Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge - Softcover

Kramer, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520207009 ISBN 13: 9780520207004

Publisher: University of California Press, 1996

Synopsis

A leading cultural theorist and musicologist opens up new possibilities for understanding mainstream Western art music―the "classical" music composed between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries that is, for many, losing both its prestige and its appeal. When this music is regarded esoterically, removed from real-world interests, it increasingly sounds more evasive than transcendent. Now Lawrence Kramer shows how classical music can take on new meaning and new life when approached from postmodernist standpoints.

Kramer draws out the musical implications of contemporary efforts to understand reason, language, and subjectivity in relation to concrete human activities rather than to universal principles. Extending the rethinking of musical expression begun in his earlier Music as Cultural Practice, he regards music not only as an object that invites aesthetic reception but also as an activity that vitally shapes the personal, social, and cultural identities of its listeners.

In language accessible to nonspecialists but informative to specialists, Kramer provides an original account of the postmodernist ethos, explains its relationship to music, and explores that relationship in a series of case studies ranging from Haydn and Mendelssohn to Ives and Ravel.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Kramer teaches in the Humanities Department at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, and is an active composer. He has published two previous books with California: Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984) and Music as Cultural Practice (1990). Both are available in paperback.

From the Back Cover

"In this pathbreaking new book, Lawrence Kramer extends the theoretical and scholarly frontiers of musicology with every chapter, each of which explores a different case study in depth. In short, [he] demonstrates repeatedly that classical music is a far more significant force in history than its champions (who want music to transcend 'mere' social formations) usually allow."―Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality

"Kramer continues his project to steer the criticism of Western art music onto the paths of contemporary intellectual discourse. No one is better equipped for the task: Kramer's range is extraordinary, his scholarship impeccable, his arguments incisive. But above all, his values are humane. He cares passionately about this precious musical heritage, and his commitment can be felt on every page, including the dazzling performative and postmodern epilogue."―Walter Frisch, author of The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908

"This book will (I hope) be one of the foundational moments of a thriving and much-needed discourse. Kramer demonstrates the power to interpret that comes with fully integrating up-to-date critical literary theory with musical analysis. The risks he takes are absolutely necessary to our discipline if it is not, along with the music it professes to enshrine, to fade away into total cultural irrelevance and oblivion. Those scholars to whom postmodernism is a liberating and not a frightening concept will welcome this book with uncommon interest."―Robert Fink, founding editor of Repercussions: Critical and Alternative Viewpoints on Music and Scholarship

From the Inside Flap

"In this pathbreaking new book, Lawrence Kramer extends the theoretical and scholarly frontiers of musicology with every chapter, each of which explores a different case study in depth. In short, [he] demonstrates repeatedly that classical music is a far more significant force in history than its champions (who want music to transcend 'mere' social formations) usually allow." Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality

"Kramer continues his project to steer the criticism of Western art music onto the paths of contemporary intellectual discourse. No one is better equipped for the task: Kramer's range is extraordinary, his scholarship impeccable, his arguments incisive. But above all, his values are humane. He cares passionately about this precious musical heritage, and his commitment can be felt on every page, including the dazzling performative and postmodern epilogue." Walter Frisch, author of The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908

"This book will (I hope) be one of the foundational moments of a thriving and much-needed discourse. Kramer demonstrates the power to interpret that comes with fully integrating up-to-date critical literary theory with musical analysis. The risks he takes are absolutely necessary to our discipline if it is not, along with the music it professes to enshrine, to fade away into total cultural irrelevance and oblivion. Those scholars to whom postmodernism is a liberating and not a frightening concept will welcome this book with uncommon interest." Robert Fink, founding editor of Repercussions: Critical and Alternative Viewpoints on Music and Scholarship

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge

By Lawrence Kramer

University of California Press

Copyright © 1996 Lawrence Kramer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520207004
One
Prospects:
Postmodernism and Musicology

Early in 1992, The New Republic published an omnibus review of four recent books by American musicologists under the headline "The Strange New Direction of Music Criticism." The books in question, by Carolyn Abbate, Susan McClary, Rose Subotnik, and myself, are really too diverse to be lumped together so casually, but they are like-minded enough in taking "classical" music out of its cloister to have sent a common signal. Or, rather, to have touched an uncommon nerve: as the headline indicates, the review was no Schumannesque praise of new paths but a warning against being seduced by these books, even those the reviewer rather liked, into straying from the straight path to the strange.1

But was this new direction really so strange? Was it even really new, or more like a renewal of something lost or forgotten? From one standpoint, nothing could be more ordinary than what these books have in common. The new direction in musicology as I understand and support it is simply a demand for human interest. It chafes at the scholastic isolation of music, equally impatient whether heaps of facts or arcane technical anatomies furnish the scholar's frigid cell. "Talk about music," the demand might run, "should bear the impress of what music means to human subjects as thinking, feeling, struggling parts of a world."

But not just any impress will do. The demand for human interest should lead to a revaluation of impressionistic, figurative ways of de-

scribing music, but that will not be enough to satisfy it. The object sought is meaning: concrete, complex, and historically situated. The search runs counter to the widely held principlehalf truism, half aesthetic idealthat music has no such thing: that, as Theodor Adorno put it, "Time and again [music] points to the fact that it signifies something, something definite. Only the intention is always veiled."2 The best way to satisfy the demand for human interest is not to prove this powerful statement false but to reveal it as a historical truth. If the intention is always veiled, that is because we accept a conceptual regime that allows us to experience the human interest of music but forbids us to talk about it. It is because we acceptperhaps even while rejecting it elsewherea hard epistemology that admonishes us not to impose our merely subjective interpretations on the semantic indefiniteness of music. When it comes to musical meaning, the famous dictum of the early Wittgenstein has long been exempt from critique: "Where one cannot speak, there one must be silent."3

This admonition cannot, I think, simply be discarded as a once-estimable but now naive error. Its underlying intention, to make sure that claims to knowledge are open to genuine collegial debate, would be difficult to abandon responsibly. But hard epistemology is oppressively and even phobically narrow in its notion of contestable knowledge. Seeking to protect truth from human fallibility, it defines subjectivity as the negative of objectivity and denies the legitimacy of any claims to knowledge in which traces of the subjectthe historical claimanthave a constructive role. In its zealous will to truth, it promotes the rhetoric of impersonality into an epistemological first principle. (The resulting oddities merit separate study. The hard epistemology of eighteenth-century science, for example, took experimenters' reports on their own bodies to be untainted by subjectivity if the experimenters were genteel males.)4 A more flexible approach might accordingly begin by separating the concept of knowledge from the rhetorical opposition of personal and impersonal expression and resituating it in the historicity of human subjects and their discourses. What if our subjective interpretations of music do not falsify its semantic indefiniteness but recognize its semantic capacities as a cultural practice? What if these interpretations are, not substitutes for a lack of knowledge, but contestable, historically conditioned forms of knowledge?

Hard epistemology depends on oppositions of fact and value, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, that may seem commonsensical but do so only because the routines of their enforcement have long since dulled our ability to see them otherwise. In order to empower new musicologies, to move from the negativity of critique to the positivity of human interest, we need to defamiliarize and deconstruct those oppositions as they apply to music. We need to reconsider what the disjunctive "and" means when we speak of music and language, or the musical and the extramusical, or subjective musical response and objective musical knowledge. There is no problem about acknowledging that each of these contraries has real historical import. The idea is not to make them disappear, which they are unlikely to do. The idea, rather, is to relativize them: to reduce them from first principles to contingent moments, temporary limits, in an ongoing conceptual dynamic.

The best means to do this, I would suggest, lie in the conceptual and rhetorical world of postmodernism. The aim of the present chapter is to characterize that world and to show its specific pertinence to understanding music. The characterization will proceed along broad lines. It will seek to establish an orientation, not to work up capsule summaries of the various modes of deconstruction, feminist theory, archaeology and genealogy of knowledge, psychoanalysis, ideology critique, neopragmatism, history of sexualities, popular culture studies, and so on that make up the crowded field of postmodernist discourses. The characterization will also be somewhat idealized. It will try to encourage, by envisioning, a generalized climate of postmodernist thought that is at best still nascent. At the same time, it will fight shy of promoting that contradiction in terms, an official or normative or definitive postmodernism. The specifically musical half of the chapter will address the disciplinary oppositions mentioned earlier and connect their postmodernist undoing to past and possible future ways of thinking about music.

For those who care about "classical" music, the possibility of tapping new sources of cultural and intellectual energy may come not a moment too soon. It is no secret that, in the United States anyway, this music is in trouble. It barely registers in our schools, it has neither the prestige nor the popularity of literature and visual art, and it squanders its capacities for self-renewal by clinging to an exception-

ally static core repertoire. Its audience is shrinking, graying, and overly palefaced, and the suspicion has been voiced abroad that its claim to occupy a sphere of autonomous artistic greatness is largely a means of veiling, and thus perpetuating, a narrow set of social interests.

In its present constitution as an object of knowledge and pleasure, classical music holds at best an honorific place on the margins of high culture. No one today could write a book such as The Song of the Lark , Willa Cather's novel of 1915: a book that translates the traditional narrative of quest romance into a young woman's career as a diva, a book that climaxes at the Metropolitan Opera as the heroine sings Sieglinde in Act 1 of Wagner's Die Walk|re :

Into one lovely attitude after another the music swept her, love impelled her. And the voice gave out all that was best in it. Like the spring indeed, it blossomed into memories and prophecies, it recounted and foretold, as she sang the story of her friendless life, and of how the thing which was truly herself, "bright as the day, rose to the surface," when in the hostile world she for the first time beheld her Friend. Fervently she rose into the hardier feeling of action and daring. . . . Her impatience for the sword swelled with her anticipation of [Siegmund's] act, and throwing her arms above her head, she fairly tore a sword out of the empty air for him, before Nothung had left the tree.5

The rhetorical and symbolic action of this passage cries out for comment, as does its Wagnermania, but I must focus here on something else. Unlike Sieglinde, Cather's heroine has friends, all of whom are in the audience to witness her triumph, which forges them into a kind of spiritual community. And perhaps the key figure in this community (saved, as best, for last mention) is an uneducated mariachi artist named Spanish Johnny, "a grey-haired little Mexican, withered and bright as a string of peppers beside an adobe door," from whom the heroine in her girlhood learned to associate music with wildness, freedom, and the sharp savor of cultural identity.6

One reason for our remoteness from Cather's image repertoire is the lack, or rather the loss, of a viable public discourse about classical music. During the nineteenth century, esoteric conceptions of music based on its apparent transcendence of signification coexisted and contended with semantic conceptions that imbued music with poetic, narrative, or philosophical meaning and with sociocultural agency.7

Traces of both conceptions appear in The Song of the Lark . But the twentieth century would witness a decisive victory for the esoteric side, at least as far as Western music is concerned. There were many causes for this: the erosion, in the world of sound recording and mass entertainment media, of musical amateurism and the culture of home performance; the complementary failings, literal-mindedness and fancifulness, of the available semantic approaches; the appalling misappropriation of the great Germanic tradition by the Nazis; and the increasing professionalization of musicology, music analysis, and music theory. The net effect was that by the mid-twentieth century, classical music had passed out of the public sphere.

In trying to reverse this development, the so-called new musicology, like most intellectual movements, is in part a revival. But it is not just a reproduction, like a new piece of period furniture. Its purpose is to recapture, not the content of an earlier discourse, but the role of that discourse in society and culture. If it succeeds, it can help revivify classical music by demystifying and de-idealizing it: by canceling the Faustian bargain that lofts the music beyond the contingencies, uncertainties, and malfeasances of life at the cost of utter irrelevance.

To start on a note of candor: the term postmodernism is something of a catchall and susceptible to mere modishness. But it is also, for better or worse, at the center of a momentous intellectual debate. As I use it, loosely following Jean-Frangois Lyotard, the term designates a conceptual order in which grand, synthesizing schemes of explanation have lost their place and in which the traditional bases of rational understandingunity, coherence, generality, totality, structurehave lost their authority if not their pertinence.8 An order so hostile to grand syntheses cannot, of course, willingly admit of one itself. Postmodernist strategies of understanding are incorrigibly interdisciplinary and irreducibly plural. Like the theories that ground them, they make up not a system but an ethos.

These strategies are localized, heterogeneous, contestatory, and contested. Rejecting traditional concepts of both subjectivity and objectivity, they focus on diverse, culturally constructed subjectivities

and objectivities at diverse levels of entitlement. They are critical, both cognitively and politically, of the ideal of impartial reason, and even more so of claims to embody it; they seek to enhance rather than reduce the mobility of meaning. They insist on the relativity of all knowledge, including self-knowledge, to the disciplinesnot just the conceptual presuppositions but the material, discursive, and social practicesthat produce and circulate knowledge. They situate human agency, however problematically, within the dynamic processes, the so-called economies, of such production and circulation rather than in the conscious self-possession of a centered and autonomous human subject. And, though they run the risk of fostering fragmentation and intellectual razzle-dazzle for their own sakes, postmodernist strategies of understanding offer, as I hope to show, new and badly needed means for the criticism and historiography of the arts to meet, not only their aesthetic, but also their social and conceptual responsibilities.

We can get a prismatic, partial, but credible image of the postmodernist ethos by focusing on new turns in the conceptualization of four important topics of modernist thought: rationality, generality, subjectivity, and communication.

Rationality

For present purposes, the term modernism refers to the conceptual order inaugurated by the European Enlightenment. Taking certain Renaissance (or "early modern") tendencies to their logical, if unforeseen, conclusion, the Enlightenment called on impartial reason to know the world and guide its progress, independent of religious and social authority and unintimidated by them. "All things," wrote Diderot in the Encyclopedia , "must be examined, all must be winnowed and sifted without exception and without sparing anyone's sensibilities."9 As this statement testifies, however, the use of reason requires the suspension of other, less severe faculties such as sympathy and imagination. Reason, a function of the subject, operates as objectivity by assuming a sovereign detachment from its objects.

Familiar critiques of modern reason, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment , hone in on this detachment.10 Although the social aim of Enlightenment is emancipatory, the mandate of detachment produces a fatal slippage toward instrumentality and domination. The effect traverses, not only the disci-

plines of knowledge, but also the social class, the bourgeoisie, whose interests the Enlightenment chiefly served. A major effort of modernist thought has been to humanize reason without entirely sacrificing its detachment from its objects, which serves as the measure of truth.

Postmodernist thought abandons the second part of this effort. It repeals the mandate of detachment, resituating reason in the midst of the dense, multiform world that reason seeks to know. It treats claims to knowledge as always also political claims, inescapably affected by and affecting the knower's position in a cultural, social, or psychical matrix. Postmodernist reason always serves interests other than truth and by that means enables itself to serve truth , however imperfectly. Partial perspective is, not a constraint on knowledge, but its very condition, and not coincidentally the condition of sympathy and imagination, too. As Donna Haraway has argued,

The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constituted and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. . . . We do not seek partiality for its own sake, but for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings [its] situated knowledges make possible. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.11

Put in Kantian terms: in the postmodernist ethos, all reason is practical reason.

A few versions of postmodernism, notably those of Jean Baudrillard and Richard Rorty, frankly subordinate the claims of reason to an extreme skeptical relativism. This position has drawn sharp criticism, especially from thinkers on the political left who see it as a hapless surrender to the mystifications of the status quo. Without some appeal to standards of truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, reason and unreason, neither social institutions nor consensus beliefs can competently be criticized.12

The majority of postmodernist discourses, however, take the effort to surmount such skepticism as part of their calling. As Haraway, again, puts it, the challenge is

to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense

commitment to faithful accounts of the "real" world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.13

Admittedly, this conceptual order is a tall one, even given the tough-minded modesty of its social and moral ambitions. At the very least the simultaneity Haraway calls for needs to be reconceived as a fluctuation or negotiation among different standpoints. Yet an order such as this should be feasible if we can get beyond the modernist frame of mind and recognize that contingency and rhetoricity are, not antithetical to reason, but interdependent with it. Each of these terms can illuminate or obscure, adjoin or displace, enable or disable the others. The effect of this interdependence on critical judgment is, not to disarm it, but to expand both its resources and its responsibilities. Truth, in Christopher Norris's words, does not "simply drop out of the picture (or become just a piece of redundant conceptual baggage) as soon as one concedes the fact of its involvement" with contingency and rhetoricity.14 At the same time, contingency and rhetoricity do profoundly alter and ramify the truths involved with them, some of which do drop out of the picture.

Generality

As Diderot suggests with his "all things must be examined," the pursuit of totality is basic to modernist thought. Both conceptual and social reasons can be given for this. Modernist master narratives break with the contents and procedures of dogmatic schemes of explanation but not with their intent to frame a comprehensive system of general truths. The critical force of modern reason could not question this intent because the constructive force of modern reason depended on it. As Jacques Derrida has argued, epistemic modernity depends on the relocation of universals such as form and essence from an "objective" ideality to a human subject "conscious and certain of itself." The result for the subject, the agent of reason, is "a sort of infinite assurance."15 This assurance, meanwhile, proved indispensable to the social and moral aims of modernism, which quickly evolved from breaking through to modernity from some sort of ancien regime to overcoming the alienating effects of modernity itself. Modernism is shot through with nostalgia for the unity of the world it shatters. It seeks to remedy the dissociative modern conditions of secularity, market economics, psychical fragmentation, and

social heterogeneity by advancing the march of science, the ideal of the organic society, or the ideology of the aesthetic.

One way to understand postmodernism is as a critique of this modernist nostalgia, an attempt to enfranchise the forces of decentralization that modernism sought (and seeks) to contain. Given the dangers of a social (de)formation in which mutually indifferent, incomprehending, or hostile groups blindly jostle together, it seems fair to say that this agenda currently makes more sense conceptually than it does practically, a point not lost on critics of postmodernism such as J|rgen Habermas.16 The practical issue is not directly at stake here. Nonetheless, it may be possible to steal a leaf from Habermas's book and regard the heteroglossic discourses of conceptual postmodernism as models for a viable polyphony of social and communicative actions.

These discourses can be said to seek a localized generality . In the place of the comprehensive truths of the master narratives, they install what Lyotard calls the "infinity of heterogeneous finalities" and Haraway the "politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating."17 They operate by assuming that any formulation of or within a master narrative can be read as responsive to a set of more local interestslocal, that is, with respect to the general terms of the master narrative but still general with respect to the phenomena that the narrative seeks to cover. (It can be argued, for instance, that the new science of eighteenth-century microscopy conceived of protozoa in terms meant to protect the image of the human body as smooth and self-contained, an image especially important at that point in the history of manners.)18 One way to write postmodernist criticism, history, or theory is to trace the interplay of the locally general with the local, the general, or both. Only the direct subsumption of the local under the general, which produces what Haraway calls the "god-trick" and the "view from nowhere," drops out of the picture.

Subjectivity

The normative characteristics of the modern subject include identity, boundedness, autonomy, interiority, depth, and centrality. Even acting only as ideals, these supply the subject with much of the "infinite assurance" proper to it. Probably the most familiar of postmodernist claims is that, like it or not, this vaunted subject is an exploded fiction. The true human subject is fragmentary, incoherent, overdetermined, forever under construction in the process of signifi-

cation. But talk of the decentered subject can be cheap; the concept quickly becomes specious if it is used to deny rather than problematize the force and responsibilities of human agency. The rhetoric of denial was much bandied about during the heyday of structuralism. The conclusion of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things provided a watchword, with its questions about the disappearance of "man": "is not . . . [man] in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter on our horizon? . . . Ought we not give up thinking of man, or, to be more strict, think this disappearance of manand the ground of possibility of all the sciences of manas closely as possible in correlation with our concern for language?" Often forgotten was the cautionary statement that followed: "Of course, these are not affirmations; they are at most questions to which it is not possible to reply; they must be left in suspense, where they pose themselves, only with the knowledge that the possibility of posing them may well open the way to a future thought."19 A subject decentered is a subject still.

Decentered subjectivity typically figures in modernist discourse as alienated, deviant, or comic. And it figures often: by one account, decentering itself is a phenomenon of the modern era, born of the Enlightenment principle that "symbolic tradition" can "no longer contain the subject, no longer bind him to its . . . mandate."20 Postmodernism is in one sense the project of undoing modernist efforts to distance and regulate decentering. Its own mandate is to establish the means of conceiving, valuing, and practicing a subjectivity that is unexceptionally mobile and contingent. In the postmodernist ethos, decentering is not a departure from rational, communicative subjectivity but the very condition of its possibility. Human agency arises, not as a radiation from a central core of being, but as a circulation among positions to be taken in discourse and society.

Communication

Modernism favors models of communication based on the capacity of a single medium, language, to classify, refer to, and make truth claims about the real. It does not matter whether these functions are meant to be cherished or begrudged, cultivated or transcended; what matters is their status as foundational. Whatever their social or aesthetic value, they are epistemologically primary. Put in terms suggested by J. L. Austin, modernism privileges the consta -

tive , that which is judged true or false, over the performative , that which is judged successful or unsuccessful.21

Postmodernism takes much of its impetus from the deconstruction of this hierarchy. It privileges neither the constative nor the performative as such, but the recognition that while all constative acts are also performative, not all performative acts are constative. The performative is the "originary" category within which the constative is produced, enfranchised, recast, subverted, and ramified. In this context, communication appears as a process in which socially and discursively situated subjects act by meaning. Communicative acts arise in signification and at the same time constitutively exceed it.22

The effects of this paradigm shift are far-reaching. The constative declines from a first principle to a distinguishing feature of language as a medium, in the process losing some (but by no means all) of its epistemic authority. In its performative or "illocutionary" aspect, language combines with all other media to form a continuous manifoldcall it a field, a dynamic, a current, a network, an economyof communicative acts. Whatever signifies affects, in so doing, the situation(s) recognized or misrecognized, believed or imagined to envelop it.

Both this process itself and the meanings it generates are protean. Particular communicative acts can nearly always be realized in a variety of media and must in principle be capable of varied repetition in an indefinite number of situations. Each must be freshly interpreted rather than merely received, and even the plainest resonates with alternative uses and realizations, with displacements, substitutions, and revaluations, with unexpected alliances and antipathies. This general transposability is a hallmark of the communicative economy. One effect of it is to break down the customary divisions between different spheres of action and the motives and meanings proper to each sphere. In the dynamics of acting by meaning, psychical, social, and cultural agencies can intersect and mutually implicate each other at any point. Meanings and values characteristic of each undergo transferences onto the others and invest the communicative economy as a whole.23

This economy, in sum, is the locus of what Derrida calls dissemination : a process of sowing meaning without hopes of reaping a har-

vest thereby, a broadcasting of seed/semen/semiosis without claims to possession/paternity/mastery of what grows therefrom. "Lapidarily: dissemination figures that which cannot become the father('s)." It can return to no origin, and, unlike polysemia, subtends no ultimate unity, however remote. Dissemination opens out the play of surplus and lack within signification with no prospect of stabilizing or closing it. The result is to unsettle symbolic traditions in both their general and locally general forms, and to do so affirmatively , "undoing the eider quilt of the 'symbolic' . . . [with] all the [attendant] risks, but without the metaphysical or romantic pathos of negativity." Dissemination is "an infraction marking the 'symbolic'": denoting it, characterizing it, defacing it, branding it, inscribing it with countersigns.24

Derrida's uses for the concept of dissemination include a critique of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of a symbolic order. Nonetheless, Lacan's work has been mined effectively and often for the means to think about the communicative economy.25 The focus of this work is not the "self" of individual psychology but the subject as constituted within a multiform process of signification. Particularly in historicizing adaptations, Lacanian psychoanalysis is not a psychology at all. It is, rather, a theory of how certain articulations of identification and alienation, desire and law, continually "mark" the field of communicative action: investing the field as a whole, traversing it (disseminally), and breaking down (but without merely obliterating) the boundaries of its psychical, social, and cultural subfields.

Lacan constructs two "orders" or "registers" of signification which he calls the imaginary and the symbolic. These constitute the terms of a developmental allegory roughly along Oedipal lines, but they are also, and more importantly, coextensive. The subject must negotiate with and within both registers continually. The imaginary involves proximity to nurture and gratification of the kind first sought from the mother; the formation and disruption of identifications (with self-images, imagoes, idealized others); and the privileging of nonlinguistic representation. The symbolic involves acceptance of distance and privation, consequences of the antithesis between law and desire imposed by the father, or rather in the judicial name-of-the-Father; the collapse of identificatory schemes; and the privileging of language. The imaginary values fantasy over discourse while the symbolic does

the reverse; the imaginary misrecognizes its own signifying character while the symbolic signifies avowedly.

Despite all these contrasts, however, the two registers do not form a traditional binary opposition. Both address the same fundamental issuethe subject's constitutive lack of unity and self-presence; they are both more ambivalent than I have been able to indicate here; and they are deeply implicated in each other's workings. Both are also set over against a register outside signification that Lacan designates as the real. But it can nonetheless be said that the imaginary continually revives the hope of plenitude despite continual disturbances and that the symbolic continually disturbs the hope of plenitude despite continual revivals. The musical pertinence of these processes will begin to appear shortly.26

Musical pertinence, indeed, has now resurfaced as my topic. As the preface intimated and the next chapter will show, modernist conceptions of music are profoundly at odds with the postmodernist ethos. No wonder, then, that Harold Powers, delivering the plenary address at the 1990 meeting of the American Musicological Society, should warn his colleagues against rushing incautiously to embrace alien disciplines and perspectives, "casually abandon[ing] traditional modes in favor of ones taken over from easier fields."27 In the process, Powers joked that the belated arrival of newfangled thinking in musicological circles could hardly be explained by the innate dull-wittedness of musicologists. And he was right.

Modernist forms of musical understanding ascribe a unique self-referentiality to music that renders it largely opaque from "extramusical" standpoints. Music must somehow be understood from the inside out. This construal is so basic that failures to observe it, let alone efforts to question it, may plausibly count as deviations from reason and common sense. Traditional musicology warded off such deviations by marginalizing the historico-critical interpretation of music, a disciplinary action (in every sense) whose history is written in Joseph Kerman's watershed text Contemplating Music .28 Such interpretation, to be sure, has since gained a musicological room of its own, but devaluing it is still a healthy practice. One need only say, with

Powers in his address, that "musical data are more resistant to verbal explication than the data in other humanistic fields. Indeed, musicology is only partly one of the humanities, which otherwise deal with the visible and above all the verbal arts."29

The heart of the matter, indeed, is the relationship of music and language. Preceded by both opera, with its perpetual war of music and words, and philosophical aesthetics, with its parallel opposition between music and definite concepts, musicology has presumed that music and language lie on different sides of an epistemological divide. On this point, the dominant esoteric and marginal semantic traditions agree. And consistent with one strain of nineteenth-century valuation (the other will concern us in the next chapter), as well as with traditional figures of cosmic harmony (which will concern us in the chapter after that), the superior position belongs to music.

This polarity comes in both dualistic and dialectical versions, predominantly the former. The latter can be represented by Theodor Adorno, whose little-known essay on the subject actually insists on music's likeness to language, but only the better to insist that this likeness must be transcended. Both music and language ideally seek to integrate concrete "intentions" into a comprehensive whole. Their efforts, however, have very different ends: "Signifying language would say the absolute in a mediated way, yet the absolute escapes it in each of its intentions, which, in the end, are left behind, as finite. Music reaches the absolute immediately, but in the same instant it darkens, as when a strong light blinds the eye, which can no longer see things that are quite visible."30 For present purposes, what is most striking about this statement is not its claimquestionable but familiarthat both language and music seek the absolute, but the buried metaphor by which music completes the sacred quest at which language fails, reaching the quasi-divine light even if only for a fleeting glimpse. Language is defined by the aftermath of what it fails to do, music by the aftermath of what it succeeds in doing. Still, even music does not attain to Dante's privilege of actually gazing into the light, and Adorno's conclusions are accordingly sober, even stoical: "Music suffers from its similarity to language and cannot escape from it. . . . Only music that has once been language transcends its similarity to language."31

The dualistic version of the music-language polarity can be repre-

sented by Charles Seeger. In his well-known formulation, "the core of the [musicological] undertaking is the integration of speech knowledge in general and the speech knowledge of music in particular (which are extrinsic to music and its compositional process) with the music knowledge of music (which is intrinsic to music and its compositional process)."32 Language on the outside, music on the inside: sounded out deconstructively, the passage is a variation on a classic theme. The inside is a figure of music as a full, immediate presence, music in the metaphysical position of form or essence. The phrase "music knowledge of music" is a circle that fuses the terms for reflection and immediacy. The first "music," designating a means of knowledge, folds over on the second "music," designating the object of knowledge. Knowledge itself, both conceptually and rhetorically, is enveloped by the identity of, fills the (non-)interval between, the one music and the other.

In contrast, the outside is a figure of language as rupture. The phrase "speech knowledge of music" is a series of isolated terms, monads alienated from each other, lumpy substantives. Knowledge is abraded by the nonidentity between speech as the means and music as the object of knowledge. Like "music knowledge of music," "speech knowledge of music" places music in the metaphysical position, but this time as precisely that form or essence which speech cannot capture. In a neat departure from traditional usage, speech, usually a metaphysical term, the privileged figure of presence, is displaced by music.

Seeger's opposition between language and music is exemplary and quite helpful in the lucidity of its underlying logic. Beyond a certain point, all too quickly reached, language and music cannot (or is it must not?) mix. The fact that language has, and music lacks, a constative dimension becomes foundational and determinative. Language is denied access to music, it cannot represent musical reality; music, indeed, becomes the very means by which the epistemological limits of language, that would-be omnivore, are set. (Here Seeger's dualism and Adorno's dialectic converge.) But if this is so, it leaves musicologists with only two disciplinary choices. Either they can use language to present positive knowledge about the contexts of musicits notation, provenance, performance venues and practices, material and

mechanical reproduction, etc.or they can develop a technical vocabulary that asymptotically draws language so close to the axis of "music knowledge" that musical style and structure can be studied with a minimum of misrepresentation. Any effort to speak about or like or in some sense with music rather than merely around it exceeds the acceptable mandate of language. Such efforts must be treated as rhetorical rather than descriptive, as subjective rather than scientific: treated, that is, as criticism.33

This rather dry procedural bifurcation tends to work in combination with, and perhaps to rationalize, something more impassioned. Since the early nineteenth century, the difference between music and language has been taken as a sign that the experience of music, or more exactly of musical "masterpieces," is a venue of transcendence. Originally, this attitude involved a naively literal replacement of religion by music. As Carl Dahlhaus puts it, commenting on an exemplary text by W. H. Wackenroder, "whereas music, in the form of church music, used to partake of religion as revealed in the 'Word,' it now, as autonomous music capable of conveying the 'inexpressible,' has become religion itself." Gradually, however, the religious truth signified by autonomous music is effaced by the very autonomy that is, or had once been, its signifier. Where "strict concentration on the work as self-contained musical process"34 once meant the apprehension of the work in its unworldliness, the same concentration now means the apprehension of the innate character, the complex unity-in-diversity, of the musical process itself. To delineate that character would eventually become the goal of musical analysis, which would thus assume the role, at least ideally, of directing the aesthetic cognition of music.

Whether inflected dryly, to create the necessity of positivist and formalist musicology, or fervently, to invest music with the glamour of what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence, the opposition of music and language is untenable from a postmodernist perspective. Neither linguistic constatation nor musical immediacy can empower that opposition, constatation because it is no longer foundational for language use, and immediacy because it is no longer either extralinguistic or unworldly. Once music and language are understood, not as antitheses divided by the lack or possession of constative power, but as

common elements in the communicative economy, their differences become practical, not radical. Their common resort to certain patterns of inflection, expression, and material and structural rhythm becomes more palpable, the cultural work they do as modes of discourse more accessible. Similarly, once the communicative economy is understood to operate as a continual interanimation of psychical, social, and cultural agencies, immediacy takes on a whole new character. It no longer dwells in a special place or medium, can no longer be opposed to reflection, and, in particular, can no longer be opposed to language. Immediacy becomes a performative effect .

It follows from this that musical immediacy, however distinctive and significant we may acknowledge it to be, cannot ground the putative unworldliness of music, either in the strong form that treats music as a numinous presence or in the weak form that acknowledges music to be contextually situated but still affirms a "relative autonomy" that allows some works or styles to transcend the limits of their contexts. Neither music nor anything else can be other than worldly through and through. From a postmodernist perspective, music as musicology has conceived it simply does not exist.

What's more, musical immediacy cannot be taken uncritically as the authorizing locus for the study of music. As a performative effect, such immediacy functions to empower the persons, institutions, and social groups in control of its production. In mystified or idealized form, the same immediacy can become a powerful means of ideological seduction or coercion, not least for those who find it most empowering or liberating.

This is not to say, emphatically not, that immediacy, musical or otherwise, is something spurious and pernicious that must be deconstructed on sight. The last thing a postmodernist musicology wants to be is a neo-Puritanism that offers to show its love for music by ceasing to enjoy it. But it is to say that what we call musical experience needs to be systematically rethought, that the horizons of our musical pleasure need to be redrawn more broadly, and that the embeddedness of music in networks of nonmusical forces is something to be welcomed rather than regretted. Those projects can only be achieved through modes of hermeneutic and historical writing that are always also criti-

cal, in the dual sense of performing both criticism and critique: modes of writing that, while conceding and indeed affirming their own "rhetorical" and "subjective" character, rigorously seek to position musical experience within the densely compacted, concretely situated worlds of those who compose, perform, and listen.35

But surely, it might be argued, music itself is the best refutation of this postmodernist position. Music is still the most immediate of all aesthetic experiences, however we relativize the concept of immediacy, and words, do what they might, are still unable to capture the character, texture, and force of compelling music attentively heard. If the first clause of this response simply begs the questiondifferent things hold different people spellbound, and the fact of spellbindingness is not in question, only what it involvesthe second clause rings true. Its truth, however, says nothing special about music. Language cannot capture musical experience because it cannot capture any experience whatever, including the experience of language itself. Language always alienates what it makes accessible; the process of alienation, the embedding of a topic in supposedly extrinsic discourses, is precisely what produces the accessibility. Describing the experience of reading Proust's Within a Budding Grove , with its leitmotif of the sea at Balbec, is just as difficult as describing the experience of listening to Debussy's La mer or, for that matter, of passing the time from dawn till noon on the sea.

The emergence of postmodernist musicologies will depend on our willingness and ability to read as inscribed within the immediacy-effects of music itself the kind of mediating structures usually positioned outside music under the rubric of context. These "structuring structures"locally general dispositions, tendencies, or cultural tropeswould appear as forces both deployed by and deploying music, deployed by and deploying discourse about music.36 At the same time the differences between text and context, the aesthetic and the political or social, the "inside" and the "outside" of the musical moment, the hermeneutic and the historiographical, would be (re)constituted as provisional and permeable boundaries destined to disappear in and through the heteroglot weaving of musicological discourse. The music "itself," whether studied at the level of work, style, or genre, would be decentered in that discoursesometimes more

so, sometimes lessbut not thereby relinquished as an occasion of pleasure, understanding, or valuation.

For a productive way to theorize this postmodernist version of musical immediacy, we can return, but with a twist, to Lacanian psychoanalysis. I have suggested elsewhere that musical immediacy behaves like the Lacanian imaginary, "the illusory, if inescapable, immediacy of the ego." Like the process of imaginary identification, music offers a seamless band of pleasure and presence, but nonetheless one "open to disruption by recurrent intimations that the supposedly self-present ego is always already alienated, that its desire is the desire of (desire for, desire determined by) the Other."37 This suggestion may be developed further with the help of Julia Kristeva's rewriting of Lacan's distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. Noting that both of these "registers" of signification imply the separation of subject and object, Kristeva focuses on a register of supposedly earlier origin that she calls the semiotic. Its character is given by the experience of drive, or rather of the multiplicity of drives in collision and interchange; it is impulsive, rhythmic, dynamic, plural, untotalized, supercharged. In these respects it is very like music when music excites us most, and Kristeva in fact calls it musical.38

Its music, however, is never heard as such. The semiotic appears only to subjects who have already entered the symbolic order of culture, and precisely by the rhythmic-impulsive disruption of that order. The very existence of the semiotic as an independent register is a retrospective hypothesis, as Kristeva is the first to insist. Like Derrida's dissemination, Kristeva's semiotic appears only in the infractions that mark the symbolic. One function of the symbolic, therefore, is to bind or channel the powerful currents of semiotic energy, a process that, because it is always unstable, also releases and articulates those energies.

The yield of immediacy that accompanies this process is what Kristeva designates as music and what grounds the metaphorical identity of the musical and the semiotic. Real music, however, musica practica , stands apart from this figurative deployment (something Kristeva herself fails to recognize). Music is, after all, a cultural practice. It is

distinctive, even unique, in that its symbolic function includes the signification of the semiotic, but it, too, necessarily binds symbolically the semiotic energies that it signifies as unbound.

The practical consequences of these interrelationships show up strikingly in some clinical observations of the neurologist Oliver Sacks. Playing, singing, and listening to music, Sacks found, or even hearing it in the mind's ear, could relieve impairments in speech, mobility, and writing in Parkinsonian patients. Important as this relief was somatically, it was even more important psychically; in the words of one patient, "It was like suddenly remembering myself, my own living tune. . . . [What music imparted] was not just movement, but existence itself." In Sacks's terms, what the music imparts is a "naturalness in posture and action" correlative to "the living 'I' ";39 in Kristevan terms, the gift imparted is the primordial jouissance (quasi-orgasmic, unrepresentable bliss) of the semiotic, the continuity of presubjective desire and signification.

Not just any music, though, can accomplish this. "Rhythmic impetus" has to be present, writes Sacks, but it "has to be 'embedded'" in a formal pattern the listener can grasp unreflectively. Raw "banging," indeed, could prompt pathological jerking. For Sacks's patients, schooled in the American popular music of the 1920s, the embedding form was melody.40 In other words, for these listeners the rhythmic pulsions of the semiotic became available as music only when they were articulated against and through the discriminate symbolic bounds of melody, which simultaneously took its own "living" quality from the pulsions it embedded.

But an articulation of this type has yet a further, and even more important, dimension. Even assuming that the dynamism of a musical passage is properly embedded, whether in melody or some other configuration as the listener's musical culture prescribes, not all such passages can become transparent in their semiotic pulsions. Only the music that listeners identify closely with their own lives, music they find meaningful, can do this. The semiotic is articulated as an immediacy only through an already-significant symbolic that endows the immediacy of the semiotic with an already-reflective meaning. All musical styles, accordingly, as well as certain musical works, embody a certain relationship to the signifying process. This relationship can prompt

and reward interpretation, both in general terms and more abundantly by producing specific sites of interplay between the semiotic (or the imaginary) and the symbolic. These sites are where music, and for that matter visual and verbal discourse, are simultaneously at their most immediate and most explicitly disseminal. The occasions of surplus on which one register overflows into the other, and the occasions of deficit on which one register breaks down into the other, thus form a cardinal source of what I have elsewhere called hermeneutic windows, sites of engagement through which the interpreter and the interpreted animate one another.41

What we see or hear at such windows can, of course, always be recuperated for the symbolic order. But by resisting or deferring that recuperation, that perhaps inevitable normalization, we can understand more than the symbolic order allows. And by that means, since no one can do other than inhabit the symbolic, we can learn to inhabit it with a disseminal energy that may in the end transform it. This project, which I would like to claim as the utopian project of postmodernism, treats as emancipatory the principle that subjectivity is, as we now say so easily, "culturally constructed." It seeks to install a credible, value-laden human agency where the irreducibly multiple and heterogeneous determinants of this becoming-constructed engage in their fullest interplay.

To do this for music in particular, we need to venture a series of radical presuppositions. The first begins with the recognition that music participates actively in the cultural construction of subjectivityan idea popular at the end of the nineteenth century but badly eroded in the twentieth.42 The process of musical subject formation may involve the conditions of composition, performance, reproduction, or reception; my concern here is primarily with the last, understood as part of the communicative economy.43

Deeds of music seek receptive listeners. As part of its illocutionary force, the music addresses a determinate type of subject and in so doing beckons that subject, summons it up to listen. The subject is determined by, or as, a position in relation to historically specific possibilities of discourse, action, and desire. The musical summons may be issued at the level of style, genre, form, or "the work itself"; it may appeal to social, sexual, psychical, or conceptual interests. Listeners

agree to personify a musical subject by responding empathetically to the music's summons. Their pleasure in listening thereby becomes a vehicle of acculturation: musical pleasure, like all pleasure, invites legitimation both of its sources and of the subject position its sources address. If I enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, my pleasure coaxes me to find edification in violent struggle, spiritual value in heroic ordeal. If I enjoy Ice-T's rap revenge-tragedy "Cop Killer," my pleasure coaxes me to find edification in violent scapegoating, social value in ritual sacrifice. That my pleasure may include an appreciation of organic form in the Fifth or visual rhythm in the "Cop Killer" video does not interdict the processes of subject formation, but interacts with them. The character of aesthetic pleasure varies with that of the subject who enjoys it, and vice versa.

To some degree, the act of personifying the musical subject situates the listener within that subject's cultural order. Just what degree depends on how much reciprocity there is between the music's repertoire of communicative actions and the listener's. It should be recognized, however, that the listener's empathy in itself posits a substantial reciprocity, without which the musical summons cannot well be heard, let alone answered. What the listener hears and says from the musical subject's position constitutes knowledge of the music, a knowledge that cannot be contrasted or subordinated to an external norm. The knowledge itself is situational, and necessarily so; claims issued from an "objective," extrasituational position do not count as knowledge here, even if they are conceded to be true.

When Helen Schlegel, protagonist of E. M. Forster's Howards End , listens to the transition from the third movement to the Finale of Beethoven's Fifth, she reflects that "Beethoven took hold of the goblins [of the third movement] and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and thenhe blew with his mouth and they were scattered!"44 Although Helen is no musicologist, she can hear a turning point as a change of mode. More importantly, she can hear the change of mode as communicative action and connect what she hears to the understanding that appearing in person is the primary technique or figure of human agency in the Fifth, and

that the locus of appearing in person is a threshold, a transitional passage. (No one, meanwhile, could fail to observe that in "Cop Killer," Ice-T, too, appears in person.)

Admittedly, this account of the musical subject and its knowledge is overidealized and therefore too simple. For one thing, the possibility of knowledge implies the possibility of error; the listener as personified subject can always listen badly, or listen well and report on it badly. Errors, however, may be dialectical means as well as dead ends. An error may ignite a debate that advances knowledge in correcting the error, or a wrong claim may be made on the right topic, confirming or revealing the pertinence of the topic. When Wagner wants to justify a long hold on the fermata in the second measure of Beethoven's Fifth, he conjures up "the voice of Beethoven . . . from the grave" to enjoin, "Hold my fermata long and terribly."45 He may be wrong that the held note should be "squeezed dry," but he, too, hears the necessity of Beethoven's appearing in person.

A deeper complication is that different listeners modify the summons to subjectivity in the process of answering it, especially when the answer crosses historical divides. In practice, most listeners personify a subject that the music only partly determines. This partly determinate subjectivity, however, may act less to limit than to enfranchise listening knowledge. A subject fully determined by the summons would be transfixed by it, a condition some music certainly encourages and some listeners seek. The effect would resemble the ideological "interpellation" theorized by Louis Althusser, in which the subject, answering a "hail," yields to a coercion misrecognized as freedom. In contrast, a measure of difference between the summons and answering subject may open a space hospitable to critical understanding, dissemination, negotiations of meaning and value. Across this space, the music acts like what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "internally persuasive discourse." In addressing us, it is "half-ours and half-someone else's. . . . It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts." In practice, musical and otherwise, the persuasive and interpellative modes of subject formation continually alternate, conflict, and intermingle.46 Helen

Schlegel answers the hail of Beethoven's Fifth by identifying ecstatically with its "gusts of splendour . . . colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death!" But she also makes what is half Beethoven's half her own: "The music summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career. . . . The notes meant this and that to her, and could have no other meaning."47

The second presupposition holds that the musical subject is not only implicated in broader psychocultural processes of subject formation, but so fully implicated that it cannot be understood apart from them. Put another way, we hear music only as situated subjects and hear as music only that acoustic imagery which somehow "expresses" part of our situatedness, our ensemble of ways to be. Music that strikes us as purely extrasituationalabstract, opaque, or alienatingcounts, literally or figuratively, as noise.48 Such musical noise has so much power to disrupt our routines of identification that it commonly provokes rage or visceral disgustjust as music that seems to transfigure those routines can evoke something like jouissance . Consequently, it is not enough to say, in contradiction to hard epistemological claims, that music may be interpreted in relation to non-musical phenomena. Rather, music must be so interpreted or it cannot even be heard. It must be made interdiscursive in theory because it is always already interdiscursive in practice.

The third presupposition holds that the formative processes affecting the musical subject, like those affecting any subject, include some specifically aimed at supporting certain values or ideologies. The musical subject's legitimacy, its conformity and/or its resistance to legitimizing principles, is always in question. The issue of legitimacy may be raised in terms of a rigid division between allowable and unallowable identities, or in terms of norms against which a variety of deviant identities can proliferate. By the reckoning of Michel Foucault, the normalizing process begins its continuing rule over Western society in the mid eighteenth-century.49 One conclusion is that the study of music in relation to deviant or illegitimate subjectivities, notably including those identified as feminine, homosexual, and exotic, does not constitute an appeal to special interests but is, instead, basic to the

cultural project of music. It is no accident that both Beethoven's Fifth and "Cop Killer" address masculineand "manly"subjects. Admittedly, this last statement is risky and suggests that the study of the musical subject's legitimation can become glib and doctrinaire. Even at its most violent, the Fifth can be heard as incorporating important, problematical encounters with the femininein the oboe cadenza of the first movement, for example. It is intriguing that Helen Schlegelor E. M. Forsterignores or disparages such encounters as if they were impediments to exclusive identification with the musical subject as all-conquering virile youth. One result may be to put a queer spin on the figure of the conquering hero consistent, if not identical, with Beethoven's own idealization of it. No such spin seems likely for "Cop Killer." Like its sexual counterpart in Forster, Ice-T's racial position tethers him to a masculinity that is continually policed, both literally and figuratively. The result in "Cop Killer" is a hailof bullets, the expressive vehicle of a hypermasculine subject who has virtually become an automaton, the youthful conqueror as killing machine. Beethoven, in short, is not Ice-T, and vice versa. But the contacts and divergences of the two are instructive when taken together, and in any case there is nothing unique in the risk of critical blindness. Any form of study can become glib and doctrinaireeven modernist musicology.

With these presuppositions in place, it should be possible to recast musicology as the rigorous and contestable study, theory, and practice of musical subjectivities. This would be a musicology in which the results of archival and analytical work, formerly prized in their own right, would become significant only in relation to subjective valueswhich is not to say the values of an atomized private inwardness, but those of a historically situated type of human agency. Such a musicology would satisfy the demand for human interest, not by making good on music's lack of meaning, but by ceasing to entertain the illusion that such a lack ever existed.

At this point a more detailed example is clearly in order. I offer one partly to set the stage for subsequent chapters and partly to show that

music "itself," even in its supposedly most autonomous form, the Viennese Classical style, can sometimes be heard to lead the way in accentuating the mediated character of its own immediacy.

Charles Rosen writes that Mozart's Divertimento for String Trio, K. 563,

is an interesting precursor of the last quartets of Beethoven, in its transference of divertimento form, with two dance movements and two slow movements (one a set of variations), into the realm of serious chamber music, making purely intimate what had been public, and, as Beethoven was to do in many of the short, interior movements of his late chamber works, transfiguring the "popular" element without losing sight of its provenance. In Mozart's Divertimento, the synthesis of a learned display of three-part writing and a popular genre is accomplished without ambiguity or constraint.50

The key terms in this paragraph are "synthesis," "transfigur[ation]," and "purely intimate." Their effect is to posit for the music an effortless, exalted immediacy, which Rosen identifies as the product of Mozart's mastery of divergent compositional styles, the popular and the learned. The divergence, a potentially mediating or alienating element, disappears without "ambiguity or constraint"that is, without a traceinto the higher (synthetic, transfigured) immediacy of "serious chamber music." This same immediacy, coded as "intimacy," also marks the disappearance of a formerly public expressiveness. It is not the culturally resonant process of negotiating between the intimate and the public that appears in the music, but only its homogeneous outcome. Presumably, residual traces of the process would count as aesthetic flaws.

But what if the music were heard, not as the site where its contexts vanish, but precisely as the site where they appear? Not long ago I attended a performance of K. 563. Its texture, which as Rosen suggests includes a great deal of complex three-voice writing, struck me not merely as transparent but as painfully transparent, transparent to excess. The instrumental voices seemed to be entwining and disengaging with something like physical frictionor so I thought until I realized that this figurative idea was close to being literal. The friction was physical, or, more exactly, corporeal. By emphasizing both the linearity of each instrumental voice and the textural differentiation among the voices, and by doing so in the spare, exposed medium of

the string trio, Mozart was foregrounding the effort required to produce the music in performance. This effort was specifically bodily, conveyed by the bodies of the performers to and through the bodies of their instruments, so that the music became a tangible projection or articulation of bodily energy.

At an early moment of the performance, this recognition added a silent fourth voice to the ensemble. I was no longer simply listening to a string trio, but specifically not-listening to a string quartet. (This moment of Derridean diffirance was enhanced, though in retrospect, by my understanding that the combination of violin, viola, and cello, unlike the quartet combination, was not yet standardized when Mozart wrote K. 563.) Had the work been a quartet, its trio sonority intimated, the bodily labor that went into it would have been effaced. The quartet combination has a sonority resonant enough to envelop its constituent voices without blurring them but open enough to distance any impression of sensuousnessan "intellectual" sonority, perfectly suited for being idealized in Goethean terms as a conversation among four intelligent people. A skillfully managed trio can, of course, approximate the same effect, but Mozart confines that sort of management largely to the trio's two minuet movements, the only ones that offer the sort of light musical entertainment suggested by the title "Divertimento." Most of the rest, the "serious chamber music" that, in ironic contrast to the minuets, lacks overt associations with the body, renders palpable the muscular effort of arms and fingers, the rhythmic sway of the players' torsos.

The body thus represented is not a natural fact but a social figure: the performer's (and by proxy the composer's) body shuttling, with ambiguity and constraint, between labor and pleasure. In revealing that figure, K. 563 opens the question of why it is usually concealed. Adorno's notion that the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, with its invisible orchestra, embodied a bourgeois disavowal of behind-the-scenes labor may or may not apply to Wagner but seems to fit neither Mozart's historical moment nor his medium.51 More pertinent is the suggestion by the art historian Norman Bryson that Western representational painting typically conceals the labor that goes into it, in part because the distancing of the palpable body has historically served as a cardinal sign for the condition of being civilized.52 Mozart's Divertimento

collapses this signifying structure; it casts its most obviously civilized (and civilizing) feature, its learned three-part writing, as not only compatible with but thoroughly contingent on a heightened corporeality. In so doing, the Divertimento intimates that the artistic and social distancing of the body is fictive at best, fictitious at worstsomething resembling what would later come to be called a defense mechanism. Push that thought a bit further and inflect it darkly, and you get the dynamic of delusion and desire that underpins the ambiguities of Cosl fan tutte .

Once recognized, Mozart's staging of the body in K. 563 alters the epistemic value of Rosen's statement that the music seamlessly unites public and private spheres of expression. What seemed to be a historically informed act of criticism becomes an ideologically fraught act of praise. (Not that the two categories exclude each other! But there is a shift of emphasis.) The body figured by the music is decidedly public and specifically artisanal; in this capacity, it is also decidedly masculine and specifically positioned within a fraternal, homo-social order.53

There is, however, a single episode, marked by the discontinuity of its presentation, in which the music exchanges this figure of the public, artisanal, masculine body for its contrary. The episode occurs during the second slow movement, a set of variations on a quasi-popular tune. Variations 1 and 2 are ornamental, but not routinely so. Their ornamentation aims at a surplus of both labor and pleasure; its contrapuntal activity and expressive intensity heighten with each reprise in the melodic pattern A B A" B" , turning a simple strophic alternation into a kind of fantasia. Intellectual rather than sensuous, "virile" rather than "effeminate," this ornamentation serves not to enhance the theme but to fragment and recast it as if to some higher purpose.54 The texture is heteroglot in both technique and expression. The A and B strains of the theme, originally all of a piece, become antithetical; brilliant passagework and learned counterpoint jostle and overlap; contrastive voiceslyrical, dry, animated, dramaticsound simultaneously. The cello, progressively liberating itself from the plodding bass line of the theme's first strain, is especially dynamic. The second strain of Variation 2 brings a climax, redoubled in its extended reprise,

Example 1.
Mozart, Divertimento for String Trio, K. 563, fourth movement (Andante), Variation 2.

as statements of an angular trilling figure pile up in close counterpoint, all but obliterating any trace of the hapless theme (Example 1).

Variation 3 follows like a sleeve suddenly drawn inside-out. Ornamentation disappears, and with it all sense of dynamism; the mode changes from major to minor; the style becomes uniform, transmuting its earlier play with learned counterpoint into a texture suggestive of archaic polyphony (Example 2). A pianissimo hush combines with a warm, tightly woven sonority to produce a tranquil breathing space. Withdrawing from labor, withdrawing their labor, the performers (the imaginary performers performed by the real ones) appropriate their bodily energy by turning it inward. In so doing, they posit a sensitive, enclosed interiority that is at once private, contemplative, and feminine. They play, though overheard, a passage for themselves.

Nothing seamless here. And nothing long: the variation, slow as it seems, is painfully brief. Variation 4, last of the series, follows as a peroration, but one that raises more questions than it answers. Here

Example 2.
Mozart, K. 563, fourth movement (Andante), Variation 3.

the plainest melody in the movement is enveloped by the most brilliant passagework. The melody, on viola, still belongs to the withdrawn, archaizing privacy of Variation 3; an inner voice, a simplification of the theme in cantus firmus-like long notes, it is suggestive of an essence bared, a primary truth discovered through introspection. In contrastwhether in synthesis or contradictionan expansive walking bass on cello and sweeping arabesques on violin carry the extrovert display of Variations 1 and 2 to its peak (Example 3). The mixture is obviously unstable, and in the end it simply comes apart, leaving a tiny lyrical codetta behind to reminisce on the first phrase of the theme.

With Variation 4 the figures of the public and private bodies themselves form a kind of counterpointor is it an unrelieved dissonance? Is the public body always a figure of excess, appointed, in line with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's argument in his Second Discourse , to disguise by sophisticated workmanship the alienation of civil society from primitive health and vigor?55 Or is this body in its artisanal form

Example 3.
Mozart, K. 563, fourth movement (Andante), Variation 4.

a vehicle of reintegration in which vigor and pleasure combine effectively with the technical and mechanical labor characteristic of the arts in civil society? Is the sensitive private body the origin and founding truth from which the public body derives? Is it the artist's body rather than the artisan's? Or is it a secondary formation in which the artisan is deceptively idealized as the modern figure of the artist?

Here, however, I imagine the sound of a skeptical voice. "This is all well and good," it says pointedly, and with some tartness. "But where is Mozart's music in this series of questions?" The shortest answer is that the questions are in the music. Mozart provokes them by making his music behave as it does and trusting to the listener to hear the music within a broader field of rhetorical, expressive, and discursive behaviors. The questions engage us, with varying degrees of directness and displacement, whenever something that they bring to the musicthe overwrought texture of Variations 1 and 2, the archaizing strangeness of Variation 3, the antipodean rhetoric of Variation 4arrests our attention, affects our pleasure, or incites us to intermit-

tent, silently verbalized commentary on what we are hearing. The same questions may affect the mind's ear as it replays the music in retrospect. From the postmodernist standpoint I have been advocating here, listening is not an immediacy alienated from a later reflection, but a mode of dialogue. And like all dialogue, it is fully participatory no matter which partner is doing the talking.

It follows that the aim of musicology, ideally conceived, is to continue the dialogue of listening. At stake in the current crisis of the discipline is the participatory scope of that dialogue: the issue of whether and how to (dis)locate the boundary between the musical and the "extramusical." A little over fifty years ago, a similar crisis arose in another discipline, a discipline that, like musicology, is primarily concerned with phenomena strongly felt and semantically indirect. Arguing against the idea that only medical doctors should be allowed to practice psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud speculated on the curriculum of an imaginary psychoanalytic college:

Much would have to be taught in it which is also taught by the medical faculty: alongside of depth psychology . . . there would be an introduction to biology, as much as possible of the science of sexual life, and familiarity with the symptomotology of psychiatry. On the other hand, analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is at home in these areas, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material.56

Freud's remarks translate with uncanny aptness into musicological terms. Faced with the question, Where is the music? a postmodernist musicology wouldwillreply that wherever it may be, we can only get to it by getting beyond it.

Continues...

Excerpted from Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledgeby Lawrence Kramer Copyright © 1996 by Lawrence Kramer. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520207009
• ISBN 13: 9780520207004
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316