‘Tis the perception of the beautiful,
A fine extension of the faculties,
Platonic, universal, wonderful,
Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies,
Without which life would be extremely dull.
This three-part workshop explores the aesthetic dimension of the verbal interpretation of music, an issue of considerable interest to music theorists engaged in analysis. We will begin, paradoxically, at an apparent impasse: the idea of the ineffable, by which romantic aesthetics issued not only a lasting challenge to the general theory of interpretation but also to the exegesis of music specifically. Indeed, arguments for music's ineffability have recently reignited debates about the possibility of musical interpretation, whether technical or hermeneutic.
These considerations about the scope and limits of interpretive talk about music will lead, in the second session, to a closer study of different modes of music-interpretive discourse. In particular, we will focus on the ways in which technical and non-technical language in critical and analytical writings from Schumann to Lewin have not only defined subject-object relations and interpretive communities, but have also raised questions about the nature of figurative language and metaphor. Our discussion about the aesthetic premises behind writing about music concludes, on the third day, with an exploration of the place of the aesthetics of analysis within the broader discipline of music theory.
MUSIC AESTHETICS AND THE BODY
Workshop Leader: Susan McClary
The human body figures centrally in the development and sustaining of musical practices: we use our ears, voices, breath, limbs, and neurological system in the making and perception of sound, and our experiences as embodied creatures inform not only the rhythms to which we move in dance but also the complex signifying devices through which we produce and understand musical meaning. Recent work by Mark Johnson and others has demonstrated that humans make sense of the world through metaphors based upon embodiment, allowing for the serious study of this dimension of cognition and perception.
But although the body always appears prominently in musical endeavors, it does not thereby qualify as a universal. For societies seek to shape bodily experiences, encouraging certain modes of expression, severely restricting others. Across history and geographical space – and even between different subgroups within a single time and place, the body and the music associated with it often become sites of intense controversy. Many consequential moments in musical aesthetics – Plato’s Republic, Louis XIV’s banning of Italian music, the desire for transcendence in German Romanticism, the Modernist scorn of mass culture, the Taliban’s violent suppression of such activities – hinge on questions of the body and its proper deportment. This workshop will examine some of the ways bodily metaphors operate within examples from a range of repertories, especially as these may enhance analysis and performance. We will also necessarily engage with the cultural ideals and anxieties related to the body that fuel aesthetic debate.
The sublime, the “second” aesthetic category beside the beautiful, has typically eluded straightforward and consistent definition. Characterized by vast magnitude or overwhelming force, the sublime is often understood as that which evades representation. What is more, the sublime is usually figured not in terms of objective features, but as a subjective – psychological – category. In Burke’s famous example, the sailor who is being tossed about in a dinghy lost in the tempestuous ocean does not have a feeling of the sublime; he merely fears for his life. It is only the observer that, from the safety of the shore, can vicariously experience and aestheticize the life-threatening force of nature as an instance of the sublime.
These difficulties notwithstanding, a number of nineteenth-century musical thinkers – Arthur Seidl, Arthur Zeising, Hermann Stephani, and Hugo Riemann – attempted to capture aspects of the musical sublime in concrete technical terms and describe its specific musical features. Musical works that typically occur in these discussions include the Haydn’s Creation, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Rheingold prelude. We will critically discuss a selection of key contributions to this debate within their broader philosophical and musical contexts: To what extent is such an approach to the “musical sublime” feasible? To what extent do these approaches hold music-theoretical interest for us today? Can more recent philosophical approaches to the sublime shed new light on this problematic musical category?
Aesthetics is inextricably linked to ethics, despite attempts to purify music from such practical knowledge. These workshops will explore the relationship between ethics and aesthetics by working through (rather than working with or working against) Adorno. Although the recent “Adorno industry” has produced nicely packaged accounts of his reading of Beethoven, we will be thinking through some of the philosopher’s more peripheral but significant theological motifs on the composer (on love, prayer, thanksgiving, for example, albeit somewhat “demythologized”). These ideas raise difficult questions on the nature of freedom (the foundation for modern ethics), and the ethics of the subject (still the backbone of our actions).
This workshop considers ways in which Beethoven’s music maps out the aesthetics of freedom, the problems intrinsic to such an ethics, and whether there is another ethics of freedom left un-thought in Beethoven’s music that might be more relevant to the twenty-first century. Music theory and analysis, perhaps unknowingly, have played an integral part in shaping these issues in that Beethoven’s music has been a model for many theories; we will explore how music analysis can rise to the challenge of a new ethics. Apart from close readings of texts by Adorno, Levinas, Marion, Zizioulas and some musicologists, we may also explore these questions through film.
LITERARY MODELS AND MUSIC
Workshop Leader: Fred Maus
Literary criticism, a large, busy enterprise in comparison to music scholarship, offers a tempting array of models with the potential for adaptation to interpretation and analysis of music. At the same time, literary criticism and related philosophical enterprises can effectively direct attention to aspects of the verbal texts that music scholars produce about music.
This workshop will address both areas of potential modeling. We will ask how approaches such as the close reading of “New Criticism,” the philosophically oriented readings of deconstruction, and narrative theory offer resources for interpretation and analysis of music. We will also turn to literary tools on texts about music, benefiting from models such as Rorty’s “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” and Derrida’s Of Grammatology.
At the turn of this century, the landscape of music studies witnessed many new cultural, critical and historicist approaches. These approaches challenge the institutionalized priorities of a field biased toward the self-referential aesthetic autonomy of music and its independence from other forms of social discourse. These approaches also challenge the foundations of Music Theory. Instead, the new musicology promises heightened awareness of the ideological dimensions of the latter 'purely aesthetic' paradigm and a renewed interest in the heterogenous and much contested cultural arena that is its condition of possibility. This paradigmatic shift in emphasis has marked an embrace of various traditionally excluded categories, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on, and a renewed faith in the ethical and political relevance of musicological writing.
How, if at all, are these cultural, ethical and political concerns relevant for music theory and how is music theory relevant to these concerns? The first session investigates the curse and the promise of notions of the “purely musical” as well as musical formalism in relation to themes raised by the new critical musicology; the second session examines the critical dimensions of works by composers ranging from Mahler to Lachenmann in relation to their philosophical underpinnings (ranging from Nietzsche to Derrida); and the third session speculates on future possibilities for ethical and political strategies in writings on music. Repertoire explored in the sessions will be drawn from popular, ritual and concert music in a global frame.
