Critics of Disenchantment

Critics of DisenchantmentAuthor(s): Stephen MilesSource: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Sep., 1995), pp. 11-38Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/898790 .

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CRITICS OF DISENCHANTMENT BY STEPHEN MILES

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In a recent essay devoted to "the new musicology," Charles Rosen added his voice to the swelling chorus of those decrying the presup- positions, methods, and conclusions of such socially conscious scholars as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, and Philip Brett.' Though not entirely negative in his assessment, Rosen raised numerous questions about the work of these scholars. His critique merits a detailed response for two reasons. First, Rosen is one of the most distinguished scholars working today; he combines astonishing erudition with insights derived from his long career as a pianist. Second, the scholars whom Rosen discussed are among the most original and provocative of the younger generation; their approach to musicology and criticism is marked by both a strong sociological orientation and a thorough engagement with intellectual domains far beyond the reach of mainstream musicology. Rosen's essay, therefore, provides the occasion for a critical assessment of these "new musicologists," placing their work in the context of traditional musicology and the sociology of music. Before proceeding to that assessment, we must first consider Rosen's criticisms.

In works such as McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sex- uality,2 Kramer's Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900,3 and Brett's Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (co-edited with Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas),4 these scholars have attempted to ground musical meaning in the context of social, cultural, and political conflict. They are dragging a most lively art (and a frequently moribund scholarly discipline) kicking and screaming into the broader world of cultural discourse. From Rosen's perspective, however, these scholars do not so much drag musicology into the world as into "the other worlds of literature, history, and politics."5 As a practicing musician of the first

Stephen Miles, a composer and theorist, is Associate Professor of Music at New College of the Uni- versity of South Florida. Forthcoming in NOTES is a sequel to this article that will focus on the sociology of musical life.

1. Charles Rosen, "Music a la Mode," New York Review of Books 41 (23 June 1994): 55-62. 2. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 1991). 3. Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1990). 4. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian

Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994). 5. Rosen, 55.

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NOTES, September 1995

rank, Rosen is concerned that something irreducibly "musical" in music's meaning is lost or corrupted when methodologies from other disciplines are applied without careful consideration of categorical differences. Lawrence Kramer, for example, may draw a connection between the expressive doubling of a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Beethoven's two-movement piano sonatas, but does his invocation of literary meaning translate adequately into the realm of sound? When Rosen makes the charge that Kramer has a weak grasp of the experience of music, he is expressing his disturbance at the way in which music as a sensual experience seemingly gets shifted to the background in Kramer's criticism.6 Kramer frequently devotes as much space to the description of a literary model and its formal structure as he does the musical object itself. Music is then brought into play with this model in such a way that (from Rosen's point of view) its musical specificity is endangered: Kramer risks reducing music to literature.

When scholars attempt to draw correlations between musical structures and those of politics or literature, they inevitably exceed the limits of formal analysis and invoke metaphorical language. Rosen, however, contemptuously recalls the silly stories frequently offered to the musically illiterate to translate music's meaning into another domain, and asserts that "all metaphors oversimplify."7 Are "the new musicologists" guilty of this error? Rosen singles out McClary for special criticism: "[McClary's] attempt to identify cadential closure in Western music with patriarchal domination in Western society is too facile to be convincing." Indeed, Rosen goes on to say, "Since the early Romantics, we have generally accepted that something as primitive as sexual desire will be reflected at all levels of culture."8 As we shall see, the efforts of McClary to revive a musical semiotics (and of Carolyn Abbate to develop a theory of musical narratology) are fraught with peril, even as they yield valuable insights into the role of music in both shaping and reflecting cultural concepts.

McClary is a tempting target for Rosen for a more general reason: in her relentless railing against traditional musicology, which still adheres to a positivist methodology, she "sets up a straw man to knock down, the dogma that music has no meaning, and no political and social significance."9 No matter how sympathetic one may be to McClary's interpretive project, one must recognize that there are indeed precedents within so-called "mainstream" musicology for detailed analysis of music's

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 59. 8. Ibid., 58. 9. Ibid.

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Critics of Disenchantment

social and political significance. The work of Paul Henry Lang comes immediately to mind, as well as that of Edward E. Lowinsky.10 Signif- icantly, some of the exponents of the "new musicology," such as Rose Subotnik, are, in fact, former students of Lang. Whereas the older musicologists focused primarily on historical explication, these younger scholars now tend to focus on social and political implications: in this, they engender (for better or worse) a politicized academy. Scholars like Joseph Kerman and Leo Treitler occupy a kind of middle ground between these two generations. Both scholars have been supportive of the emerging sociological criticism, Kerman through his survey of the discipline, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology," and Treitler through his sustained critique of historical methodology, elaborated in such essays as "History, Criticism, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," "On Historical Criticism," and "What Kind of Story Is History."12

If one accepts Rosen's "straw man" criticism of McClary, it is easy to understand why he abhors the very notion of positioned criticism, scholarship pursued consciously from a specific social or political perspective. At its best, such criticism is illuminating, revealing previously ignored fault lines and blind spots in musical reception; at its worst, however, it can degenerate into name calling, with accusations of "phallocentrism" being hurled with the same vehemence as were earlier epithets such as "fascist hyenas."13 When sociological criticism becomes a simple list of "good gals and bad guys," it is defeated by its own simplemindedness. Though critics of whatever political or cultural position-Marxist, Af- rican-American, Latino, feminist, gay, lesbian-articulate a committed critical position against marginalization, they do so inescapably from within the society they criticize. This question of complicity cannot be ignored, and it is also not always clear just who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. The highly polemical tone of much sociological criticism can leave one feeling strangely nostalgic for the good old days of humanistic innocence.

In a sense, all of Rosen's objections can be traced to an assertion raised at the outset of his essay: "Almost everyone agrees that performing and listening to music are primary activities; writing about music is secondary, parasitical."14 On the face of it, there is little here with which to

10. Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1941); Edward E. Lowinsky, Music in the Culture of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

11. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1985).

12. Collected in Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1989).

13. Rosen, 56. 14. Ibid., 55.

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disagree. Though one might take issue with the characterization of musical writing as "parasitical," one could hardly assert that such writing is indeed musical in the same sense as are performing and listening. Writing most certainly does not carry that status; it is, rather, the critical effort on the part of musicians and non-musicians not to leave music or listeners alone. When music is left alone, it is abandoned entirely to the sensual level: the listener is left to commune with the mute otherness of sensation and feeling. The problem, of course, is that no one is truly left alone with music; like all experience-especially aesthetic experience -it is mediated through cultural, sexual, economic, and political concepts. It is already, to recall Rosen's term, "in the world." Once we start to ponder the significance of music, even in rigorously formalist terms, we begin to exercise judgement about value: what is important, and what is not; what is meaningful, and what is not; what constitutes appropriate discourse, and what does not. In short, musical meaning is always deeply and inescapably embedded in a cultural context, in the scene of social and political struggle.

Conservative critics such as Rosen do not doubt that there is indeed a subdiscipline of musicology that could be described as "the sociology of music," but their definition of its subject matter would diverge sharply from that of the scholars who are the focus of this essay. There has always been room in musicology to explore the social context in which music is composed, performed, and heard; not even the most conservative of scholars has questioned the legitimacy of investigating the social and political implications of music education, and there has always been interest in data related to concerts and the development of musical institutions. But, as Christopher Ballantine points out, this is not really a sociology of music, but more specifically a sociology of musical life.15 Much to the consternation of conservative critics, the scholars of the "new musicology" endeavor to understand the ways in which music itself-as a sonic, temporal art-carries social and political implications, in ways that both reflect and help produce social reality.

Does music possess immanent meaning? Are there methods that can enable us legitimately to relate musical structure to social meaning? Does music simply create "musical meaning," something splendidly meaning- less that nonetheless strikes listeners as perhaps more meaningful and valuable than anything found in the realm of the social? These questions lead inevitably to the issue of the supposed autonomy of music, and more specifically to the concept of absolute music. When music is ac- companied by or juxtaposed with a text, the issue of social significance

15. Christopher Ballantine, Music and Its Social Meanings (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1984), xv.

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is at least facilitated by an explicit conceptual framework. In fact, the tendency when analyzing music with texts is to privilege the latter, focusing on how the music reflects the structural and rhetorical strategies of the text, or, less frequently, the ways in which the music works as counterpoint to textual meaning. However, when instrumental music is scrutinized, especially instrumental music that avoids any extramusical associations through title or programmatic reference, the clear musicological bias is to accept the claim of absolute music to radical autonomy and not to interrogate the work in social or political terms.

It should be remembered that absolute music is a nineteenth-century phenomenon that arose in a particular social context and in response to specific ideological needs. With the decline of religious foundations and the inexorable exposure of the contingency of reason, it is not sur- prising that the aesthetic, as a cognitive domain, would be posited as a place of spiritual refuge. Instrumental music, as viewed by Hoffmann and others, was offered as an ersatz spirituality, virtual religion, as it were. Terry Eagleton has pointed out that this development was not coincidental: in the wake of Kant's critiques of reason and judgement, the moral and intellectual foundations for an individualistic capitalist culture had been severely undermined, thus prompting an aesthetic ideology of individual experience, the purest expression of which was absolute music.16

Once the ideological motivations for absolute music are acknowl- edged, a much more formidable problem presents itself: How to develop analytical methods for an art form that by definition is removed from verbal meaning? How to learn to hear social and political implications in musical sound? In what follows I will discuss a range of responses to these questions, each of which takes as its task the analysis of the social meanings of music. The various methods bear some similarities, yet they also pose new questions of their own and are difficult to reconcile with each other. Following this discussion of methodology, I will return to the questions raised by Rosen's essay.

THEODOR ADORNO, ROSE SUBOTNIK, AND DIALECTICAL CRITICISM

The first philosopher of music successfully to assail the transcendent status of absolute music was Theodor W. Adorno, whose work has had a seminal influence on the sociology of music, an influence that is still felt today. Though Adorno's work has now found a secure place in Anglo-American musicology, and no longer can be considered revolu- tionary, a brief examination of his precepts will prove useful to the

16. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 70-101.

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discussion of more recent scholarship. Not only have all the scholars under discussion had to come to terms with Adorno's thought, and readily acknowledge his influence, but some aspects of his thought have become more timely than ever, especially his view on musical autonomy.

Were the relationship of music to society transparent in function and content, a philosophy of music would be unnecessary. Since the En- lightenment, however, music has required philosophical elaboration because of a radical shift in the social status of art and the sovereignty of the artist in relation to artistic materials. Hegel diagnosed modern art as "dead" in the Lectures on Fine Art (1835) because the advanced art of his time had ceased to serve traditional purposes: advanced art had su- perseded the conceptual understanding of society at large, and art had exhausted its formal latency. Artistic decisions regarding form and style had become increasingly arbitrary. In short, art had become self-reflec- tive and ironic: it had itself become a kind of philosophy, a self-conscious commentary on previous discourse.

Adorno's form of music criticism must be understood as a response to Hegel's view. In all his criticism, whether of music or literature, Adorno attempted to rescue the art work from mute isolation, probing its structures for latent philosophical and social significance. Likewise, he held up the art work to society as critical revelation: the advanced art work-precisely because of its autonomous status-stands suppos- edly apart from society, yet it participates in the same network of social relations and is itself the product of society's own tensions. It thus offers the possibility of a clear analogical representation of social reality. Before discussing Adorno's analytical method in some detail, I want first to com- ment on the two concepts that lie at the heart of his thought: the contingency of knowledge and the autonomy of art. I also want to show how he related these concepts dialectically.

As Kant inadvertently made clear in the Critique of Pure Reason, there is no way to get outside language to some purely objective viewpoint, no way to avoid the limitations of mind in its relationship to the incomplete data of experience. Knowledge thus has no universal foundation and is always the product of a dialectical relationship between the cognizing subject and the objective world. No one can lay claim to knowledge of the world that is not colored or framed by subjective interests, whether they be psychological or social in origin. Though positivist epistemological models may seek to avoid this predicament through a strict ad- herence to fact, this process ultimately serves only to mask the deeper problems of knowledge, especially when the object of study is art and aesthetic experience. Facts can be displayed and accounted for through self-referential systems, but they acquire significance only when those

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systems are presented in a larger context of meaning and interpretation. The most elaborate and technically sophisticated analytical systems de- pend nonetheless on a certain element of subjective choice in the se- lection of data and its interpretation. The most fruitful path toward humanistic knowledge, therefore, would seem to entail the recognition of contingency and the incorporation of that recognition methodolog- ically. Adorno's invocation of philosophical and sociological concepts is taken precisely in this recognition, and constitutes part of his effort to frame all knowledge as the product of human interests.

With regard to the concept of autonomous art, there are at least two aspects that must be distinguished: social autonomy and aesthetic autonomy. The traditional concept of autonomous art is fundamentally economic, based on the removal of art from patronage and commerce. Though this was a necessary step in the emergence of autonomous art, the more decisive move (in characteristically modern fashion) was the development of art according purely to the internal dynamics of each art form. For example, when we consider advanced tonal music in the nineteenth century, we observe a process of individuation: a progressive shift away from the secure foundation of classical form and harmonic hierarchy to stylistic particularity and harmonic ambiguity. (It is precisely this kind of development that confirmed Hegel's perception of the removal of modern art from social function and utility.)

These twin features of autonomous art lead almost inevitably to its function as ideology. Autonomous art offers the appearance of social transcendence, while continuing to exhibit the contradictions of society on the level of structure. In the case of music, specifically absolute music, the social implications consist in the shifting balance of subjective and objective elements-the way the composer stipulates an objective universe and then moves as subject within its limits. Just as Adorno calls us to understand knowledge as contingent, he also focuses our attention on the constructed character of artistic form and its philosophical implications. He insists that composers and all other artists act as social beings even as they create structures that seemingly resist social analysis. In the essay, "Classes and Strata," Adorno writes:

Here and now, music can do nothing else but represent, in its own structure, the social antinomies which also bear the guilt of its isolation. It will be the better, the more deeply it can make its forms lend shape to the power of those contradictions, and to the need to overcome them socially-the more purely the antinomies of its own formal language will express the calamities of the social condition and call for change in the cipher script of suffering. It does not behoove music to stare at society in helpless horror; its social function will be more exactly fulfilled if the social problems contained in it, in the inmost

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cells of its technique, are presented in its own material and according to its own formal laws. The task of music as an art comes thus to be a kind of analogue to that of social theory.17

The task of criticism from Adorno's perspective is, by extension, to relate the contingency of artistic form to the contingency of knowledge, and to describe the relationship of both to social conditions.

In Adorno's dialectical criticism, there are no concepts held to be universal and "transcendent," nor are there individual art works that stand apart from culture and society as aesthetic monads, ciphers of meta- physical mystery and ideological mystification. Dialectical criticism assumes the autonomy of the art work, yet recognizes its incompleteness, its philosophical opacity. Dialectical criticism also posits the necessity of concepts (derived from historical and philosophical reflection), while never allowing concepts to substitute for the art work itself. Art works and concepts are used to keep each other in tension: the illusion of totality-artistic and cognitive-is thus avoided.

On a practical level, how does one speak of the social meaning of music without violating its autonomous status? The critic is faced with the problem of differing aesthetic levels: the surface, which resists specific interpretation, and the more abstract level, which is to be interpreted analogically. The danger is that the details of the musical structure will be understood to be in a direct relationship with social meaning; this is the problem of musical semiotics. Music possesses some of the features of language, but it is not itself a language; it is meaningful -on both the aesthetic and social levels-yet these levels cannot be al- lowed to collapse into identity, for that would be no less ideological than the pure illusion of autonomy.

In a characteristically terse essay of 1956, "Music and Language: A Fragment," Adorno drew important distinctions between these phenom- ena. In view of Rosen's attacks on the use of metaphor and the tendency on the part of McClary and others to speak of music in ways that virtually equate it with language, Adorno's observations are particularly crucial. One can almost imagine Rosen smiling in agreement with following:

[.. .] if musical structure or form is to be more than a set of didactic systems, it does not just embrace the content from outside; it is the thought process by which content is defined. Music becomes meaningful the more perfectly it defines itself in this sense-and not because its particular elements express

17. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Con- tinuum, 1988), 70.

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something symbolically. It is by distancing itself from language that its re- semblance to language finds fulfillment.18

Sociological analysis of music must focus on the logic of musical technique, not the specifics of gesture. If indeed music is the most rational of the arts, based on the premise that of all the arts it is the most de- pendent on number (Max Weber), it reflects society's rational values in an entirely analogical way. Adorno therefore focuses on the dialectical relationships of bourgeois music: the tension between the objective re- quirements of form vs. the subjective direction of the musical materials themselves, the tension between the objective imperative toward comprehensibility vs. the subjective imperative toward expression. Adorno finds social meaning in the gaps and fissures that open up between these cognitive poles.

The most famous example of Adorno's dialectical criticism is probably his discussion of Schoenberg in The Philosophy of Modern Music.19 In Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, Adorno found a most compelling critique of modern culture, and elaborated it through a constellation of dialectical images: the music that struck audiences as completely chaotic was, in fact, the most highly organized music ever composed; the dis- sonance these audiences interpreted as destructive of meaning was in truth socially contributive through its negation; subjectivity found its most radical expression in complete objectivity; the gap that defined these two cognitive poles had been eliminated. Schoenberg had relent- lessly followed the paths of musical rationality and expression to their teleological conclusions, and produced music that did not offer the false consolations of ideology: the music reflected social truth by unstintingly revealing the dialectic of enlightenment. Though Schoenberg frequently composed music with explicit social referents (e.g., Moses und Aron, Ode to Napoleon, and A Survivor from Warsaw), his music actually attained the greatest social significance when it most radically embraced autonomy, shunning all reference to society.

Adorno's ideas have sometimes been rejected out of hand because of his connections to Marxism (for years he was regarded within the musicological community as little more than a pretentious Marxist snob), yet such a dismissal loses sight of Adorno's more profound identification with German idealism generally, with its epistemological focus on the subject-object dialectic. Given the centrality of philosophical idealism to

18. Theodor W. Adorno, "Music and Language," in Quasi una Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 6.

19. Theodor W. Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973).

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contemporary aesthetic theory, Adorno's thought demands continued attention, and no one on the contemporary musicological scene has done more to develop Adorno's ideas than Rose Rosengard Subotnik, a professor of music at Brown University and the author of an influential collection of essays, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music.20

Subotnik's relationship to Adorno's work is complex: her writings on Adorno display a critical appropriation of his ideas, simultaneously de- fending his positions even while distancing herself from them. Funda- mentally, she is allied with Adorno on two levels. Following Adorno (who in turn had followed Hegel and Marx), Subotnik first of all adheres to a dialectical method, always attempting to understand a phenomenon in the complex web of cognitive relations. By locating meaning unam- biguously in the human subject, critics like Adorno and Subotnik are compelled to move beyond the empirical data of music history into the broader issues of culture, this step inevitably entailing a consideration of the conflicts and contradictions of social life. Further, Subotnik does not pretend to approach the critique of culture in a disinterested fashion; imbued with the same moral passion that marked Adorno's work, she invites us to confront the moral and ethical dimensions of music and is unwilling to absolve music from its complicity with social conditions.

For all of her indebtedness to Adorno, Subotnik should not be regarded as simply an Adorno disciple. A careful reading of her work reveals a thinker who has staked her own position on the relationship of music to philosophical and cultural discourse, a critic who holds views that would never have been countenanced by her influential predecessor from Frankfurt. In the first place, Subotnik is hardly a Marxist. (There are those who would argue that Adorno wasn't a Marxist either, but that's another matter.) She is deeply concerned about the ideological function of music in Western society, the way that its supposed autonomy blinds us to the social implications of its structures, yet this is hardly a notion unique to Marxism. Another feature distinguishing Subotnik from Adorno is her receptivity to popular culture. Indeed, in her essays "Individualism in Western Art Music and Its Cultural Costs" and "The Challenge of Contemporary Music," she proposes renewed ties to popular culture as one of the ways to break the isolation (and, in her opinion, impotence) of much of contemporary music.

Ultimately, the differences between Adorno and Subotnik come down to the fact that the former was a radical while the latter is a liberal. For

20. Rose Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

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all her challenges to the musicological establishment, and for all her invocations of critical theory and dialectics, Rose Subotnik returns again and again to a plea for genuine pluralism and liberal tolerance. When one considers how profoundly liberal Subotnik is, it is difficult to fathom why her work has generated controversy. That her work has been controversial no doubt reflects less on her than on the essentially conservative disposition of the American musicological community.

The bulk of Subotnik's essays are devoted to a single subject: the structural and stylistic distinctions between classical and romantic music, and their connection to what Subotnik refers to as a "semiotic universe." Given the breadth of her musical and philosophical training, Subotnik is always insightful, regardless of what topic she takes up; however, when she focuses her attention on the classical and romantic repertory, she is virtually without peer. The underlying assumptions that support Su- botnik's analysis of this music are worth repeating here. Classical music is based on the idea that a stable substructure of harmonic functioning ensures the comprehensibility of each composition's superstructure. We follow a sonata not because all sonatas conform rigidly to a predeter- mined pattern, but because their individual harmonic schemes work alternately to negate and affirm our shared expectations of harmonic structure, phrase structure, and sequence of events. Beethoven's sin- gular contribution, of course, was to devise structures that increase the tension between these cognitive poles, shifting the balance away from the objective principle of order to the subjective principle of freedom.

Subotnik discusses post-classical music in the context of this collapse of structural certitude: without the firm support of abstract, generalized rational principles of harmony and form, post-classical music becomes music about this very loss of meaning. It becomes music that is less concerned with structural process (and by extension, progress) and more about arbitrary structural juxtaposition, less concerned with the control of temporal experience and more with the assemblage of empirical frag- ments in a manner that takes on a spatial quality.21 Whereas Adorno viewed this historical development as a sign of the deterioration of reason, Subotnik finds in romantic music an exemplar of the liberal society she is so passionately eager to defend. She beholds the relativism of romantic music-the void at its center, its burden of subjectivity-and sees it as reflecting the modern condition itself ("What Kant inadvertently suggests, romantic music with some self-consciousness, exempli- fies: the contingency-and almost certain empirical impossibility-of a semiotic universe").22

21. Ibid., 121, 123. 22. Ibid., 128.

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If the contingency of post-classical musical discourse must be acknowl- edged, Subotnik asserts, so must we recognize the contingency of knowledge itself. With the irretrievable loss of universal reason, the process of cognition must be viewed as dialectical, and all knowledge must be understood as constructed. The goal of attaining some kind of objective knowledge, so treasured by empiricists, is thus simply unattainable. One of Subotnik's recurring themes is, therefore, that scholars must acknowledge their own interests: no matter how much one attempts to restrict knowledge to the factual, the role of the cognizing subject cannot be eliminated or denied.

It is at this point that we arrive at the central controversy between mainstream musicology and contextual criticism, developed at length in the essays "The Role of Ideology in the Study of Western Music" and "Musicology and Criticism." In the former essay Subotnik contrasts the Continental and Anglo-American philosophies of scholarship: the Con- tinental approach being based (some might say preoccupied) with the ideological assumptions inherent in all scholarly undertakings, the An- glo-American approach being marked by a more empirical emphasis, at times taking on a rigidly positivist character. Given her understanding of Kant's epistemology, Subotnik has little patience for the facticity of traditional musicology. She writes scornfully of the reduction of the discipline's vision to the production of authentic editions, the study of manuscripts and sketches, and the determination of historically "authentic" performance practices. In her view, empirical musicology contin- ually sidesteps the question of interpretation, safely choosing to pursue the narrow goal of accuracy rather than to confront honestly the morally compelling issues of knowledge and human interests. Yet her argument is at times severely overstated. When Subotnik asserts that empirical musicologists take few interpretive risks and are reluctant to acknowledge their own ideological motivations, she is on firm ground. But she carries this too far when she writes, "expertise in criticism consists not in the mastery of any body of facts but in the refinement of an unquantifiable sensibility."23 This is reductionist and simplistic, and is, in fact, contra- dicted by Subotnik's own scholarly method. While she is ultimately concerned with the interpretation of music, her investigations of musical issues are always grounded in an understanding of the factual context and display a mastery of textual details. This is perhaps a case in which Subotnik's eagerness to distinguish herself from the musicological mainstream conceals important areas of commonality.

23. Ibid., 91.

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By contrast, a most persuasive argument for contextual criticism is found in Subotnik's musical analyses, which ably demonstrate her theories of structure in classical and romantic repertory. Freed from the straightjacket of positivist analysis, Subotnik is able to attend to unquantifiable aspects of the music, particularly the way in which the most frag- mentary tonal structures work in a narrative fashion. As she writes in "On Grounding Chopin," Chopin's music "demonstrates that structure need not be autonomous in the sense of internally generated in order to be perceptually coherent."24

Subotnik's analysis of Chopin's A Minor Prelude, op. 28, no. 2, provides an excellent example of her approach to analysis and interpretation. She first establishes the context of the work, beginning not with static, immutable notions of tonal structure, but with a discussion of harmonic and formal contingency, two of the great themes of romantic music:

Whereas the classical musical structure projects the illusion of involving a logical sort of competence, one that permits the establishment of necessary connections between disparate minds or their externalized structures, the romantic musical structure seems openly to acknowledge that it can count only on modes of competence that involve the contingency of analogy; rather than assuming or evoking 'universal' normative notions of right and wrong, romantic music seems simply to want and to seek an understanding of what it is saying, and thereby to acknowledge the very act of understanding as prob- lematical.25

In this context, the structure of Chopin's Prelude is viewed not as anom- alous (or worse, incoherent), but rather as paradigmatic: its movement through various keys problematically related to A minor is viewed not as being concerned with the establishment of a key, but with the question of tonality itself. Heard in this way, an important social meaning of Chopin's music emerges: it becomes a sign of contingency, of contradiction, and hence contributes to the emergence of a radically isolated subject.

Subotnik and Adorno both predicate their critical theory on the autonomy of music. For Adorno, in the context of dialectical criticism, the autonomy of music is the precondition to its social function. Subotnik differs in a fundamental way, for she understands the autonomous status of music as an illusion; like all cultural products, it is contingent, and bears the mark of the ongoing history of reason. This leads to the following questions: What if music is not autonomous at all? What if the

24. Ibid., 153. 25. Ibid., 120.

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notion of autonomy must be eliminated entirely? These questions constitute the basis for the work of one of the most prolific, influential, and controversial musicologists working today, Susan McClary.

SUSAN MCCLARY AND MUSICAL SEMIOTICS

Though McClary was trained at Harvard, hardly a bastion of musicological radicalism, she has been consistently portrayed as a rebel, a kind of bad girl, since she first appeared on the musicological scene nearly two decades ago. McClary has published at a torrid pace since the early 1980's and has gained an ever widening audience for her ideas over the years, particularly through two books, Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception (edited with Richard Leppert)26 and Feminine Endings. Both works have appealed to a broad range of scholars both inside and outside musicology, particularly those engaged in feminist criticism, cultural studies, and the sociology of art. This is not coincidental: a number of McClary's early essays appeared in journals, such as Cultural Critique, that encourage interdisciplinary research. McClary first attempted to demonstrate to cultural analysts in other fields that the social meanings of music could be discerned just as well as those of any "text." It is only later that McClary began to direct her argument against the ideological constraints of the musicological establishment, this feature of her thought having become increasingly prominent in recent years.

McClary has vehemently attacked the supposed autonomy of absolute music because she views it as one of the most pernicious sources of social ideology: music moves us profoundly and influences us in ways that are all the more difficult to analyze because of its nonverbal structure and the academic prohibition against such interpretation. Her work may be understood as an attack on these two interpretive fronts, the former from the front lines, the latter as a rear guard action.

McClary has stressed that meaning is not inherent in music, that it is only given meaning by communities. Though this would seem to be an obvious point, it has two important consequences for understanding the social meaning of music. First, it underscores the fact that even though absolute music is offered as something completely autonomous, it is rarely experienced as such: our understanding of music on even the most elementary levels is shaped by accompanying discourse, which can be as sophisticated as scholarly discussions of Beethoven's historical and stylistic significance, or as banal as commercial invocations of Beethoven's name as the ultimate symbol of high culture. Though it is

26. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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theoretically possible for someone to experience Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in complete ignorance of its extra-musical discourse, such a reception could be compared to viewing a painting by Jackson Pollock in total ignorance of abstract expressionism or the concept of modern- ism. Both experiences would be so radically private that they could not constitute knowledge in any legitimate sense. (Even to experience the work as musically meaningful requires the listener to be sufficiently fa- miliar with other music of a comparable style and genre; in other words, the experience presupposes a cultural context.) Second, once musical meaning is understood as being produced by music and its discourses (working together in a perpetual feedback loop), musical structures and forms become less opaque: their positions and functions within cultural and social systems can be analyzed. Musical structures can thus be understood as bearing more than formal meaning; they also can be heard metaphorically, as analogues to other social structures.

Decoding the social meaning of instrumental music may involve any number of tools-semiotics, narratology, cultural history-and few musicologists draw on a wider knowledge of cultural theory than McClary. (The endnotes of Feminine Endings by themselves comprise virtually an annotated source book of contemporary cultural theory.) McClary sub- jects every aspect of musical structure to social interpretation. Not only are the formal dynamics of the sonata principle viewed as expressing the dichotomous, oppositional tensions of bourgeois society (terrain already developed by Adorno and Subotnik), but the connotations of specific musical gestures are analyzed as well. McClary refuses to respect the supposed autonomous status of absolute music, and instead interprets such music as metaphorical narrative, drawing equally on musical texts and the discourse devoted to them. This eclectic incorporation of theoretical insights can sometimes give the impression of being haphazard. Rather than developing a systematic theory, McClary moves freely across the interpretive field, probing musical sound for every conceivable connection with social and political structures. McClary's analytical eclec- ticism leads both to brilliant insights, but also, as we shall see, to gross simplification.

Some of McClary's best work has been devoted to music and words, and her discussions of sexual representation in the operas of Monteverdi and Bizet are particularly strong. She has also written perceptively about such popular performers as Laurie Anderson and Madonna.27 Since this essay is devoted to problems in the sociological analysis of instrumental music, I will concentrate entirely on her analyses of that portion of the

27. See her essays, "Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi's Dramatic Music," "Sexual Politics in Classical Music," "This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson," and "Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly," all in Feminine Endings.

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art music repertory. McClary's work has centered increasingly on issues of gender and sexuality, and her insights in these areas will emerge in the discussion that follows.

Reading McClary is frequently an exhilarating experience. She is a brilliant writer whose prose is filled with the excitement of her own sense of discovery. Whether or not she has consciously adopted this as a rhetorical strategy, the result is no less effective: it's hard not to agree with much that she has to say, for she confirms our sense that music is far more meaningful than traditional music scholarship usually allows. Af- ter reading her analysis of the second movement of Mozart's Piano Con- certo in G Major, K. 453 or Brahms's Third Symphony it is impossible to listen to those works again in the same way, even if one disagrees with her point of view and conclusions.28 McClary has already made a sig- nificant contribution to musical discourse, and that discourse will ultimately have its own effect on musical reception and understanding. (This must be maddening to McClary's conservative critics: no matter how much they may criticize her work, there's no putting this genie back in the bottle.)

Though McClary persuasively argues that music is a kind of social text, she sometimes falls into the trap of forgetting the metaphorical nature of her analysis. Not only does she claim that music bears social meaning, but she treats music as if it were almost linguistic in nature: witness the liberal use of verbs such as "articulates," or the use of an- thropomorphizing verbs ("the piano plunges headlong," etc.).29 Mc- Clary's metaphors effectively convey her insights into the social meanings of music, but at times they obscure the distinction between music and language.

One of the refreshing aspects of McClary's scholarship is that, in contrast to the aridity of formalist analysis, she is willing to interrogate the affective dimension of music. Because McClary wishes to explain the social power of music, she must of necessity deal with the fact that music moves listeners profoundly, and that this emotional experience is not only important to listeners today, but was considered its single most important feature by early theorists of the absolute (Hoffmann, Schopen- hauer). In her Mozart analysis, McClary calls attention to the radically different affects elaborated by the piano soloist and the orchestra. She demonstrates convincingly that these alternative emotional states are in-

28. Susan McClary, "A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement 2," Cultural Critique 4 (1986): 129-69; "Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms's Third Symphony," in Music and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 326-44.

29. "A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment," 121, 146.

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tensified through the tonal narrative and thematic structure. This line of reasoning can be taken too far, however. Describing the piano soloist's music in m. 35, heard after the "prettiness" of the ritornello, she writes that the piano "plunges headlong into the contrary affective direction, defining itself in terms of anguish and sorrow."30 This kind of emotional specificity is problematic. On the one hand, there is no denying the emotional connotations of this music, yet if her argument hinges on specificity of emotion, it becomes strained, and depends too much on the power of her rhetoric. Sociological criticism can hardly be advanced by an excessively subjective orientation.

McClary fares better when interpreting the narrative implications of the tonal scheme. Describing the piano soloist's music in terms of "anguish" or "sorrow" is suggestive, but it borders on the atmospheric; her case for the soloist pursuing an irrational path is substantiated by a rig- orous analysis of the harmonic structure. She calls our attention to the fact that the soloist moves progressively away from the preordained goal of the development-the return to the tonic key of C major. When we expect G major in m. 35, the soloist offers the parallel minor; the D minor episode that begins the development section is in the minor dom- inant. Movement through the circle of fifths then follows, ultimately reaching the remote key of C-sharp minor. McClary's interpretive coup is to portray the orchestra's abrupt modulation back to C major as an opposition between individual willfulness (and introspection) and social convention: she points out that this transition is not the result of logic, but rather of fiat: "In the scant interval of four measures, the orchestra seizes this remote key and forces it (through a series of sleight-of-hand harmonic puns) back to the tonic . ...,31 On the next page, McClary offers her interpretation of this harmonic move:

Just at the moment at which the soloist seemed hopelessly lost in despair, the orchestra valiantly salvages the situation, returns the piece to the comfort of 'rationality:' a deus ex machina turnaround (though if rationality is what we are celebrating, then attaining it by irrational means seems questionable at best.)32

By basing her case on the objective features of the musical structure (supported of course by affective connotations), McClary offers a convincing reading of Mozart's composition as social text. It is not offered as definitive: on the contrary, it is offered as an argument, one that

30. Ibid., 146. 31. Ibid., 150. 32. Ibid., 151.

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cannot be proven or refuted, but one that amplifies for social purposes the indisputable objective features of the work.

McClary's social readings of Mozart or Brahms beg a number of questions. First, does it matter that the composers were probably completely unaware of even the possibility of such a social reading? Second, what about completely contrary social interpretations? Third, if music can be understood as a semiotic text, where does that leave music as an abstract art?

The answer to the first of these questions is complicated, but may be summarized as follows. A musical composition, like every other cultural artifact, has no stable meaning. Though the composition may exist in a definitive text, or score, its realization in performance will inevitably subject it to variation. Even if we maintain that the work itself is stable, the context of reception is constantly changing, so its significance cannot be pinned down definitively. Though the composer's intentions must no doubt be considered important, they are not necessarily more important than the views of the performers or the listeners, and this becomes more the case with the passage of time. (These interpretive issues have, of course, been central to the "authenticity" debate.) We may be highly interested in the self-understanding of Mozart or Brahms, but the social content of their music can in no way be tied to that self-understanding. As Peter Burger has argued, the social implications of the art work are determined less by the intentions of the artist than by the social status of the art work itself.33

To the question of other social readings, McClary addresses that topic repeatedly in her work by confronting the reader/listener with the need to adopt a specific position in relation to the material.34 The goal is not the construction of a privileged interpretation that is in some way objective. Like Subotnik, McClary clearly believes that all readings of musical texts are informed by listeners' social and political affinities; she has simply made her position explicit and is inviting her readers to do the same.

The third question is the most problematic. If the autonomous status of absolute music has been thoroughly refuted-and musical compositions can be read as musical texts-is this to be understood as unequiv- ocally a gain? It certainly is beneficial from the standpoint of articulating the ways in which music can have quite specific social connotations, yet the very specificity of such interpretation can be interpreted as a threat to musical meaning: one can defend the nonverbal nature of music in

33. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1985).

34. "A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment," 147.

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the very name of political interpretation. Indeed, it is possible to understand that aspect of music as its most politically subversive feature: its subversion of the bourgeois compulsion for meaning itself. McClary seems to ignore the possibility that music's resistance to social specificity of meaning is not necessarily a politically oppressive phenomenon. As Roland Barthes's later work repeatedly stressed, the ability of music to give meaning the slip could be understood as a refuge from the endless grinding of the concrete, the particular, and the sensual by the abstract, the universal, and the conceptual.35

This leads to the single greatest problem of McClary's analysis-its decidedly undialectical character. If absolute music is ideological in its denial of social content, McClary's work is falsified by her own reluctance to allow for music's excess. In granting semiotic specificity she assumes a virtual identity between the (musical) signifier and the (social) signified, and, especially in her early work, places inadequate emphasis on the role of reception. McClary's argument for semiotic specificity ultimate hinges on the baroque precedent of the Affektenlehre, or the "doctrine of the affections," the elaborate set of correspondences between musical gestures (harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, textural) and specific emotional states. McClary maintains that the semiotic codes of the Affektenlehre were still operative in nineteenth-century music, though this was unacknowl- edged.36 Thus, she is able to attribute specific emotional connotations to gestures, like the opening measures of Brahms's Third Symphony: "Its sonority, volume, aggression, and rocketlike gesture mark it as 'masculine.' 37 Apart from the questionable assumptions about what constitutes expressions of gender in music (see below), there is a historical problem that must be addressed. McClary would have us believe that principles similar to those of the Affektenlehre were still operative in Brahms's time, but that this practice was in effect denied so as to maintain the ideological fiction of absolute music. In a sense, this is quite true. Many of the elementary affective distinctions (e.g., major/minor, assertive/lyric, etc.) were fundamental to an understanding of bourgeois music; without these distinctions the early romantics would not have been able to describe music in such explicitly emotional terms. On the other hand (and one can feel Adorno rising to speak at this point), as the rational and formal latency of music continued to be realized throughout the classical and romantic periods, the emotional connotations of music became increasingly difficult to specify. The music indeed

35. This point is made by a number of scholars in Music and Difference. See Solie's introductory essay and the contributions by Brett and Kramer.

36. "Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music," 329, n. 13. 37. "Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music," 335.

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became self-referential: autonomous. This does not mean, however, that it lost its social character; far from it: from Adorno's perspective, it was only at this moment that music could be truly meaningful in a social and political sense.

When McClary undertakes criticism from an explicitly feminist perspective, these problems are complicated even further by their entan- glement with unresolved issues of gender theory. Some of McClary's work in this field has been subtle, nuanced, and highly convincing. Even Rosen singles out her Carmen analysis for special praise; indeed, it may be her finest work to date.38 She vacillates, however, between a constructed notion of gender and a more essentialist position. In her essay, "Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II," McClary describes Genesis II (a piano trio) as presenting a rigid dichotomy between the musical masculine and feminine; the former is associated with "goal oriented" music for the strings, the latter with "clockwork" music that "sets up no expectation for change."39 Not only are these dichotomies developed undialectically throughout the essay, but the "feminine" stasis is valorized over "masculine" striving. McClary even goes so far as to offer a kind of empirical proof of her interpretation: the male students in her class who listened to this music reported feeling frustrated by the "clockwork" music.40 Even if one were to find such anecdotal evidence convincing, one would still be left wondering why a feminist would valorize the idea of not expecting change. This kind of argument is so clumsy as to make all such criticism suspect. In his contribution to Music and Difference, Leo Treitler rightly questions such arguments, pointing out the disturbing parallel that could be found with other kinds of essentialism, most notably the racist theories of art espoused by the Nazis.41

The Vandervelde essay originally appeared in the Minnesota Com- posers Forum Newsletter in 1987 and was later revised for inclusion in Feminine Endings. McClary's more recent essays display greater theoretical and analytical sophistication. In "Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music," McClary explicitly avoids the essentialist argument: "I do not believe that one can discern a composer's sexual orientation (or gender or ethnicity) merely by listening to the music;" rather, her concern is Schubert's "particular construction of subjectivity."42 Even more impressive is the way McClary is willing to follow her reasoning

38. Susan McClary, George Bizet: "Carmen" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 39. Feminine Endings, 112-31. 40. Ibid., 124. 41. Leo Treitler, "Gender and Other Dualities in Music History," in Music and Difference, 36-37. 42. Music and Difference, 206, 208.

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into complex terrain. After beginning her analysis of Brahms's Third Symphony with an exposition of the gender connotations of sonata form, she ends by focusing on Brahms's problematic relationship to classical form-how far to follow his own path and still remain intelligible. This discussion allows us to see how dualisms located on the level of gender are echoed and reproduced on formal levels of increasing ab- straction.43

McClary practices a kind of deconstruction, insofar as she demonstrates how radically subversive musical structure can be of traditional meaning. All too frequently, however, she offers arguments that in turn present a new kind of identity: musical composition as a semiotic con- struct free of problematic contradiction. While her analyses demonstrate the flexibility of semiotic codes (how composers work both with and against musical conventions), the meaning she posits for the work seems almost as stable as that which she argues against.

POST-STRUCTURALIST CRITICISM

Both Adorno and Subotnik emphasize the dialectical nature of knowledge in ways that allow for social and political interpretation and yet preserve the moment of music's aesthetic autonomy in vital ways. In- deed, for Adorno this dialectical tension is seen as a precondition to the social significance of music in the modern era. Though McClary argues persuasively that musical conventions function as part of a vast network of semiotic codes, her interpretive strategy is severely reductionist, only rarely acknowledging and developing the kind of contradictions that prove fruitful in her Brahms analysis.

McClary holds that music is not truly autonomous, that it possesses a socially determinate meaning. That meaning is clear and there for the taking: we have only to crack the codes. McClary's two premises are not necessarily related, however. One can agree with her that musical autonomy-as understood by theorists of absolute music-is an ideological fiction, but dissent profoundly on the question of determinate meaning. This latter, post-structuralist assumption has formed the basis for the work of Lawrence Kramer, a scholar who is also prominent among the younger generation of musicologists. The methodological assumptions behind Kramer's musical hermeneutics are made explicit in the introductory chapter of Music as Cultural Practice.

First, Kramer dismisses the notion that textless instrumental music presents unsolvable problems for interpretation. Drawing on speech-act theory and Jacques Derrida's critique of same, he asserts that music, like

43. "Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music," 341.

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illocutionary or expressive acts of all kinds, can be interpreted through hermeneutical windows. These windows mark the points at which the music (or the poem or painting) is most unstable and most in need of explication. Operating on the assumption that the work "resists fully disclosing itself, that in certain important respects it is mute, and that we ourselves understand it at first in terms we must work to articulate,"44 Kramer seeks to find that feature of every composition that is most ob- sessive or, conversely, most illusive.

Second, he suggests three different kinds of windows for the hermeneutics of music: (1) texts, either to be sung or included in the score as appendages, (2) titles and musical quotations, and (3) structural tropes, the forms of thought and musical behavior found at any specific moment in history that both reflect and mould consciousness. These include not only the formal and technical procedures consciously held as normative by musicians at any given time, but also the broader cultural concepts operative in society as a whole. Kramer rightfully compares these structural tropes to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, in the way they constrain and inform action without functioning as a rigid system of rules.45

Kramer then expounds at length on the instability of the interpretive act itself, acknowledging that interpretation does not reveal meaning in any simple sense; rather, it produces it. Interpretation is an expressive act of its own that cannot be governed by strict rules of procedure:

An interpretation unhesitatingly seizes on any association, substitution, analogy, construction, or leap of inference that it requires to do its work. If it is guided by rules, then it partly makes up the rules as it goes along. Not for an idle reason does the term hermeneutics invoke the name of Hermes, the wing-shod messenger of Olympus and god of invention, cunning, and theft.46

Let us examine Kramer's method in practice, turning to his analysis of Chopin's A Minor Prelude, the same work analyzed by Subotnik. For Subotnik, the Prelude demonstrated the romantic rejection of classical norms. The piece does not posit A minor as a tonal center through analogous events, each reflecting on the other in symmetrical balance; rather, the piece is about the problem of establishing the necessity of a tonal center. Subotnik had a rather simple objective in her essay: dem- onstrating the breakdown of classical temporalities and harmony in the romantic recognition of cognitive and aesthetic contingency.

44. Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 5. 45. Ibid., 9-10. 46. Ibid., 15.

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Kramer goes far beyond Subotnik in investigating the profound am- bivalence of Chopin's composition, the way it consists of two mutually negating structural processes. His hermeneutic window is the incongru- ous processes of melody and harmony: the melody moves from ambiguity to stability of the large-scale structure; the harmony does the reverse ("the melodic prelude tends to identify resolution with reversal, the harmonic prelude tends to replace resolution with reversal").47 This insight allows Kramer to place the A Minor Prelude in the context of sexual and aesthetic desire. More specifically, Kramer invokes yet another trope, arguing that this particular prelude corresponds to an object of desire best described as an "impossible object": one that is ex- cessive, strange, and that simultaneously arouses both desire and disgust. He cites a number of other such "impossible objects"-a painting of severed limbs by Gericault ("Study of Dissected Limbs"), a strangely human animal in one of Kafka's stories ("The Crossbreed"), as well as stories and poems by Wordsworth, Hoffmann, and Keats. By placing the prelude in this context, Kramer can go on to argue that Chopin's harmony converts the tonic into an object of desire-an object that disappoints once it is attained. ("Romantic desire always expects something... else.")48

Kramer's analysis is lucid and insightful, yet maddeningly elusive at the same time. It takes on the character of an impossible object itself, giving rise to the question: Where does all of this lead? Post-structuralist analysis can become a quagmire, an academic game in which scholars simply wish to demonstrate that meaning is unstable, and then move on to the next indeterminate text. (This is perhaps what Rosen has in mind when he writes, "the typical ploy of claiming that some essential element has no meaning or no logic has begun to seem tiresome today.")49 Yet, we have already encountered a form of deconstruction in the thought of Adorno, an observation made by numerous critics, including Chris- topher Norris and Juirgen Habermas.50 The purpose of negative dialectics is not simply to expose the ideology of any notion of identity, whether on the level of cognition or society, but to do so in the name of reason. Only when reason refuses false identity can it bear the hope of genuine enlightenment. The problem with Kramer's work is that it is strangely unpositioned, thus falling into some of the same traps

47. Ibid., 77-78. 48. Ibid., 84. 49. Rosen, 59. 50. Christopher Norris, "Utopian Deconstruction: Ernst Bloch, Paul de Man and the Politics of Mu-

sic," in Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St Martin's Press, 1989), 305-47; Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 185-210.

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as scholars of the positivist tradition. Let us turn now to the work of Carolyn Abbate, a scholar who has embraced post-structuralist methods without retreating into a false objectivity.

Abbate's work offers another important counterexample to that of McClary, for she is also concerned with the implicit narrative structures of music. However, where McClary's analyses are frequently simplistic in their application of semiotics, Abbate views musical meaning as in- herently slippery and unstable. She is also able to conduct her criticism as a feminist, coupling an analysis of those aspects of music most re- sistant to conceptualization (most notably timbre) with notions of identity derived from French post-structuralist thought. Where McClary shows composers operating within the very constraints she opposes, Abbate more radically demonstrates the undoing of those constraints themselves. To paraphrase Barthes, Abbate disentangles, while McClary de- ciphers.51

Like the other scholars discussed in this essay, Abbate is concerned with the problems of music as narrative. Unlike McClary, who depicts structural events as part of a larger symbolic narrative, Abbate describes the narrative structures of music in more complex terms. In Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, Abbate depicts musical compositions not as being unified narratives projected by a single voice, but as the scene for the emergence of narrative polyph- ony.52 In this conception she is strongly influenced by the later Barthes, who redefined the interrelationships of author-text-reader as cognitive activities of a positioned reader on an unstable text. This move carries profound implications for the construction of gender, as it negates the notion of "authority" (constructed as masculine) and valorizes the meaning-creation of readers, those who had previously been constructed as receptive and obedient (hence, feminine). Barthes likewise called attention to the many factors of a text that elude rational control. Citing Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, Abbate writes, "Rather than killing the author, Barthes proposes the rebirth of an author 'inside' the artwork, one that reveals herself in the 'grain' of the voice(s) that speak what we read (hear); he eliminates a specifically male position (the Author), sup- planting it with this overtly female and musical force (the Voice)."53 The sensual immediacy of female voices usurps the authorial voice of the composer (read: male) in opera.54

51. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 147.

52. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

53. Carolyn Abbate, "Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women," in Musicology and Difference, 232. 54. Ibid., 228.

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In her analysis of Salome ("Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women"), Ab- bate develops an elaborate metaphor derived from Barthes-the cas- trato as a symbol of repressed homosexual desire, the woman in the form of a man-and interprets the opera as a constellation of images, each turning on and inverting two key dichotomies: masculine/feminine and author/performer. Abbate views Salome as a dialectical image: she is the sensual object of male desire, yet she also poses the threat of cas- tration. This much is of course obvious and has formed the basis for numerous conventional analyses of Salome. Strauss is the composer of the opera; it is he who constructs the music and controls the design and its attendant implications. The music is the representation of the text; its purpose is to reinforce those meanings. For Abbate, the audible character of live musical performance takes priority over the textual and dramatic structure; the sensual form of the voice usurps the authority of the composer. Salome is the real voice of the opera: "The subject position might be female; the object position might be male; the com- posing voice might be that of a woman. Salome might have made this music."55

Abbate's post-structuralist methodology offers a number of distinct advantages over less dialectical critics such as McClary. First, she does not reduce music to a text: she places greatest emphasis on the sensual character of the music and demonstrates how subversive of authority that can be. Music both undermines authorial control while simultaneously releasing listeners for interpretive activity. (Quoting Jean- Jacques Nattiez, "music is the pretext for narrative behaviors on the part of listeners.")56 Second, she argues that it is precisely the subversion of authorial control by music that most aids the projection of flexible sexual identity; in this she negates the very dualisms that engender sexism. Finally, by arguing rigorously from within the musical structure, she satisfies the primary condition for an authentic sociology of music, yet by showing how unstable musical meaning really can be, what kind of decentered knowledge it constitutes, she is able to conduct her criticism as a feminist project.

Post-structuralist analysis does indeed bear similarities to negative dialectics: both methods steadfastly refuse any underlying stability of meaning, understood as identity-whether of subject and object, or of signifier and signified. Practitioners of both methods maintain that the only meaningful critical activity is in pointing out the ideology that such identities exist in any form.

55. Ibid., 252. 56. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, "Y a-t-il une diegese musicale?" in Musik und Verstehen, ed. Peter Faltin and

Hans-Peter Reinecke (Cologne: Volk, 1974), 247-58; quoted by Abbate in Unsung Voices, 29.

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Given this acknowledgement of the contingency of knowledge, and with it, any pretense of critical objectivity, it is incumbent upon critics to position themselves socially and politically. There are two reasons for this. First, since no critical position is objective, it implies a position; to decline to take a position is nonetheless to take a position. Second, if negative dialectics or deconstruction are to be something other than a nihilistic exercise, they must be placed within the context of social struggle. This means acknowledging that one has interests, and that it is for the sake of those interests that one acts. The alternative to this is just as bleak and ideological as positivism. In fact, as Eagleton has pointed out, the pretention of social detachment is bankrupt:

One advantage of the dogma that we are prisoners of our own discourse, unable to advance reasonably certain truth claims because such claims are merely relative to our language, is that it allows you to drive a coach and horses through everyone else's beliefs while not saddling you with the in- convenience of having to adopt any yourself. It is, in effect, an invulnerable position, and the fact that it is also purely empty is simply the price one has to pay for this.57

CONCLUSION

I began this essay by considering Charles Rosen's criticisms of "the new musicology," pointing out that his various objections ultimately hinge on the privileged status of absolute music and its supposed resistance to sociological analysis. Now that we have considered the various strategies for such analysis, I shall return to Rosen's objections and consider them in the light of these strategies.

We should remember that the sociology of music is still in a state of emergence: there are some who espouse half-baked ideas, some who seek to catch a wave of professional expediency. There is also nothing to stop scholars from using any critical methodology in unintelligent ways. Though social readings of music from multiple perspectives are valuable, there will always be scholars who will substitute jargon and name-calling for clear, independent thinking. Critical thinking and intellectual clarity must not be sacrificed in the name of political commitment. In evaluating the work of sociological music critics, we should, of course, condemn simplemindedness and dubious logic. We should not, however, allow intellectual missteps to be criticized solely because of the scholars's political perspective, nor should we forget that much of the "old musicology" was flawed and dim-witted: imaginative

57. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 144.

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scholars have always been few in number, regardless of their theoretical orientation.

Particularly, we have seen that McClary (like others who would develop a semiotics of music) needs to think more dialectically. The direct correspondences and equivalences such critics offer frequently suffer from extreme simplicity. The "inherent instability" of music's meaning does not prohibit semiotic illumination; such illumination, however, cannot be understood as exhaustive. Music's excess, its resistance to stable interpretation is part of its political value as well (a point that is poorly understood by many social critics). There are already signs that emerging scholars are chafing against the rigidity of received political and musical wisdom.

Rosen's charge, however, that McClary has set up a musicological straw man to attack is substantively wrong. Traditional musicologists rarely state explicitly that music has no social or political significance; rather, they simply act as if it doesn't. That's the reason why McClary and others go to such lengths to stress the social contingency of music. What Subotnik, McClary, Kramer, and company are attempting to do is alter the "rules of the game" (to cite Treitler): the rules no longer allow a scholar to declare music value free, to remain ignorant of the social and political connotations of language, to take political refuge behind the autonomy of music.58 In a sense, these scholars are calling for historical musicology to absorb the analytical methods of ethnomusicology; it will take some time before the insights of the latter discipline have been digested and applied to the canon in a mature way.

After considering the various methodologies discussed in this essay, it is difficult to understand Rosen's contention that "the new musicologists" have failed to bring musicology into the world. Given the nonverbal structure of absolute music, it is virtually impossible to drag it immediately "into the world." Its presence in the world is symbolic: ab- stractly, through the premises of its formal structure; more concretely, through the manipulation of semiotic codes.

Regarding Rosen's objection to the simplifications of metaphorical language, Abbate has asserted that all language about music is metaphorical:

The metaphorical status of all words about music is not always self- consciously recognized by its interpreters.... There is nothing immanent in a musical work (beyond the material reality of its written and sonic traces), and

58. Treitler, "Gender and Other Dualities in Music History," 37-45.

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our perceptions of forms, configurations, meanings, gestures, and symbols are always mediated by verbal formulas, as on a broader scale by ideology and culture.59

The issue is not whether to resort to metaphorical language, but rather, which metaphors to use. The issue is not that some scholars are seeking truth while others only want to argue politics, for scholarship is inher- ently political. Though scholars rarely discuss the importance of rhetoric, all scholarship is concerned on some level with convincing the reader, shaping a reader's perspective; in short, making an argument ("picking fights"). Eagleton has argued that literary criticism should be understood as an attempt to have an effect on the world: to promote certain views while contesting others. This seems inescapable, and his argument applies no less forcefully to the field of musicology.

We should recall the first sentence of Rosen's essay: "Almost everyone agrees that performing and listening to music are primary activities; writing about music is secondary, parasitical."60 This is Rosen's major premise: music ultimately requires no sociological explanation, it speaks for itself, and forcing the issue of social meaning is somehow "parasitical." This suppression of social meaning is, in fact, the primary problem. It's no good to long nostalgically for an enchanted time when music could be held as absolutely transcendent from the sordid world of politics and social division. If this knowledge means that we can no longer experience music with a psychologically regressive voluptuousness, it's a good thing. The loss of musical innocence doesn't mean the denial of pleasure (even of rapture); it does mean a transformation of pleasure into something informed by social and political passion.

59. Abbate, Unsung Voices, xiv-xv. 60. Rosen, 55.

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Critics of Disenchantment

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