Rethinking Music Edited by NICHOLAS COOK & MARK EVERIST OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS‘UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogoté Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Séo Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © The several contributors 1999 Reprinted with corrections 2001 ‘The moral rights of the contributors have been asserted All rights reserved. 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Mark, 1956- ML3791.1.R48 1999 780—dc21 97-7579 ISBN 0-19-879003-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-19-879004-x (pbk) 79108 Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Lid., Guildford & Kings LynnPreface ‘Music may be what we think it is’, Philip Bohlman writes at the beginning of the first chapter; ‘it may not be’. That catches the tone of this book very well. The history of musicology and music theory in our generation is one of loss of confidence; we no longer know what we know. And this immediately throws into doubt the comfortable distinction between the objective description of fact and the subjective judgement of value—an assumption whose power can hardly be underestimated. It underlies many of the day-to-day activities with which the discipline of musicology is concerned, from the choice of concert programmes to the marking of student assignments, from the selection of research topics to the refereeing of journal articles. It is only to be expected, then, that musicolo- gists will recoil at the implications of Bohlman’s statement: they may feel that they know what music is, that they can recognize a worthwhile research pro- posal when they see one, and that they do not need someone else to expose their own ideological positions. Indeed, they may not consider that they occupy any ideological positions at all. And yet a widespread loss of confidence remains, visible most obviously in the uneasy tension between a self-aware critical stance and the day-to-day practice of musicology. However finely tuned he or she may be to the pitfalls of music history constructed around a series of ‘master-works’, what musicologist working on an archival or institutional project is likely to ignore (and not publish) material that relates to a major named composer? Imagine that he or she is engaged in the study of an eighteenth-century English aristocrat who was interested in the music of the Indian subcontinent, but who turns out to have left records of hearing Mozart in London: however well aware the musicologist may be of the inadequacy of predicating the history of eighteenth-century music on a Bach-Haydn—Movzart paradigm, the temptation to report on the Mozart connection would be simply too great to ignore.’ In such cases the insti- tutional pressures to gain a position, tenure, promotion, and grants are likely to override the intellectual priorities of the discipline. Not surprisingly, then, many musicologists have sought to resolve—or at least to evade—such uneasy tensions through an unquestioning adherence at all costs to some fixed theoretical point; not just Schenker or Marx, but Adorno, Benjamin, and even Dahlhaus have acquired the status of authorities who do not require (and maybe do not admit) question or challenge. The tendency is widespread: the ways in which more recent writers such as Nattiez, Kerman, or McClary are ‘used’ betray a similar pattern of respect for—or it might be more accurate to say dependence on—authority. Of these authors, perhaps only * Jan Woodfield, ‘New Light on the Mozarts’ London Visit: A Private Concert with Manzuoli, Music & Letters, 76 (1995), 187-208.vi Preface Kerman has been subjected to the challenge he deserved, in the form of the many reviews of and commentaries on Contemplating Music (to give the book's Amer- ican title; the no-contemplation-please-we're-British title was simply Musicol- ogy).’ And it is the notion of authority that is central both to Kerman’s critique of musicology and to the objections that have been raised against it. In his chapter Jim Samson notes that Kerman ‘unhelpfully’ associated posi- tivism in historical musicology with formalism in analysis, and in terms of Bohlman’s axiom it is true that the two stand for diametrically opposed positions. The kind of formalist music theory that Kerman was talking about (the neo- serial approaches emanating from Princeton and the set-theoretical approaches emanating from Yale’) represented an assertion that music is what we make it. Like the compositions of the Darmstadt avant-garde, such theory took history by the scruff of the neck, and made an existential statement that music shall be precisely what we think it is, no more and no less. (The heady atmosphere of that world, which somehow managed to combine hard-edged scientific values with those of late 1960s alternative culture, is best captured in Benjamin Boretz's monumental dissertation ‘Metavariations’, published over a period of four years in successive issues of the then Princeton house journal, Perspectives of New Music;* its muted echoes may be detected in Joseph Dubiel’s contribution to the present work.) By contrast, what Kerman characterized as musicological posi- tivism—the steady accumulation of source studies and monumental editions— assumes a total separation of the researcher from what is researched. For the musicological positivist (as indeed for some of Kerman’s earlier ‘formalists’, like Schenker), the music is there, regardless of what we think it is, and it will coin- cide with what we think it is only to the extent that we happen to be right. For- malism and positivism, then, are similar, in that each embodies a stance of unproblematical authority; the difference is that in the one case authority is invested in the musical thinker, while in the other it is invested in the music that is thought of. And while responses from theorists to Kerman’s work were thin on the ground, reactions from musicologists were damagingly predictable: Kerman’s view of source studies was rightly seen as narrow, and was criticized for failing to take account of the complexity of textual study. But this was the extent of the response; there seemed to be a general perception that the musi- Joseph Kerman. Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.. 1985): Musicology (London, 1985). > ‘The reference is to the work of Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte respectively. The remaining member of the dom- inant triumvirate of ‘formalist’ music theory is David Lewin, formerly Forte's colleague at Yale, but now at Harvard, ‘Some key references: Babbitt, ‘Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music’ and “The Structure and Punction of Music Theory’, both in Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (eds.), Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory (New York, 1972), 3-9, 10-21; Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (eds.), Words about Music (Madison, 1987); Borte, The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven, 1973); Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transfor- mations (New Haven, 1987) and Musical Form and Transformation: 4 Analytic Essays (New Haven, 1993). * Benjamin Boretz, ‘Meta-Variations: Stadies in the Foundations of Musical Thought (I)', Perspectives of New Music, 8/1 (1969), 1-74; ‘Sketch of a Musical System (Meta-Variations, Part II)’, PNM 8/2 (1970), 49-111; ‘The Construction of Musical Syntax’, PNM 9/1 (1970), 23-42; ‘Musical Syntax (I)', PNM 9/2-10/1 (1971), 232-69; “Meta-Variations, Part 1V: Analytical Fallout (1), PNM 11/1 (1972), 146-223; ‘Metavariations, Part IV: Analytical Fallout (Il, PNM 11/2 (1973), 156-203,Preface vii cologist had done his or her job by pointing out Kerman's shortcomings. In this way, Kerman’s more fundamental objections to received notions of musicologi- cal authority remained unaddressed. Of course, Kerman’s characterizations were really caricatures; few except exhibitionists openly admitted to being formalists or positivists in the aftermath of the publication of Kerman’s book. But his critique would not have created the furore it did if the cap hadn't fitted. And what Kerman’s formalism and posi- tivism have in common is more than anything else an attitude: the sense of an established discipline, the sense that there is work to be done, and that there are known ways of doing it.° That attitude has largely collapsed in the ten years since Kerman’s book came out. Fissures between the different strands of professional activity have become increasingly apparent: you can easily find yourself expounding the values of compositional unity in Haydn and Mozart to a class of undergraduates in the morning, and drafting an academic paper that de- constructs the concept of unity or challenges the construction of a history of Viennese eighteenth-century chamber music around just two composers in the evening, (Ellen Koskoff puts such pedagogical double binds in a cross-cultural context in her contribution to this book.) Other aspects of professional work, too, have developed new and often troublesome dimensions of meaning: in her chapter, Kay Shelemay describes the problems that arise for ethnomusicologists when their subjects ‘talk back’, and several contributors grapple with the ethical consequences of their actions as teachers, researchers, and (as Ralph Locke puts it) ‘informed citizens and members of the human race’. But such problems begin at home, and none is more pressing than that of the participation of women in the discipline. Anyone who has had the opportunity to compare meetings of the American Musicological Society (approximately equal numbers of males and females, with the latter perhaps in the majority) with those of the Royal Musical Association (besuited fifty-somethings) will be aware of the speed with which change can take place, and Suzanne Cusick’s contribution is a sympathetic attempt to put the matter in perspective. In the aftermath of the near collapse of classical music as a form of public entertainment in North America and its recent rebirth in Britain in the form of play-list-oriented commercial radio stations and news-stand magazines, it is not just the disciplinary integrity of musicology that has become problematic; it is, to put it bluntly, the relationship between musicology and the rest of the universe. (Where does musicology come on anybody's list of global priorities? When we look back on our lives, will we be able to justify our career choice to ourselves?) Seen from this discomfiting perspective, Kerman’s formalism and positivism begin to acquire the same kind of nostalgic aura as the tail-fins of American cars in the Fifties: they are a reminder that things were so much > Of course, Kerman’s uncritical view of the subdivisions within the discipline—seeing them as unchanging or given—could itself be seen as reflecting a postivistic bia (we arc grateful to Giorgio Biancorasso, formerly a master's degree student at King’s College, London, now a doctoral candidate at Princeton, for this observation),vili Preface simpler in those days, when people knew what they believed, and believed what they knew, Or was it ever really like that? We seem to be well on the way to cre- ating a disciplinary myth that divides musicological history into two discrete ages, the old and the new, separated by Kerman’s opening of Pandora's box (or rather his public announcement that it was being opened). There is good reason to be suspicious of any myth whose motivation is too transparent, and the before Kerman/after Kerman paradigm serves equally the interests of those who see musicology as having come of age in the last decade and those who see today’s post-formalist, post-positivist, post-everything agenda as a betrayal of the discipline. Yet, as myths go, this is quite a helpful one, because the current configuration of the discipline (if, that is, it still makes sense to think of it as a discipline) can be usefully summarized in terms of the different impact that Kerman’s critique had on different musicologists—which is to say, at the least, music historians. theorists, and ethnomusicologists. For ethnomusicologists, Kerman’s book rein- forced an existing sense of difference vis-a-vis the rest of the musicological estab- lishment; Kerman confessed to a lack of interest in non-Western music, and made no serious effort to incorporate the complexities of ethnomusicological thought into his vision of musicology. (The present book, by contrast, is intended to convey the inseparability of ethnomusicology from a musicology more gen- erously conceived.) Historical musicologists, on the other hand, had their cen- trality within the academic musical firmament confirmed, but were directed to elevate their gaze from the positivist purview of dusty texts to a humane, criti- cally informed musicology. Under the slogan of ‘criticism’, Kerman created the vacuum that was filled by what came to be called the ‘New Musicology’; this resulted in a dramatic expansion of the musicological agenda in the decade after 1985, Opinions vary as to how the term ‘New Musicology’ came about.° An impor- * Canonic texts underpinning the New Musicology are Rose Rosengard Subotatk, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis, 1991); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991); Ruth Solie (ed.), Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley, 1993); Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991); Law- rence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley, 1990). A special issue of Current Musicology enti- led “Approaches to the Discipline’ reveals something of the range of positions encompassed within the New Musicology (Current Musicology, 53 (1993); see in particular the exchange between Lawrence Kramer and Gary Tomlinson). As many of these names illustrate, the empowerment of the female voice in musicology played a major role in this expansion of the musicological agenda; the gender imbalance between the two parts of the present volume reflects the fat that, despite the efforts of scholars such as Marion Guck and Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, music theory remains a distinctly male-dominated discipline. (There are some strong hints as to why this might be the case in Suzanne Cusick’s chapter) There is as yet no authoritative conservative response to the New Musicology. The best knowa rebuttal, directed specifically at gender-oriented masicology, is Pieter van den Toorn’s ‘Politics, Feminism, ‘and Contemporary Music Theory’, Journal of Musicology, 9 (1991), 275-99, incorporated in his more comprehen- sive book-length critique, Musi, Politics, and the Academy (Berkeley, 1995); see also Ruth Solie’s ‘What do Feminists Want? A Reply to Pieter van den Toorn’, Journal of Musicology, 9 (1991), 399-410. At least one other musicologist, to our knowledge, is working on a comparable book, See also Charles Rosen, ‘Music la Mode’, New York Review af Books, 61/12 (23 June 1994), 55-62, and the subsequent exchange of letters between Rosen and Lawrence Kramer, New York Review of Books, 61/15 (22 Sept. 1994), 74-6.Preface ix tant early usage was in a paper presented to the American Musicological Society’s annual meeting in Oakland in 1990: Lawrence Kramer's abstract for “Carnaval, Cross-Dressing, and Women in the Mirror’ claimed a place for the paper in ‘the new musicology that tries to situate musical structures within their larger cultural context’.’ But this aim is shared by a much larger musicological constituency than Kramer suggested. Few music ‘historians’ would claim that they were doing much else, while some would claim that Kramer's view of a ‘larger cultural context’ is actually a rather narrow one. The range of musical repertories encompassed by Kramer and those who endorse his scholarly pro- gramme is similarly narrow; so too is the range of theoretical engagements with that repertory. Finally, the orientation of this kind of ‘new musicology’ towards the musical work rather than the culture that constructs it means that there is something deeply unhistorical—if not, indeed, anti-historical—about it. In a paradoxical way, then, Kramer's brand of ‘new musicology’ lays itself open to the same charge as formalism: that it constructs musical works as timeless, and in this sense autonomous, entities. Despite such contradictions, the effect of these developments, together with the prolonged and sometimes acrimonious debates to which they gave rise, was (to borrow Ralph Locke's term) to massively ‘reinvigorate’ the field of musicol- ogy, or some of its furrows at least. It is hardly surprising, however, that the enlarged outlook that Kerman adumbrated in the name of criticism took the form of a largely uncritical admixture and dissemination of new or borrowed methodologies, ideologies, and buzz-words, It was also characterized by a reluc- tance to encompass any rapprochement between theoretical approaches, the result of which was a curiously serial process in which theoretical positions were taken up and cast aside: Geertzian thick description, narratology, Annalisme, and the Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’ were all explored and then discarded in turn.® Multivalency—the acknowledgement of the possibly equal validity of multiple interpretations, adumbrated for the first time by Harold Powers in 1984—itself seems almost to have emerged as a passing phase, to be replaced by the next critical position.’ But at least dealings with most of these disciplinary 7 Abstracts of Papers Read at the Joint Meetings of the American Musicological Socety, Ffty-Steth Annual Meeting: Society for Ethnomusicology, Thirty-Ffth Annual Meeting; Society for Music Theory, Thirteenth Annual Meeting, Nover- ber 7-11, 1990, Oakland, California (Urbana-Champaign, Il, 1990), p. 8. The paper was published without refer- ence tothe ‘new musicology’ ia Solie(ed.), Musicology and Difference, 305-25. * For musicological applications of these approaches see Gary Tomlinson, “The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology’, 19th-Century Music, 7 (1984), 350-62: Philip V. Bohlman, ‘On the Unremarkable in Musi’, 19%h- Century Music, 16 (1992), 203-16: William Weber, ‘Mentalité, tradition et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au xviiesidce', Annales: économies, société, civilisations, 44 (1989), 849-72; Jane Fulcher, ‘Current Perspectives on Culture and the Meaning of Cultural History in France Today’, Stanford French Review, 9 (1985), Kevin Korsyn, “Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music Analysis, 10 (1991), 3-72: Joseph N. Straus, ‘The Anxiety of Influence in Twentieth-Century Music’, Journal of Musicology, 9 (1991), 430-47; idem, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). See also Richard Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46 (1993), 114-38. * A formal interest in questions of multvalence seems to have peaked in disagreements about the interpretation of Puccini: Allan Atlas, ‘Crossed Stars and Crossed Tonal Areas in Puccini's Madama Butterfly’, 19th-Century Must,x Preface models had the advantages of consistency and integrity. In retrospect they appear responsible and even cautious by contrast with, say, Kramer’s oppor- tunistic (and soon obsolete) amalgam of speech-act theory, its Derridean cri- tique, and New Historicism. And this provides the context for the ‘rethinking’ to which this book bears witness, the principal characteristic of which is a conscientious and often self-conscious accommodation between established methodologies and new horizons.!° Whereas the New Musicologists annexed new terrain in the name of musi- cology, the principal concern of our contributors might be best characterized as careful cultivation. Conquest is giving way to colonization, which is perhaps also to say that controversy is giving way to compromise. Jim Samson sets the tone of this reconciliation when he suggests that ‘the time is ripe to point beyond a debate that is in danger of growing wearisome’. Controversy, after all, arises out of certainty, even if it is only the certainty that nothing can be certain. If much New Musicological writing embodied what might be called a rhetoric of coer- cion, demanding that attention be paid to the broad range of music’s meanings and condemning traditional musicology for its narrow focus, our contributors are, by comparison, slow to demand or to condemn. What is characteristic of their approach is more often an openness to the multiplicity of possible inter- pretations and a studied avoidance of value judgement. The source of this lies in the problematization of authority and a more generous attitude not only to endeavours in different musical fields, but also to the value of different sources of musical interpretation. What is adumbrated in this book might perhaps be described as a ‘musicology of the provisional’. It would not be entirely unreasonable to complain that the New Musicology deconstructed everything except the disciplinary identity of musicology, and that in the narrow (principally North American) sense which distinguishes musi- cology from music theory; paradoxically, the musicology/theory boundary remained generally intact, and sometimes even became more marked, as the boundaries between musicology and other humanities disciplines became increasingly fuzzy. If Kerman sought to redirect musicology, he effectively sought to abolish theory as a serious intellectual pursuit, and he did so by means of what might be described as a systematic misunderstanding of its aims and achieve- ments.'! For Kerman, analysis combined the worst attributes of nineteenth- 14 (1990), 186-96; Roger Parker, ’A Key for Chi? Tonal Areas in Puccini, 19th-Century Music, 15 (1992), 229-34: Allan Atlas,‘Multivalence, Ambiguity and Non-Ambiguity: Puccini and the Polemicists', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 118 (1993), 73-93. "© In this sense there is perhaps a basic difference between the idea of ‘rethinking’ music and that of the ‘New’ Musicology—terms which Treitlr elides at the beginning of his chapter. Whereas a certain finality is implicit in the label ‘New’, the concept of rethinking is iterative; as Bohlman puts it, ‘we rethink music out of the belief that ‘we missed something first time round’. And in view of Treitler’s gloss on the prefix re tis striking that the penul- ‘imate sentence of his chapter calls for ‘a realignment: the re-aestheticization as well as the re-historicization of ‘music! "In addition to Contemplating Music/ Musicology, see Kerman’ ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’ Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), 311-31.Preface xi century ideology and naive scientific positivism; it was predicated on a mono- lithic conception of organic unity (which it saw as a universal attribute of music, rather than a historical contingency) and executed by means of mechanical dis- covery procedures. It was, in short, a solution in search of a problem. There is no need here to offer a refutation of Kerman’s cruel caricature of analysis; that job has frequently been undertaken (and in his chapter Nicholas Cook offers a critique of similar arguments advanced by Leo Treitler). But again, there was enough truth in the charge for at least some of the mud to stick, and much of the controversy associated with the New Musicology revolved around the kind of ‘close reading’ that analysis conspicuously embodies. Put in a nutshell, the issue was whether the kind of direct communion with music that has tradition- ally been seen as the goal of analysis is a viable—or indeed a reputable—aim. Analysis was seen as suspect because it attempted to provide ‘purely musical’ (that is to say, formalistic) explanations for what were in reality socially medi- ated meanings; it held out the false promise of an unmediated, unproblematic familiarity with the music of other times and places.'? Kerman’s attack and the subsequent emergence of the New Musicology, then, effectively presented theorists and analysts with the same two alternatives that it presented to historical musicologists. One, obviously, was to ignore the fuss and get on with the job; that remains a professionally viable option (although how long this will continue to be the case is another matter), but it is not one that is. explored here. The other was to rethink the discipline, not so much in the sense of inventing new analytical tools or historical methodologies, but in the sense of trying to decide what these tools and methodologies can tell us, or perhaps of coming to the conclusion that no final, universally applicable decision on the matter is possible or even desirable. If the writers represented in the present book have a common aim, this is it. Some focus on methods such as semiotics, whereas others focus on topics such as the musical surface or the concept of unity; some focus on the disciplinary identity of musicology or engage with more traditional questions of history, whereas others focus on the relationship of analysis to such activities as performance and composition. But in virtually every case there are the same underlying concerns: what are we doing when we analyse or contex- tualize music, and why are we doing it? What kind of truth can analysis or his- torical musicology reveal, and how might it relate to other kinds of truth about music? Should we be speaking of truth at all? Or does the act of engaging in analysis or the writing of history lock us into a predetermined epistemological stance? If so, how can we do analysis or history, yet question the premisses that govern what we do? " This position has been most uncompromisingly advanced by Gary Tomlinson, according to whom ‘it is the act of close reading itself that carries with it the ideological charge of modernism’ (‘Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musi- cologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer’, Current Musicology, 53,(1993), 18-24, p. 22). The controversy over close reading resonates throughout this special issue of Current Musicology; see in particular Kramer's response to ‘Tomlinson (25-35) and Stephen Blum’s ‘In Defense of Close Reading and Close Listening’ (41-54). Leo Treitler critiques Tomlinson’s arguments in his contribution to the present book.xii Preface To ask such questions, let alone to try to answer them, is to step beyond the narrow boundaries of analysis and historical musicology as characterized by Kerman. Whereas Kerman envisaged and championed a musicology that went beyond positivism, he seems to have been unable to imagine what it might mean for theory to go beyond formalism; it is as if he saw some internal contradiction in the idea of theory and analysis being ‘critical’, let alone self-critical. But there is no such contradiction, and the present book provides ample demonstration of this. To take a single example, many of our contributors grapple in one way or another with the issue of musical autonomy. They attempt to locate the concept of autonomy in its historical and social context (Samson, Cusick, Fink, Treitler), probing the relationship between formalism and hermeneutics (Whittall, Burnham, Rink) or between analytical representation and experience (Maus, Cook, Dubiel). They assume neither music’s self-sufficiency (as early proponents of formalism did) nor its lack thereof (in the manner of much of the New Musi- cology). Instead, they attempt to formulate the ways in which music operates autonomously, and to establish limits beyond which the concept of musical autonomy ceases to be viable or, at any rate, useful. In a word, they problema- tize the issue of musical autonomy. And in so doing, they problematize their own role as analysts and historians of music—albeit without lessening their com- mitment to their discipline. There are widespread rumours (not all of them emanating from historical musicologists) of the death of analysis. If analysis is understood as Kerman understood it, as a discipline predicated on the blithe assumption of music's sep- arateness from the rest of the universe, then the rumours may well be true. But a better way of expressing it is that, after a lengthy period during which it was preponderantly absorbed with issues of method and technique (in other words, with problems of its own generation), analysis is moving outwards to embrace the issues of value, meaning, and difference that increasingly concern other musicologists. Samson envisions the possibility that under these circumstances ‘analysis as a separate discipline (though not as an activity) will lose its identity in a mesh of wider critical perspectives, its tools and practices drawn into and absorbed by those wider perspectives’. Maybe, then, musicology is absorbing analysis. Or maybe, as we broaden our reading of music from text to world, it is analysis that is absorbing musicology. It is hardly worth arguing the toss; in intel- lectual (though not, to be sure, in institutional) terms, it doesn’t make much dif- ference which way round you put it. And that is why we offer this book under a totalizing title that conveys the connectedness of all musical thinking and, of course, rethinking. NICHOLAS COOK MARK EVERISTContents Contributors Introduction wee * uw 15 1 a 7 L 19 o PART I Ontologies of Music Philip V. Bohlman Analysis in Context Jim Samson Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dialogue Kevin Korsyn Autonomy/Heteronomy: The Contexts of Musicology Arnold Whittall Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface Robert Fink The Challenge of Semiotics Kofi Agawu An Experimental Music Theory? Robert Gjerdingen Concepts of Musical Unity Fred Everett Maus How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited Scott Burnham Translating Musical Meaning: The Nineteenth-Century Performer as Narrator John Rink Analysing Performance and Performing Analysis Nicholas Cook Composer, Theorist, Composer/Theorist Joseph Dubiel PART II The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North American Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nett! Other Musicologies: Exploring Issues and Confronting Practice in India Regula Burckhardt Qureshi The History of Musical Canon William Weber The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present Leo Treitler Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value Mark Everist The Musical Text Stanley Boorman Finding the Music in Musicology: Performance History and Musical Works José A. Bowen 102 138 161 171 193 WNW aoe Ros 311 336 356 378 403 424xiv 20 21 22 23 24 Contents Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology John Covach Gender, Musicology, and Feminism Suzanne G. Cusick Musicology and/as Social Concern: Imagining the Relevant Musicologist Ralph P. Locke ‘The Impact and Ethics of Musical Scholarship Kay Kaufman Shelemay What Do We Want to Teach When We Teach Music? One Apology, Two Short Trips, Three Ethical Dilemmas, and Fighty-Two Questions Ellen Koskoff Index 452 471 499 ae 545 561Contributors Kori AGAWU is Professor of Music at Yale University, He is the author of Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music and African Rhythm: A North- ern Ewe Perspective. PHILP V. BOHLMAN teaches ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, where he also holds positions in Jewish Studies and Southern Asian Studies, and serves as a member of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Among his recent publi- cations are Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, which be co-edited with Katherine Bergeron, and The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936-1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War Il. STANLEY BOORMAN is a Professor at New York University, where he also directs the Collegium Musicum. He has worked primarily in the mid-Renaissance and in the history of music printing, has compiled the Glossary for the New Grove Dic- tionary of Music Printing and Publishing, and is completing a detailed biblio- graphical catalogue of the editions of Ottaviano Petrucci. José A. BOWEN is Director of the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) at the University of Southampton; he is currently working on a book entitled The Conductor and the Score: A History of the Relationship between Interpreter and Text. He is also an active composer with experience in jazz and film, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize, and commissions from Hubert Laws, Jerry Garcia, and the Allegri Quartet. Scorr BURNHAM, Associate Professor of Music at Princeton University, is the author of Beethoven Hero, a study of the values and reception of Beethoven's heroic style, and Music and Spirit: Selected Writings of A. B. Marx (forthcom- ing). NICHOLAS COOK is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. His publications range from aesthetics to psychology, and from Beethoven to popular music; recent books include a Cambridge Music Handbook on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Analysis Through Composition, and Analysing Musical Multimedia. JOHN COVACH is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is co-editor of In Theory Only and has published widely on twelve-tone music, the philosophy of music, and rock music. He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Analyzing Rock Music, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. SUZANNE G. CUSICK teaches music history and criticism at the University of Vir- ginia. Her recent publications include essays on Francesca Caccini, Monteverdi,xvi List of Contributors the gender politics of classical music performance, and the possible relationships between sexualities and musicalities. JosePH DUBIEL teaches composition and theory at Columbia University, and co- edits Perspectives of New Music. Manrk EveRIsT is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. He has written books on the sources of thirteenth-century polyphonic music and on the thirteenth-century motet; current projects include a book provisionally entitled Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824-28 and three volumes in the ongoing Oiseau-Lyre edition of the Magnus Liber Organi. RoseRT FINK is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, and a founding editor of the journal repercussions. He is currently researching a book on musical minimalism, desire, and consumer society. ROBERT O. GJERDINGEN was trained at the University of Pennsylvania by Eugene Narmour, Leonard B. Meyer, and Eugene K. Wolf. He is the author of A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention, translator of Carl Dahlhaus'’s Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality, and is working on a book on Mozart and the galant style. Kevin Korsyn received his Ph.D. in Music Theory from Yale University, and cur- rently teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is Director of Graduate Studies. In 1991 he received the Young Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory for his article ‘Schenker and Kantian Epistemology’. He is currently writing a book called Decentering Music: A Postdisciplinary Fantasy for Oxford University Press, New York. ELLEN Koskotr is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, where she teaches courses in ethnomusi- cology and world music. She is the editor of Women and Music in Cross-cultural Perspective and has written extensively on the musical practices of Lubavitcher Hasidim, as well as on gender and music issues. Her recent publications include “Where Women Play: The Role of Musical Instruments in Gender Relations’, ‘The Language of the Heart: Men, Women and Music in Lubavitcher Life’, and ‘Miriam Sings Her Song: The Self and Other in Anthropological Discourse’. In addition to her teaching and research activities, she is the Director of the Eastman School’s Balinese gamelan angklung. RALPH P, LOCKE is Professor of Musicology at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. His publications include Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians, articles on orientalism in Western opera, and several chapters in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, which he co-edited with Cyrilla Barr.List of Contributors —xvil FRED EVERETT MAUS teaches music at the University of Virginia. He has written on dramatic and narrative qualities of instrumental music, gender studies, aes- thetics, and recent American music. BRUNO NETTL is Emeritus Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Among his several books, the best known are Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology and The Study of Ethnomusicology, and the most recent Blackfoot ‘Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives, The Radif of Persian Music, and Heart- land Excursions: Ethnomusicological Perspectives on Schools of Music. REGULA BURCKHARDT QURESHI is Professor of Music. Director of the Centre for Ethnomusicology, and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the University of Alberta. Her recent publications include Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali as well as the co-edited Muslim Families in North America, and Voices of Women: Essays in Honor of Violet Archer. She is working on a book on Hindustani music making. JOHN RINK is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published in the fields of theory and analysis, nineteenth-century music, and performance studies. Recent books include Chopin: The Piano Concertos, The Prac- tice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, and Chopin Studies 2. He is active as a pianist. JIM SAMSON is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. He has pub- lished widely on the music of Chopin and on analytical and aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Kay KAUPMAN SHELEMAY is an ethnomusicologist who has published widely on musical traditions of Ethiopia, the Middle East, and urban America. Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Harvard University, Shelemay's books include Music, Ritual and Falasha History and A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey. Leo TREITLER is Distinguished Professor of Music at the Graduate School and University Centre of the City University of New York. He is author of Music and the Historical Imagination and of a forthcoming collection of essays on the trans- mission of music in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press), and he is general editor of the forthcoming revised version of Oliver Strunk's Source Readings in Music History (W. W. Norton). WILLIAM Weer, Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, has written on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical topics addressed to both musicologists and historians. ARNOLD WHITTALL is Emeritus Professor of Music Theory and Analysis, King's College, London. His main publications are in the field of twentieth-century music and music theory.Introduction Part I In ‘Ontologies of Music’ (Chapter 1), Philip Bohlman attempts a basic ground- clearing exercise, sketching out a kind of cross-cultural calculus of musical pos- sibility. He provides a representative taxonomy of what kind of thing (or what kind of not-thing) music may be or be seen to be; he offers a sample of the ways in which music may relate (or not relate, or be seen not to relate) to society. As he emphasizes, to speak of ‘music’ is already to predicate a particular kind of existence for it, as compared with ‘musics’, or with cultures that do not have a term for ‘music’, or, for that matter, with the ‘hegemonic universality’ implied by die Musik. Bohlman stresses the political aspects of such ‘nominalist strate- gies’, and indeed of all systems of representation. ‘Thinking—or even rethink- ing—music’, he says, ‘is at base an attempt to claim and control music as one’s own’; and a few pages later he adds that ‘Claiming a music as one’s own recog- nizes music as an object’. Ultimately, then, musicologists cannot escape the ontology of music that they constitute by thinking it, by rethinking it, by writing about it; as Bohlman puts it, ‘Ideally, I should endeavour to represent non- ‘Western ontologies of music; I should draw on “other” metaphysics no more nor less than my own. I can't. . . . I've responded to the dilemma by capitulating to it, by writing this essay at all.’ Bohlman emphasizes that ‘Music's ontologies are not . . . separable from the practices of music’. In other words, without an ontology there can be not only no reflection on music, but no music to reflect on. But it is obvious that musi- cology’s ontologies, if they may be called that, are inseparable from the attempt to formulate musical insights and experiences in verbal form, and as Bohlman says, ‘The metaphysical conundrums that result from the inability to unravel the distinctions between music and language are legion.’ (This is a theme that recurs throughout this first part.) In ‘Analysis in Context’ (Chapter 2), Jim Samson attempts to unravel, if not the distinctions between music and language (that would be too much to ask), then at least some of these musicological ontologies. He offers an interpretation that is at once historical and ideological, showing how analysis emerged as a distinct discipline in tandem with the autonomous work of art. We have, then, the paradoxical phenomenon of a discipline that is predicated on the synchronic (music analysis, you might say, is music minus history), but which turns out to be itself grounded in a particular historical2 Introduction moment. From this premiss, Samson draws a number of conclusions concern- ing the epistemology of analysis. He rejects the idea that analysis might stand ‘in a similar relation to the work as science does to the natural world’; on the contrary, he argues, ‘In music analysis the subject is irredeemably implicated.’ Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that ‘music analysis is as much a form of self- analysis (raising all the familiar problems of the “I” describing itself) as an empir- ical explanation of the other’. Another way of saying this is that analysis involves interpretation, and inter- pretation involves the possibility (indeed the logical necessity) of other interpre- tations. Three things can be seen to follow from this. One is that analysis is irreducibly pluralistic. ‘The formalist enterprise’, says Samson, ‘retains its con- stituency and much of its potency, but it is now just one of several options open to the wider community of analysts.’ The second is that analysis is fictive, and its substance lies in metaphor; Samson points out that the very idea of ‘absolute music’ (epitomized by Hanslick’s ‘tonally moving forms’) is predicated on the metaphor of space, and stresses the need ‘to scrutinize the nature of the images, models, or metaphors used in analysis, since their modus operandi defines the gap between our experience and our description of that experience’. The final con- clusion, in Samson's words, highlights ‘motivations rather than methods’; analysis—any analysis—responds to ‘the need to share our reactions (especially our enthusiasm and excitement), and there are no restrictions on their authen- tic expression’. In this way ‘the old formalism, no less than the New Musicology, may take its impetus from pleasure and intensity’. In associating this final argu- ment with Barthes’s ‘pleasure of the text’, Samson stresses the postmodern qual- ities of contemporary analysis as he sees it; its summarizing trait, he observes, is ‘a focus on the signifier, and a replacement of the single signified by a recursive intertextuality’. Where Samson sees an implicit postmodernism in today's analytical practice, Kevin Korsyn argues that ‘Although music research has sometimes adopted post- structural insights, we have been reluctant to face the radical consequences of such thought’. In ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dialogue’ (Chapter 3), he offers an approach that draws explicitly on post- structuralism, and in particular the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Analysts, Korsyn says, have traditionally looked for a quasi-grammatical unity in the compositions they study. But the unity of a sentence is not an appropriate model for music. We should be comparing music not with language but with utterances, which is to say the use of language in real-life communicative situations. And Bakhtin has shown how utterances are not unified in the same way that sentences, by defin- ition, are; on the contrary, they are characterized by the irreducible heterogene- ity, the multiple consciousness, that Bakhtin termed ‘dialogic’. In the same way, Korsyn argues, ‘We need new paradigms for analysis, new models that will allow both unity and heterogeneity.’ > Bduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, rans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis, 1986), 29.Introduction 3 Korsyn goes on to provide a practical example of what this might mean, showing how the first movement of Brahms'’s String Quartet Op. 51 No. 1, embodies ‘stratified musical languages . . . [that] do not merge, do not coalesce; instead, Brahms creates a plurality of unmerged voices’. The result, says Korsyn, is to decentre the listener, denying him or her a stable, privileged position from which to experience or interpret the music. Comparing his own analysis with David Lewin's (which emphasizes Brahms's synthesis of oppositions), Korsyn concludes: ‘The non-convergence, the abrasion, of discourses seems to me more essential than any dialectical resolution’. (Following Samson, we might say that Korsyn’s Bakhtinian reading of the quartet represents an option, an interpreta- tion, no more nor less valid than any other; Korsyn does not, presumably, wish to privilege heterogeneity over unity, but rather to establish an orientation within which both concepts are available to the analyst.) And he extends his Bakhtinian paradigm to cover music history as well. ‘Just as music analysis has generally privileged unity over heterogeneity,’ he writes, ‘so music history has preferred continuity to discontinuity.’ Indeed, he sees a ‘complicity’ in the traditional relationship between analysis and history: each, he argues, is predicated on an artificial and unsustainable distinction between text and context. If Samson traces the emergence of analysis as a distinct discipline in tandem with the autonomous musical work, Korsyn in effect writes an epitaph for both. Arnold Whittall’s ‘Autonomy/Heteronomy: The Contexts of Musicology’ (Chapter 4) can usefully be read side by side with Korsyn’s chapter, and not only because it includes a sympathetic critique of Korsyn’s reading of Brahms, Whit- tall is responding to the same post-structural and New Musicological currents as Korsyn, but in his case the aim to reach an accommodation between established methodologies and new horizons is more overt. For Whittall, ‘A deconstructed musicology ceases to be musicology at all if it resists direct engagement with the composer and composition, and side-steps the possibility that works of art may be defences against the world as much as products of the world.’ This links with Whittall’s earlier remark, which he makes in relation to Elliott Carter's Scrivo in vento, that ‘In linking work to world, it is still the work that dominates, because itrepresents a triumph over the world: it is a product of the world that transcends its context’. For Whittall, then, what Dahlhaus called the relative autonomy of music remains a possibility, and with it an ‘interpretative musicology’, a ‘multi- valent analysis [which] can balance the claims of poetics and formalism within acoherent discourse’. If Whittall admits that ‘even the most unambiguous texts prove to contain the makings of doubt and uncertainty’, his aim nevertheless seems to be to demonstrate that the converse is also true: the makings of ‘an interpretative musicology that is adequately plural and adequately coherent’ can be found even amidst the doubt and uncertainty of present-day musicological and analytical writing. In a memorable phrase, Whittall refers to ‘that inescapable binary stand-off between music and language’; like Charles Seeger, he locates the musicological