Round Table II: Literary Studies: Caught up in the Web of Words

Round Table II: Literary Studies: Caught up in the Web of WordsAuthor(s): Roger ParkerSource: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 69, Fasc. 1 (Jan. - Jun., 1997), pp. 10-15Published by: International Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/932795 .

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10 16th Congress of the IMS - Round Tables

Round Table II:

Literary Studies: Caught up in the Web of Words

ROGER PARKER (OXFORD)

Seen in historical perspective, ,,self-criticism" in search of theory need not and should not

casually abandon traditional modes in favor of new ones taken over from easier fields. A true

,,self-criticism" might also suggest that we acquaint ourselves more widely with what has been done in our own field, and analyze more carefully how some of it has been done. There are cases where pragmatic laboring with musical materials has resulted in methodological approaches and theoretical constructs that anticipate by many years their appearance in easier humanistic

fields.1

Thus spoke Harold Powers, addressing a plenary session at a joint meeting of the American Musicological Society, the (US) Society for Ethnomusicology and the (US) Society for Music Theory. It was in Oakland, 1990. Although he doesn't

spell it out here, Powers had earlier implied that some fields were ,,easier" than

musicology because they did not have to contend with the fact that writing about music involves an act of translation; as he puts it, ,,musical data are more resistant to verbal explication than the data in other humanistic disciplines".2

To many today, the point would seem unexceptionable, even self-evident; but it has nonetheless come under recent fire. In a book published in 1995, Lawrence Kramer offers an impassioned rebuttal:

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 of possession of constative power, but as common elements in the communi-

cative 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.3

In the wake of these two quotations, it might seem inevitable that a ,,position paper" for a panel devoted to Musicology and Literary Studies will need to take a position. The possible stances are alarmingly varied. For an audience many of whom will have little or no stake in the US institutional context, the rhetorical flourishes of the second, in particular its assumption of a ,,perspective" that

might be unfamiliar or even downright unknown, may seem excessive; but, on

the other hand, few would deny that it can nevertheless be salutary to question from time to time the ,,common-sense" approach of the first quotation - to

H. S. POWERS, Three Pragmatists in Search of a Theory, in: Current Musicology 53 (1993), p. 5-17. 2 Ibid., p. 6.

3 L. KRAMER, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley 1995), p. 16-17.



16th Congress of the IMS - Round Tables 11

ponder once more the extent to which that ,,resistance to verbal explication" so routinely claimed for the musical object is as universal and neutral as it is often assumed to be. Whatever one's view, a broadly historical and musicologically multinational perspective on the matter can surely do no harm.

Where to start such an enquiry will of course partly depend on how broadly one defines ,,musicology". General definitions such as ,,the systematic study of music" have the benefit of excluding very little, but it may be more useful here to propose something a good deal narrower, an insistence that this ,,study" characteristically takes place within an institutional context.4 Our chronological purview is at least thus restricted, allowing us to focus discussion on the relatively recent past, even though this itself will inevitably obscure important continuities with previous discourses about music. But even with one of its terms thus limited, most will agree that the topic ,,Musicology and Literary Studies" presents an ocean of possibilities. Although the discipline of musicology was born in a period in which the relationship between music and language was becoming increasingly problematic, musicologists have constantly turned to literary studies for inspiration and methodological clarification. Our gaze on the literary scholar has been intense, often needy and, possibly because rarely returned, sometimes tinged with envy.

Within this tangled web of interconnection, it may be useful (though inevitably somewhat arbitrary) to single out certain strands. Most, for example, would agree that one of the earliest and most basic of musicology's borrowings was from philology, a discipline that has helped us to be critical about much of the musical material we confront, and in certain cases enabled us to see more clearly whole areas of otherwise-obscure repertory." Typically, though, the borrowing has not been unproblematic. To take an obvious crux, how does the music philologist negotiate the business of ,,authorial intention" (that rock of the philological enterprise) when the musical object is so often only part of a composite that embeds within it other systems of communication, and hence other - as often as not competing - authorial intentions? Perhaps an even more basic problem arises from the simple fact that music requires performance, and that tension can emerge between the scruples of the modem scholar and the needs of the modem performer.6 Many musical works demand a high level of competence on the part of those who would bring them to life, and this fact seems to edge them further than, say, a novel or a poem towards the space occupied by those works of art (chiefly paintings and sculpture) which are at one with the artifact that transmits them. The necessity of having ,,qualified" performers causes, it seems, a new level of editorial problems, and sometimes

4 Perhaps ,,academic discourse about music"? This is not, of course, to suggest that musicology can only emerge from within the academy, merely that validation of the fact that ,,outside" discourses are ,,real" musicology (rather than, say, journalism or fiction) will invariably come from within. 5 The most thoroughgoing recent attempt to survey this issue is G. FEDER, Musikphilologie. Eine Einffihrung in die musikalische Textkritik, Hermeneutik und Editionstechnik (Darmstadt 1987). 6 I have explored this issue at greater length in R. PARKER, A Donizetti Critical Edition in the Postmodern World, in: L'opera teatrale di Gaetano Donizetti. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi 1992, ed. F. BELLOTTO (Bergamo 1993), p. 57-68, from which the following two paragraphs mostly derive.




even necessitates a fresh set of criteria, ones somewhat different from those of ,,classic" philology.

In the case of a painting, for example, the business of ,,restoration" is clearly contentious. To clean a painting may well reveal aspects that were for long invisible, but it will also permanently erase accretions through which the work has been viewed by many of its past interpreters. It will, in other words, cause a violent rift in the continuity of the work's reception history. Musical works are of course less obviously fragile in this sense; but precisely because few musical works can be realized without the agency of those with highly special skills, and because those skills have (at least in more recent times) been handed down

through tradition, and thus have a profound link to the past, to ,,tamper" with a musical work brings with it the possibility of divorcing that work from some of the connective tradition that sustains it, of denying it some of the living force of its reception history. To put this another way: all music moves through time to

complete its patterns, but a great deal of it now also moves through a double time, inhabits permanently a space that we merely rent for a brief period. It is thus inevitable, and eminently defensible, that the presence of a living performance tradition inflects musical-editorial decisions at every turn and often proves crucial in decision-making, sometimes thus overriding the text-critical ortho- doxies of the literary establishment.

I have lingered over these problems because they might seem to illustrate tensions that will inevitably emerge when methodologies from other disciplines are brought to bear on musicological inquiry. But is this always or necessarily the case? A second ,,strand" of cross-influence, one associated primarily with the recent past, may give us pause. I refer to what might loosely be called musi-

cology's engagement with some of the various structuralisms that have taken hold of literary (and other) studies, notably with semiotics, with various

analytical models derived from linguistics, and with more recent offshoots of these such as narrative theory.7 Although at the start there were of course

pockets of resistance to these new enthusiasms, it is in retrospect surprising now

quickly and unproblematically they were absorbed, to the extent of becoming ,,mainstream" musicological activity, particularly in the subdisciplines of musical analysis and ethnomusicology.

There will be many possible explanations as to why this occurred, their variation in part depending on which area of the musicological globe one addresses the issue from. Perhaps most frequently-voiced these days, at least in the Anglo-American context, is the suspicion that these various structuralisms were so easily assimilated because they were ultimately comforting: that in a climate in which - whether of necessity or not - it was considered a basic skill to

engage in a kind of structuralism even to accomplish rather basic acts of

description, the importation of a new formal vocabulary was more a paint-job than a sea-change. There was, in the end, little to fear: a discipline that continues

7 For an overview of the borrowings from the perspective of the late 1970s, see H. POWERS, Language Models and

Musical Analysis, in: Ethnomusicology 24 (1980), p. 1-60.




to school its neophytes in the use of Roman numeral analysis, and that can elaborate multi-level charts and graphs to account for a ,,typical" sonata-form movement, could soon come to regard the kinds of ,,score notation" offered by the most advanced narratologist as domestic rather than radical."

We might seem with this to approach the position touched on by Harold Powers when, in the quotation that began this paper, he warned that we ,,should not casually abandon traditional modes in favour of new ones taken over from easier fields": if we knew it all already, then such appropriations were surely little more than opportunistic, a patina of sophistication. But the matter is not quite that simple. It is at least possible, for example, that borrowings from literary studies, even if they ultimately turn out to be simplistic or unsuited when applied to musical objects, can still be valuable, not least by encouraging us once more to measure our (constantly changing) distance from those who deal in verbal discourse. At the very least, such initiatives narrowed the gap, encouraged a generation of musicologists to see literary critical activity as something immediately relevant to their concerns. That in itself may have been as valuable as any ,,advances" that might in the process have been missed. But, arguably, the cross-influence also enriched considerably our language for connecting music with cultural and social history - for showing that, in Kramer's words, music could do ,,cultural work".

The experience of the immediate past unfortunately makes these matters only more confusing. Our opening debate outlined a considerable tension that has emerged between the ,,structuralist" position and a third strand of borrowings, the impact on musicology of feminism, deconstruction, new historicism and other approaches that seat themselves under the large, postmodern umbrella. The question arises: whence this sudden divide? Both strands were, after all, imported more-or-less wholesale from literary studies, and in that field the transition to poststructuralism was comparatively seamless - was often, indeed, effected within the writings of individual figures (Barthes immediately comes to mind). If we can come to some conclusions about this anomaly, then perhaps the debate will move along. Whatever the case, it is clear that this latest wave has not yet run its course: many graduate students in several countries want to pursue these ,,new" approaches, whether or not encouraged by their elders. Quite what is at stake is by no means clear. Some fear that we may go the way of literary studies in the US, which have in some areas imploded to the extent that what used to be regarded as literary texts are now hardly addressed: theory, context, and theory of context, is all. If this happened in musicology, the discipline might quite swiftly lose much of its - at present considerable and extensively nurtured - ability to address ,,the music itself" in technical detail. But how serious would such a loss be? Would it mark a catastrophic and terminal decline in discourse about and around music; or would it, as Kramer

8 For a prolonged meditation on the application of literary narrative theory to musical objects, see C. ABBATE, Unsung Voices. Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton 1991), esp. p. 30-47, in which some Barthesian ,,notation" is discussed at length.




suggests, merely mark a healthy loosening of our ties with the relatively recent

past?

As the function of the present paper is primarily to serve as an introduction to debate, I will not try - hopelessly - to mediate between these positions. I prefer, for what it is worth, to close by juxtaposing three quotations. The first is from Frank Kermode's recent autobiography. It describes the present state of literary studies in terms very similar to those of the ,,implosion" outlined above; but it ends with a striking musicological analogy:

The academy has long preferred ways of studying literature which actually permit or enjoin the

study of something else in its place, and the success of the new French approaches has in many quarters come close to eliminating the study of literature altogether; indeed, there are many who

regard the word as denoting a false category, a term used to dignify, in one's own interest, one set of texts by arbitrarily attributing to them a value arbitrarily denied to others. This position many find grateful, either because it saves trouble or because they have ideological objections to the notion that certain sorts of application can detect value here and dispute it there; or because

they are, as it were, tone-deaf, and are as happy with the new state of affairs as a professor deaf from birth might be if relieved of the nightmare necessity of ,,teaching" the Beethoven quartets.'

Kermode's ironic use of his deaf professor would seem on the surface to be another ,,common-sense", unexceptionable view. Looked at a little longer, though, it reveals a questionable implicit assumption: that while the present, postmodern obsession with ,,theory" might allow a literary scholar successfully to hide ,,deafness" to text, such a parlous condition would be absurd in

musicology - no musical scholar could pretend to function with such a

disability. Again we are drawn into the view that music in some way inhabits a safe place, one in which the ,,metaphysics of presence" can reside unchallenged.

Though it may at first seem a strange leap, I'd like immediately to confront the terms of that assumption by means of a second quotation, this one from W. J. T. Mitchell's Iconology:

What can the blind know of painting? ... Suppose we took the case of a person blind from birth. The answer, I suggest, is still a great deal. The blind can know anything they want to know about a painting, including what it represents, what it looks like, what sort of color scheme is

involved, what sort of compositional arrangements are employed. This information must come to them indirectly, but the question is not how they come to know about a painting, but what

they can know. ... How much of our normal, visual experience of painting is in fact mediated by one sort of ,,report" or another, from the things we are taught to see in and say about pictures, the labels we learn to apply and manipulate, to the descriptions, commentaries, and reproduc- tions on which we rely to tell us about pictures?10

And so what can the deaf know of musicology? If we follow Mitchell's reason-

ing, do we find that we have laughed off that disabled professor ,,teaching" Beethoven too easily? And is our laughter connected to the fear that literary studies might ,,invade" our discipline, make us become too much caught up in the web of words, too separate from the ,,pure" experience of The Music Itself?

9 F. KERMODE, Not Entitled: A Memoir (London 1996), p. 219. 10

W. J. T. MITCHELL, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago 1986), p. 117-118.




A final quotation. In the late 1750s and 1760s Denis Diderot began to produce commentaries on the Salons at the Louvre, chaotically large exhibitions that occurred annually over several weeks in late summer." His first yearly accounts were reasonably concise, and could pass as simple reportage, but by the Salon of 1765 his developing art-critical fantasy, in particular his desire to reflect the sheer variety of opinion he encountered at these newly-public sites of viewing, had caused the reports to expand alarmingly. Though he attended the exhibitions dutifully and assiduously, his writing-up of the event now inevitably con- tinued long after the Salon had closed its doors, and this distance from immediate contact, far from curtailing his accounts, seemed to stimulate still further layers of elaboration. More important for our purposes, it also caused him occasionally to meditate on what we might call the epistemological status of his accounts, now hovering between experience and memory:

114. A Head in Pastel Another rather beautiful thing. All the flesh is convincing and wonderfully soft, the relief is successful and the strokes thickly applied, though it's a bit grey; the fallen corners of the mouth

convey pain mixed with pleasure. It may be, my friend, that I'm mixing two paintings together; I

bang my head, paint and repaint the thing in front of me, return to the Salon in my imagination; wasted effort, this has to stay as it is.12

What is so revealing here is the manner in which Diderot's ironic meditation on his unreliability seems to be sparked by language itself. The ,,mixture" of pain and pleasure on the subject's mouth leads directly to the suspicion that two paintings are ,,mixed" together in the writer's mind. The sheer obviousness of the connection is somehow disarming. But it might also remind us that to be knowingly caught up in the web of words may not necessarily restrict our fantasy and our discourse; it may perhaps broaden our purview all the better, encouraging us to experiment with yet further means of trying to communicate about our special, disciplinary concerns.

11 For a fascinating account, see THOMAS CROW's Introduction to Diderot on Art, ed. and trans. J. GOODMAN (New Haven 1995), I, p. ix-xix. 12

CROW, Diderot on Art, I, p. 102.



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Round Table II: Literary Studies: Caught up in the Web of Words

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