that implied a logic akin to that of language, composers opened up rich possibilities for a playful subversion of that logic. It was thus the outward predictability of conventional procedures in the Classical style that enabled its subtle and sophisticated level of discursive play. More recently, a number of scholars have drawn attention to this dimension of Classical instrumental music. For Daniel Chua, irony ‘is the distinguishing feature’ of the Classical style, exemplified in the music of Haydn whose forms ‘explore an ironic gap in their constant preoccupation with their own dislocated structures’ (Chua 1999, 209–10). Mark Evan Bonds locates the link between Haydn and literary irony in the late eighteenth century in the way that ‘art-works overtly call attention to their own techniques of artifice’ (Bonds 1991a, 68). Scott Burnham similarly suggests that Laurence Sterne’s meta-novel finds a parallel in Haydn’s metamusic; both, he comments, ‘foster an ironic sense of aesthetic detachment’ (Burnham 2005, 74). Burnham’s analysis of Haydn’s musical humour draws out specific techniques by which this is achieved – exaggeration, parody, incongruity, discontinuity, and musical ‘punch lines’ at points of return and endings. As Gretchen Wheelock underlines, such strategies not only depend upon a knowing audience, but actively draw the listener in ‘as highly self-conscious participants in a process of completing the jest’ (Wheelock 1992, 13).4 In Burnham’s words, Haydn’s ironic humour requires the listener: to be caught out and then brought back inside, to move from being fooled to being informed, from being manipulated to being aware of being manipulated, from enacted object to understanding subject – this shift in perspective forces a sudden recognition of consciousness. And this brief shock of recognition is not a vertiginous glimpse into a solipsistic abyss but rather a surging confirmation of the self-transcending diversion of self-consciousness. (Burnham 2005, 75)

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In demanding the listener’s interaction in this way, Haydn thus embodies something of the alternating flow of thought and counter-thought by which Friedrich Schlegel characterized the new ironic literature of his time (Behler 1990, 83). These might seem like grand claims to make of the often light-hearted humour of works like Haydn’s Op. 33 Quartets (1781), nicknamed gli scherzi on account of the Minuet movements being recast as scherzi (literally, jokes). For the generation writing on art and literature around 1800, however, the category of the ernster Scherz (the serious joke) was central to the broader idea of ‘Romantic irony’, most frequently associated with early romantic literature, in the works of Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The same attitude of mind can be found in Classical music of the same period – and, indeed, in musical techniques that closely parallel literary ones. Haydn’s play with musical conventions, as later with the young Beethoven, embodies the attitude of Romantic irony by foregrounding the self-consciousness of the creative subject (not just the composer, but also the performer and the listener). Romantic irony is more than simply ‘humour’, as Rey Longyear insists in distinguishing between the ‘playfulness’ of Haydn and the Romantic irony of Beethoven. The latter, he suggests, is found in the arresting juxtaposition of the poetic and the prosaic, as between the Adagio movement of the Violin Sonata, Op. 96 and the Scherzo that follows it, or the similar contrast between the third and fourth of the Bagatelles, Op. 126 (Longyear 1970, 655). The aesthetic intention in Beethoven’s musical irony, Longyear argues, is to expose music’s own artifice, to reveal the illusion of the aesthetic construction. He offers as an example the Finale of Beethoven’s Quartet in F minor, Op. 95. This was dubbed by the composer as a ‘Quartetto serioso’ yet, in the coda of the Finale, its high seriousness is undermined by a turn to the musical comedy normally associated with opera buffa. The light-hearted Allegro ending, Longyear suggests, ‘exemplifies many of the other characteristics of romantic irony which Schlegel described: paradox, self-annihilation, parody, eternal agility, and the appearance of the fortuitous and unusual’ (Longyear 1970, 649).5 The ironic turn of Classical music, though it may provoke no more than a wry smile from the informed listener, is thus also an affirmation of self-consciousness; it draws the listener into the self-contained world of the musical work, while simultaneously acknowledging itself as a fictive activity, a work of pure artifice and artful construction. The sudden digressions, interruptions, non sequiturs and inappropriate exaggerations exhibited in musical humour are thus the musical corollaries of the literary devices of Romantic irony, summarized by Lloyd Bishop as a ‘frequent recourse to oxymoron, paradox, parabasis, parataxis, montage, or other staccato effects such as sudden changes of mood, theme or stylistic register’ (Bishop 1989, 17). They constitute a musical version of what happens when an actor steps ‘out of character’ by moving towards the audience to comment on the play of which he is part. This is exactly what Friedrich Schlegel meant when he described irony as ‘a permanent parabasis’ (Schlegel 1963, 85) a term that refers to the moment, in ancient Greek drama, when an actor steps across the threshold that separates the theatrical space to communicate directly with the audience. In works of romantic literature it is most frequently found in novels in which characters comment upon the progress of the narrative or on their own fictional status. Richter, in the Vorschule, points both to Tieck’s Prinz Zerbino and also to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In the latter, he says, the author ‘several times speaks lengthily and reflectively about certain incidents, until in the end, he concludes: “all the same, ’tis not a word of it true”’ (Richter [1804] 1973, 93),6 a sentiment that the ending of Beethoven’s F minor Quartet, Op. 95 (discussed above), might be heard to parallel. The serious business of humour (the ernster Scherz) was thus to do with foregrounding the gap between the mundane world of the particular characters

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and their story and a sense of a far broader perspective. Humour was a tool for dissolving the finite boundaries of the everyday world of objects in order to project a sense of infinitude, exactly the sense of a ‘constant alternation of self-creation and self-destruction’ found in the philosophy of Schlegel (Behler 1990, 84). This idea of parabasis in music can be seen most immediately in opera buffa, the comedy of which is founded upon a kind of complicity between the audience and key characters on stage, at the expense of those whose folly will be exposed. Both Schlegel and Richter talk about irony in terms of a ‘transcendental buffoonery’ and ‘Italian buffoonery’, referencing the critical capacity of the Italian commedia dell’arte that also informs the origins of opera buffa. Consider Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an opera in which parabasis is deployed to puncture the fiction of the drama observed by the audience, but also as part of the sudden and uncomfortable turns in this opera between its dark and serious subject matter and the light-hearted comedy of its telling. In the final scene of the opera, as the Don awaits his mysterious dinner guest, the on-stage band plays contemporary operatic hits as a comic nod to the audience that underlines the fictive and theatrical nature of the tale they are watching. As the band plays an excerpt from Mozart’s own Le nozze di Figaro, Leporello’s wry comment ‘I know this one rather too well’ is typical of the way he constantly bridges the gap between stage and audience. It provides one example among many of how opera buffa, filtered through writers like Marivaux, Goldoni and Gozzi, took from commedia dell’arte a kind of critical anti-naturalism that opposed the otherwise generally mundane quality of its subject matter. This critical anti-naturalism is precisely why a fascination with the ironic stance of opera buffa resurfaces so powerfully in the early twentieth century and why Mozart’s Così fan tutte, vilified, ignored or rewritten for much of the nineteenth century, fascinated the twentieth century because of its ‘modern’ tendencies to break its own narrative frame, decontextualize its own conventions and insist that identity is performed not given (see Hunter 1999, 45). However, the real test of the possibility of musical irony is found in instrumental music. As Charles Rosen and others have shown, the development of the Viennese Classical style was indebted to the influence of opera buffa, absorbing into the symphony, string quartet and sonata not only the clarity and pacing of comic opera, but also clear dramatic types and modes of interaction. Haydn’s Op. 33 Quartets, Rosen underlines, were written at the end of a decade that Haydn had spent supervising comic opera productions at Esterháza. Mozart’s new set of quartets, written between 1782 and 1785 and dedicated to Haydn, were composed while he waited for his first opera buffa libretto from Da Ponte. Mozart’s set provides an excellent and sophisticated example of how irony can work in Classical instrumental music. Published in 1785, these six quartets mark a move from the innocence of the Enlightenment logic of Mozart’s earlier music to the far more contradictory world of Romantic irony. The hallmark of this new style is the way in which Mozart creates a disjunction between the simplicity of his chosen material and the sophistication of its treatment; nowhere is this clearer than in the humble Minuet. In Mozart’s ‘Haydn Quartets’, this most conventional of genres is constantly undercut by musical materials that become too complex – harmonically, rhythmically, contrapuntally and emotionally. The Minuet of the A major quartet, K. 464, provides a good example and is worth examining closely (Musical Example 12.2). Ostensibly a short and simple little movement, its combination of sparse, fragmented textures and unprepared tonal juxtapositions produce music of solitary introspection rather than the innocent collective dance implied by the genre. The harmonic twists are highly subtle. The modulation to the dominant in m. 13 is made by a substitution chord (the sudden C major triad, mm. 11–12) approaching the dominant key by means of its

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Musical Example 12.2 Mozart, String Quartet in A major, K. 464, Minuet, mm. 55–72

flat submediant. The preparation for the strong cadence at the end of the first section of the Minuet is diverted by a further substitution, so what should be a simple IV–V six–four/five–three preparation in m. 23 leads instead, via the B# in the bass, to C# minor in m. 24. In the second half of the Minuet the return of the tonic and main theme (m. 55) is almost instantly derailed by the harmonic sequence beginning in m. 59. The highly chromatic bass line (given by cello and viola in parallel octaves) leads to a repeated diminished 7th chord, left hanging in the air (mm. 63–4), before the quiet resumption of the tonic is picked up in m. 65. The aftermath of the diminished 7th chord still echoes in the substitution chord in m. 69. These harmonic twists, too complex for the simple Minuet, are heard alongside an emphasis on the simple repeated crotchet figure, first heard in mm. 5–8, which uses an element of repetition central to the genre but exaggerates it until it sounds more like a fugal exercise. The result is something that appears to present the elements of an innocuous Minuet but implies something different by means of their treatment. What should be festive music becomes oddly melancholic, introverted and subdued; motivic economy, outwardly the vehicle of creative strength, here becomes rather obsessive and inward. Heard in such a way, this simple Minuet by Mozart anticipates a modernist inversion of generic signification that connects this music to Mahler.

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Elsewhere, Mozart presents Minuets and Trios where the latter are not just contrasting but radically dissociated from their Minuets. In the D minor Quartet, K. 421, for example, the Minuet presents agitated contrapuntal music in D minor, shot through with sliding chromaticism and an obsessive use of a dotted rhythm, quite at odds with the simplicity of the genre. However, the Trio that follows in the subdominant major, utterly diatonic and monodic, is breathtakingly naive. As if to underline its complete inversion of the world hitherto presented, it reverses the little dotted-note figure of the Minuet. Something similar can be heard in Mozart’s later String Quintets. In the G minor Quintet, K. 516, for example, the wistful simplicity of the Trio seems to present the classical ideal as something lost, sandwiched between the alienated Minuet and its repeat, and in the D major Quintet, K. 593, the Trio contrasts so strongly that it sounds like a piece of theatrical make-believe, its ultra-high 1st violin and pizzicato accompaniment drawing attention to its own artificiality. Mozart’s late chamber music anticipates Stravinsky in the melancholy of its ironic beauty (the term is Scott Burnham’s, 1994). Self-aware of its own fictitiousness, it seems to acknowledge that the self appears only where it is performed in language and that, outside such moments of social performance, the subject becomes inaudible, even to itself. At the same time, however, it counters this acknowledgement with nostalgia for an identity that might still lie outside of such language games. This music thus recurrently stages a kind of overstepping of itself through elaboration that is too rich for the material and the form; by breaking free from the conventional space in which it must move, the expressive voice necessarily alienates itself. Irony is thus its default position, or else it lies; therein lies the modernity of Mozart’s music. Plural voices: divided identities in romantic music Given the importance of irony to the Classical style, its apparent absence in much nineteenthcentury music is striking. Whereas eighteenth-century composers often drew attention to the artifice of their art, many nineteenth-century composers affirmed a remarkably non-ironic tone. The latter reaches a peak in the music of Richard Wagner which epitomizes the aesthetic claim of romantic music to embody directly a metaphysical truth that somehow bypasses the conventionality of language. This position, articulated in the aesthetic philosophy of Schopenhauer before Wagner, became not only normative for much nineteenth-century music, but has remained so for the popular reception of classical music ever since. However, against this assumption of direct and authentic musical expression the cultivation of musical irony sounds an important counter-note, appearing in quite different musical traditions, from German lieder to French operetta. A quality of ironic self-consciousness is definitive of the German lied from its first major works. Consider, for example, Schubert’s ‘Frühlingstraum’, the eleventh song of his Winterreise cycle (1827). The major key opening and gently flowing accompaniment in a 6/8 metre seem to complement perfectly the dream of springtime described by the words (‘I dreamed of colourful flowers/such as blossom in May/I dreamed of green meadows/and the merry calling of birds’). The first stanza, however, is followed by a sudden turn to the minor (m. 15), a faster tempo, far more chromatic harmony and a broken, uneven texture (Musical Example 12.3). This is the protagonist’s wintry reality, waking from his dream of spring to a cold grey morning and the harsh calls of the crows. Within the poetic world of the song cycle, the opening of ‘Frühlingstraum’ is false: its illusion of spring is broken by the sudden return of the reality of winter in the second stanza. In fact, heard in the context of the whole cycle, it is the untroubled major-key opening

246 • Julian Johnson Etwas bewegt.

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Irony • 247

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that sounds dissonant. Schubert’s music often proceeds by such juxtapositions, oscillating between two kinds of music that, as here, seem to propose a dreamlike or ideal vision only to contrast it with a harsher reality. This is a long way from the humour and play of a Haydn quartet and yet depends on the same ironic double-take, on not taking an initial musical proposition at face value. Unlike Beethoven, who sets up oppositions in order to resolve them, Schubert often declines to resolve his musical antinomies. Instead, he allows extended movements to proceed by a process of constant alternation, a musical embodiment of a divided ironic consciousness that sees the world in double vision. The tradition of German Lieder running from Schubert to Mahler is built on this fundamentally ironic double-take by means of the contrast between the simplicity of its materials and the sophistication of their treatment. The simplicity of the material comes initially from the cultivated

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folk tone (Volkston) of the poetry it sets, evincing a similar act of musical pastiche. Schubert, like Mahler seventy years later, uses simple musical means to evoke a folksong style – melodies based on simple triads, repetitive motifs, especially rhythmic ones, and simple strophic forms. At the same time, both mark this material as not folk music, by subtle deviations from it – twists in the harmony, interruptions, exaggerations, a disjunction between text and music. The fundamentally ironic turn thus derives not from the more modern aspects in themselves, but precisely the difference between a collective folk voice in which the individual is not essentially separate from the collective, and the harmonic, melodic and dramatic twists that highlight the protagonist’s distance from this ideal unity. In other words, Schubert’s evocation of an older, simpler past, is part of the means by which he highlights a present alienation. This divided consciousness is often explicitly thematized in songs as, for example, in ‘Wehmut’, from Schumann’s Eichendorff lieder, Op. 39 (1840). ‘It is true, I can sing at times as though I were happy’, begins this deceptively simple song, ‘but secretly tears well up to relieve my heavy heart’. Schumann achieves his exquisite balance of conventional simplicity and inward disclosure by taking the form of a naive little song, but subtly inflecting it. The symmetrical phrase structure and major key denote outward calm and contentment, but the turn to the relative minor for the answering couplet (mm. 5–6) drives a sharp but subtle wedge between outward sense and ironic difference. This is one of Schumann’s most telling devices, inherited directly by Brahms and Mahler. The power and poignancy of German lieder is located precisely in this gap (Brauner 1981; Rosenberg 1988). Both Schumann and Mahler were fascinated by the key literary figures of German romanticism for whom irony was such a central strategy. In the case of Schumann, as John Daverio underlines, irony is not only indebted to literary models, but conceived in literary terms, making Schumann ‘perhaps the first [composer] in Western musical history to view the art of composition as a kind of literary activity’ (Daverio 1997, i). His models were most obviously E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul Richter, but where other composers adapted Hoffmann’s stories or took on some of the insights of his music criticism, Schumann’s music demonstrates a real kinship in terms of narrative technique and aesthetic form.7 Their shared sense of aesthetic self-awareness is manifest in the ways in which texts problematize themselves – as in various forms of authorial intrusion into the apparently autonomous world of the story itself, moments when the fictional world is broken into by the normally invisible author. Schumann has several ways of achieving this effect of a divided voice. One is his use of quotation, either literally (as with the return of the opening theme of Papillons Op. 2 in the middle of the ‘Florestan’ movement of Carnaval Op. 9) or else by presenting a section of music as if it were a quotation (as in Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, No. 15, where a piano introduction is followed by what is clearly a song, aspiring to something non-pianistic despite the fact that both are actually played by the piano). A second clear strategy for creating ironic distance is Schumann’s use of abrupt structural discontinuities as a way of questioning the music’s own formal propositions. Just as Hoffmann’s narratives are marked by sudden, violent moments of breakthrough between the everyday world and a fantastical, spirit world, so Schumann’s music shows a parallel fascination with formal dislocation. The opening sequence of pieces in Papillons (1831), for example, presents a series of tiny pieces, disjunct with respect not only to key but also to musical style, gesture, texture and tempo. The sequence of separate sections imposes a kind of form and implies a certain logic but at the same time suggests something contingent, as if these fragments might have been ordered quite differently. By such strategies, as Heinz Dill underlines, ‘the creative process itself becomes thematic, i.e., the content of the work of art

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is art itself, or, more precisely, the making of art’ (Dill 1989, 178). This structural discontinuity is often marked by Schumann’s designation of a passage as an ‘intermezzo’, sometimes functioning like a ‘trio’ by being combined with a scherzo. It thus corresponds to the original idea of an intermezzo as an episode that ‘comes between’ other sections, but its provenance in opera buffa is significant here, and thus its direct link to the appearance of commedia figures in eighteenth-century operatic intermezzi. In his Intermezzi, Op. 4 (1832), Schumann presents a whole collection of short pieces that were traditionally understood to come between larger more serious pieces, signalling a deliberately tangential perspective, avoiding direct statement in favour of displacement. In this insistence on diversion, Schumann’s music famously signals a preference for allusion, masks and fictional identities, a play with language that is explicitly historical. The first piece of the Intermezzi, for example, begins with a grand, rather sombre piece of quasicanonic baroque counterpoint, complete with double-dotted rhythms. However, its studied historicism is answered by an unequivocally modern passage and, on a larger scale, the piece juxtaposes this ‘baroque’ first section with a whimsical ‘Alternativo’ section replaying the same basic musical material in modern dress. One musical manner calls the other into question; neither can safely be taken at face value. The dangers of explaining musical irony as a product of a composer’s individual disposition rather than in cultural and historical terms are underlined by the case of Mahler. Although his own strategies of irony are indebted to the music of Schubert and Schumann (most obviously the lieder), Mahler’s ironic tone has repeatedly been explained away as a result of his own psychology, often elided with his ‘Jewish’ nature in a manner that borders on a crude racial stereotype. This was certainly the tone of much musical criticism in Mahler’s own time, though it now provides some fascinating historical insights for all its distasteful elements. When, for example, the critic Max Kalbeck referred, in 1900, to Mahler’s First Symphony as a Sinfonica Ironica he unwittingly drew attention to a tension between genre and material in the late nineteenth-century symphony that far exceeds Mahler as an individual; the implied contrast with Beethoven’s Eroica, intended to denigrate Mahler’s work, points instead to a historical process (as Richard Strauss also did, with wonderful self-irony, with his Sinfonia Domestica).8 Mahler was not unaware that his use of folk materials, from his settings of poetry from Des Knaben Wunderhorn to his use of these ‘naive’ materials in the early symphonies, would cause consternation among his critics, to say nothing of his importing into the most hallowed form of Austro-German instrumental music aspects of urban popular music, operetta and military marching bands. If ever proof were required that Mahler and Bruckner took an antithetical approach to music, it is found here, in Mahler’s multi-voiced symphonic tapestries, music (in the words of Peter Franklin) ‘that demands to be read as if between quotation marks’ (Franklin 2001, 615). As we saw in the example from the Rondo Burleske of the Ninth Symphony, however, the peculiar character of Mahler’s musical irony is that the affirmation of the ideal of authentic expression and the self-mockery of that ideal appear side-by-side (see Hefling 2001; Johnson 2009). For Mahler’s Viennese contemporary, the writer, editor and critic Karl Kraus, irony was a sharp tool for cutting through the tangled undergrowth of social, political and journalistic lies that flourished in lazy thinking and the misuse of language. For him, the negativity of irony was not an end in itself, but a means of clearing the space to allow a more careful and purer use of language. In his later years, one of his most popular ways of using the material of the world to indict itself, was his ‘recital’ of Offenbach operettas (half-sung, half-spoken performances by Kraus himself, with piano accompaniment).9 In this way, half a century after Offenbach’s

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heyday, a rather unmusical Viennese critic thus reactivated the ironic force of Offenbach’s music which, in its own time, had attracted the admiration of no less a philosopher than Nietzsche (who saw it as a counterbalance to Wagnerian music drama).10 Largely ignored by the course of Austro-German music, Offenbach (a German abroad) signals a specifically Parisian kind of musical irony which stands at the head of a long French tradition. Debussy once referred to his ‘transcendental irony’ (Janik 2001, 113); Saint-Saëns acknowledged him in Le carnival des animaux (1886) where the tortoise is depicted by a massively slowed-down version of the ‘Galop infernal’ from Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (1858). Like all comic opera, Offenbach plays with the disjunctions of style and substance, material and context. His use of the characters and iconography of classical antiquity (as in La belle Hélène, 1864) was a tool to expose the historical pretensions of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. His sensitivity to the comic potential of the deliberate mismatch between contemporary popular dance music and his mythic and grand historical characters undoubtedly follows in a long tradition of comic opera (back through Rossini to Mozart and beyond). Amid all the satirical comedy, however, Offenbach’s work tells some incisive truths about its age by means of its musical irony. In Orphée aux enfers, the polarization between the state of boredom that seems to affect everyone in the opera and the ‘infernal’ headlong rush to oblivion of the dance music points, with telling accuracy, to the contradictions of modern urban life – to its sense of accelerating time and technology coupled with a state of emptiness and boredom. La vie parisienne (1866), which begins in a Parisian railway station, makes this paradox its theme. Spleen and ideal: irony and modernism Offenbach’s upbeat ironic jollity might seem a long way from his Parisian contemporary, Charles Baudelaire, though both are products of the same world. The first part of Les Fleurs du mal, published in 1857, titled ‘Spleen et Idéal’, is one of the most powerful statements of the cognitive dissonance in which modern irony is located though it found no parallel in music until Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire of 1912. Schoenberg’s texts may be translations of poems by Albert Giraud but, like Baudelaire’s, they explore the gap between ideal vision and unbearable reality, an impossible psychological tension that results in a kind of madness (Alban Berg would go on to explore something similar in Wozzeck, just a few years later). There are many levels of irony in Pierrot Lunaire (derived from the tension between the ‘expressionless’ blankness of the Pierrot mask and the intensity of inward expression) but the most powerful way in which Schoenberg articulates a sense of the unbridegeable gap between experience and representation is in the breaking of the musical voice – literally in the case of the singer, who famously relinquishes a conventional singing tone for Sprechstimme, and figuratively in a musical style whose violently expressionistic gestures generate a musical delirium utterly at odds with the ordered musical forms through which Schoenberg deploys them. A quite different, altogether cooler and more detached form of irony is found in the neoclassicism of Stravinsky. After the aesthetics of romantic expression, this ironic stance was taken to be a hallmark of modernism, but as Stravinsky’s music underlines, through its preoccupation with eighteenth-century music, the modernism of his music was in part a recuperation of an earlier ironic self-consciousness, subsequently obscured during the nineteenthcentury. Indeed, the irony of neoclassicism is less a response to earlier music and more a critical swipe at the contemporary reception of music, dominated by the assumption that music could be a direct and authentic expression. Stravinsky’s oft-quoted comment that ‘music is, by its very

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nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all’, generally taken as a modernist dismissal of the aesthetics of romanticism, is thus more generally a statement of the self-awareness of music’s conventionality, one that connects Stravinsky back to Haydn (Stravinsky 1975, 53). This, more than a rejection of the modernist idea of progress, constitutes not only the irony of Stravinsky’s music but also the overtone of melancholy that accompanies it. The Histoire du Soldat (1918) is ironic in a similar way to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, in that the attenuated musical resources (reduced ensemble, popular dance forms and repetitive rhythmic patterns) seem disproportionately meagre to the import of the story, but neoclassical works like the Octet (1923) or the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1924) stage a distance between themselves and the eighteenth-century materials on which they draw, which call both into question. Stravinsky’s play with eighteenth-century music and contemporary popular music was anticipated by Erik Satie. Two years before Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Satie’s Sonatine bureaucratique (1917) presents the essential gap at the heart of musical irony, between material and treatment, basing his own composition on Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina in C major, Op. 36, No. 1 (1797). Clementi’s simple, almost mechanical lines and proportions are subtly deployed and distorted at the same time, while Satie’s accompanying textual commentary suggest a modern-day narrative about the idle thoughts of an office-worker completely at odds with the usual associations of Classical instrumental music. Quotation and allusion similarly abound in the Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois (1913), with their mixing up of a Tyrolean dance and Mozart’s alla turca in the first movement, a play with the popular ‘danse nègre’ in the second (with a nod to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps) and a swipe at Chabrier in the third movement, titled Españaña. Esti Sheinberg underlines that what is foregrounded in such music is a new role for the musically banal, where deliberately simple, repetitive and, in conventional terms ‘unexpressive’ musical types are used as a counterweight to assumptions of expressive potency (Sheinberg 2000, 87). Satie’s verbal texts highlight the gap between the musical text and the meaning presumed by an earlier aesthetic. His target is thus the hermeneutics of romanticism, the assumption of composers, audiences and critics that the music ‘carries’ some other meaning. Half a century before John Cage (one of his most significant successors), Satie used irony to question one of the most fundamental assumptions of musical aesthetics. Such provocation naturally met with angry response; in The Musical Quarterly in 1919, Rudhyar D. Chennevière agreed that Satie was a musical ironist but went on to ask angrily, ‘Yet has irony any musical value? Is not the phrase “the music of irony” absolutely meaningless?’ (Chennevière, 1919). Satie, he suggests, is ‘the representative in music of an intellectualism’ that is utterly opposed to the essential value and nature of art, by which, of course, he means art conceived as capable of the unproblematic expression of a true, authentic subject. However, the simple binary of ‘intellectualism’ and a notion of expressive truth (somehow by-passing the intellect) is precisely what irony calls into question and deconstructs. Far from being opposed to the idea of expression, irony is bound up with it – testing its assumptions, collapsing its conventions, most obviously as a way of implying something more adequate rather than dispensing with the idea altogether. It is, in the words of Louis Andriessen, ‘a very profound form of philosophy in art’ (interview in Cross 2003, 255). Satie’s modes of childlike innocence and naivety, though certainly not confined to French music (examples abound from Schumann and Mahler to Britten and Ligeti), were also key for Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc. The proposition of their ostensibly childlike music is always

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more complex than it appears. In the ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ from the Children’s Corner (1906–8), for example, Debussy famously quotes a passage from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Sheinberg suggests that Debussy here ‘satirises not just the over-complication of Wagner’s harmony but also the over-simplicity of popular music’ (Sheinberg 2000, 144–5) but it surely does more than just poking fun at both. Debussy’s sad doll, like Stravinsky’s Petruschka and Schoenberg’s Pierrot, is also torn between mechanical and collective dance rhythms and a memory of the subjective yearning of erotic love. The double-voicing points to an awareness of being caught between two linguistic or stylistic modes, each of which is called into question by the other. Ravel’s childlike vision, epitomised in L’enfant et les sortilèges (1925), is embodied in a musical style that hinges on a deliberate naivety and an art of understatement for which his music is a kind of touchstone (see Kaminsky 2000).11 It signals a definitive irony because its obliqueness is, implicitly, a questioning of the ‘truth’ statements on which German romanticism, and its reception is founded. ‘I consider sincerity to be the greatest defect in art’, Ravel famously remarked in 1924, ‘because it excludes the possibility of choice’ (quoted by Kaminsky 2000, 186). Or again, on another occasion: ‘isn’t it better at least to be fully aware and acknowledge that art is the supreme imposture?’ (Orenstein 1990, 38). Foregrounding an instability and plurality of stylistic voice is often taken to be key to the neoclassicism exemplified, in different ways, by Satie, Stravinsky, Ravel and Poulenc, but it is, more broadly, a key sign of musical irony. From Haydn to Shostakovich, the mixing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ musical styles serves an expressive function that runs from the merely playful to the bitingly sarcastic. No discussion of musical irony would be complete without mentioning Shostakovich, although his music has been extensively discussed from this angle by Esti Sheinberg (2000, 2008). Key to understanding the ironic potential of Shostakovich’s music is, of course, the social and political situation in which his music was composed and first performed; the musical techniques themselves (of quotation, exaggeration, distortion and parody) are familiar ones. More ‘shocking’ from a stylistic point of view is the work of Shostakovich’s successor, Alfred Schnittke, in which a bewildering musical heteroglossia becomes the primary material of the music. In the context of the essentially historical practice of classical music, Schnittke’s ‘carnivalesque’ mounts an assault on the idea of an authentic musical voice. It is striking that this polystylism was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, at the same time as the music of Mahler came to occupy a central place in the orchestral repertoire that it has held ever since. However, whereas Mahler’s contemporary popularity hinges on a specific mix of affirmation and doubt in the ideal of authentic expression, Schnittke seems to foreground its impossibility. Schnittke’s music has often been cited as an example of postmodern irony in music, mixing up and juxtaposing musical styles from quite different periods of music history and thus subverting the expressive authenticity presumed by any one of them. A good example is found in the Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1976–7) for two solo violins, harpsichord, prepared piano and string orchestra. The opening slow Prelude presents a kind of musical ruin frozen in time, accentuating the gap between natural tones and alienated ‘prepared’ sounds in the piano, and between the quasi-baroque materials and their fragmentary presentation. The second movement (Toccata) similarly begins with a baroque pastiche (the two solo violin lines in canonic imitation) but is followed immediately by the twelve orchestral violins in a proliferation of canonic entries that quickly produces a dense, chromatic micropolyphony, like the acceleration of a dysfunctional machine. In the final movement (Rondo), the two solo violins once again set off in patterns of baroque imitation, given over a stock harmonic sequence heard in rolling harpsichord arpeggios, only for the lines of the orchestral strings to multiply in an over-dense texture that occludes

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the soloists. In turn, this gives way to a tango and subsequently to a rich, late-romantic lyricism reminiscent of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, before returning to the sounds of the prepared piano heard in the opening Prelude. This is music that proceeds like a kind of historical selfanalysis; its ‘shock’ is that it presents voices from within the classical tradition but places them within its carnival scene in ways that necessarily decentre them, uncouple them from the authenticity they presume. The list of composers referenced in this way by Schnittke is extensive, from Lassus and Beethoven in the Second String Quartet (1983), to Bruckner in the Second Symphony (1979), Mahler in the Piano Quartet (1989), and Schütz, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti and Berg in the Concerto Grosso No. 3 (1985). Sheinberg underlines that the single term ‘irony’ is often used to refer to a range of quite different practices which she divides principally between the idea of satire (which always implies the assertion of a non-ironical message or value) and non-satirical forms of irony (which share a common scepticism towards the possibility of any single, unitary voice) (Sheinberg 2000, 61–2). The heteroglossic music of Schnittke makes a quite different proposition to that of the Schubert and Schumann Lieder we considered earlier, songs which intensify the expression of an ‘unexpressed’ idea by the ironic presentation of its opposite. It is different again to the romantic irony at work in Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, where the self-conscious play with the formal and stylistic expectations of music becomes a vehicle for the affirmation of a selfconscious and free subjectivity. In Schnittke, as also in some works by Berio (like the Sinfonia of 1968) or Ligeti (the Aventures of 1962), the plurality of musical voices is less the assertion of the sovereign subjectivity of the composer than an acknowledgement of a subjectivity found only amid such plurality – lost and found, dissolved and reconstituted in a host of borrowed voices – a shift in postmodern culture both celebrated and lamented in equal measure. Music, irony and the limits of language One hundred and fifty years after Friedrich Schlegel characterized irony as ‘a permanent parabasis’, Stravinsky’s Epilogue to The Rake’s Progress (1951) offered one of the most famous of operatic examples, as the house lights go up and the principal characters step to the front of the stage to draw the moral from the tale they have just enacted. The men are without their wigs and Baba without her beard. Real life, the actors now warn us, does not always turn out like fiction. Stravinsky’s ending echoes that of one of his models, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which, after the Don’s descent to hell, the remaining principals assemble to decide on their own futures before singing together the final moral, a similarity that neatly underlines the high degree of ironic self-reflection in eighteenth-century opera. Hermann Danuser has drawn out the fascinating parallels between meta-operas of the late eighteenth century and those of the early twentieth, throwing a bridge between Salieri’s Prima la musica, poi le parole and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. The first version of the latter was written in 1912, the year in which Schoenberg completed Pierrot Lunaire; for all their obvious differences, both works juxtapose attempts at authentic expression with self-ridicule at the impossibility of doing so. From Pierrot and Stravinsky’s Petrushka to Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, but also back to Schumann’s Carnaval, musical modernism’s concern with the mask, the puppet and the tragic clown is the recurrent vehicle for an exploration of the impossible gap between private experience and public representation. Musical irony runs through the music of the last few hundred years as a counterweight to the notion of authentic musical expression, binding the so-called classical era to the so-called modernist, and suggesting that we might better understand both as part of a broader idea of a

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singular musical modernity. The significance of this extends beyond questions of musical style or taste since, in its aesthetic exploration of the play of identity and non-identity, music anticipates a central theme of modern philosophy. In the Vorschule der Ästhetik, Jean Paul Richter set out a poetics of romantic art centred on the philosophical seriousness of the comic – the ‘ernster Scherz’ we encountered earlier. In humour, Richter argues, the ironic consciousness achieves a kind of ‘inverted sublime’ (umgekehrte Erhabene); by foregrounding the gap between the finite world of objects and the infinite world of ideas, between linguistic representation and what lies outside language, humour confounds the understanding and thus breaks it open (Richter [1804] 1973, 88). Richter talks of the ‘audacity (Keckheit) of annihilating humour’; Schlegel talks of irony as a ‘transcendental buffoonery’ (Schlegel 1968, 126) that produces a derangement of the natural order of things whose moment of cognitive dissonance is, at the same time, both comic and sublime.12 This moment of cognitive dissonance is a central idea for Lydia Goehr in an essay on music, philosophy and humour. What links all three is what she calls the performance of thought, its necessarily dynamic character in moving from one moment to another, from an initial proposition to a ‘cognitively dissonant moment’ that occasions a reappraisal of the world (Goehr 2005, 312, 317). This moving away she relates to the idea of exile in modern philosophy – a literal exile for the philosophers she discusses (Adorno and Wittgenstein) but also a figurative one at the heart of modern philosophy, expressed in Novalis’s aphorism that philosophy is ‘really homesickness . . . the drive to be at home everywhere’ (cited by Bowie 2007, 39). The same might be said of the quest of modern art more generally; Georg Lukács, in his study of the novel as the key literary form of modernity, finds at its heart the ‘transcendental homelessness’ of the modern subject, the legacy of a world in which – since a harmony of subject and world is no longer possible – can be represented only through a fundamentally ironic consciousness of the gap between the ideal and the real, the contingent particularity of the material and the abstract sense of the whole (Lukács 1917, 93). Andrew Bowie sums up the crisis in German romantic thought around 1800 as ‘the uneasy coexistence of the desire to be able to say what it is in thinking that is unlimited [and] an accompanying sense of the impossibility of saying it’ (Bowie 2007, 66). In the face of such a double-bind, he underlines, romantic thinkers looked increasingly to music. It may well be that, in their enthusiasm for the apparent ineffability of music and their readiness to assume that music might speak a kind of truth inaccessible to language, writers within German romanticism were more interested in projecting on to music what philosophy lacked. My point is rather different – that music was already exploring, and had been doing so for some decades, the dynamic thought of ironic self-consciousness. Bowie suggests that Schlegel’s idea of a ‘transcendental literature’ – one that embodies reflection upon its own process of composition, its own nature as writing – prefigures the key philosophical systems of Schelling (the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800) and Hegel (the Phenomenology of Mind of 1807; Bowie 2007, 82). Schlegel’s conception, however, owed much to the example of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, originally published in nine parts between 1759 and 1767, by which time music was already exploring, most obviously in the work of C. P. E. Bach, what Schelling would later call ‘the beauty of caprice’, in fantasias and capriccios that employed the kind of shock effects that would later be lost to music, only to be rediscovered by Schumann via German romantic literature. In his brief Monologue of 1798, over a century before Wittgenstein, Novalis made the radical proposition that language is no more than a ‘game of words’ and ‘only concerns itself with itself’; like mathematical formulae, he suggested, words ‘constitute their own world’, so it is a

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mistake to imagine that language speaks cogently about anything other than itself (Bowie 2007, 65). Hegel would hardly have concurred, and yet he argues something remarkably similar in the Introduction to the Logic, in his defence of philosophy against the charge of those who maintain that it is unintelligible. Their difficulty lies partly in an incapacity – which in itself is nothing but want of habit – for abstract thinking; i.e., an inability to get hold of pure thoughts and move about in them . . . When people are asked to apprehend some notion, they often complain that they do not know what they have to think. But the fact is that in a notion there is nothing further to be thought than the notion itself . . . The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas, feels the ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath it, and, when transported into the region of pure thought, cannot tell where in the world it is. (Hegel 1987, 7) Hegel famously dismissed instrumental music, as Kant had before him, as similarly unintelligible, yet this passage is striking in that it characterizes philosophy in ways that suggest a remarkable parallel with the intellectual play of a musical tradition that not only surrounded him, but had been sounding forth even before his birth. It is no coincidence that the idea music might be like a language arose at the same time that modern philosophy questioned its own adequacy as language. By the same token, the selfconscious questioning of the limits of musical language in the twentieth century needs to be understood in conjunction with the philosophical Sprachkritik of Mauthner, the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein. Bowie’s study of the relationship between music, philosophy and modernity argues persuasively that music has a critical relationship to philosophy that hinges precisely on its non-linguistic aspect. Musical irony may be understood as a particular version of this, taking on attributes of language in order to bring them to self-conscious scrutiny. This is, of course, quite different from philosophy itself, because music’s principal means of doing this is to stage the disjunction between grammatical conventions and their performance in particular, individual works rather than to work with concepts. There is no better demonstration of this than the non-conceptual particularity with which Beethoven’s music challenges the totality of the systemic whole in which his music works. The Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106 (1818) announces the definitive move to a ‘late style’ even as it attempts to recoup the affirmative tone of Beethoven’s early music. The ‘heroic’ fanfare that begins the first movement reappears in quite different guise at the start of the Scherzo, foreshortened into a simple anacrusis figure whose sequential repetitions saturate the movement. The transition from its central Trio section is effected by a buffa interlude (Presto, mm. 81–112) whose faux drama accentuates the comic nonchalance of the Scherzo theme when it returns (one could imagine Leporello whistling it to himself). It is the Coda of this movement, however, which presents the most startling act of authorial intrusion. The peremptory close in the tonic, Bb major (m. 160) mirrors that of the original scherzo (m. 46), but is now answered by an elongated play with the concluding figure in which the repeated Bbs (forte) are answered, in a lower octave, by repeated Bns (piano). The enharmonic change from Bb to A# implies a new modulation, before the bare repetition of the Bn in multiple octaves becomes (apparently through sheer force of repetition) a flattened-supertonic and falls back to Bb for the concluding measures. The innocuous motif, nothing more than a weak cadential figure, is heard three times, transposed an octave higher on each repetition until it simply evaporates (pianissimo).

256 • Julian Johnson

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Irony • 257

These few bars are emblematic of the nature, depth and significance of musical irony. Cast in comic form, they nevertheless make audible the gap that breaks open the illusion of the artwork as an autonomous whole. The authorial interruption of the music’s formal and grammatical logic inscribes the presence of a divided self-consciousness, one that both creates the work and, at the same time, underlines its own awareness of the fictive and constructive nature of that creation. The significance of this far exceeds questions of musical style or familiar accounts of idiosyncratic composers ‘playing’ with musical conventions. The narrow gap between the Bb and the B n marks a defining moment of historical slippage between language and subject, a fissure that opens up between the functioning system and the subject’s self-awareness of it. As such, this momentary break in musical grammar, passed off as ironic humour, is the audible manifestation of a far deeper and more significant fracture – one that runs all the way down to the fault-line of modernity itself. Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The importance of genre in this respect is discussed by a number of writers, including Dubrow 1982, Kallberg 1988, Samson 1989 and Micnik 1994. The most extensive study is Sheinberg 2000. There are a few book-length studies of musical irony devoted to specific composers, including Zank 2009, Johnson 2009, Castagné et al. 2001, Celestini, 2006, and a collection of articles and chapters (mostly referenced in the course of this article) addressing the use of irony in Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mahler, Ravel, and Prokofiev. Principally in the theoretical works of Mattheson, Koch, Sulzer, Forkel. This is discussed by Bonds 1991b and Spitzer 2004, 207–75. The title of Wheelock’s book derives from a phrase in the preface to Domenico Scarlatti’s Essercizi per gravicembalo (1738) by which the composer describes his own music. The most sustained example, Longyear suggests, is the Scherzo of the Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1. The Sterne quote is from Book 8, Chapter 27 of Tristram Shandy. The idea of narrative in Schumann has been discussed by a number of writers, notably Newcomb 1987. Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 19 November 1900. Kraus gave 124 ‘readings’ of Offenbach between 1929 and 1935. See Janik 2001, Chapters 5 and 6. See also Botstein 2009. Letter from Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, cited by Janik 2001, 113. For the original citation, see Janz 1972, 120. Kaminsky suggests that the Histoires naturelles of 1906 are ‘the exemplar of literalism and irony’ in Ravel (Kaminsky 2000, 171). See also Zank 2009. For more on the inverted sublime, see Downes, ‘Beautiful and Sublime’, this volume, pp. 95–7.

Bibliography of works cited Behler, Ernst. 1990. Irony and the Discourse of Modernity. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Bishop, Lloyd. 1989. ‘What is Romantic Irony?’, in Romantic Irony in French Literature from Diderot to Beckett. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 1991a. ‘Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 44: 57–91, 68. ––––– 1991b. Wordless Rhetoric: Music Form and the Metaphor of Oration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Botstein, Leon. 2009. ‘German Jews and Wagner’, in Thomas S. Grey (ed.), Richard Wagner and His World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 151–200. Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brauner, Charles S. 1981. ‘Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann’, The Musical Quarterly, 67: 261–81. Burnham, Scott. 1994. ‘Mozart’s “felix culpa”: Così fan tutte and the Irony of Beauty’, The Musical Quarterly, 78: 77–98. ––––– 2005. ‘Haydn and Humor’ in Caryl Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Haydn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 61–76. Castagné, Andre. et al. (eds). 2001. Gustav Mahler et l’ironie dans la culture Viennoise au tournant du siècle. Montpellier: Éditions Climats. Celestini, Federico. 2006. Die Unordnung der Ding: Das musikalische Groteske in der Wiener Moderne (1885–1914). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Chennevière, Rudhyar D. 1919. ‘Erik Satie and the Music of Irony’, The Musical Quarterly, 5: 469–78. Chua, Daniel K. L. 1999. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

258 • Julian Johnson Cross, Jonathan, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daverio, John. 1997. Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’. New York: Oxford University Press. Dill, Heinz J. 1989. ‘Romantic Irony in the Works of Robert Schumann’, The Musical Quarterly, 73: 172–95. Dubrow, Heather. 1982. Genre. London: Methuen. Franklin, Peter. 2001. ‘Mahler’, in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan, 15, 615. Goehr, Lydia. 2005. ‘Philosophical Exercises in Repetition: On Music, Humor, and Exile in Wittgenstein and Adorno’, in Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (eds), Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 311–42. Hefling, Stephen E. 2001. ‘Techniques of Irony in Mahler’s Oeuvre’, in Andre Castagné et al., Gustav Mahler et l’ironie dans la culture Viennoise au tournant du siècle. Montpellier: Éditions Climats. Hegel, G. W. F. 1987. Logic, trans. William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunter, Mary. 1999. The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Janik, Allan. 2001. Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Janz, Curt Paul. 1972. Die Briefe Friedrich Nietzsches: Textprobleme und ihre Bedeutung für Biographie und Doxographie. Basel: Editio Academica. Johnson, Julian. 2009. Mahler’s Voices, Irony and Expression in the Songs and Symphonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kallberg, Jeffrey. 1988. ‘The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor’, 19th-Century Music, 11: 233–61. Kaminsky, Peter. 2000. ‘Vocal Music and the Lures of Exoticism and Irony’, in Deborah Mawer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ravel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 162–87. Kramer, Lawrence. 2011. Interpreting Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Longyear, Rey M. 1970. ‘Beethoven and Romantic Irony’, The Musical Quarterly, 56: 647–64. Lukács, Georg. 1917. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock. London: Methuen Press. Micnik, Vera. 1994. ‘Mahler and the Power of Genre’, Journal of Musicology, 12: 117–51. Newcomb, Anthony. 1987. ‘Schumann and Late-Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies’, 19th-Century Music, 11: 164–74. Orenstein, Arbie, ed. 1990. A Ravel Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Richter, Jean Paul. [1804] 1973. Vorschule der Ästhetik in Jean Paul, Werke (Fünfter Band) (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1963), trans. Margaret R. Hale as Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetic. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Rosenberg, Wolf. 1988. ‘Paradox, Doppelbödigkeit und Ironie und der Dichterliebe’, Dissonanz/Dissonance, 15: 8–12. Samson, Jim. 1989. ‘Chopin and Genre’, Music Analysis, 8: 213–32. Schlegel, Friedrich v. 1963. Philosophische Fragmente, Kritische Ausgabe seine Werke 18. Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh. ––––– 1968. Lyceum 42 in Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sheinberg, Esti. 2000. Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities. Aldershot: Ashgate. ––––– 2008. ‘Jewish Existential Irony as Musical Ethos in the Music of Shostakovich’ in Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 350–67. Spitzer, Michael. 2004. ‘Rhythm and Language’, in Metaphor and Musical Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 207–75. Stravinsky, Igor. 1975. Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography. London: Calder & Boyars. Wheelock, Gretchen. 1992. Haydn’s Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor. New York: Schirmer. Zank, Stephen. 2009. Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

13 Propaganda Jim Samson

Preamble All art, irrespective of how it is intended or received, has elements of autonomy character and elements of dependency character. This is not an either–or. And likewise, all art has elements of intrinsic value and elements of instrumental value. We may enjoy it or loathe it, but either way it has some capacity, small or great, to transform us. There are four separate categories here, and the balance between them constantly shifts. Yesterday, the instrumental value of an artwork may have seemed all-important; the poet might save the world. Today, its intrinsic value may be foregrounded; we appreciate what we now take to be its inspired pointlessness. Here, the artwork seems to have broken the chains binding it to the social world; the painter makes her own statement. There, its ecology is all too obvious; the social determinants of that same statement stare us in the face. A little distance, temporal or spatial, can make all the difference. Propaganda, more or less by definition, places the emphasis firmly on one of these four categories, instrumental value, but not to the exclusion of the others. For one thing, any art may be propagandized, including art that originally aspired to an autonomy character. Propaganda is certainly about intentions, but not always the intentions of the author, nor even the intention of the text, to borrow a formulation of Umberto Eco (1991). And for another thing, those who read, view or listen are not bound by anyone’s intentions. However explicitly encoded, the message may be decoded quite differently. Even if we focus exclusively on instrumental value, we must allow a further complication. Just where does propaganda begin? When Dickens depicted the prisons, schools and workhouses of Victorian England, he had a mission of social amelioration; he set out to make a difference. Is this propaganda? If we resist the label here, it may be because we have drawn a line somewhere on the spectrum between intrinsic value and instrumental value. On one side of the line – the Dickens side, let us say – the artwork may engage with and reflect upon a social and/or political subject matter; it may be intended as a force for social and/or political change. Its primary business, however, we believe, is art. On the other side of the line that subject matter is not just a material to be elaborated; it has become the substance or content of the artwork. And to that extent intrinsic value is occluded. Just where we place this line is so much a matter of individual judgement that we might reasonably question if it can have any explanatory value at all. Is it not less restrictive to accept the relativism implicit in my opening remarks? Thus, Dickens, like Shakespeare, depended on something like a mass market, and openly catered for that market (dependency character).

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Yet the afterlife of his novels has demonstrated that they transcended this commodity status (autonomy character). Likewise, there is no contradiction between the propaganda function of his novels (their instrumental value) and their demonstrable aesthetic qualities (their intrinsic value). If we consider the pedigreed usage of the term ‘propaganda’ and the connotative values it has acquired, we may find further arguments against including Dickens, notably that propaganda is conventionally deemed to present a one-sided, partisan picture of whatever reality is at stake; in other words, there is an exclusion of alternative points of view. In this habitual understanding of propaganda, the bias and selectivity in the message are tantamount to deliberate falsification. Propaganda is viewed as antithetical to truth; it is on the wrong side of the moral argument. It hardly helps that it is commonly associated with the manipulative strategies of mass communication, with the traumas of war, and with the abuse of power, notably through a politics of dictatorship, whether of the right or the left. This negative image is so all-pervasive that it has become part of the modern definition of the term, at least for ‘primary’ forms of propaganda, by which I mean the distortion, suppression or censorship of information by various (usually mass) media, as well as proscriptive education and other forms of institutionalized persuasion. Yet artworks stand at something of an angle to this explicit manipulation of information. However much they proselytize, they represent a ‘secondary’ form of propaganda, though there may be an ontological grey area here. This chapter will nod towards ‘primary’ forms at the end, but its principal concern will be with music and music-making per se. Within that constraint I will try to explore the concept in a rounded way, recognizing that negative connotations were neither there from the start nor suggested by the etymology, where the essential link is with the propagation of values. And I will also identify and discuss elements of propaganda avant la lettre, bearing in mind that the term entered the language as late as the seventeenth century, that it gained widespread currency only in the mid nineteenth century, and that a key stage in its subsequent dissemination occurred as recently as the First World War . It is time to take an example from music. When Beethoven composed his ‘Eroica’ Symphony he intended it, inter alia, as cultural support for ideas of liberal humanism that were part of the climate of social romanticism in the arts at that time; even the title has instrumental value here.1 Thomas Sipe has demonstrated that the ‘Eroica’ was understood in just this way by many of Beethoven’s contemporaries (Sipe 1998). Yet later in the nineteenth century the same symphony could be read as a paradigm of ‘absolute music’. And in a present-day performance by Daniel Barenboim and the East–West Divan Orchestra it can become propaganda for the Middle East peace process (this before we have heard a note; it is enough to recognize who is performing and who is on the podium). These multiple readings draw attention to a key paradox about music and propaganda. Since it lacks referential acumen, wordless music ought to be poorly equipped to serve as propaganda. Yet precisely that lack of specificity makes it all the easier to appropriate for one cause or another. We are helped in negotiating these ambiguities by terms of reference already present in the poetics of antiquity. In particular, the concept of propaganda might be grounded in theories of mimesis and rhetoric. Theories of mimesis allow that music may convey a message, including a subliminal message. Yet this already introduces a problematic of meaning and of value, where music may be either a degenerative copy of noumenal forms (incapable of truth) or an imitation of the soul (incapable of lies); these, very roughly, represent Platonic and Aristotelian positions respectively. Theories of rhetoric, meanwhile, shift the focus to questions of agency and

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persuasion, taking us even more directly into the territory of propaganda. The devices of rhetoric confront us directly with the space that can exist between substance and style, and between idea and presentation. Moreover, a further consequence of this, also recognized by the ancients, is that music – because of its affective power – can be both enabling and subversive, and thus invites both appropriation and censorship. Panorama Appropriation or censorship may serve any number of causes, and only some can be explored here.2 Music may be appropriated or censored by a faith, and the earliest uses of the term ‘propaganda’ appeared in just this context. It may advance the interests of a nation or a wouldbe nation, and did so often and volubly in the nineteenth century, at which point ‘propaganda’ began to acquire its pejorative associations. It may act as the mouthpiece of a controlling ethnic majority, or as part of the cultural capital accrued by an ethnic minority (in which case it works to enhance visibility). What all these have in common is that they are concerned with the play of power, either by those who exercise it or by those over whom it is exercised. However, our present age of mass media has found yet other uses for music. It may promote a product, sell a lifestyle, improve our health and productivity, and recruit a cohort, to name but some. Such blatantly commercial propaganda is also about power, but it is more about persuasion. While the term ‘propaganda’ was coined in a modern European setting, the concept knows no boundaries, either of time or of place. Even the most ancient empires of today’s Middle East used cultural forms as modes of propaganda, as we know from the explicitly proselytizing stone carvings found in the Assyrian palace of Nineveh, a celebration of royal power and a stark warning of the price of dissent. Music leaves a less obvious material trace, given that only a limited number of ancient civilizations and societies developed notational systems, but there is an abundance of secondary evidence, in both written and oral histories, attesting its importance to the powerful in earlier times, most obviously as a means of social control. In some cases, especially in pre-modern societies, such evidence can be illuminated further by means of presentday ethnographies. Two brief case studies, located in different continents, will make the point. Henry Stobart has drawn our attention to the use of music by the Incas as a means of ‘orchestrating’ the year, a practice that continues among rural communities in the Bolivian Andes to this day (Stobart 2006, ch. 3). He further points out that these musical calendars, determined by the selection of genres, instruments and tunings, and closely tied to climate and crop production, were by no means neutral. They were intimately related to mechanisms of social and religious control, and to the reinforcement of political order and ancestral authority. The monthly ceremonies of the Inca rulers, marked by particular song genres, instrumental groups and dances, contributed to the establishment and maintenance of distinct social hierarchies among the subjects of the empire. In other words, the imposition of calendars was also an imposition of power. Even today, Stobart tells us, music continues to play a role in defining ethnic, territorial and class identities in the Bolivian Andes, and it can further articulate a sense of an idealized past and a degenerate present, a theme that is common to many cultures. Compare this with Thomas Hale’s account of the Griot or Jali musicians of West Africa. Hale informs us that the many roles of Griot musicians included praise singing as a means of celebrating the power and ancestry of the rulers, of whose entourage they formed an essential component (Hale 1998). Praise singing has been well documented elsewhere in Africa (Gleason

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1984), but the practice of the Griots has a notably ancient pedigree in the great sub-Saharan kingdoms to the west, and especially the gold-rich kingdom of Mali. Hale refers to written sources that stretch back a good seven centuries to the writings of the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who encountered Griot praise singers at the court in Mali in 1352. He goes on to illustrate historical continuities by referencing European travel writings from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Throughout this period the musicians remained close to those who exercised political power, and they stand as testimony to the perceived efficacy of music as a means of upholding authority. In authoritarian states in the modern world this role is commonly associated with an official state style and aesthetic, with roots in either a classical or a ‘folk’ culture. This is starkly exemplified by the changing phases of North Korean music since the political division of the peninsula. Keith Howard identifies three such phases (Howard 1996, 2006). In the early days of the new state, dance troupes and related orchestras, on a familiar Soviet model, functioned not just as celebratory ballast for state occasions, sports events and mass rallies, but also as ‘propaganda squads’ designed to energize the workforce. Then, in the late 1950s, these performance troupes yielded to the so-called Galloping Horse Movement, which worked to eliminate all traces of elite culture and to promote indigenous creativity based on demotic traditions, as understood and arbitrated by Kim Il Sung. Finally, from the 1970s onwards, the juche movement formalized the ideological element in North Korean official music, such that artists were required to reflect state policy through a ‘seed policy’ in which an ideological element formed the kernel. This is an extreme form of an official aesthetic, broaching no counter culture and no dissent, and employing strict censorship to maintain the status quo. It testifies to the truism that the more repressive the dictatorship, the more omniscient the dictator; Kim Il Sung was an expert on music, as on everything else! However, persuasion can be more nuanced, as music history in South Africa illustrates. Grant Olwage demonstrates how missionary choralism was used during the colonial age as a (Foucauldian) disciplinary tool (Olwage 2005), for example, while Johnny Clegg and Michael Drewett document and discuss some of the censorship later employed by the apartheid state (Clegg and Drewett 2006). There was resistance to that censorship, of course, but the resulting counter-propaganda could often be articulated safely and effectively only from without the state; witness, with Shirli Gilbert, the role of music in ANC (African National Congress) projects in diaspora, and in particular ensembles such as Mayibuye in the 1970s and Amandla in the 1980s. Here a subversive black South African popular music flourished in exile (Gilbert 2007). Where counter-propaganda was fostered at home, it could involve both musicians and audiences in a precarious – even a dangerous – balancing act, and it could also misfire. Christopher Cockburn’s reception history of Handel’s Messiah in 1950s South Africa illustrates that the musico-political tightrope was as real for white liberal audiences as for the black singers involved in the performances of the Johannesburg African Music Society (JAMS) (Cockburn 2008). One of his conclusions is that ‘instead of helping to turn back apartheid, the JAMS performances eventually became its victims’. In another essay in the same collection, Brett Pyper demonstrates comparable ambivalence within the institution of the State Theatre in Pretoria during the later stages of apartheid (Pyper 2008). In particular, he exposes the space that can exist between the monolithic propagandizing agenda of ‘official’ institutions and the diverse, nuanced and constantly shifting cultural practices they host. Such reversals and ambiguities are the story of music in repressive regimes. Consider Iran. Between the 1979 Revolution and the electoral victory of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 there

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was relatively little opportunity for a culture of dissent, but Laudan Nooshin informs us that after the legalization of popular music enacted by the reformist Khatami regime, a grass-roots ‘alternative’ music, influenced by Western rock, developed alongside the newly legalized mainstream movement. This music acted as a channel for political dissent, and in doing so displaced an earlier black market in ‘imported diaspora pop’ (Nooshin 2009). Nooshin discusses this in relation to developing ideas of a civil society, the emergence of a distinctive youth culture and the spread of the internet, but she further points out that an officially sanctioned culture industry found ways to absorb and neutralize this critical dimension. Her case study is Arian Band, which steered a cautious path between conformism and dissent, somehow gaining official approval while simultaneously speaking to the concerns of disillusioned youth. In a discreet propaganda, Arian Band, it seems, gives public voice to a promesse de bonheur. There is no preaching, but simply by ‘reclaiming public space in the name of civil society’, the band offers a cultural model of what a society might be. It is worth stressing the importance of both popular music and traditional music to propagandizing agendas, whether official or dissenting. By definition, popular music reaches the widest possible public and it cultivates the direct emotional appeal in which propaganda tends to trade. There are certain global patterns here. Typically, radical elements of mass culture will be neutralized through appropriation by the status quo, and that in turn will prompt alternative forms of subversion. Popular music, in other words, can serve several masters, but traditional music (so-called ‘folk music’) is no less versatile and can exert a no less powerful ideological charge. Since it supposedly embodies the voices of the ancestors, the fathers, it can stand for stability and history in ways that can be useful to those in authority, but equally to those who protest. Propaganda, then, often involves a play on the different meanings that can arise from state, traditional and popular styles. Something of this play of meanings emerges from Anna Morcom’s online article on Tibetan music and dance since the 1950s (Morcom 2007). Morcom’s starting point is the official, heavily ‘sinicized’, state music that represented Tibet through to the 1980s, but she proceeds to demonstrate that the relaxation of censorship during that decade led both to a revival of traditional styles and to the importation of popular styles. In the late 1980s and 1990s this all added up to a genuinely radical counter-culture, where music could reinforce a sense of ‘authentic’ Tibetan identity extending well beyond official prescriptions. However, the real fascination of Morcom’s account is her suggestion that not only was this popular music appropriated by the state in due course; a reverse appropriation also took place, in which state styles were in turn redirected by ‘the people’, becoming forms of desirable modernity. There is continuous slippage between style and idea in this surface play of meanings; it is a modern version of that ancient counterpoint of which theories of rhetoric speak. A similar play on state, traditional and popular styles has been demonstrated by ethnomusicologists working on music in China and in its related territories. Nimrod Baranovitch, for example, has discussed how pop/rock music was appropriated by the Chinese state through Chinese MTV and state-sponsored pop concerts, effectively neutralizing its subversive charge and absorbing it increasingly into the world of ‘state performing arts’, where it could acquire an explicit propaganda role (Baranovitch 2003). Yang Mu likewise shows how traditional music has been appropriated for propaganda purposes in China, with the academic world heavily implicated (Yang Mu 1994; for a parallel study in Singapore, see Tan Shrz Ee 2005). The other side of the coin is that both these genres have been able to retain a dissenting role in those territories whose relation to China has been problematized historically. In this connection,

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several scholars have examined how music has been hijacked by identity politics to generate a counter-culture. We see something of this already in Morcom’s work on Tibet, but Nancy Guy has presented comparable sequences for Taiwan, and Barbara Mittler for Hong Kong (Guy 1999; Mittler 1996, 1997). This brief global tour begs some further questions about music and propaganda. Returning for a moment to mimesis, and to the views of Plato and Aristotle, we may note that to invoke distortions is also to invoke essences; in other words, to examine ideologically motivated transformations of meaning is also to interrogate truth content or authenticity. Traditional music has been especially susceptible to the quest for authenticity. The idea that this music has survived for centuries gives it a powerful emotional charge as a representation of strength and stability, encouraging nostalgia for a mythic-pastoral world of conservative values, where older moral and social orders are preserved. Yet such views risk essentialism. Lying behind them is perhaps a fear of change, a rejection of the contemporary world and of an associated commercialism that can be conveniently represented by highly generalized understandings of popular music. Acts of recovery, in short, can distort the lens just as much as acts of appropriation. Faith and nation On the European continent, faith, nationhood and ethnicity – more or less in that order – were among the principal arenas for negotiating identities until relatively recent times. Faith trades in perceived truths, but faith and Church are by no means synonymous, and the Church was from the start enmeshed in a decidedly earthly politics of institutions, a politics in which music was heavily implicated as a mode of propaganda. This point could be illustrated via the encounters of Islam and Christianity in early modern Europe (note how music in the tekke-s helped acclimatize the Ottoman world to local cultures in southeastern Europe);3 it could be pursued by way of dialogues and synergies between Eastern and Western Christianity (compare the politically motivated reforms of elaborately melismatic repertories within both traditions); and it could be refined further by exploring music and politics in the Eastern Church itself (observe how the chant was harnessed to the rival political agendas of separate nations). For present purposes, however, I will focus on Western Christianity, and specifically on music and confession in sixteenth-century Germany.4 It is a good moment to do this, given that recent scholarship has illuminated the topic in new ways. The broad outlines of the history, as of an analogous history in England, are familiar enough. Where liturgical music is concerned, it is a story of vernaculars versus Latin, and more broadly of theology versus art. Thus, for Reformation theologians the degree of comprehensibility ensured by the vernacular and by a conservative, ‘one syllable one note’ idiom was all about the propagation of values (propaganda); echoing Plato, we might say that beauty should not distract from truth. However, this maxim might apply equally to the Catholic rejoinder, as articulated in the debates of the Council of Trent. In other words, very similar desiderata – the simplification and ‘purification’ of sacred polyphony; clarity of text declamation – were proposed for Reformation and CounterReformation music alike. This broader picture has been nuanced and revised in recent years. In the first place, the spotlight has shifted from sacred polyphony to what might be termed popular music, whose role has been understated in the past, partly because of the hierarchies firmly cemented into cultural histories, but also because this stratum of music-making presents obvious pragmatic difficulties to the researcher. In the second place, there have been detailed site-specific studies

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that have deconstructed pedigreed narratives about music and confession. We learn that even with cultivated polyphonic repertories there was relatively little uniformity in musical responses to either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation. We are cautioned about some of the bias found in our historiographical inheritance, notably a tendency, deeply rooted in stories about Germany and nationhood, to associate Lutheran cultural forms with modes of modernity. Rebecca Oettinger has demonstrated that Lutheran propaganda was disseminated more widely through music than was previously thought (Oettinger 2001). The importance of Protestant song as a symbol of the new Church has long been acknowledged, but Oettinger’s work opened up a little-researched world of ‘mass media’ communication in which polemical song played a key propaganda role in an age of limited literacy. The contrafactum (exchanging sacred and secular texts, and fitting sacred texts to popular melodies) was of special importance here. It has a lengthy cross-confessional history (see Perris 1985, 144–5), but its characteristic intertexts came into their own during the German Reformation, parodying, challenging and disrupting Catholic belief in a manner that could easily be assimilated by the common folk. Oettinger documents the spread of such songs during the first half of the sixteenth century, and she notes their importance as a mode of resistance during the Augsburg Interim, when bi-confessionalism was monitored from a position of Catholic strength. Her work testifies to some of the special qualities of music as propaganda: direct appeal, egalitarian accessibility to literate and nonliterate alike, immunity from material loss and the durability of the intangible. By looking in close detail at music and confession in specific German cities, other scholars have been able to take a thicker slice across repertories, faiths and social communities. Thus, Alexander Fisher’s discussion of music in bi-confessional Augsburg during the CounterReformation addresses several ‘layers’ of music and confession. There was the counter-propaganda role of the Jesuits, backed by wealthy families, and involving not just vernacular songs and ‘school dramas’, but a body of devotional polyphony suitable for amateurs (Fisher 2004). There was the continuing tradition of Lutheran polemical song, associated especially with the ‘calendar controversy’ of 1584 and fuelled by a strong sense of socio-economic disadvantage (Fisher documents several of the criminal trials that resulted from the proscription of such songs up to the Edict of Restitution in 1629). There was also the Catholic liturgy as practised at the cathedral, the Benedictine monastery and the leading churches, notably involving the introduction of the Roman rite in the late 1590s. We gain a clear sense here of how the pendulum-like changes to confessional and musical fortunes were linked, and of how they were driven by politics. Every German city had a unique profile, of course, and when we turn to Heidelberg, one of the lay Electorates of the Holy Roman Empire, we encounter confessional tensions of a rather different order. In the second half of the sixteenth century, indeed right up to the sacking of the city in 1622, official doctrine alternated between Lutheranism and Calvinism according to the (largely political) interests of respective Electors. Thus, an anti-Catholic – anti-Habsburg – orientation could be more clearly signalled by Calvinism than Lutheranism, and for a time Heidelberg became a major Calvinist centre, despite its status within the Empire. Catholicism, meanwhile, maintained a subordinate presence, but one that increasingly broke surface in the years immediately prior to 1622. Matthew Laube’s research on Heidelberg problematizes these confessional identities, partly by examining different social layers (court, university, ‘common folk’) and partly by using music as an index of the internal coherence of faith communities (Laube 2014). The familiar musical codes certainly apply, but we learn from Laube’s work that whatever the directives from above, the confessions and their associated musics were much less

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discrete, much more fluid, in Heidelberg than conventional historical narratives allow. Propaganda, we are reminded, pits itself always against the built-in inertia of established praxes, in this case religious, social and cultural. Let us stay with Heidelberg but leap forward some two centuries to the early 1800s. Faith was still an important marker of identity in early nineteenth-century Heidelberg, but among the intelligentsia it was now rivalled by nationhood and (increasingly) ethnicity, even if it took some time for an awareness of these identities to trickle down to the population at large. In particular we find, for a brief period, a group of writers (among them Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim) engaged in the publication of folksong collections and related essays that would resonate in German culture through to the early twentieth century. By depicting in idealized form an image of ‘old Germany’, at times associated with a no less idealized image of Classical antiquity, these men constructed a modern myth of Germany, often involving a poeticized nature symbolism in which the Rhine was an emblem of nationhood. It was a movement that would culminate in a remarkable outpouring of Rhinelieder in the 1840s (Porter 1996), in the work of the Nazarene painters and in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. The distance separating these two ‘historical moments’ in Heidelberg measures a step change in Germany more generally as nineteenth-century cultural nationalism began to take hold. What distinguished this nationalism from earlier varieties is that ethnies (embodied in language, customs, rituals, traditional cultures, even landscape) were forged into nations by the homogenizing effects of emergent bourgeois high cultures, due partly to a strengthening industrialtechnological base in European societies (Gellner 1983), and partly to the influence of developing ideals of popular sovereignty and egalitarianism. However, Liah Greenfeld further points out that nineteenth-century nationalism took on the character of a belief system, ‘sacralising the secular’ and substituting ‘the social and political relations between men for the bond between man and God’ (Greenfeld 1996). In doing so, it promoted the nation not just as a community, meeting deep-seated human needs for bonding and belonging, but as a sacred community or congregation, worthy of self-sacrifice and, more pertinently for present purposes, of proselytism. Defining and then selling the nation was the job of intellectual and political elites in the nineteenth century. Although constantly invoking nature and ‘the folk’, it was a project firmly grounded in the cities and unfolding in the realm of high rather than popular culture (but see Bohlman 2004). At its heart was a prevailing belief that nations had a clear sense of cultural identity, investing them with an image of authority that might challenge even that of the Church. In the first place, cultural nationalism demanded the validation of nationhood by history. Roots became all-important, and if necessary they could be refashioned, or created afresh, for myth and history were intertwined in the job of building the cultural nation. In this way ‘Germany’ was propagandized musically by a potent blend of neo-medieval imagery, classical homologies, a folk ethos and nature worship. It was further promoted by an emergent, genealogically conceived national canon, firmed up in festivals, conservatory syllabuses, concert life and publishing enterprises, and by the historicism and organicism around which a good deal of idealist thought was gathered. All this worked to forge a concept of the nation as a cultural unity. The familiar category ‘classical music’ was thus linked from the start to ideas of the German nation, but it also functioned more broadly to construct roots for a bourgeois social and political ascendancy. This was a development associated mainly with the charismatic cultural capitals of Western and Central Europe, where an ‘innocent’ music – music from a different era, notably Bach and ‘Viennese’ Classicism – served as propaganda for a new social order. Conversely, in the eastern half of Europe, and more generally around its edges, a very different

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‘innocent’ music – music from a different social stratum, specifically traditional agrarian repertories – served as propaganda for would-be nations (in established states such as France, such music tended to promote regionalism rather than nationalism). In other words, intellectual elites from this part of Europe, including composers, chose to make symbolic capital from the culture of the ‘folk’.5 There was nothing new in composers turning to traditional music. What was new was the spirit in which it was deployed from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Even when presented in the form of simple transcriptions, traditional music became an agent of nationalist propaganda. This kind of cultural nationalism exhibited a paradoxical condition. It staked its claim on a respected contribution to a generalized high culture. Yet at the same time it asserted its distinctiveness by drawing elements of sanitized rural folk culture into a synthetic national tradition. In a sense, then, each nation displayed a variant of a single bourgeois culture, while at the same time competitively elevating, asserting and promoting its uniqueness. In practice, a repertory of generalized folk idioms served as all-purpose musical signifiers, inflecting what Philip Bohlman calls the ‘aesthetic centre’ (Bohlman 2007), while specificity resided in a poetics of intention and reception. The musical materials themselves, like the liquids in Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernities’, flowed freely across the boundaries (Bauman 2000). This is a narrative that began (at least symbolically) with Chopin’s Op. 6 and Op. 7 mazurkas and ended with a cluster of latter-day nationalists in the early twentieth century. One such was the Greek composer Manolis Kalomiris, whose ‘manifesto’ of 1908 speaks for the agenda of romantic nationalism more generally in its proposed symbiosis of peasant music and sophisticated art music. An authentic national school, Kalomiris claimed, should be ‘based on the music of our unspoiled, authentic folksongs . . . embellished with all the technical means . . . of the musically advanced peoples’ (Little 2001, 96–8). Setting aside the vast space between rhetoric and reality here, note that this represented a kind of ‘last gasp’ of romantic nationalism in music. In the early twentieth century composers such as Béla Bartók really did invest in ‘our unspoiled, authentic folksongs’, but they did so in a very different, essentially modernist, spirit. This was no longer a story about cultural nationalism, even if that was in some cases the initial publicity. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the triumph of nations over dynasties, such stories were no longer an imperative. The ‘necessary lie’ The modality and ‘mentality’ of war changed in 1914. Paul Fussell has described how the collective experience of the Great War changed sensibilities and divided generations, promoting a new, harsher ‘cohort thinking’ about the ‘topos of inevitable war’ (Fussell 2000). This war was not in the mould of earlier professional conflicts, unfolding at some remove from most people’s lives. Rather it promoted the idea of war as a self-sacrificing collective struggle, and for that very reason propaganda came to be assigned a role of unprecedented importance. Rachel Moore has examined its discourses in France, from localized interventions at the beginning of the war to wider national directives under the auspices of the Service de faction artistique à l’étranger (in which Alfred Cortot played a leading role) by 1916 (Moore 2012). Her case studies include Saint-Saëns’s Germanophilie, read in the context of both official and populist debates (the Académie, the daily press), ‘national matinée’ concerts, which – like many other wartime concerts – often included propagandistic speeches, and ‘national’ publishing enterprises. By the end of

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the war the machinery of centralized state propaganda was already of an order, or approaching an order, that would become familiar in later twentieth-century conflicts. Yet Moore’s findings remind us that propaganda, however insistent, can often struggle to impose itself in practice. Whether in concert life or in publishing, she tells us, the centrality of German music in France was not so easily undermined. Here, in the Great War, at a defining moment in the history of propaganda, an important lesson was learned. The story will be more persuasive if you work with – if you harness – existing musical tastes than if you seek to forge and impose new tastes. It was a lesson that would not be lost on the protagonists of the Cold War. The Treaty of Versailles marked the culmination of a century-long competition between dynastic government and the nation state, a competition reinforced in its later stages by developing tensions between racial identities: German, Slav and Latin. As noted earlier, its principal outcome was the defeat of dynasties by nations, but even as this played out in Europe a new global politics was emerging, to be formalized in the aftermath of the Second World War by the ascendancy of two superpowers and of their associated ideologies. The subsequent battle of ideologies dominated global politics for more than forty years, and although it was directed – and largely funded – by the superpowers themselves, much of it was outsourced to a divided Europe. And since this was a ‘cold’ war, propaganda was advanced right to the front line, where music played its part. I will examine the musical coding, and specifically the code switching, that enabled this propaganda. Under Communism two categories that were considered antithetical within bourgeois culture – modernist music and commercial popular music – formed an unlikely alliance. Both were deemed to be part of the cultural–political armoury of the United States, and were condemned by the Soviet Union and its client states as anti-humanist and decadent. There was further code switching associated with classical music. A creation of bourgeois Europe, this was an elite culture, but when appropriated by socialist realism it lost these associations and became the property of the people, expressive of universal human values. It also became a site of competition, an assertion of cultural prestige on the world stage. Opera was part of this, but it was also a special case. Its elitist origins conveniently forgotten, the ‘Soviet opera project’ had prestige, signalling a sophisticated culture, but when translated into a people’s art it had propaganda value too.6 Folk music, meanwhile, was eagerly appropriated by socialist realism. Its propaganda value as a putative music of the masses had not been lost on the Nazis, and there are similarities between the folklorist projects of 1930s Germany and those of post-war Communist states. However, the pedigreed associations of folk music with bourgeois nationalism became problematical for these states. Links with the nation were not eliminated, but in a sense they should have been, given that national states should wither away in the new order. Instead, Stalin’s classic formulation – national in form, socialist in content – tied nation building to the class struggle, so that the nation not only prevailed but gained enhanced status. What seemed more crucial was that folk music should lose another of its bourgeois associations, this time with the primitive. To a modernist, the primitive could be a valued category; to a socialist realist, it was a mark of inferiority and regression. Hence the ‘classicizing’ of folk music in state ensembles and its migration from village square to concert platform. Choirs were a mainstay of musical life under state socialism, with a repertory that relied heavily on folksong arrangements, on mass songs – usually propagandistic – and on socialist cantatas composed to a blueprint provided by the Soviet Union. It was the choral medium that most successfully bridged the gap between classical music and folk music, and often the choirs

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were formally linked to dance troupes with a mission to promote the culture of ‘the people’. This was part of a sustained attempt to democratize musical life, while at the same time raising standards to a professional level, and it was closely linked to the proliferation of showcasing competitions and mass festivals. This ethos of progress, where even amateur musicians were encouraged to develop the highest professional standards, also informed the investment in music education, the government-subsidized publishing houses, the recording companies and the radio, for it goes without saying that the Eastern bloc was alive to the importance of dissemination, and to the even greater importance of controlling that dissemination. As for composers, the official unions, under the aegis of Ministries of Culture, had the job of censoring their work through ‘adjudication panels’, as well as ‘self-criticism’ and ‘purge’ sessions, and also of commissioning new works, notably mass songs and socialist cantatas. A careful eye was kept on union membership, with émigré composers characteristically excluded, and with the activities of the membership closely monitored. In liaison with security networks and the agitprop of the Central Committee, the unions had a major say in who would attend this or that festival, for example, and in particular who would be allowed to make visits overseas. Senior figures in the unions – leading composers or musicologists, who effectively created the official art and the official artistic discourse – could wield a powerful influence on the course of musical life, often based on little more than personal likes or dislikes. Careers could be made or broken. Samuel and Thompson remind us that both positive and negative myths were projected by this socialist–realist propaganda (Samuel and Thompson 1990). There was the myth of socialist man, a progressive figure there to be celebrated by artists, and there was the myth of his political enemies, there to be demonized, for, as Tzvetan Todorov has remarked, ‘the totalitarian state cannot live without enemies’ (Todorov 1999, 7). Those enemies included artists and intellectuals who refused to accept, or whose work was deemed to mystify, the new reality. No one was left in any doubt about the official line on demons. There was typically a ‘hunt for opposition’, followed by the co-ordinated ‘denunciations’ that had become formulaic within the Bolshevik Party back in the 1930s. The activities of journalists, writers, artists and musicians were all brought under the aegis of agitprop sections of the Party Central Committees. Until relatively recently it was usual to contrast these ideologically freighted cultural practices with the apolitical modernisms of Western Europe. However, it now seems clear that the avant-gardes of the West, far from cutting loose from a political establishment, were themselves institutionally grounded and subject to political influence as modes of counter-propaganda. When (in 1966–7) the New York Times and the journal Ramparts broke the story of CIA cultural propaganda in Europe, major questions arose about just how far European artists and intellectuals, mostly with explicit leftist sympathies, were aware of what George Kennan, architect of the Marshall Plan, called the ‘necessary lie’. We learned at the time about the funding of Nabukov’s Congress of Cultural Freedom (Saunders 1999; see also Carroll 2003), about CIA backing for the magazines Preuves, Der Monat, and Encounter, about ‘quiet channels’ such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and about networks or ‘consortia’ of ex-Communists all over Europe. There is now an extensive literature dealing with the place of music within these post-war campaigns,7 telling us about US orchestras on tour, scholarships, American House programs and so on. What remains more of an open question, however, is how far there was an ideological charge attached to particular kinds of repertory. It is tempting to see a mirror image of the code switching in the Soviet bloc, with the avant-garde acting as an insignia of the Free World.

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In the case of France and occupied West Germany, this is not without foundation, but it needs qualification. What one might say is that the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the radio stations of the occupied zones in West Germany and other US-sponsored activities made room for an avant-garde to develop, but that propaganda was only part of the story. Local agendas surfaced and there are convincing alternative narratives for the ideology of post-war avant-gardes. In the case of Greece, strategically of vital importance to NATO, the sponsorship was arguably more crucial. It is no exaggeration to claim that the explosion of post-war modernism in Greece was only possible because of US and West German sponsorship. Modernism was a badge of Greece’s allegiance to the West. On both sides of the divide, Cold War propaganda was at its most intensive during the ‘dark decade’ following 1947, when the hard-line Stalinist position established by Andrei Zhdanov was in its heyday. Following the Kruschchev ‘thaw’ in the late 1950s, there were new cultural initiatives in the Eastern bloc, with the reinstatement of previously proscribed works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and the rehabilitation of figures such as Myaskovsky and Khachaturian. A younger generation of Soviet composers also emerged at this time, and several of them managed to forge a musical career at some distance from the officials of the Composers’ Union. Subsequently, there were various pendulum swings, but the overall trajectory was clear. The codes were losing their signifying power, and especially so in the client states. Formerly proscribed repertories – avantgarde, jazz, progressive rock – were rehabilitated, and in some cases became part of ‘official’ culture. They were now a property of East and West alike, and in due course the USSR itself was unable to stem the eastward flow of the new. The ‘destruction of alternatives’ The price paid for new freedoms in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War was a high one, and especially in former Yugoslavia. An industry of books has been devoted to this subject, but for present purposes we may note that, where music was concerned, propaganda again relied on codes, albeit now entirely within the field of popular culture. We may begin with ‘newly composed folk music’, or ‘neo-folk’. As Ljerka V. Rasmussen has demonstrated, this emerged in Yugoslavia in the 1960s in a context both of urbanization and of ‘(r)urbanization’ (the ‘ruralizing’ of urban culture by those who moved to the towns but found themselves unable to adapt) (Rasmussen 2002). These (r)urbanites were widely known as primitivci (primitives) and, along with returning gastarbajteri (guest workers), they made up much of the audience for neofolk. The contrary pole of attraction within Yugoslav popular culture was a thriving rock scene, linked to the West, and implicitly or explicitly critical of state socialism.8 It oversimplifies the picture to suggest that these two traditions were utterly separate, or to associate neo-folk with Serbia–Bosnia–Macedonia and rock with Croatia–Slovenia. The taste publics for the two traditions were defined more by social background than by nationality. Likewise, the ‘New Wave’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in significant interpenetration. One aim of the ‘New Wave’ was to transfer to neo-folk, typically perceived as culturally regressive and still stereotypically associated with rural, (r)urban or émigré traditions, something of the prestige associated with a more internationalist rock and popular music scene. The most famous band associated with this modernized neo-folk was Goran Bregović’s Bijelo Dugme (White Button), established in 1974 in Sarajevo, and soon immensely popular all over Yugoslavia. That it was situated in Sarajevo was no accident. The Bosnian capital was a site of remarkable

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creative energy in popular music, right up to the Yugoslav wars. It has become conventional to speak of a ‘Sarajevo pop-rock school’ and Bijelo Dugme was a leading part of this. Yet even as one branch of neo-folk was modernized, another was commercialized, culminating in the successor genre known as turbo-folk. This was characterized by escapist narratives, ‘star’ singers, kitsch lyrics and above all oriental idioms that could be read as both local (Ottoman legacy) and global (MTV exotic). It was turbo-folk that became closely associated with the xenophobic policies of the Milošević regime. It was endlessly promoted by state-controlled media as part of a propaganda machine that entered into private and leisure space – truly a case study in the uses and abuses of power and with media technologies all-important. In truth, it is not immediately obvious why turbo-folk should have been of propaganda value to the Serbian regime. Ljerka Rasmussen quotes Tomislav Longinović’s seductive hermeneutic, in which he argues that ‘techno rhythms . . . embraced from the colonial cultures of . . . Europe proper [are] markers of racial/cultural superiority’, while ‘the wailing voice of the singer articulates a suppressed, shameful legacy of one’s slavery to the Turks who are regarded as a part of inferior cultures and races of the East and South’ (Rasmussen 2007, esp. 78–9). That may be a touch over-imaginative, but what is not in doubt is that the musical propaganda was remorseless during a period of increasingly polarized politics in Yugoslavia. Eric Gordy documented it in the terms of a ‘destruction of alternatives’ (Gordy 1999). He noted that rock culture was marginalized under Milošević in the early nineties, and that the more it critiqued the association of turbo-folk with the regime, the more it was ghettoized. (The whole process, associated with the independent radio station B-92, was also described, more anecdotally, in Collin 2001.) B-92 carried on what has since become a legendary rearguard action against turbofolk by promoting both Western rock and an indigenous anti-establishment rock. When its airwaves and its physical property were hijacked by the regime in the early stages of the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, there was outrage among the intelligentsia, expressed through a major campaign of support that culminated in a ‘Free B-92’ concert involving several of the leading progressive bands. If we look more closely we see other strands. In the early 1990s, for example, rap and hiphop subcultures found their way to the local discos, with the potential to foster feelings of social and political disadvantage but also to carry the sense of a faddish interest in the most recent Western trends. Homemade varieties of these movements were then established, notably by the Montenegrin Rambo Amadeus, whose early albums combined rap and pop-folk, but whose parodic play on styles became increasingly anti-establishment and politically activist after the outbreak of war. Then, in sharp contrast, there was a self-consciously sophisticated countercultural avant-garde, often incorporating elements of classical music, and best represented by the elite Slovenian group Laibach, whose subversive political satire has proved to be notoriously open to misreading. If neo-folk, and its progeny turbo-folk, represented the most inward-looking tendencies of Yugoslav popular culture, then Laibach was the most outward-looking. This was a blatantly cosmopolitan Balkan critique that came from within but as though from without. Throughout these years, the engagement between popular music and politics took multiple forms. Music functioned as an ‘unknowing’ index of social and political change; witness the emergence of neo-folk from social disadvantage. It was an unwitting prey of political agendas, as with the appropriation of traditional music by the Communist regime and of turbo-folk by Milošević and – in a different way – by some Muslim groups in Bosnia (Hogg 2005). It was an active agent of political subversion in the last days of Communism, exerting a powerful counter-

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cultural charge; some Roma repertories acquired these connotations as early as the 1970s, but in the late 1980s rock bands such as Riblja Čorba (Fish Chowder) likewise qualified. Finally, it functioned as propaganda for militant, celebratory ethnonationalist agendas, as with some of the explicit pro-war messages articulated by Serbian and Croatian musicians alike in the early 1990s. Rather later – and this is really another story – pop-folk and Eurovision generated yet another mode of propaganda, one that renegotiated national identities, even to the point of reinscribing Yugoslavia. Epilogue These various case studies may enable some useful generalizations about music and propaganda. It is clear that one mode of propaganda relies on the capacity of music first to arouse emotions and then to channel and energize them. The issues involved in affective response are beyond my brief in this essay, but several psychologists believe that music has the capacity to catalyze both reductive and polarizing tendencies (positive or negative) within emotional arousal when it is allied to particular social or political goals.9 This is germane to propagandistic music in North Korea and to celebratory music everywhere. Unpromising though it may seem, a comparison of the Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytope, performed on location in 1978, and the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics is very much to the point; in both cases music and spectacle celebrated nationhood by underlining historical continuities. This mode of propaganda is no less germane to the singing of Protestant songs and hymns in Reformation Germany. However, Protestant hymnody also reminds us that propaganda can depend on ‘prototypicality’, meaning an appropriate ‘fit’ between music and setting, and that this in turn can promote conformity and compliance. As Steven Brown puts it, music can thus homogenize social behaviour within groups (Brown 2006). The success of the Xenakis polytrope in Mycenae likewise depended on an appropriate fit and, in a rather different way, so did those JAMS performances of Messiah in South Africa. Even the translation of traditional music into folk music within state socialism (the folk ensembles in the Soviet bloc) might be understood in these terms. In each case the aim is, or was, to strengthen and unify group ideologies. Prototypicality helps the powerful to use music as a means of behavioural control: by welding music to ritual (the Incas), by exploiting existing tastes to direct social action in determinate ways (popular music in China) and, conversely, by censoring supposedly subversive repertories (Apartheid in South Africa). In such instances subjects may well be unaware of the persuasion; the propaganda may be subliminal, and this is all the more important given that it has to overcome the inertia of pedigreed responses. One US national security directive of July 1950 spelled this out: the most effective propaganda, it reads, allows ‘the subject [to] move in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own’ (Saunders 1999, 4). Music can be supportive, and the Cold War politics to which the directive refers is by no means the only relevant context. Of course, behavioural control is not always exercised subliminally. At the far extreme from hidden persuasion we have music as humiliation and torture. This is a big, dark and increasingly topical, subject. It can only be hinted at here, but has been discussed at length by Joseph Moreno and Suzanne Cusick in the contexts of (respectively) the holocaust and Guantanamo (Moreno 2006; Cusick 2006). Propaganda may also depend on music’s emblematic value, which allows it to affirm or reinforce the attitudes and prejudices associated with particular (e.g. counter-cultural or subcultural) identities. By functioning as an emblem, a badge, music can play a role in movements

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of protest and dissent (Western pop in Tibet and Iran). However, it can also allow propagandists to manipulate the stereotypes, targeting particular social groups, age ranges or genders. Almost by definition propaganda counters individuation in musical taste and encourages a sense of pride in the group, as well as a sense of hostility towards non-members. To an extent, ‘traditional music’ and ‘classical music’ worked in this way in nineteenth-century art music, just as ‘popular music’ works in that way in certain totalitarian regimes in the Far East today. This was also the role of neo-folk and turbo-folk in former Yugoslavia, where group identities were further cemented by associative links (through lyrics and videos) with negative stereotypes of permissive sexuality and gansta violence. In today’s world there is music ‘round the clock’. This has a bearing on propaganda, if only because of the conventional wisdom that it numbs the senses or empties the mind, leaving us open to subliminal suggestion. Some psychologists add a sophisticated sheen to the conventional wisdom by referring to ‘double arousal’, where – it is argued – there is a compensatory dimension to arousal by music and arousal by the context in which the music is experienced; if one is high, the other will be low (North and Hargreaves 2008, 90). This might have relevance to some of the political contexts already discussed (at a time of high tension or war, does music need to be simple and direct?), but it is more pertinent to a dimension of propaganda that has not been discussed at all in this chapter: music as a commercial and advertising tool. Here we invoke what I earlier called primary propaganda, where music’s role is either entirely catalytic or entirely parasitic. Many of the categories discussed above – prototypicality and compliance, subliminal persuasion and group identities – map onto this context without difficulty; but perhaps none is more apt than ‘double arousal’. We learn from empirical studies that low involvement in the product (any toothpaste will do) allows music to propagandize efficiently. The converse also holds, however. If we are genuinely interested in the product (I really want the best toothpaste), we will be less swayed by the propaganda. One of the most entertaining accounts of music in commercial environments concerns two wine-buying studies summarized by North and Hargreaves (2008, 280). In the first study, set in a supermarket, French wines outsold German when typically French music was played, while German wines outsold French when typically German music was played. In the second study, set in a specialist wine shop, sales of the more expensive wines were significantly higher when classical music was played than when the Top 40 was played. In both studies we witness subliminal persuasion with a vengeance. Our purchasers made a good ‘fit’ between the music and the wine; they were suitably compliant and conformist; they subscribed to a strong sense of group identity; and they valued the emblematic status that allows music to define the group. If music can sell wine, it can also sell democracy, religion, nationhood and war. Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

Beethoven’s title is modest in ambition compared to a whole rash of late twentieth-century titles designed to prick our social consciences, or – the cynic might say – to ensure that we are ‘on side’ before the music begins. A case in point is Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. I am grateful to Anna Morcom, Henry Stobart and Tan Shzr Ee for helpful advice on this section. The Bektashi order in particular drew on local traditions of music and dance. For a case study of acculturation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, see Aščerić 2004. I am grateful to Stephen Rose for advice on this section. Dahlhaus 1980 has reminded us of the spurious basis of this association. Frolova-Walker 2006 exposes the contradiction at the heart of this project. In addition to Saunders 1999 and Carroll 2003, one might cite Beal 2006, Thacker 2007 and Monod 2005.

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For an account of the rise and fall of Yugo-Rock, see the chapter ‘Rock Music’ in Ramet 1996. Relevant here is the ‘circumplex model’ outlined by North and Hargreaves 2008, 128ff.

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Volgstein (eds), Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Carroll, Mark. 2003. Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clegg, Johnny and M. Drewett. 2006. ‘Why Don’t You Sing about the Leaves and the Dreams? Reflecting on Music Censorship in Apartheid South Africa’, in M. Drewett (ed.), Popular Music Censorship in Africa. Aldershot: Ashgate, 127–36. Cockburn, Christopher. 2008. ‘Discomposing Apartheid’s Story: Who Owns Handel?’, in G. Olwage (ed.), Composing Apartheid: Music For and Against Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 55–77. Collin, Matthew. 2001. This is Serbia Calling. Rock’n’roll Radio and Belgrade’s Underground Resistance. London: Serpent’s Tail. Cusick, Suzanne G. 2006. ‘Music as Torture/Music as Weapon’, Trans, 10. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1980. ‘Nationalism and Music’, in Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. M. Whittall, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 70–101. Eco, Umberto. 1991. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fisher, Alexander J. 2004. Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630. Aldershot: Ashgate. Frolova-Walker, Marina. 2006. ‘The Soviet Opera Project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 18: 181–216. Fussell, Paul. 2000. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gilbert, Shirli. 2007. ‘Singing against Apartheid: ANC Cultural Groups and the International Anti-Apartheid Struggle’, Journal of South African Studies, 33: 421–41. Gleason, Judith, ed. 1984. Leaf and Bone: African Praise Poems. New York: Penguin. Gordy, Eric D. 1999. The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Greenfeld, Liah. 1996. ‘The Modern Religion’, Critical Review, 10: 169–91. Guy, Nancy. 1999. ‘Governing the Arts, Governing the State: Peking Opera and Political Authority in Taiwan’, Ethnomusicology, 43: 508–26. Hale, Thomas A. 1998. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hogg, Bennett. 2005. ‘Who’s Listening?’, in A. J. Randall (ed.), Music, Power, and Politics. New York: Routledge, 211–30. Howard, Keith. 1996. ‘Juche and Culture: What’s New?’, in H. Smith, C. Rhodes, D. Pritchard and K. McGill (eds), North Korea in a New World Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 169–95. ––––– 2006. ‘The People Defeated Will Never Be United: Pop Music and Ideology in North Korea’, in K. Howard (ed.), Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 154–67. Laube, Matthew. 2014. ‘ “Hymnis Germanicus Davidis, Lutheri et aliorum piorum virorum”: hymnbooks and confessionalisation in Heidelberg, 1546–1620’, in N. Haag, M. Fischer and G. Haug-Moritz (eds), Musik in Konfessionskulturen (16.–19. Jahrhundert): Räume-Medien-Funktionen. Ostfilden: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 85–102. Little, Bliss Sheryl. 2001. ‘Folk Song and the Construction of Greek National Music: Writings and Compositions of Georgios Lambelet, Manolis Kalomiris and Yannis Constantinidis’. Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland. Mittler, Barbara. 1996. ‘The Politics of Identity in New Music from Hong Kong and Taiwan’, CHIME 9: 4–45. –––- 1997. Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949. Wiesbaden: Harrassovitz Verlag. Monod, David. 2005. Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945–1953. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Moore, Rachel. 2012. ‘Performing Propaganda: Musical Life and Culture in Paris, 1914–1918’. Ph.D. diss., University of London. Morcom, Anna. 2007. ‘Modernity, Power, and the Reconstruction of Dance in Post-1950s Tibet’, The Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, 3. Available at: www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/#!jiats=/03/ morcom.

Propaganda • 275 Moreno, Joseph J. 2006. ‘Orpheus in Hell: Music in the Holocaust’, in Steven Brown and U. Volgstein (eds), Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music. New York: Berghahn Books, 264–86. Nooshin, Laudan. 2009. ‘Tomorrow is Ours: Re-imagining Nation, Performing Youth in the New Iranian Pop Music’, in L. Nooshin (ed.), Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Aldershot: Ashgate, 245–68. North, Adrian and D. Hargreaves. 2008. The Social and Applied Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oettinger, Rebecca Wagner. 2001. Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Olwage, Grant. 2005. ‘Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical Colonialism’, in A. J. Randall (ed.), Music, Power and Politics. New York: Routledge, 25–46. Perris, Arnold. 1985. Music as Propaganda: Art to Persuade, Art to Control. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Porter, Cecelia Hopkins. 1996. The Rhine as Musical Metaphor: Cultural Identity in German Romantic Music. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Pyper, Brett. 2008. ‘State of Contention: Recomposing Apartheid at Pretoria’s State Theatre, 1990–1994. A Personal Recollection’, in Grant Olwage (ed.), Composing Apartheid: Music For and Against Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 239–53. Ramet, Sabrina P. 1996. Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 2002. Newly Composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia. New York: Routledge. ––––– 2007. ‘Bosnian and Serbian Popular Music in the 1990s: Divergent Paths, Conflicting Meanings and Shared Sentiments’, in D. A. Buchanan (ed.), Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image and Regional Political Discourse. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 57–93. Samuel, Raphael and P. Thompson (eds). 1990. The Myths We Live By. New York: Routledge. Saunders, Francis Stonor. 1999. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books. Sipe, Thomas 1998. Beethoven ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stobart, Henry. 2006. Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes. Aldershot: Ashgate. Tan Shrz Ee. 2005. ‘Manufacturing and Consuming Culture: Fakesong in Singapore’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 14: 83–106. Thacker, Toby. 2007. Music After Hitler 1945–1955. Aldershot: Ashgate. Todorov, Tsvetan. 1999. Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria, trans. R. Zaretsky. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Yang Mu. 1994. ‘Academic Ignorance or Political Taboo? Some Issues in China’s Study of its Folk Song Culture’, Ethnomusicology, 38: 303–20.

14 Virtuosity and the virtuoso James Deaville

True virtuosity gives us something more than mere flexibility and execution; a man may mirror his own nature in it. (Schumann [1841] 1891, 171) The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen. (Debussy 1921, 54)1 The virtuoso slaughters the piece of music in the name of the spellbound community as an act of atonement . . . in a concert, as in our dreams, the actors in the rites may exchange their roles. Frequently we may no longer know who is being sacrificed: the work, the virtuoso or ourselves. (Adorno 1963, 66) Seventy-six trombones led the big parade With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand. They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuoSos, the cream of ev’ry famous band. (Wilson Meredith, ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’, The Music Man (1957), Act I, Scene 5)

Introduction Studying the aesthetics of virtuosity brings the researcher into direct contact with a host of contradictory meanings and interpretations that not only cut across centuries of music-making and virtually every style type, but also play out in other disciplines and professions, ranging from dance and theatre to jurisprudence and theology.2 Given this permeation of society past and present by notions of ‘virtuoso’ and ‘virtuosity’, such an investigation must necessarily exclude substantial plots of territory in order not to become uselessly general. In this survey of aesthetic issues, the field of enquiry limits itself to instrumental art music, to which the lion’s share of aesthetic contemplation has been dedicated in the last two centuries.3 Furthermore, the chapter invokes Liszt’s name and activities frequently: he is the jumping-off point if not focus for most historical and current investigations of virtuosity and thus the greatest number

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of documents has been assembled around his virtuosic performances; his abilities as technician and interpreter were recognized by friend and foe alike; and the ‘Lisztomania’ of the 1840s is taken as the progenitor of late twentieth-century crazes over virtuosi in the realm of popular music.4 Towards a definition Upon first consideration, the task of defining the term ‘virtuosity’ for music would appear straightforward, for which purpose a standard music-lexical might suffice. However, the researcher quickly becomes aware of hurdles that require negotiation. First, English-language music dictionaries seem to possess an aversion towards addressing the practice called ‘virtuosity’, while the person of the ‘virtuoso’ receives attention (see Jander 2013; Randel 1986, 925) – more about this imbalance below. General dictionary definitions, like that in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary – ‘great technical skill (as in the practice of a fine art)’ – do not address the diversity and complexity of the practice.5 However, the general public seems to know instinctively what it should mean, so that Hollywood was able to entitle an action film Virtuosity without any extra explanations.6 Indeed, the concept seems to be rooted in the habitus of Western civilization: we use it to describe artistic and sport performances, the public presentations of teachers, clerics and other speakers, accomplishments in work contexts, and even love-making. Thus one might be tempted to posit that virtuosity after all does represent ‘great technical skill’, which attaches it to a person. However, if we consider it from the perspective of performativity, we must ask, what is the real site of virtuosity? In music we must ask, is it a quality that a performer possesses, is it a feature of the music, or does virtuosity inhabit the act of exercising it? In other words, is it ontological or phenomenological? Or something else again? (See Hennion 2012, 125.) These questions have preoccupied philosophers, aestheticians, musicologists and performance theorists from the time of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636) to Vladimir Jankélévitch (1979) and Lawrence Kramer (2001). The historical consideration of virtuosity makes apparent another complicating issue: the practice has not received the same valuation over the years and among its assessors. What was initially perceived as a designation for virtue became the subject of derision in the nineteenth century, as a powerful critique against virtuosity and its alleged shallowness – i.e. lack of aesthetic substance – arose. The stigma associated with it has persisted in academic circles through to the end of the twentieth century, when scholars from various performative humanistic disciplines, including dance, theatre and music, came to realize the significance of the practice for cultural modernity and identity formation (Smith 2002, 76). The public, however, has always seemed to appreciate its qualities and effects, and not just as passive spectator/auditors:7 as we shall see, the virtuoso concert hall/stage has historically served as the site for a transfer of power between performer and audience. A final difficulty in defining the concept resides in the praxis of virtuosity, the exercise of the skill that seems to characterize it. Must the virtuoso performer necessarily overcome the limitations of his/her instrument/voice through display that invokes tropes of excess, e.g. prestidigitation or coloratura? Or can the performance of a slow movement elicit the designation of virtuosic, through the mastery of control and expression? Investigating the aesthetic and practical meanings behind the concept should shed light upon its applications in such varied contexts.

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History of the concept As Hanns-Werner Heister suggests, individuals who have demonstrated elevated skills have existed since the dawn of collective human endeavour (Heister 1998, cols.1722–32). High regard for virtuosi in music is first documented in Greek Antiquity (Pincherle 1961, 9), and has continued as a thread throughout musical history. The term ‘virtuoso’ was introduced first in Italy of the sixteenth century, where it was used to designate an individual distinguished in any humanistic field (see Jander 2013). The concept seems in wide circulation in the English language by the mid-seventeenth century,8 to the extent that Thomas Shadwell could publish in 1676 a satirical play under the title The Virtuoso, albeit about the evils of the leisured aristocracy (Shadwell 1676). As Gillen D’Arcy Wood observes, the figure of the amateur virtuoso persisted in England well into the eighteenth century, for Samuel Johnson proffered the definition of the virtuoso (1751) ‘as an amateur devoted to “subjects of study remotely allied to useful knowledge”’ (Wood 2010, 2). It was this identification of the virtuoso with the monied idle class that – as argued by Wood – led to the British ‘virtuosophobia’ in the nineteenth century (Wood 2010, 182). In contrast, ‘virtuosity’ appears in only a handful of English-language publications prior to 1700, and then only sparingly; French writers would develop the concept behind the practice. The first lexical definition of virtuosity occurs in Sébastien de Brossard’s Dictionnaire de Musique of 1703, under the term ‘virtu’. He participates in the tradition of ‘distinguished ability’ when he describes virtuosity as ‘that superiority of genius, skill or ability that causes us to excel, be it in the theory or the practice of the fine arts’ (Brossard 1703, np).9 Brossard applies it to ‘an excellent painter, a skilled architect’10 as well as to a superior musician. Over the course of the eighteenth century the musical application of the concept came to predominate in French literature – still, the 1835 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie de France allows for a broader use when it presents ‘Virtuose’ as a ‘word borrowed from Italian that mean a man or a woman who possesses talent for the fine arts, especially for music’.11 Indeed, Paul Metzner’s study Crescendo of the Virtuoso historically applies the designation ‘virtuoso’ to chess masters, chefs, police detectives, automoton builders and musicians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris. In keeping with a more comprehensive definition of the practice, Metzner defines virtuosi as ‘people who exhibit their talents in front of an audience, who possess as their principal talent a high degree of technical skill. . . . In general they showed their technical skill through the overcoming of difficulties’ (Metzner 1998, 1–2). The English more slowly developed the concept beyond Johnson’s aforementioned usage. In specific application to music, Charles Burney still relied in 1771 upon the originary Italian definition when the glossary to his The Present State of Music in France and Italy links practice and practitioner as follows: ‘Virtù, talents, abilities; hence Virtuoso, a performer’ (Burney 1771, vii). Thomas Busby’s Dictionary of Music from 1817 divides these meanings in two separate entries: Virtu. (Ital.) Taste and address in performance. Virtuoso. (Ital.) One who feels delight in, and possesses taste for, the musical science. (Busby 1817, 326) It is less surprising to discover the same wording in Busby’s Complete Dictionary of Music (1827) than to find it reprinted in the Complete Encyclopedia of Music that John W. Moore freely

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adapted from Busby and published initially in 1854 (Moore 1854, 964), which was then reissued by American publisher Oliver Ditson in 1880 (Moore 1880). German musical lexicography presents an advanced understanding of the concept at an early date. Thus Johann Adolph Scheibe wrote the following in 1738: The word virtuoso is too general, for one uses it for everyone who excels in a science or an art, and thus you always have to say a musical virtuoso or a virtuoso in music. Moreover, when used in music, the word virtuoso usually is appropriated only for those who are excellent in singing or playing. (Scheibe 1745, 206)12 German philosophers and aestheticians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries accommodated virtuosity within their respective aesthetic systems, which at the same time laid a rational foundation for its critique. The list of contributors to the discussions is impressive: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Theodor Mundt and (later) Friedrich Theodor Vischer, among others. These figures had to account for a practice that developed from an aesthetic ideal to a popular cultural phenomenon, occasioning a general shift from a position that tended to regard virtuosity as a component of genius to one that vilified it as superficial and self-serving. Thus if Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz, writing in 1807, could demand of the artist of genius that he ‘be fully technically capable [and] accordingly possess artistic virtuosity’ (Pölitz 1807, 23), Mundt argued in 1845 that ‘an age of virtuosity has broken out instead of an age of art’ (Mundt, 1845, 27). With regard to music, Gustav Schilling’s definition from 1840 typifies the term’s eventual firm identification with performance in German-speaking Europe: We generally use the term virtuosic for those musicians who make it their primary task to present compositions that have already been composed, and to which end they have attained an especially high degree of proficiency on an instrument or in singing. (Schilling 1838, 780)13 This was written at a time when virtuosity had become firmly established as a popular musical practice in the concert halls and opera houses of Europe. Music from the era increasingly reflected and encouraged the development of technical skill, although composers from earlier periods already had challenged the practical and interpretive boundaries of contemporary performers, with Bach’s organ virtuosity as one aspect of his activity that was noted during and remembered after his lifetime (see Schulenberg 2013). Among others, Jane O’Dea maps out a progression of virtuoso talent from Mozart through Paganini (O’Dea 2000, 4) whose activity as ‘violoniste extraordinaire’ (d’Ortigue 1837, 3) occupies a watershed position in the literature about virtuosity and served as an inspiration for Liszt (Metzner 1998, 143). And, of course, it was Liszt’s performance and music that came to define virtuosity for generations. Arrival at a semantic consensus about the practice and practitioner of virtuosity does not imply its widespread acceptance, however. As already observed, English critics and audiences demonstrated general opposition to the phenomenon, even as exercised by a commanding figure like Liszt (Wood 2010, 180–214), and certain German and French critics and aestheticians also developed antagonistic attitudes towards the exercise of virtuosity. The opposition helped to define its aesthetic parameters, whereby notions of excess and transgression came to define the practice.

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Literature review14 Post-war phases Given the critique, it stands to reason that scholarly engagement with virtuosity would defer its appearance until such a time that performance, and in particular the performing body, would occupy a position of respectability or at least acceptance within the academic community. Thus Marc Pincherle’s pioneering book Le Monde des virtuoses (1961) remained an isolated publication, even though his discussion of the phenomenon remained focused on individuals through historical information and anecdotal accounts, in other words, did not essentially stray from what Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon and others have termed the principle of ‘collective biography’ (Davies and Gannon 2006, 1–15). Virtuosity would remain the purview of the public sensationalist and curiosity seeker and the journalist until after the poststructuralist turn of the 1970s, when formerly marginalized areas of investigation and the role of the body in culture entered into scholarly discourse. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the earliest serious examinations of virtuosity arose (1) in response to Liszt, (2) in France and (3) at the hands of aestheticians. Jankélévitch published the remarkable book Liszt et la rhapsodie: essai sur la virtuosité in 1979, which assisted in the acceptance of Liszt as a serious topic for aesthetic consideration, while at the same time appreciating and advocating ‘the transcendence of virtuosity’ (Davidson 1998, viii). At the beginning of the decade, musicologist/historian Robert Wangermée had already drawn attention to the traditions governing the virtuoso in the early nineeteenth century, in the sense of a contract with his or her public, to be manipulated by a network of interlocking interests (Wangermée 1970; see also Wangermée 1987). Virtuosity by and large entered into German-language musical scholarship of the late twentieth century through the study of the concerto in the late 1980s and early 1990s.15 Most notable among the early investigations was Tomi Mäkelä’s dissertation from 1989, which demonstrated how virtuosity influenced compositional thought and how its immanence grounded it within the concept of the musical work (Mäkelä 1989). Widening the field of investigation to concerto virtuosity in all eras, Konrad Küster followed in 1993 with Das Konzert: Form und Forum der Virtuosität (Küster 1993). Scholars from the Anglo-American academic communities appeared reluctant to take the issue of virtuosity up into scholarly discourse, and even more so in musicology, for quite differing reasons, however; on the one hand, the post-war years in North American musical studies witnessed an ever-increasing trend towards positivistic research,16 while British musicologists seem to have relegated such research to the work of biographers (see Allsobrook 1991; Walker 1983–96, esp. vol. 1, 1983). It is indicative of anglophone musicology that the first serious monographs about virtuosity by a musician did not appear in print until Jim Samson’s Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Samson 2004) and the publication of Dana Gooley’s dissertation as The Virtuoso Liszt (Gooley 2004).17 However, an American scholar from the field of history, William Weber, laid the foundations for the study of virtuosity in any genre through his pioneering study Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848 (Weber 1975). Drawing on historical and sociological methodologies in interpreting the material culture of the time, Weber established the role of the ‘popular’ virtuoso concerts in the musical life of the newly formed alliance of the aristocracy and the upper-middle class within those

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three cities. As such, he provided the first empirically based insights about the social role of the virtuoso, anticipating later research into the history of keyboard virtuosity.18 Moreover, two North American scholars working in disciplines outside musicology, Paul Metzner in history and Susan Bernstein in comparative literature, authored dissertations respectively in 1989 and 1991 that introduced poststructuralist perspectives to the figure of the virtuoso (Metzner 1989; Bernstein 1991).19 Metzner explored the multivalence of the term for a wide variety of cultural activities in which the subject of the French Enlightenment could excel, while Bernstein situates virtuosity in a nexus between music and literature, arguing for the writings of Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire as virtuosic productions on the basis of linguistic and literary theory. Lacking in historical details, these two studies nevertheless reflect how the discourse around virtuosity profited from the poststructural turn – they both argued for it as a cultural practice of far-reaching social relevance. The 1990s brought widespread recognition of virtuosity as a key consideration in performance studies, even as that field began to exert its influence over musicology. The interest in virtuosity has not only persisted to the present but has intensified, with monographs, conferences and research collectives dedicating themselves to understanding the phenomenon in theory and practice. All but the most popular literary manifestations of the new academic ‘virtuosomania’ have shared the common feature of some degree of dependence on interdisciplinarity, i.e. on approaches and insights from other fields of enquiry and not just the performing arts: researchers from history, anthropology, even theology have joined the ongoing discussions. Certain academic publications and scholars after 1990 played key roles in the development of virtuosity as a topic for serious aesthetic study. An amalgam of historical musicologists (especially Liszt specialists), sociologists and cultural theorists, the list of authors includes Jim Samson, Dana Gooley, Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer, Cécile Reynaud, Bruno Moysan, Antoine Hennion, Tomi Mäkelä and Thomas Kabisch. The anglophone musicological studies, potentially the most fruitful for the aesthetics of virtuosity, fall into a rough chronology of research that builds upon successive publications, albeit generally to the neglect of the Frenchand German-language secondary literature. Anglophone interpretations Liszt predictably served as the starting point for the evolving discourse. After Alan Walker established a biographical basis for his activities as touring virtuoso (Walker 1983–86) collections of documents about his performances in various locations followed, creating a foundation for the analysis and interpretation of his activities. Above all, Geraldine Keeling gathered reviews of his Parisian concerts (Keeling 1986, 1987), David Allsobrook collected documents from his English tours (Allsobrook 1991) and Michael Saffle published the copious documentation for his concerts in Germany (Saffle 1994). The aforementioned studies by Metzner and Bernstein would encourage and inform the interpretive work of Kramer and Gooley, even though the Liszt chapter by Metzner amounts to little more than a critical biography. Virtuosic musical performance (and writing about music) above all helped to destabilize the romantic aesthetic that privileged the ineffability of music over literature in Bernstein’s interpretation. Bernstein’s study appeared too late to serve as a source to inform Richard Leppert’s 1999 investigation. As an Adornian, Leppert engaged with the social conditions and material culture

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that shaped the virtuoso as a ‘modern’ figure who embodied and mobilized such paradoxes as looking/hearing, passive/active, male/female, superhuman/machine and charlatan/genius. He was particularly concerned with period representations and the visuality of the virtuoso’s performing body, for ‘the abstract quality of artistry and paradoxical immateriality of sonority itself were experienced and made concrete by the presence of performers and their physicality in producing sound’ (Leppert 1999, 258). Virtuoso bodies were texts to be read by the emerging bourgeoisie, with personal identity staged as a spectacle. Thus for Leppert virtuosity played a crucial social role, at least during the period of the Vormärz. In 2001, Kramer published his interpretation of Liszt’s virtuosity as the chapter ‘Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere’ in his important text Musical Meaning: Toward a Cultural History, which stresses the lived experience of music (Kramer 2001). Gooley calls Kramer’s perspective ‘a broadly new-historical approach’ (Gooley 2004, 4) that interprets the phenomenon through such diverse cultural practices and historical contexts as visuality, theatricality, the bal, the carnivalesque, star celebrity and musical excess. His primary thesis argues for virtuosity as a manifestation of the bourgeois public sphere: ‘Mingling aesthetics, entertainment, and social transformation, virtuoso performance both summons a large public into being and pleasurably resists social domination by replacing it with the masterful but self-expending charisma of the artist’ (Kramer 2001, 99). Over ten years later, Kramer would expand on the last point, elaborating on the ‘self-sacrifice’ of the virtuoso, ‘which is also his [sic] self-aggrandizement’ (Kramer 2012, 239). Here Kramer develops his reading of the virtuoso body and its communicative power, although as a symbolic body, a simulacrum that ultimately manifests itself in the listening body, i.e. the audience. This material substance of what he calls ‘social force’ enables the public to experience the pleasure of the Other (the performing body of the virtuoso). The concept of virtuosity as excess most prominently links Kramer with other aesthetic models for the practice. The texts by Bernstein, Leppert and Kramer individually – yet clearly interconnectedly – introduced poststructuralist thought to the study of Liszt’s virtuosity – the authors regarded his ‘excessive’ performances as the sites for important cultural work among his audiences. Such interventions would in turn stimulate further cultural interrogations of the phenomenon within the Anglo-American academic community, although still ostensibly centred on Liszt. Samson’s and Gooley’s more comprehensive studies of Liszt followed in the wake of this anglophone efflorescence. That they originated independently of each other is borne out by their thoroughly contrasting approaches and emphases: Samson provides the first detailed interpretation of virtuosity on the basis of composition(s), in his case focusing on the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt, while Gooley undertakes a close investigation of the contexts in which Liszt’s publics assigned meanings to his performances. Distancing himself from Leppert and Kramer, Samson posited that ‘a direct, close-to-the-text engagement with musical materials is likely to prove more revealing than the seductive hermeneutics of the 1980s and 1990s’ (Samson 2004, 2). Samson presents one of his primary tasks as that of exploring the relationship between the event-status and the work-status of music, which underlies the tensions behind the practice of virtuosity. His approach advocates a balance between the earlier musicological emphasis on work-status and the more recent privileging of event-status, recognizing that in the Études Liszt inscribed the virtuosity in the music itself. Where Samson agrees with his ‘new musicological’ predecessors (without admission) is over the aesthetics of the concert hall:

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Audiences mold it [virtuosity] to their own needs. And in this respect the public concert tapped into a rather fundamental human need, the need to admire and applaud, to experience extremes of emotion vicariously, through a kind of secret identification with epic motifs . . . (Samson 2004, 78) Already before the appearance of his book Gooley had published an article about virtuosity, ‘Warhorses: Liszt, Weber’s Konzertstück, and the Cult of Napoleon’, in which he investigated the military dimension of Liszt’s performances and issues of violence on the virtuoso stage (Gooley 2000). The subsequent monograph studied the diversity of meanings that attached to his person through a series of case studies that interrogate canonic moments from or aspects of his performing career: the 1837 duel with Thalberg, his martial performance style, the Pest concert of 1840, the German performances of the early 1840s, and the Berlin concerts of 1842. In each case he situates virtuosity within a complex of cultural discourses that were in circulation in a given place at a given time. For example, the ‘Lisztomania’ of 1842 Berlin reflected the ‘social unwellness’ of the city’s inhabitants, which expressed itself in the excessive responses at the virtuoso events. Gooley posits the roots of these public displays in the repressive rule of Friedrich Wilhelm IV – the Berliners found a release in Liszt’s performing body. It is important to remember that Gooley’s observations base themselves upon Liszt’s practice of virtuosity – since they are so specifically geohistorically grounded, such readings may not apply to other virtuosi of the time.20 In Franz Liszt and His World (2006), Gooley revisits (Liszt’s) virtuosity, this time in terms of the journalistic critique of the practice from the 1830s and 40s (Gooley 2006). There he extends the enquiry to encompass the growing conflict between the rise of German symphonic music and the cult of the virtuoso: an elite group of critics, informed by emerging notions of self and ego, encouraged bourgeois perception of the individual performer’s eccentricities and of the audience excesses he or she empowered in contrast with the collectivity and proper social decorum of the symphony. These findings extend beyond Liszt, laying the foundations for contemporary discourses against virtuosity. French-language interpretations In comparison with the American musicological approaches to virtuosity that have been informed by cultural studies and have centred on Liszt, French scholars have further cultivated the socioaesthetic path of Jankélévitch in particular. Liszt may serve as a focal point, but in general he functions as an index of the relationship between virtuosity and Romanticism. Moreover, if Anglo-American specialists tend to produce individual studies on virtuosity, the work of continental Europeans – especially German scholars – has appeared in anthologies, typically conference proceedings volumes. Indeed, the first substantial French contribution to the subject after Wangermée and Jankélévitch was a wide-ranging collection of essays, Défense et illustration de la virtuosité (Penesco 1997). The volume’s pioneering comprehensive approach to virtuosity established a precedent that no ensuing anthology was able to match, in terms of time frame (from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century), nationality (French and Italian), performance vehicle (piano, voice, violin) and mode of reception (composition, theoretical writing, press review).

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Cécile Reynaud’s scholarly activity has interrogated virtuosity from diverse perspectives, including its meanings for French Romanticism and its critical reception and social impacts. The monograph Liszt et le virtuose romantique (Reynaud 2006) follows her 2001 dissertation and the special ‘virtuosity’ issue of the journal Romantisme: Revue du dix-neuvième siècle (2005) that she edited. Like Bernstein’s work, the dissertation examines the encounter of music and literature as realized through the figure of the virtuoso, with special emphasis on the aesthetics of instrumental music and the emergence of autonomy. Reynaud regards the virtuoso (and virtuosity) as the product of a singular conjunction of an aesthetics, a technology (the instrument of the piano) and a type of individual. In discussing Liszt, Reynaud extends the concept of virtuosity to non-performance contexts, so that for her he also occupies the role of virtuoso composer, transcriber and reader. The aforementioned collection reflects Reynaud’s own wide-ranging interest in the early nineteenth-century in France, especially with regard to cultural Romanticism. Her contribution argues for a reading of virtuosity that regards it as an escape for Liszt and Paganini away from the critique of the times and towards a transcendent Romanticism (Reynaud 2005). Other authors profitably examine literary constructions of virtuosity: Éric Bordas argues for the application of the designation to French novels of Romanticism (and not just poetry; Bordas 2005); Sylvie Jacq-Mioche reads the early nineteenth-century literature on ballet virtuosity as a balancing act between aesthetics and moral concepts (Jacq-Mioche 2005), and Moysan finds in it contradictory elements of modern subjectivity (solism and decentredness; Moysan 2005). Moysan, who has devoted most of his academic career to Liszt research, developed his thoughts more fully in the study Liszt virtuose subversive (Moysan 2009). This sophisticated analysis of Liszt’s virtuosity draws upon the advances of American cultural studies approaches, but focuses on the concept of ‘fantaisie’ as the nexus for music, politics and social life, played out through a negotiation between performer and audience. According to Moysan, Liszt introduced a set of codes that subverted those in force at the time, thereby adopting the role of social reformer – at the same time, the ambiguity of instrumental music allowed him to practice a hidden commentary on stage. Most recently, Antoine Hennion has produced a set of reflections on virtuosity that reintroduce certain fundamental questions to the discussion (Hennion 2012): is it in the performance, or in the music, or somewhere else? Does it serve its own purposes or is it in service of a work? Does it ‘hide art by very art’ (Hennion 2012, 128)? After reviewing the aesthetic terms for the possibility of virtuosity, he comes to the conclusion that the traditional, classical separation of work and performance will not allow for a viable virtuosity. Rather, its effects should be sought in the fusion of creation and execution, whereby he points to jazz as the quintessential virtuosic art form. German-language interpretations It is interesting to observe how the most substantial German contributions to the discussions over virtuosity after 1990 adopted the form of essay collections and a major research project. This situation undoubtedly arose from several different factors, both aesthetic and practical: German musicology historically undervalued Liszt and virtuosity (for the reasons Gooley articulated in 2006), the Habilitation requires a study on a topic other than that of the dissertation (thereby discouraging continued research on a given subject), and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft has traditionally promoted larger projects and conferences.

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Just one year before the appearance of Penesco’s collection, the Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis published its 1996 issue as ‘Virtuosität und Wirkung in der Musik’. A scholarly journal devoted to historical performance practice suited the topic of virtuosity quite well, and the issue did introduce specialized perspectives on the practice and its practitioners, although the coverage was uneven (two essays on Clara Schumann) and the publication lacked any broader engagement with the topic. Perhaps most significant for the aesthetic question was Erich Reimer’s essay ‘Der Begriff des wahren Virtuosen in der Musikästhetik des späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts’ (Reimer 1996). Starting five years later, three other anthologies appeared in succession, none of them representing an effort to systematically examine the topic (such a collaborative study remains a desideratum for musicological literature). The earliest, Virtuosen: Über die Eleganz der Meisterschaft—Vorlesungen zur Kulturgeschichte (2001) resulted from a series of lectures at the Herbert von Karajan Centrum, Vienna (Fleiß and Gayed 2001), and the broader topics adopt a wide-ranging set of methodologies in the hands of five authorities from divergent disciplines (see Riethmüller 2001; Saïd 2001). Most relevant and innovative is the contribution by Albrecht Betz, who calls on Adorno and Canetti to respond to Nietzsche’s severe critique of virtuosity in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All too Human) (Betz 2001). However, by virtue of the number and diversity of contributions, Musikalische Virtuosität from 2004 covers the most substantial territory among these German-language collections. Above and beyond the case studies for the practice in the hands of individual composers such as Chopin, Schumann and Mendelssohn (and not Liszt), the volume’s authors present virtuosity in its historical, social and cultural contexts, largely in central Europe. Musikalische Virtuosität significantly expands the sphere of topic areas in the academic discourse around virtuosity: Cornelia Bartsch (2004) considers the historical gendering of performers, virtuosi and the concert experience; Linde Grossmann (2004) queries the factors behind the pedagogy of virtuosity; Reinhard Kopiez (2004) empirically explores the relationship between virtuosity and human physiology; and Peter Wicke (2004) changes the conversation to deal with popular music. As such, the volume reflects the array of traditional and newer interpretive approaches the researcher can bring to the topic, each invoking a different set of aesthetic premises. Its breadth of topics notwithstanding, Musikalische Virtuosiät remains grounded in the musical practice and practitioner. In contrast, Virtuosität: Kult und Krise der Artistik in Literatur und Kunst der Moderne (Arburg et al. 2006) returns the discussion to an interdisciplinary level, and more evenly represents the field of inquiry. While the essays do not interject new viewpoints into the ongoing academic debates about virtuosity, the wide chronological span affords observations into the twentieth century, especially from the turbulent years of the Jahrhundertwende. Possibly the most ambitious and most broadly interdisciplinary research undertaking regarding virtuosity was the subproject ‘Die Szene des Virtuosen: Zu einer Grenz-Figur des Performativen’ within the Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen of the Freie Universität Berlin. Established in 1999 (and terminated in 2010), the special research area sponsored a variety of activities in connection with its overall theme and its individual subprojects, which included the topic of the virtuoso. The collaborators on virtuosity presented conferences, workshops and publications, the most significant results of which was the final conference and its proceedings (Brandstetter 2012). Topics of contributions ranged from chess and cooking to hiphop and ‘Guitar Hero’, reflecting the all-embracing conception of the organizers: ‘What is virtuosic? Everything that so elevates that for one it leads to self-improvement, the other is stunned, enthusiastic, and motivated to break out into applause – or into pandemonium and protest.’21

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That not the star performer alone but the performance of virtuoso and audience serves as the site for both affirmation and contestation of tastes, values and ultimately politics across disciplines and their practices emerges as one of the group’s most significant contributions to the discussion: Last but not least, this dynamic of attestation or contestation of excellence makes apparent how the proof of the virtuoso never establishes itself through the singular figure alone, but rather always in a scene of reciprocal experiential intensification with an audience.22 Aesthetic issues The review of literature reveals high levels of aesthetic contestation over the concepts of virtuosity and virtuoso, which precludes any essentialist definition or even agreement on common features. Indeed, cultural contradictions seem to underlie the aesthetics of virtuosity, to the extent that it thrives in a set of dialectics between dualisms such as centre and periphery, high and low, and spirit and substance. That the emergence of paradoxical terms like these accompanied the historical rise of virtuosity is understandable, for it challenged traditional aesthetic concepts of value, constructions of identity and modes of social propriety. Yet just this contested practice has also resulted in pleasure and empowerment among its audiences, and (to a limited extent) has contributed to the democratization of the concert hall. Nature and role of the practice and practitioner The nature of virtuosity and the function of the virtuoso became significant aesthetic issues in tandem with the rise of the musical work and of the professional performer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Hunter 2005, 357). For the early Romantic German theoreticians of virtuosity, the qualities described by the term nevertheless resided in the performer, not the piece. This correlates with the evolving recognition of ‘genius’ in a certain category of performer, who could stand on a level equal to that of the composer, and indeed, becomes a surrogate for the same in the aesthetic discourse of the time. Hegel provides the most extended treatment of the virtuoso performer in an oft-cited passage from his Aesthetics: If the composition has, as it were, objective solidity so that the composer himself has put into notes only the subject itself or the sentiment that completely suffuses it, then the reproduction must be of a similar matter-of-fact kind. The executant artist not only need not, but must not, add anything of his own, or otherwise he will spoil the effect. He must submit himself entirely to the character of the work and intend only to be an obedient instrument . . . If . . . art is still to be in question, the executant has a duty, rather than giving the impression of an automaton . . . to give life and soul to the work in the same sense that the composer did. The virtuosity of such animation, however, is limited to solving correctly the difficult problems of the composition on its technical side and in that process avoiding any appearance of struggling with a difficulty laboriously overcome but moving in this technical element with complete freedom. In the matter not of technique but of the spirit, genius can consist solely in actually reaching in the reproduction the spiritual height of the composer and then bringing it to life. (Hegel, cited in Hunter 2005, 362)

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Here, in rather clear and concise formulation, we encounter the ideal of virtuosic performance that would predominate musical discourse to the present: the submission to the composition, the merging with the composer’s spirit, the genius of communicating that spirit to the audience, the deployment of technical skill (in the service of the work) and the avoidance of extraneous additions. The seeds of the critique of virtuosity are readily evident in the passage; such were the standards by which future virtuosi would be assessed and by which many, including Liszt, would fail for subsequent generations of aestheticians and critics. Carl Lommatzsch’s transcriptions of Schleiermacher’s aesthetic lectures (published in 1842) likewise associated virtuosity (in any art) with a high degree of accomplishment, but regarded the work as occupying a position of productive tension between ‘genius’ (Genialität) and virtuosity. Schleiermacher’s thought moreover accounted for a ‘one-sided’ (einseitige) and ‘mechanical’ (mechanische) virtuosity, concepts that would prominently figure in the censures of the practice. Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen: Die Kunstlehre from 1851 maintains the dialectic between creative genius and reproductive virtuosity (‘the virtuoso is not a producing artist’; ‘Der Virtuos ist nicht produktiver Künstler’), yet allows for a bridge through performance, whereby ‘he immerses himself fully in the spirit of the composition and, through all of the moments and motions of his performance, brings it to full expression’ (Vischer 1846, 117). This perception of virtuosity as the domain of the reproductive artist has dominated the popular and academic discourses surrounding it for over two hundred years. Attempts to dislodge the phenomenon from this artist-centred position have concentrated on reintroducing the work concept into performativity, which ‘draws the performer right into the heart of the work’ (Samson 2004, 2). Such a construction recognizes and ostensibly eliminates the prospect of technical proficiency masquerading as virtuosity, a concern articulated by aesthetician and critic alike since the late eighteenth century. While it is possible to push virtuosity from music’s eventstatus towards its work-status (see Samson 2004), one runs the risk of reducing the practice to velocity and associated techniques, which leads Hennion to aver that ‘Schumann’s pieces or, in a less unambiguous way, those of Chopin are not virtuosity pieces’ (Hennion 2012, 131). However, if virtuosity consists in a high degree of facility and interpretive ability, why should a moving, fully proficient presentation of a slow movement – devoid of ornaments – not be considered virtuosic? For example, Liszt’s (concert) transcriptions of songs by other composers like Schubert and Robert Franz often hewed close to the originals, i.e. without extraneous ornamentation, and yet are reported to have exercised a profound effect on their auditors.23 With regard to the audience, Brandstetter, Bandl-Risi and van Eikels compellingly argue that virtuosity and the virtuoso only acquire meaning when, ‘in a scene of reciprocal experiential intensification with an audience’, practice-room heroes must prove themselves on stage.24 The high-level performer not only pleases the public through mastery of the notes and their expression, however; audience members have historically reported some form and degree of corporeal and/or psychic empowerment through the experience of virtuosity.25 Few aestheticians or musicologists have considered the actual dynamics of the virtuoso concert hall, with the exception of Kramer. Popular music scholars may have more intensely studied the practice, yet other than Rob Walser’s studies in which he addresses physiological responses to volume and distortion,26 their tendency as well has been to regard dexterity, precision and amplitude (among other features) as markers of a virtuosity that mysteriously impacts its listeners. Kramer explains ‘ecstatic fandom’ through the public’s co-experience with the artist, who disseminates him- or herself as a gift to the

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audience and ‘through whose body and its appendages each spectator [sic] sees and loves himself [sic]’ (Kramer 2012, 241). Thomas Wartenberg provides an alternative interpretation for audience-celebrity interactions, a transaction of power that can apply to the virtuoso experience as well: the public ultimately responds to the virtuoso’s exercise of power, as personality, as technician, as interpreter (Wartenberg 1990). Sociologists conceptualize relations of power as a continuum, ranging from domination to liberation (see, for example, Freire 1985). Wartenberg’s paradigm identifies what he calls transformative power relationships, which rely on the development of trust within the subordinate agent (person acted upon) towards the dominant agent (actor): Trust is central to the establishment of a truly empowering relation . . . The point of a transformative power relationship is to empower the subordinate agent to such an extent that she can transcend her relationship to the dominant agent . . . Any social practice can be engaged in a manner that opens up the possibility of engaging in transformative power relationships with others. (Wartenberg 1990, 211–14, 221) In this power relationship, the dominant agent encourages the subordinate agents to develop their own potential, empowers them. This also describes the power of virtuosity, wherein audience members give themselves trustingly over to the dominant agent of the virtuoso, for the purpose of their own transcendent empowerment. Wartenberg uses the concept of ‘superposition’ of agents to describe these relationships, which for virtuosity can metaphorically join dominant and subordinate agents (performer and listener) in the experience of musical performance. This translates not only into narcissistic jouissance, but also into social outcomes; as Kramer suggests, ‘The audience becomes a material embodiment of social force as such but only insofar as its members surrender themselves unconditionally to the virtuoso’s transfiguring presence’(Kramer 2012, 219). Richard Taruskin posits an enunciatory role for the virtuosic artist of the romantic era: ‘The virtuoso would become a sublime, rabble-rousing orator on behalf of social progress’ (Taruskin 2009, 265).27 The same transformational experience has occurred since the nineteenth century in the face of virtuosity. Although the effect on the audience may be transitory – much like Bakhtin’s carnival (Bakhtin [1941] 1984) – its social benefits cannot be disavowed, at least as a temporary liberation from oppressive economic, social and cultural conditions at a given time (Deaville 1998). Whether the professional observer (i.e. critic, composer, performer) labels the results ‘ravishing virtuosity’ (Bie 1899, 75) or marks the presentation of a ‘tawdry virtuoso’ (Britten [1952] 2003, 116), the success or lack thereof ultimately inhabits the domain of the audience whose response – contingent upon multiple factors within individuals – will arbitrate in a given context, and then not uniformly. Most commentators presume a unitary crowd reaction to a virtuoso performance, yet between the antipodes of approval or disapproval exists a whole range of responses available to each person in the hall, even if fellow audience members may influence a collective response. Undoubtedly, the salutary effects of virtuosity upon the general public have led to its continuing popularity, even at times when the mandarins of taste have inclined to renounce the practice as shallow and vainglorious, as in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries.28 The reception of virtuosity has also varied according to the vehicle of dissemination; the attitudes in the daily press reflect those of its consumers, which are generally favourable, while those in music journals and professional publications are apt to adopt a more cautious position on the

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virtuosity of an artist. The most critical voices may have been those in the scholarly literature until about 1990, when such performance began to come into its own as a historical (and current) cultural practice. Critique and paradoxes The critique of virtuosity originated early in its public existence, as already discussed; it was perceived as threatening the established order. The fears articulated by its critics have been multiple and persistent over time – ostensibly over aesthetic issues, the criticisms have arisen within particular social and political contexts, as Gooley (2006) has demonstrated for Germany of the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the most prevalent issue conflates self-promotion and display with lack of depth and empty technique, which has resulted in accusations of charlatanism that cut across style boundaries. Thus the ‘false virtuoso’ does not enter into the spirit of the composition or composer that characterizes ‘genuine’ virtuosity with its aura of authenticity, whereby the audience likewise fails to enter into the more profound immersion beneath the surface of the notes. The emphasis on interiority as the basis for aesthetic experience has not limited itself to the classical musical canon: jazz performers, for example, have long worked under a similar regime of expectations. Yet the critique seems as much a manifestation of the anxiety of elite gatekeepers over a potential loss of control as a desire to maintain performance standards, for ‘ecstatic fandom’ can also mobilize social and political action. While uncontrolled bourgeois bodies in concert halls may have occasioned concern among ruling powers in pre1848 Europe, the same could be said for African-Americans making music in public places the late twentieth century.29 Indexical for the ongoing debate over virtuosity is a range of paradoxes that has prominently figured in the various position-takings over the years. Leppert identified the following contradictory meanings that attached to Liszt and can mark the virtuoso in general, as ‘the epicenter of the cultural and social issues that characterize modernity’: artist/businessman, inspired superhuman/machine, sincere/calculating, authentic/fake, masculine/feminine, Byronic hero/fainting aesthete. To that list could be added such related binaries as transcendent/materially grounded, model of success/charlatan, body/mind, diseased/healthy, non-normate/normate. That these paradoxical interpretations still contribute to the assessment of a new star performer reveals itself in the case of an artist like Lang Lang, for whom the issue of ethnic identity adds another layer to the evaluation (see Hung 2009). The critics may well privilege one side of the duality over the other, depending on their response to an individual practitioner or the practice in its entirety. Yet such paradoxical constructions can also create productive tensions that enable the expression and even working out of cultural anxieties. During Liszt’s time, the concern over the machine – here embodied in the piano – was assuaged by its mastery at the hands of the flesh-and-blood virtuoso, who could even ‘out-machine the machinery’ (Leppert 1999, 273). Jimi Hendrix’s uncanny control over and manipulation of the sounds of the electric guitar helped to ‘viscerally communicate the experience of modern, technological warfare’ (Kramer 2013, 145), whereby listeners could obtain to a (temporary) sense of personal empowerment through the transformational capacity of his performance. Needless to say, the most debated of the dualities has been the complex of characteristics embracing sincerity, authenticity and substance over manipulation, fakery and shallowness. Various meanings have attached to the virtuoso on the basis of his or her communication in

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concert: a model of success, a conquering hero, a spiritual presence and a sexual force, among others. These and other meanings implicate the exercise of power in the hall, which may result in the empowerment or the overpowerment of the participant subject – in the case of sexual force, the effects of virtuosity have been variously interpreted either as release or as domination over women spectator/auditors.30 However, according to traditional applications of the term, the ‘true virtuoso’ dispenses self to the onlookers and ‘onlisteners’ in a benevolent act of body and mind together: the mutual, profound experience of the musical work. Yet success for the virtuoso performer has required calculation, both off- and on-stage. The privileging of interiority in German idealist aesthetics notwithstanding, the virtuoso has never immersed him- or herself so deeply in the music as to become insensate to the audience, for the goal of such presentation should be communication. Moreover, the professional instrumentalist or vocalist has traditionally acquired and cultivated gestures and behaviours in performance that serve the purpose of drawing spectator/auditors into the musical experience.31 The failure of these somatic signs to hail members of the public may have manifold reasons, ranging from the performer’s inability to master or control them to the spectator/auditors’ frames of mind, but if they do misfire, the tendency among observers has been to dismiss the performer as a charlatan – at least if he or she appears to be manipulating the audience. At the same time, evident visible and audible ease in performance has been valorized as a sign of virtuosity, within the paradox that only hard work could produce such apparent effortlessness. If certain paradoxical characteristics inhabit the virtuoso, it is also possible to attribute potentially contradictory terms to the audience for the virtuoso experience – for example, looking/hearing, active/passive or attentive/inattentive. Unlike the paradoxes evidenced in the body and performance of the artist, however, those for the public are not mutually exclusive and indeed, such opposing behaviours may equally manifest themselves during one and the same concert visit. And these physical and psychic states can arise (be aroused) in response to the performance, as already noted for specific artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Excess and disability Samson observes that one of the early (i.e. late eighteenth-century) criticisms of virtuosity dismissed the practice on the basis of the ‘pejorative connotations of excess’ (Samson 2004, 4). This reading of the phenomenon could only gain momentum as performers ratcheted up their display and the public increasingly responded through physical demonstrations of enthusiasm that have remained at high levels. The attributed losses of control and of propriety have firmed up the observations of hysteria and even disease among audiences, and have justified the critiques of artist fakery; after all, interiority remains the standard among performers and audiences in the classical genre. Kramer, whose discussion of virtuosity from 2012 represents the most detailed exploration of the concept of excess, seems to aim more at the popular-music concert when he uses the designation ‘ecstatic fandom’. As he remarks: The virtuoso performer also performed a self, a public persona uniting expressive power and sensitivity with celebrity. The result of this union was to incorporate excess into the very field of social relations meant to restrict excess: the excess on the one hand of the performer as a charismatic exception to whom all things are permitted and the excess on the other hand of the spectator drawn into the licensed intoxication of ecstatic fandom. (Kramer 2012, 231)

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He proceeds to explain the process whereby the transfer of power and pleasure takes place, a transaction and communication that call to mind Wartenberg’s transformational power, only here involving an undifferentiated mass audience in the sense of a ‘social totality’:32 The virtuoso body is like a battery charged with the shock of the unknown; the function of the virtuoso performance is massive discharge – a public transference of cathexis, understood to pass from the interior of the virtuoso to the interior of the audience . . . The body of the Lisztian virtuoso pushes its capacity to channel overwhelming force to the outer limit of possibility . . . The virtuoso’s self-sacrifice, which is also his self-aggrandizement, allows the audience in some degree to possess the performer by focusing on bodily part-objects and thus to take possession of the Other’s pleasure. (Kramer 2012, 238–9) In a discussion of the dancer Oguri, Judith Hamera draws on a different metaphor to embody the excess of virtuosity: the monster. ‘The virtuoso as sacred monster rewrites plots of possibility for other bodies even while demonstrating the inability of other bodies, including those of critics, to execute this virtuous discipline themselves’ (Hamera 2000, 149). Yehudi Menuhin first described the extraordinary body of the virtuoso as a ‘sacred monster’33, and that image well captures another paradox of the virtuoso – superhuman/freak. While the trope of ‘virtuosity as excess’ dominates the interpretive realm for somatic cultural practices, within that discourse resides another potential reading of the literary and visual records, quite the opposite to the virtuoso as superhumanly endowed hero: the virtuoso as nonnormate in the sense of a ‘freak’ and a model of disability. Some performers were visibly disabled, which invited comment: Maria Theresia Paradis ‘was presented as a freak – a performer who was young, female, foreign, and blind – in her tours to Paris and London. The public that paid to hear and gawk at these performers connected their prodigious musical abilities to something “alien” about them – their nationality or youth or handicap’ (Parakilas 2002, 65). Of course, the tortured, deteriorating body of Paganini with all of its virtuosic skill performed the freak-genius paradox of virtuosity, in his case enabled and empowered by a mythical allegiance with the forces of darkness. In contrast, able-bodied virtuosi like Liszt came to represent physical excess in performance that transcended the corporeally possible, and thus likewise satisfied the voyeuristic demands of his audience, yet were coded as disabled in various cultural for a; for example, caricatures regularly presented virtuosi like Liszt, Thalberg and Gottschalk as possessing too many fingers or hands. Whether displaying and performing bodies of lack or excess, the extraordinary body of the virtuoso has become the site for verbal or visual images drawn from the rhetoric surrounding disability, like the Washington Post review of Hilary Hahn that compared her to a ‘freak of nature’ (Battey 2011) or the commentator from the BBC who wrote about the ‘virtuoso contortions’ of jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine (Longley 2012). Closing remarks As this chapter has revealed, the phenomenon of virtuosity is revealed in performance; whether recording can capture that aura remains to be determined, Glenn Gould’s practice and aesthetics notwithstanding. The polysemous nature of virtuosity has ensured that generations of performers and audiences will assign it diverse meanings, according to collective contexts and individual identities. Its paradoxical character bears out the innate multivalence of the concept, which,

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despite over three centuries of reflection, still resists clear definition. Still, the study of the practice and practitioner does suggest some common ground, even if delimited by its contested aesthetic status. Virtuosity is a product of performance, bringing one or more exceptional interpreting bodies into communication with an audience that undergoes an extraordinary experience through that mediation. A number of virtuoso- and virtuosity-related issues remain to be explored by the academic community. First among them is the ‘Liszt problem’: until we move away from Liszt and his audience as the templates for analysis,34 we will not be able to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. Gooley and Moysan stress the unique character of Liszt’s life and activity as virtuoso, and yet his practice becomes the standard by which the meanings behind that designation are studied. What about Kalkbrenner, Pixis or Hummel, among many other ‘average’ piano virtuosi of his day, let alone the thousands since then, in different styles and on diverse instruments and voices and as conductors? Questions of gender and sexual identity have scarcely entered into discussions of the topic, where Clara Schumann may be mentioned from an historical perspective, but any possible inherent differences encoded in the performance and the reception of female virtuosos have not yet received attention, across style boundaries. This also applies to women audience members and their responses to male and female virtuosic performers/performances, again, whatever the style. Indeed, the audience of virtuosity remains a fruitful field for study, and this includes in particular cognitive research in performance venues, whereby somatic responses could be empirically measured and compared. One question that such a methodology could help answer would address differing abilities of perception among audience members, which could reflect varying levels of listening ability or attentiveness and lead to identifying a ‘virtuoso spectator/ auditor’ if such exists. Another aspect of audience research is the extent to which technology mediates and modifies the experience of virtuosity. Are recorded audio-only performances truly regarded as less virtuosic? Do older audio recording techniques hinder the listener’s appreciation of exceptional talent? Do video tapes and DVDs (and televised performances) also provide a reduced experience? Finally, researchers should seriously examine figures who have historically occupied the borderland between virtuosity and charlatanry (and not Liszt, whose superior talents were never a matter for debate). Liberace, for example, billed himself as ‘Liberace – the most amazing piano virtuoso of the present day’ (Pyron 2000, 79), while the followers of saxophonist Kenny G like to brand him as a saxophone virtuoso.35 This last topic leads back to the narrative of the virtuosic as solitary, Byronian artist, struggling against the elements and the gods, who disperses his/her remarkable favours over an undifferentiated mass of humanity. As Hamera remarks, however, ‘there is another possibility. That is: to abandon the singular hero-story of virtuosity entirely in favor of a bracing love story between artist and critic [i.e. public] in which each remakes the other’ (Hamera 2000, 151). Therein may reside the true mystery and miracle of virtuosity. Notes 1 2

‘L’attrait qu’exerce le virtuose sur le public parait assez semblable à celui qui attire les foules vers les jeux de cirque. On espère toujours qu’il va se passer quelque chose de dangereux . . .’ My sincere gratitude to those who have directly and indirectly assisted in the preparation of this chapter, including editor Stephen Downes (Royal Holloway), colleagues Dana Gooley (Brown University) and Richard Leppert

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17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

(University of Minnesota), and particularly graduate student Agnes Malkinson (Carleton University), whose expert bibliographic work facilitated the study’s completion. Unless indicated otherwise, the translations are by the author. Hennion 2012, Miller 2009, Walser 1993 and Wicke 2004 have established the aesthetic parameters for virtuosity in jazz and popular music, which differ in significant aspects from those for art music. Ken Russell’s 1975 film Lisztomania makes the connection tangible through the casting of Roger Daltrey as Liszt. ‘Virtuosity’, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Available at: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtuosity (accessed 23 January 2013). The film was released in 1995, directed by Brett Leonard and featuring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Since looking and listening are equally crucial components of the virtuoso experience, this chapter will adopt the compound term ‘spectator/auditor’ for the audience act of consuming virtuosity. See, for example, Alsted 1664 in which he observes in the unpaginated ‘To the Reader’, ‘I know that all Virtuoso’s will encourage those things which conduce to the Improvement of any ingenious art’. ‘Cette Superiorité de genie, d’adresse ou d’habilité, qui nous fait exceller soit dans la Théorie, soit dans la Prattique des beaux Arts.’ ‘un excellent Peintre, un habile Architecte’. ‘mot emprunté de l’italien, qui signifie, Un homme ou une femme qui a des talents pour les beaux-arts, et particulièrement pour la musique’. Institut de France, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 6th edn, Vol. 2 (FirminDidot frères, 1835, 941). This definition represents a version of one already in circulation in France during the mid-eighteenth century, as exemplified by Supplément au dictionnaire universel français et latin . . . (Nancy: Pierre Antoine, 1752): ‘Mot emprunté de l’Italien, pour dire, Un homme ou une femme qui ont des talens pour les Arts, comme la Musique, la Peinture, la Poésie , &c.’, col. 2309. ‘Das Wort Virtuose ist zu allgemein/denn man sagt es von allen, die sich in einer Wissenschaft oder Kunst besonders hervor thun; und man müste also allezeit sagen/ ein musicalischer Virtuose, oder ein Virtuose in der Music . . . Ueber dieses wird auch das Wort Virtuose, wenn es in der Music gebrauchet wird, am meisten nur denjenigen beygeieget, welche etwan im singen oder spielen vortreflich sind.’ ‘Virtuos nennen wir gewöhnlich denjenigen und jeden solchen Musiker, der sich vornehmlich den Vortrag bereits componirter Tonstücke zur Aufgabe macht, und zu dem Ende einen besonders hohen Grad von Fertigkeit auf einem Instrumente oder im Gesange erworben hat.’ The following review surveys publications in three language groups – English, French and German – which correspond to the most substantial bodies of primary and secondary sources about virtuosity. As will become apparent, they also represent distinct cultures of reception for the practice. Already in the 1970s Friedhelm Krummacher had published a short essay on this approach to the topic (Krummacher 1974). Leon Plantinga did publish an article about Clementi’s virtuosity and the ‘German manner’ in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1972, but there the practice represents an ostensibly shallow approach to music from which the composer Clementi developed into a style of harmonic and contrapuntal complexity (Plantinga 1972). Gooley’s Princeton dissertation from 1999 was entitled ‘Liszt and his Audiences, 1834–1847: Virtuosity, Criticism, and Society in the Virtuosenzeit’. Both Weber and Kenneth Hamilton would carry on the investigations into virtuoso repertoire as reflected in concert programs. See Weber 2009, in particular Ch. 5: ‘Convention and Experiment in Benefit and Virtuoso Concerts’, 141–168, and Hamilton 1998. Bernstein’s dissertation appeared under the same title from Stanford University Press in 1998. Although it may sound oxymoronic, the ‘average virtuoso’ finds no place in the work of Gooley or other anglophone authors. ‘Was ist virtuos? Alles, was sich so sehr steigern lässt, dass jemand es darin zu einer Vortrefflichkeit bringt, die andere verblüfft, begeistert, dazu motiviert, in Beifall auszubrechen—oder auch in Tumult und Protest.’ ‘Prekäre Existenz’ Call for Papers, 2010. Available at: www.bewegungsforschung.de/pdf/ankuendigung_szene_des_ virtuosen.pdf (accessed 23 January 2013). ‘Nicht zuletzt wird in dieser Dynamik der Attestierung und Bestreitung von Exzellenz sichtbar, dass sich die Evidenz des Virtuosen nie durch die singuläre Figur alleine, sondern immer in einer Szene wechselseitiger Steigerung mit einem Publikum herstellt.’ Ibid. The best source about Liszt’s transcriptions is Kregor 2012. Even Liszt’s nemesis Eduard Hanslick has to recognize that his transcriptions were ‘epoch making’ (Hanslick 1869, 336). This raises the question of whether a performer can acquire the reputation of a virtuoso exclusively from the recording studio, which seems unlikely in the modern performance tradition: even Glenn Gould initiated his career as a concert artist. See Williams 1990 for a compendium of reports about the ‘transcendental’ effects of Liszt’s virtuosity, and not just from published reviews; he also includes diary entries and letter passages by the virtuoso and his contemporaries among the documents. Walser 1993, 45. His third chapter, ‘Eruptions: Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity’ (57–107) is particularly noteworthy for its detailed examination of specific virtuosic practices in heavy metal and their effects.

294 • James Deaville 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Taruskin’s invocation of ‘the sublime’ may or may not reference David Nye’s work on the ‘technological sublime’, but Nye’s concept of a sublime that ‘permitted both the imagination of an ineffable surplus of emotion and its recontainment’ certainly could apply to the experience of virtuosity (Nye 1994, 282). As Burk 1918 noted, ‘[the] public flocks to the lure of billboards and world renown, pays enormous sums, and beholds, in puerile wonderment and delight, feats which dazzle, and leave in their wake little more than a tingle of stupefaction.’ See, for example, Bohlman 1993, especially 411–13, where he discusses the role of rap during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. In their publications from the early 1990s, Susan McClary and Rob Walser appear to occupy opposing perspectives on this issue: see Deaville 1997, 181–2. Borsszem Jankó, 6 April 1873 published the set of eight caricatures of the performing Liszt by János Jankó, which illustrate his wildly contrasting demeanours at the keyboard. This concept is foundational in the social thought of Adorno. Yehudi Menuhin, interview with Sixty Minutes, 21 March 1999, cited by Hamera 2000, 148. For a discussion of this issue, see Deaville 2007. Popular websites, including those for Kenny G himself, www.kennyg.com, and for ticket services like Ticketmaster, http://reviews.ticketmaster.com/7171/736524/kenny-g-reviews/reviews.htm?page=24&sort=rating, document the enthusiasm of the public, which contrasts with the dismissive tone in reviews by jazz/sax professionals.

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Contributors

Stephen Downes (editor) is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was previously Professor and Head of Music and Sound Recording at the University of Surrey. He is the author of six monographs: Szymanowski as Post-Wagnerian (1994), Szymanowski, Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology (2003), The Muse as Eros (2006), Music and Decadence in Central and Eastern Europe (2010), Hans Werner Henze: ‘Tristan’ (2011) and After Mahler: Britten, Weill, Henze and Romantic Redemption (2013). He won the Wilk Prize for Research in Polish Music (University of Southern California) and in 1999 was awarded the Karol Szymanowski Memorial Medal. He is a co-editor of Music & Letters and treasurer of the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group. Jeremy Barham is Reader in Music at the University of Surrey. He researches in the areas of Mahler and early modernist culture, screen music, and jazz. His publications include Rethinking Mahler (Oxford), ‘Mahler: Centenary Commentaries on Musical Meaning’ (guest-edited issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review), The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, as well as studies of screen music in 19th-Century Music, Music and the Moving Image and The Musical Quarterly. He is series editor of Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz, and is currently working on two monographs: Music, Time and the Moving Image (Cambridge University Press) and Mahler, Music, Culture: Discourses of Meaning (Indiana University Press). Keith Chapin is Senior Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. He has taught at Fordham University (New York) and at the New Zealand School of Music (Wellington). He specializes in issues of critical theory, music aesthetics and music theory in the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, and in particular on issues of the sublime and counterpoint. He has been Co-Editor of Eighteenth-Century Music and Associate Editor of 19th-Century Music. The collection of essays Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, co-edited with Andrew H. Clark, appeared with Fordham University Press in 2013. James Deaville is Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture: Music at Carleton University, Ottawa. He has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music and 19th-Century Music Review (among others), has contributed to books published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Princeton University Press, Ashgate and Routledge (among others), and is editor of Music in Television: Channels of Listening (Routledge, 2011). He has published essays about virtuosity since 1997: ‘The Making of a Myth: Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity’, in Analecta Lisztiana II:

298 • Contributors

New Light on Liszt and His Music (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997, 181–95); ‘Liszt’s Virtuosity and His Audience: Gender, Class, and Power in the Concert Hall of the Early 19th Century’, in Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft (1998, 281–300); ‘La figura del virtuoso da Tartini e Bach a Paganini e Liszt’, in Enciclopedia della musica, Vol. 4: Storia della musica europea , ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Einaudi: Torino, 2004, 803–25); Review-article of Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 60, No. 3 (2007): 666–677; and ‘A Star is Born? Czerny, Liszt and the Pedagogy of Virtuosity’, in Beyond the Art of Finger Dexterity: Reassessing Carl Czerny, ed. David Gramit (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008, 52–66). James Garratt is Senior Lecturer in Music and University Organist at the University of Manchester. His publications include two monographs: Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has written widely on nineteenth-century German music, aesthetics and culture, and has published numerous articles and reviews in Music and Letters, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 19th-Century Music Review, 20th-Century Music, and the American Historical Review. Kenneth Gloag is Reader in Musicology at Cardiff University. His publications include a monograph titled Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge, 2012) and he has published on the music of Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Nicholas Maw and Michael Tippett. He is co-author of Musicology: The Key Concepts (2005) and co-editor of Peter Maxwell Davies Studies (Cambridge, 2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett (2013). He was inaugural reviews editor of Twentieth-Century Music (2004–12). Thomas Grey is Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is the author of Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (1995), as well as editor and co-author of the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Wagner’s Flying Dutchman (2000), the Cambridge Companion to Wagner (2008) and Wagner and his World (Princeton University Press, 2009). Among other topics, he has also written on Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other (non-Wagnerian) nineteenth-century opera. Recent projects include the painting of Hans Makart in relation to Wagner criticism in the late nineteenth century, the idea of ‘absolute music’, ecocritical perspectives on landscape and nature in nineteenth-century music, ‘Richard Wagner’ for Oxford Bibliographies Online, music and the ‘Gothic’ and American musical theatre. James Hepokoski is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at Yale University. Exploring new ways of synthesizing the once-separate domains of music history, music theory, and music as cultural discourse, he is the author or co-author of seven books and has written several dozen articles on a broad range of musical topics. His book from 2006, co-authored with Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the LateEighteenth-Century Sonata, won the 2008 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory. This was followed in 2009 by a joint dialogue with William Caplin and James Webster entitled Form, Forms, & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections (University of Leuven Press). His most recent book is a collection of fifteen of his musicological essays from 1984 to 2008, Music, Structure, Thought (Ashgate 2009). While his current work primarily involves

Contributors • 299

exploration into Late Beethoven, his recent essays include a study of the first movement of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto (in Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning, ed. Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith (Indiana, 2012)) and a contribution, ‘Ineffable Immersion: Contextualizing the Call for Silence’, to the Vladimir Jankélévitch Philosophical Colloquy that appeared in JAMS 65 (2012). A discussion of Carl Dahlhaus’s concepts of text and event, and their ever-persistent variants in more recent anglophone musicology, was published in 2013 under the title The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge University Press). Julian Horton is Professor of Music at the University of Durham. He has taught at University College Dublin, King’s College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he held a Research Fellowship. His research focuses on the analysis of nineteenth-century instrumental forms, with special interests in the symphony, the piano concerto and the theory of sonata form. He is author of Bruckner’s Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2004), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and has published in The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, Music and Letters, Musical Quarterly and Music Analysis. In 2012, he was awarded the Westrup Prize for his work on first-movement form in the early nineteenth-century piano concerto. Julian Johnson is Regius Professor of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on Viennese modernism (Mahler, Webern, Berg and Schoenberg) but his research interests extend across the broad period of musical modernity from the late eighteenth century to the present. His historical studies of music are always shaped by questions of musical meaning, evident in an engagement with the philosophy of music, ideas of nature and landscape in music, and the relation of music to the other arts (literature and painting). He was for many years an active composer and his music has been professionally performed in Europe, the USA and Japan. His Three Pieces for Orchestra (1992) was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, as was his choral work, The Kingfisher (1993), performed by the BBC Singers. He is a regular speaker at international academic conferences – most recently speaking in London, Cologne, Vienna, Graz, Frankfurt, Toronto, Seattle and New York – but he has also given frequent public talks to a wider audience for the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne Opera, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and on BBC Radio 3. In 2009, he acted as Series Consultant to the Philharmonia Orchestra for City of Dreams: Vienna 1900–35. In 2005, he was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association for ‘outstanding contributions to musicology’. Sanna Pederson, who specializes in German music history and culture in the nineteenth century, has been the Mavis C. Pitman Professor of Music at the University of Oklahoma since 2001. Her most recent work has been engaged with the aesthetic theories of Richard Wagner and has eleven articles in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia related to that topic. She has also been working on the history of the term absolute music. ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’ appeared in Music & Letters in 2009 and she has published elsewhere and given many conference papers on the subject in recent years. In 2005–6 she was a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies, and was on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society 2007–13. Earlier work focused on the reception of Beethoven, on which she has published with regard to nationalism, gender studies,

300 • Contributors

narrative theory and historiography. Her dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania was on ‘Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800–1850’. Nicholas Reyland is Senior Lecturer in Music at Keele University. His research interests include the life and music of Witold Lutosławski, narratology, screen music, affect, emotion and embodiment, and, more broadly, the theory, analysis and criticism of music since 1900. He published his first two books in 2012: Zbigniew Preisner’s ‘Three Colors’ Trilogy: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Press) and the co-edited collection (with Michael Klein, Temple University) Music and Narrative since 1900 (Indiana University Press). He has also published essays on music and narrative in Music & Letters, Music Analysis, Music Sound and the Moving Image and Witold Lutosławski Studies. He has given invited research seminars at prestigious venues, including Cornell University, the Fryderyk Chopin Institute and the Institute for Musical Research, written for The Guardian, been interviewed on BBC Radio 3 and appeared as a preconcert speaker at the BBC Proms. His present projects include edited collections on analysis and the body, and on Lutosławski’s life and music, an analysis textbook, and a series of essays on affect, emotion and narrativity in a range of musical repertoires. Jim Samson is Emeritus Professor of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely (including eight single-authored books and seven edited or co-edited books) on the music of Chopin, and on analytical and aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury music. His books have been translated into German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese. He is one of three Series Editors of The Complete Chopin: A New Critical Edition (Peters Edition, in progress). In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture for his contribution to Chopin scholarship, and in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Book Prize in 2004, and most recently Music in the Balkans (Brill, 2013). He edited a textbook with J. P. E. Harper-Scott, An Introduction to Music Studies, and is currently preparing a co-edited volume on ‘Greece and its Neighbours’ (with Katy Romanou) and an edited volume on Music in Cyprus. His edition of the Chopin Ballades (Peters Edition) was named ‘2009 Edition of the Year’ in the International Piano Awards. He is currently writing a novel set during the Greek War of Independence.

Index of musical works, composers and performers

Alpert, Herb 34 Andriessen, Louis 251 Arian Band (Iran) 264 Ayler, Albert 197 Babbitt, Milton 10, 58 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel 254 Bach, Johann Sebastian 29, 44, 50, 52, 253, 266; The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, 54; Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, BWV 1050, 57; Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542, 98; The Well-Tempered Clavier 47, 52–3, 58, 217 Barenboim, Daniel 260 Bartók, Béla 267; Kossuth 67 Beach Boys, The 32, 35; ‘God Only Knows’ 37–8; Pet Sounds 32, 34–8 Beatles, The 34; Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 33, 36–7 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 7,12, 25, 29, 32, 34–6, 45–6, 51–2, 69, 87, 93–5, 112, 118, 150, 151, 157, 205, 247, 253; Bagatelles, Op. 126, 242; The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43, Overture 44; Der glorreiche Augenblick, Op. 136, 34; Egmont Overture, Op. 84, 63, 66; Fidelio, Op. 72, 151–4; Piano Concerto No. 4 in G, Op. 58, 217–18; Piano Sonata in D minor, Op. 32, no2. ‘The Tempest’ 15, 112, 120–7, 129, 135, 139–41; Piano Sonata in A, Op. 101, 210–12; Piano Sonata in B b, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ 18, 255–7; Piano Sonata in C, Op. 111, 52–3; Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, 117; Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 57 ‘Appassionata’, 206–7; Piano Trio in D, Op. 70, ‘The Ghost’ 205, 219–20; String Quartet in F minor Op. 95 ‘Serioso’ 205, 207, 219–20, 242; String Quartet in F, Op. 135, 211, 220–21;

Symphony No. 3 in E b, Op. 55, ‘Eroica’ 35, 37, 57, 70, 218, 249, 260; Symphony No. 5 in C, Op. 67, 35, 36, 42, 86, 89; Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68, ‘Pastoral’ 64, 71, 79 n.4; Symphony No. 9 in D, Op. 125, 14, 43–4, 47, 87–90, 94, 135; Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120, 58; Violin Sonata in G, Op. 96, 242; Wellington’s Victory, Op. 91, 34, 58, 69 Benes, Jára: Die vom Rummelplatz (dir. Lamač), 230–1 Berg, Alban 253; Lyric Suite 67; Piano Sonata, Op. 1, 112, 135–40; Wozzeck 164, 250 Berio, Luciano 18; Sinfonia, 253 Berlioz, Hector 49, 170; Harold en Italie 78; Symphonie fantastique 63, 67 Berry, Chuck 7 Bejelo dugme (‘White Button’) 270 Biber, Heinrich: Battalia 69; Sonata violino solo representative 69 Binchois, Gilles 155 Birtwistle, Harrison: Punch and Judy 253 Bizet, Georges: Carmen 183 Blume, Friedrich 157 Bootz, Erwin: Abschied (dir. Siodmak) 231–2 Boulez, Pierre 10, 58, 189 Brahms, Johannes 54, 63, 112, 118, 248; Symphony No. 3 in F, Op. 90, 51, 56–7, 127; Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98, 127 Braxton, Anthony 17, 188, 197–9 Brendel, Alfred 210–12 Britten, Benjamin 251 Brown, James 10 Bruckner, Anton 52, 54, 112, 239, 249, 253; Symphony No. 1 in C minor 31; Symphony No. 2 in C minor 128; Symphony No. 3 in

302 • Index of musical works, composers and performers D minor 128; Symphony No. 5 in B b 112, 127–35 Busnois, Antoine 155 Buus, Jacques 49–50 Byrd, William: ‘The Battle’, from My Ladye Neville’s Booke 69 Cage, John 1, 48, 251 Caron 155 Chabrier, Emmanuel 251 Cherry, Don 194 Chopin, Fryderyk 44, 170, 285, 287; Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, 205; Mazurkas, Op. 6 and Op. 7, 267; Prelude in G, Op. 28 No. 3, 214–17; Waltz in A minor, Op. 34 No. 2, 239 Clapton, Eric 56 Clementi, Muzio 58, 148; Sonatina in C, Op. 36 No. 1, 251 Coleman, Ornette 17, 56, 188, 190, 192–6, 198–9 Coltrane, John 56, 196–7 Corelli, Arcangelo 157 Cortot, Alfred 267 Couperin, François 47, 159 Davis, Miles 191 Debussy, Claude 18, 250, 251, 276; ‘La cathédral engloutie’ (Préludes, book 1) 65; ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ (Children’s Corner) 252; La mer 66, 68; ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ (Images, series 1) 65 Delius, Frederick 69 Dufay, Guillaume 155 Dunstable, John 155 Dvořák, Antonín: Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70, 127 Dylan, Bob 36 Earth, Wind and Fire 11 Eisler, Hans: Kuhle Wampe (dir. Dudow) 229 Farina, Carlo: Capriccio stravagante 68 Faugues, Guillaume 155 Fauré, Gabriel 251 Franck, César: Symphony in D minor 55 Franz, Robert 287 Friedhofer, Hugo: The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. Wyler) 232 Gabrieli, Giovanni: Canzoni i sonate 49–50 Gillespie, Dizzy 190–1

Gottschalk, Louis 291 Gould, Glenn 291 Griot musicians of West Africa 261–2 Grofé, Ferde: Grand Canyon Suite 58 Hahn, Hilary 291 Handel, George Frideric 157, 253; Messiah 262, 272; Suite No. 6 in F # 204, 207 Hanon, Charles-Louis 50 Haydn, Joseph 18, 44–6, 69, 148, 157, 240–3, 247, 251–3; The Creation 65; String Quartets, Op. 33, 242–3; Symphony in F #, ‘The Farewell’ 127 Hendrix, Jimi 56, 289 Herrmann, Bernard: Vertigo (dir. Hitchcock) 227 Herz, Henri 58 Hollaender, Friedrich: Der blaue Engel (dir. von Sternberg) 229 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk 292 Janequin, Clément: La Battaile de Marignan; La guerre 69 Kalkbrenner, Frédéric 292 Kalomiris, Manolis 267 Kenny G. 292 Khachaturian, Aram 270 Kirnberger, Johann Philipp 32 Koch, Heinrich Christoph 32, 156–7 Laibach 271 Lang Lang 289 Lassus, Orlande de 253 Liberace 292 Ligeti, György 18, 240, 251; Aventures 253 Liszt, Franz 19, 48–9, 63, 112, 170, 276, 279–85, 287, 289–92; Dante Symphony 78; Die Ideale 67; Mazeppa 51–2 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 157 Lutosławski, Witold: Symphony No. 4 216 McCartney, Paul 37 Mahler, Gustav 18, 66, 79 n.6, 179, 185–6, 205, 211–12, 234, 239, 244, 247–8, 251, 253; Des Knaben Wunderhorn 249; Symphony No. 1 249; Symphony No. 3 212; Symphony No. 4 212; Symphony No. 6, 127; Symphony No. 9, 127, 216–17, 240, 249 Mancini, Henry: Touch of Evil (dir. Welles) 226

Index of musical works, composers and performers • 303 Marsalis, Wynton 199–200 Mendelssohn, Felix 44, 170, 285; ‘Hebrides’ Overture, Op. 26, 65; Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21, 77 Menuhin, Yehudi 291 Messiaen, Olivier 69, 239 Meyerbeer, Giacomo: Robert le diable 94 Monk, Thelonious 190 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 18, 44–6, 90, 103, 144–6, 148–9, 157, 164–5, 171, 183, 240, 250–1, 253, 279; Così fan tutte 146, 243; Divertimento for String Trio K. 563, 57; Die Entführung aus dem Serail 144–6; Don Giovanni, 146, 243, 253; Idomeneo 151; Le nozze di Figaro 243; Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 457, 120–1; Piano Sonata in C, K. 545, 101; Serenade, K. 320 ‘Posthorn’ 50–1, 57; String Quartet in D minor, K. 421, 245; String Quartet in A, K. 464, 243–4; String Quartet in F, K. 590, 159–61; String Quintet in D, K. 593, 245; String Quintet in G minor, K. 516, 245; Symphony No. 39, K. 543, 57; Symphony No. 41, K. 551 ‘Jupiter’ 31, 161–3; Die Zauberflöte 151 Musorgsky, Modest: Boris Godunov 48 Myaskovsky, Nikolay 270 Ockeghem, Jean de 155 Offenbach, Jacques 16, 18, 249; La belle Hélène 177–8, 183, 250; Orfeé aux enfers 177–8, 250; La vie parisienne 250 Paganini, Nicolò 279, 284, 291 Palestrina 157, 161 Paradis, Maria Theresia 291 Parker, Charlie 17, 188, 190–2, 194, 198–9 Penderecki, Krzysztof: Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima 273 n.1 Pine, Courtney 291 Porter, Cole 2 Poulenc, Francis 14, 251–2; Les biches 103–5; Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings 98–9, 101; Pastourelle 96–7; Sextuor 101–3 Prince 10–11 Prokofiev, Sergei 239, 270 Rambo Amadeus 271 Rautavaara, Einojuhani: Cantus arcticus 69 Ravel, Maurice 18, 69, 251–2; L’enfant et les sortilèges 252; Le tombeau de Couperin 164 Régis, Johannes 155

Reich, Steve: Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboard 217 Respighi, Ottorino 69 Riblja Čorba (‘Fish Chowder’) 272 Riemann, Hugo 14–15, 159 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay: Sheherezade Op. 35, 30 Roach, Max 190 Rodgers, Richard 48 Rolling Stones, The 34: Their Satanic Majesties Request 33, 36 Rossini, Gioachino 34, 87, 89, 93–4, 127, 177, 250 Rota, Nino: La Dolce Vita (dir. Fellini) 227 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 150; Le Devin du village 151–2 Saint-Saëns, Camille 267; Le carnival des animaux 250 Sanders, Pharaoh 197 Satie, Erik 18, 105, 252; Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois 251; Sonatine bureaucratique 251 Scarlatti, Domenico 47, 253 Schenker, Heinrich 29, 54, 205, 208, 218 Schnittke, Alfred 18, 252; Concerto Grosso No. 1, 252–3; Concerto Grosso No. 3, 253; Piano Quartet 253; String Quartet No. 2, 253; Symphony No. 2, 253 Schoenberg, Arnold 10, 15, 18, 62–3, 65, 71, 111, 117–19, 123, 171, 179; Pierrot lunaire 119, 239, 250–3; Verklärte Nacht 63 Schubert, Franz 18, 129, 171, 249, 253, 287; ‘Erlkönig’ 70; ‘Frühlingstraum’ (Winterreise) 245–8 Schumann, Clara 285, 292 Schumann, Robert 18, 44, 50, 112, 170, 205, 251, 253–4, 276, 285, 287; Carnaval, Op. 9, 231, 248, 253; Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, 248; Intermezzi, Op. 4, 249; Liederkreis, Op. 24, 16, 174; Papillons, Op. 2, 248; Paradies und die Peri, Op. 50, 51; ‘Wehmut’ (Eichendorff Lieder, Op. 39) 248 Schütz, Heinrich 253 Scriabin, Alexander: Prelude in G, Op. 11 No. 3, 217 Sessions, Roger 10 Shepp, Archie 197 Shostakovich, Dmitri 18, 239, 252, 270 Smetana, Bedřich: Vltava 67, 78 Sousa, John Philip: Washington Post 70

304 • Index of musical works, composers and performers Stockhausen, Karlheinz 189 Strauss Jr., Johann 50 Strauss, Richard 67, 171, 179, 185; Also Sprach Zarathustra 78; Ariadne auf Naxos 253; Don Quixote 63; Metamorphosen 253; Sinfonia Domestica 249; Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche 206 Stravinsky, Igor 15, 18, 29, 58, 117–19, 129, 146–9, 166, 239–40, 245, 250–1; La baiser de la fée 103; Concerto for Piano and Wind 103, 251; L’Histoire du soldat 239, 251; Octet 146, 164, 251; Petrushka 119, 252–3; Pulcinella 103, 251; The Rake’s Progress 146–7, 253; The Rite of Spring 119, 251 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 14, 103; 1812 Overture, Op. 49, 69; Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32, 78; Rococo Variations, Op. 33, 103–4; The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66, 103–4; Symphony No. 6, Op. 74, ‘Pathétique’ 127 Thalberg, Sigismond 291

Van Morrison 36 Vandermark, Ken 199 Vivaldi, Antonio: The Four Seasons 63, 67, 69 Volkmann, Robert 51 Wagner, Richard 29, 43–9, 53–4, 56, 58, 63, 66, 69, 71, 87, 90–1, 94, 170, 176–9, 183–6, 233, 245; Der Fleigende Holländer, Overture 78; Der Ring des Nibelungen 266; Parsifal 16, 176, 184–5; ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ 70; Tannhäuser 16, 174–6, 178, 180, 185; Tristan und Isolde 14, 16, 90–3, 180–2, 185, 252 Weber, Carl Maria von: Conzertstück, Op. 79, 67, 283; Overture to Der Freischütz 78 Webern, Anton von 198, 239 Williams, John: Star Wars (dir. Lucas) 233–4 Xenakis, Iannis: Mycenae Polytope 272 Zorn, John 199

Index of terms in aesthetics

absolute 5, 8, 12–13, 27, 32, 42–59, 64, 86–7, 91, 95, 113–14, 161, 260 alienation 116–17, 174, 193, 195, 248 anti-romanticism 12, 16, 169–70, 176–7, 185–6 Apollonian 93, 167 authenticity 9, 13–14, 35–6, 56, 84–5, 98–9, 116–18, 149, 152, 184, 240, 245, 249–53, 263–4, 267, 289 autonomy 4–11, 25, 32, 45, 49–50, 54, 56–7, 62, 98, 100–1, 116, 189, 191, 196–7, 229, 259–60, 284 avant-garde 7, 11, 12, 17, 25, 84–5, 188–200, 269–71 beauty 4–6, 8, 13, 23, 26, 29, 34, 45–6, 53–4, 57, 84–6, 90–5, 99–106, 172, 174–5, 177, 179, 245, 254, 264 classicism 12, 15–16, 31, 33, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51–5, 84, 101, 105, 112, 118, 120, 123, 137, 144–67, 171–2, 183, 241–5, 250, 253, 266, 268, 284, 290 comedy 11, 14, 95–9, 105, 146, 214, 216–7, 230, 242–3, 250, 254–5, 257 dialectics 6, 7, 9, 12, 14–16, 46, 52, 89, 93, 111–41, 148, 158, 171–2, 191, 225–9, 232–4, 286–7 Dionysian 16, 93, 167, 174, 181–2 formalism 1, 4, 7, 26, 56, 146, 204 gender and sexuality 10–12, 56–7, 86–7, 89, 175–6, 180–1, 185, 211, 273, 285, 290, 292 genre 4, 12, 15, 16, 24, 32, 34, 37, 43, 46–8, 50, 56, 64, 72, 74, 76, 78, 87, 127, 135, 144, 148–50, 155, 157, 163, 166, 218, 221 gothic 14, 94, 96–9, 105 grotesque 14, 95–8

hermeneutics 3, 6, 17, 64, 68, 75–9, 199, 204, 251, 282 history 2, 7, 9, 14–18, 25, 46, 62, 64–5, 70, 75, 77, 87, 111–17, 123, 127, 141, 148, 150, 156, 171, 186, 189, 194–5, 199, 205, 217, 229, 252, 262–6, 268, 278, 280–1 idealism 6, 14, 95, 105, 112, 127, 148, 167, 254 ideology 4–9, 11, 23–8, 42–3, 56, 62, 77, 84–6, 100, 105, 111, 118, 148–9, 170–3, 186, 188–9, 192, 199, 203, 221, 262–4, 268–70, 272 imitation 48, 53, 64, 69, 84, 155–8, 177, 205, 241, 260 irony 5, 9, 12, 17–18, 87, 90, 95, 214, 216, 239–58 judgement 8, 12, 15, 23–33, 37–9, 100, 148, 164, 166, 171, 173, 198 kitsch 30, 36, 84, 100, 230, 271 meaning 2, 5, 7–11, 47, 51, 56–7, 64–6, 68, 70–2, 74–5, 96, 116, 119, 128, 134, 149, 172, 210, 217, 221, 226, 239, 251, 260, 263–4, 282–3, 289–92 memory 11, 70, 74, 91, 252 metaphor 2, 12, 14, 52–5, 57, 64–5, 71–8, 89, 101, 140, 211 modernism 6, 8–9, 11, 14, 18, 24–5, 29, 54, 56, 58, 84, 86, 89, 99–100, 111–12, 115, 163, 171, 179, 185–6, 189–90, 193, 195–6, 217, 225, 244, 250–57, 267–70 narrative 12, 13, 15, 17, 29, 49, 52, 56–7, 62–3, 66, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 98, 111, 117–9, 127–8, 135, 140–1, 194, 203–21, 224–34, 242–3, 248, 251, 271, 292

306 • Index of terms in aesthetics nation 30, 56, 69, 93, 127, 148, 166, 184, 261, 264–73, 291 neoclassicism 12, 15, 53, 119, 144–9, 158, 164–7, 177, 186, 200, 250–2 Neue Sachlichkeit 186, 230 objectivity 6, 29, 32, 54, 75, 77, 117–19, 135, 146, 148, 159, 161–4, 167, 173–4, 179, 212, 216, 232 organicism 5, 8, 29, 36, 50, 54, 119, 163, 184, 225, 228, 232, 266 pastoral 68, 70, 71, 104, 146, 210, 212, 216, 264 perception 53, 64, 66–7, 225, 234 pleasure 10–11, 20 n.17, 26–8, 35, 53–4, 84–7, 91, 95–7, 100–3, 144, 154, 175–8, 182, 282, 286, 291 poetics 4, 6, 254, 260, 267 politics 5–9, 56, 85, 100, 112, 164, 166, 196, 260, 264–5, 268, 271–2, 284, 286 postmodernism 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 24–5, 56, 86, 89, 97, 111, 141, 189–90, 199, 217, 252–3 primitivism 11, 49, 177, 182, 184, 268, 270 program music 12–14, 42–52, 56, 57, 62–80, 203–6, 218, 225 propaganda 12, 18, 100, 259–74 romanticism 1, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18, 31, 90, 145, 148, 170–86, 248, 251–2, 254, 283–4 semantics 10, 43–7, 55, 57, 64, 68–71, 208, 239, 279

sensuousness 7, 34–5, 62, 77, 97, 210, 213, 217 sentimentalism 5, 14, 26, 96, 99–106 somatics 10–11, 19, 290–2 subjectivity 1, 7, 36, 50, 75, 86, 97, 105, 117, 119, 127, 148, 221, 231, 253, 284 sublime 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 53, 84–106, 193, 228, 254, 288 taste 15, 18, 24–8, 35, 99–100, 164–6, 254, 268, 270, 272–4, 278, 286, 288 topic 11, 14, 26, 51, 64, 68–78, 120, 128–30, 133–4, 206, 210, 212–13, 216 tradition 117–9, 145, 149–50, 157, 165, 172, 175, 179–80, 185–6, 188–96, 198–200, 203, 205, 245, 247, 249–50, 253, 255, 262–7, 270–2 tragedy 48, 95, 97, 119, 127, 146, 182, 191–2, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 253 transcendentalism 5, 8, 24, 32, 42, 46, 63, 86–9, 93, 97, 103, 114–16, 210, 243, 250, 254, 284, 288–9 trivial 7, 31, 34–5, 64, 87, 97, 99, 140 truth 4, 8–10, 23, 34, 36, 48, 79, 85, 90–1, 95, 98, 100, 114, 116–18, 134, 140, 156, 163, 172, 218, 245, 250–2, 254, 260, 264 value 5, 7–9, 11, 12–13, 15, 18, 23–39, 44–5, 51–5, 58, 86, 95, 99, 148–9, 151, 155, 164–5, 171, 198–200, 204, 214, 216, 226, 228, 251, 253, 259–60, 264, 268, 271–3, 286 virtuosity 10–12, 18–19, 34, 56, 87, 119, 151, 164, 191, 199, 276–92

General index

Abbate, Carolyn 20 n.17, 206–8 Adorno Theodor W. 2, 3, 9, 14–15, 25, 30, 35, 84, 94, 99–100, 111–12, 115–20, 123, 127–8, 135, 137, 140, 149, 208–9, 211–12, 221, 225, 254, 276, 285 Agawu, V. Kofi 2, 69, 120 Allanbrook, Wye J. 163 Allsobrook, David 281 Almén, Byron 204, 208, 212, 214, 216 Altenburg, Detlef 64 Altman, Rick 224 Apollinaire, Guillaume 97 Aristotle 29, 79, 205, 213, 234, 260, 264 Armstrong, Isobel 5–6 Arnim, Achin von 266 Bakhtin, Mikhail 205, 208, 288 Bal, Mieke 214 Balázs, Béla 225 Baraka, Amiri 192–3 Baranovitch, Nimrod 263 Barthes, Roland 205, 208, 213, 219, 229 Bartsch, Cornelia 285 Baudelaire, Charles 95, 250 Baudrillard, Jean 12, 24 Bauman, Zygmunt 28, 267 Baumgarten, Alexander 4 Beardsley, Monroe C. 29 Beiser, Frederick, 113 Benjamin, Walter 9, 85, 115, 117 Bernstein, Susan 281, 282, 284 Bérubé, Michael 5 Betz, Albrecht 285 Bishop, Lloyd 242 Blainville, Charles Henri 53 Boethius 155 Bohlman, Philip 267 Bonds, Mark Evan 46, 55, 86–7, 241

Booker, Christopher 203, 217–18 Borchmeyer, Dieter 171 Bordas, Éric 284 Bordwell, David 226, 227 Born, Georgina 10, 28 Bourdieu, Pierre 12, 25, 27–8 Bowie, Andrew 1, 6, 181, 254–5 Boyé 53 Brendel, Franz 14–15, 112 Brentano, Clemens 266 Brooks, Peter 4 Brossard, Sébastien de 278 Brown, Royal 224, 227 Buhler, James 227, 233 Burch, Noël 229 Bürger, Peter 17, 188–90, 196–7, 199 Burke, Edmund 84, 97 Burney, Charles 278 Burnham, Scott 89, 90, 218, 241, 245 Burns, Ken 199 Burt, George 226 Busby, Thomas 278 Cahn, Peter 155 Camper, Fred 226 Canetti, Elias 285 Caplin, William 124 Castiglione, Baldasar 163, 165 Cecchi, Alessandro 232 Chabanon, Guy de 53 Chennevière, Rudhyar D. 251 Chion, Michel 224, 226 Christgau, Robert 35 Chua, Daniel 241 Cicero 155 Clair, René: Sous les Toits de Paris 228 Clarke, David 6 Clarke, Eric 74–5, 210

308 • General index Clegg, Johnny 262 Cockburn, Christopher 263 Cocteau, Jean 99 Colbert, Stephen 9–11 Collins, Matthew 271 Cone, Edward T. 205, 209 Constant, Benjamin 95 Cook, Nicholas 65, 72, 73, 203, 209, 221 Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Schoedsack: King Kong 228 Corcoran, Stephen 26 Cox, Arnie 211 Currie, James 11 Curtius, Ernst Robert 15, 149, 158 Curtiz, Michael: Casablanca 228 Cusick, Suzanne 272 Dada 189 Dahlhaus, Carl 3, 7, 12, 15, 29, 31, 56, 63, 66, 88–9, 111, 115, 120–1, 123, 126–7, 135, 140, 179, 185 Danto, Arthur 1, 85 Danuser, Hermann 253 Darcy, Warren 221 Daverio, John 248 Davies, Bronwyn 280 Davies, Stephen 1, 3, 68 Davis, Nick 232 Dell’Antonio, Andrew 8 Demme, Jonathan: The Silence of the Lambs 228 DeNora, Tia 28 Derrida, Jacques 86 Dickens, Charles 259–60; Great Expectations 216–7, 221 Dill, Heinz 248–9 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock 100–1 Ditson, Oliver 279 Donnelly, Ken 226 Drewett, Michael 263 Duchamp, Marcel 189 Dudow, Slatan: Kuhle Wampe 229 Eagleton, Terry 5 Eastenders 214 Eco, Umberto 259 Eichendorff, Joseph von16, 173–5 Eichhorn, Andreas 89 Eisenstein, Sergei 225–6 Eisler, Hans 225, 229 Eisner, Lotte 230

Epic of Gilgamesh 218 Everist, Mark 203, 209 Fauconnier, Gilles 14, 72–3 Fellini, Federici 226–7 Feuerbach, Ludwig 54, 115 Fink, Robert 89 Fisher, Alexander 265 Flaubert, Gustav 99 Fleming, Victor: The Wizard of Oz 228 Floros, Constantin 212 folk music 36, 69, 248–9, 262–3, 266–8, 270–3 Frampton, Daniel 228 Franklin, Peter 249 Freud, Sigmund 96–7 Frith, Simon 8, 28 Fubini, Enrico 4 Fukuyama, Francis 141 Fulcher, Jane 105 funk 10–11 Fussell, Paul 267 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 199–200 Galand, Joel 4–5, 8 Galilei, Vincenzo 156 Gannon, Susanne 280 Gautier, Théophile 95 Gendren, Bernard 190, 192 Genette, Gérard 14, 67 Gilbert, Shirli 263 Girard, René 188 Giraud, Albert 251 Goehr, Lydia 1, 32, 62, 254 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 171 Gooley, Dana 19, 280–4, 288–9, 292 Gorbman, Claudia 224–5, 227, 228, 229, 232 Gordon, Daniel 166 Gracyk, Theodore 8, 30–1, 34, 37–8 Greenfeld, Liah 266 Greimas, A. J. 205 Grey, Thomas 184 Griffiths, Steven 33 Grossmann, Linde 285 Guy, Nancy 264 Habeneck, François-Antoine 94 Habermas, Jürgen 115 Hale, Thomas 261–2 Halm, August 52 Hamera, Judith 291–2 Hamilton, Andy 2–3

General index • 309 Hanslick, Eduard 43–6, 48, 50–7, 63, 89, 90; On the Musically Beautiful [Vom Musikalisch-Schönen] 14, 16, 26, 29, 44–6, 51–5, 91, 176–7, 184 Harrison, Daniel 37 Hatten, Robert 14, 68, 74–5, 205, 208, 210 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1, 2, 16, 45–6, 52, 54, 94–5, 111–18, 123–4, 127, 135, 140–1, 161, 171–3, 180, 255, 279; Lectures on Aesthetics 172, 286; The Phenomenology of Mind 14–15, 113–15, 254; Science of Logic 113–14, 140 Heidegger, Martin 77 Heine, Heinrich 281 Heister, Hanns-Werner 278 Hennion, Antoine 19, 277, 281, 284, 287 Hepokoski, James 124, 221 Hesmondhalgh, David 11 Hinton, Stephen 87, 89 Hitchcock, Alfred: Vertigo 227; Lifeboat 228 Hoeckner, Berthold 115 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 32, 35–6, 42–3, 46, 53, 57, 86, 88–9, 94, 103, 170, 172, 242, 248 Hooper, Giles 6 Horace 155–6 Horkheimer, Max 99–100, 115, 172 Howard, Keith 262 Hucke, Helmut 161 Hugo, Victor 95 Huyssen, Andreas 99 Hyde, Martha 158 Jacob, Max 97 Jacq-Mioche, Sylvie 284 Jakobson, Roman 205 Jameson, Frederic 86 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 19, 277, 283 jazz 1, 17, 56, 150, 188–222, 270, 284, 289, 291 Jean Paul see Richter Joffé, Roland: The Killing Fields 228 Johnson, Mark 72 Johnson, Samuel 278 Joughin, John J. 6 Kabisch, Thomas 281 Kalbeck, Max 249 Kant, Immanuel 1–3, 5, 8, 12, 48, 63, 90, 93–7, 100, 112–14, 163, 239, 255; Critique of Judgement 26–8, 33–4, 38, 53–5, 84, 86–7; Critique of Pure Reason 114 Karl, Gregory 206–7, 209 Kassabian, Annahid 224, 227, 228, 234

Keats, John 85 Keefe, Simon 163 Keeling, Geraldine 281 Keller, Hans 99, 100 Kennan, George 269 Kerman, Joseph 204, 209, 218 Kermode, Frank 213 Kim Il Sung 262 Kinderman, William 208 Kivy, Peter 1, 3, 46, 64–7, 90, 239 Klauwell, Otto 63 Kopiez, Reinhard 285 Korsyn, Kevin 6–7, 9–10, 54 Kracauer, Siegfried 230 Kramer, Lawrence 4, 11, 19, 29, 56–7, 67, 75, 221, 240, 277, 281–2, 287–91 Kraus, Karl 249–50 Kretzschmar, Hermann 57 Krims, Adam 4 Kristeva, Julia 86 Krushchev, Nikita 270 Kunze, Stefan 163 Küster, Konrad 280 Lacan, Jacques 227 Lack, Russell 226, 228 Lakoff, George 14, 72, 74 Lamač, Carl: Die von Rummelplatz 230 Langer, Suzanne K. 66 Lamb, Charles 42–3 Laube, Matthew 265 Leppert, Richard 7, 19, 281–2, 289 Lethen, Helmut 167 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 172, 207, 212 Levinson, Jerrold 1, 3, 14, 67, 228 Lippman, Edward 3–4 Liska, James Jacób 214 Lochhead, Judy 86 Lommatzsch, Carl 287 Longinus 85–6, 90 Longyear, Rey 242 Lucas, George: Star Wars 233–4 Lukács, Georg 171–2, 254 Lyotard, Jean-François 8, 84, 86, 89 McClary, Susan 7, 10–11, 56–7, 89 McCreless, Patrick 205, 219 McKay, Nicholas 64 Mäkelä, Tomi 280–1 Mallarmé, Stéphane 56, 95, 205 Malpas, Simon 6 Man, Paul de 85

310 • General index Mann, Michael: The Insider 228 Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm 145 Martin, George R.R.: Game of Thrones 214 Marx, A. B. 15, 63, 77, 94, 123 Marx, Karl 14, 115–16, 171 Maus, Fred 205, 208–9, 219–21 Meelberg, Vincent 214 Meltzer, Richard 33–6 Mersenne, Marin 277 Metzner, Paul 278, 281 Meyer, Leonard B. 29 Michaelis, Christian Friedrich 33, 50, 89 Micznik, Vera 207–8 Middleton, Richard 8 Milbank, John 86 Milošević, Slobodan 271 Modiano, Raimonda 95 Momigny, Jérôme-Joseph de 204, 208 Monelle, Raymond 14, 70–1 Moore, Allan F. 8 Moore, John W. 278–9 Moore, Rachel 267–8 Morcom, Anna 263–4 Moreno, Joseph 272 Moritz, Karl Philipp 50 Mottram, Ron 226 Moysan, Bruno 281, 292 Mundt, Theodor 279 Murphy, Richard 190 Mussolini, Benito 166 Nabokov, Vladimir 209, 213 Nägeli, Hans-Georg 31, 34 Nancy, Jean-Luc 85 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 206–8, 211–12, 218, 220, 228 Neubauer, John 53 Neumeyer, David 224, 227–8, 230–1 Newcomb, Anthony 205, 216 Ngai, Sianne 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich 23, 56, 170, 174, 181–5, 250, 285; The Birth of Tragedy 16, 93, 179, 181–3; The Case of Wagner 183–4 Nooshin, Laudan 263 Nordau, Max 177, 184 Novalis 170, 254–5 O’Dea, Jane 279 Oettinger, Rebecca 265 Olwage, Grant 262 Paddison, Max 119, 221 Pasler, Jann 213

Peirce, Charles Sanders 69, 71 Pincherle, Marc 280 Plato 54, 95, 155, 260, 264 Plutarch 150 Poggioli, Renato 188–90 Pölitz, Karl Heinrich Ludwig 279 Pollock, Jackson 195 Prendergast, Roy 226 Propp, Vladimir 205 Pyper, Brett 262 Quintilian 155 Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 270–1 Ratner, Leonard 14, 68–70 Reimer, Erich 285 Reynaud, Cécile 281, 284 Reynolds, Christopher 220 Richter, Hans 51 Richter, Jean Paul 86, 94, 97–8, 241–3, 248, 254 Ricoeur, Paul 85 Rink, John 208 Rivet, Jacques: Duelle 227; Noroît 227 Rochlitz, Friedrich 33, 34, 36–7 rock 7–8, 12–13, 25, 32–9, 47, 209, 263, 270–2 Rodano, Ronald 197 Rosen, Charles 112, 157, 243 Rupprecht, Philip 218 Saffle, Michael 281 Safranski, Rüdiger 167, 172 Samson, Jim 189, 280–3, 287, 290 Saunders, Thomas 230 Schelling, Friedrich 170: System of Transcendental Idealism, 254 Scheibe, Johann Adolph 279 Scherzinger, Martin 8–10 Schiller, Friedrich 23, 27–8, 32, 85, 89–90, 101, 167 Schilling, Gustav 279 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 86–7, 170 Schlegel, Friedrich 170, 242–3, 253, 254 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 1, 279, 287 Schmalfeldt, Janet 123–4, 135–8 Schmidt, Matthias 161 Schmitt, Carl 171 Schopenhauer, Arthur 1, 16, 52–6, 63, 91, 178–81, 245; The World as Will and Representation 47–8, 84, 179, 181 Scruton, Roger 2–3, 25, 30, 57, 63, 66 Seidl, Wilhelm 50, 53 Shadwell, Thomas: The Virtuoso 278

General index • 311 Shakespeare, William 259 Sheinberg, Esti 253 Shusterman, Richard 10–11 Siodmak, Robert: Abschied 231–2 Sipe, Thomas 260 Sisman, Elaine 162–3 Smith, Adam 154–5 Solomon, Maynard 89–90 Solomon, Robert C. 100–1 Spitzer, Michael 3, 15, 120, 220–1 Staël, Madame de 94–5 Stalin, Joseph 268, 270 Steiner, Wendy 85 Stendhal 171 Sternberg, von: Der blaue Engel 229 Sterne, Laurence: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 241–2, 254 Stilwell, Robynn 217–18 Stobart, Henry 261 Strohm, Reinhard 50 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard 8, 10, 161 Sulzer, Johann Georg 32, 88 surrealism 189 Tan, Shzr Ee 263 Tarasti, Eero 205 Taruskin, Richard 7–8, 49–50, 58, 87, 103, 111, 141, 171, 185–6, 288 Taylor, Charles 111, 115 Thompson, Kristin 226 Tieck, Ludwig 46, 53, 170, 242 Tinctoris 155 Todorov, Tzvetan 213, 216, 269 Tomlinson, Gary 4 Turner, Mark 14, 72–3 Vattimo, Gianni 23 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 95, 279, 287

Wackenroder, Wilhelm 46, 53, 170 Walser, Rob 287 Walton, Benjamin 93–4 Walton, Kendall 67, 74 Wangermée, Robert 280, 283 Wartenburg, Thomas 287, 291 Watkins, Holly 36 Weber, William 280 Wegman, Rob 155 Welles, Orson: Touch of Evil, 226 Wendt, Amadeus 33, 36 Weiskel, Thomas 95 Wheelock, Gretchen 241 White, Hayden 205, 209 Wicke, Peter 7–8, 285 Wierzbicki, James 226 Wilcox, John 95 Williams, Alastair 3 Williams, Paul 35 Williams, Raymond 5 Willis, Ellen 33, 37 Winckelmann, Johann 95 Winters, Ben 226, 228–9, 232 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 254–5 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy 278 Wurth, Brillenberg Kiene 86 Wyler, William: The Best Years of Our Lives 232 Yang Mu 263 Young, Terence: Dr No 218 Zangwill, Nick 1–2, 3 Zbikowski, Lawrence 72 Zelter, Carl Friedrich 163 Zhdanov, Andrie 270 Zich, Otakar 1 Žižek, Slavoj 93, 233

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