Essay: Socialising Analysis Through Postmodern Knowledge

Socialising Analysis Through Postmodern Knowledge

(MPhil Submission, Lent Term 2012)

3500 Words

The 20^th Century saw the study of music predominantly focused on the study of Western Art Music through analyses which took as their starting point the 'music itself'– interpreting the structures of a work, together with their resolution into relatively simpler elements, to show how harmony and motives work together to form a unified whole. From the late 1950's onwards, the quasi-scientific field of music theory and analysis underwent rapid expansion and professionalisation in North America, 'music theorist' becoming an esteemed professional identity (Everett Maus 2004: 14). Although there are certainly agreed upon methodological 'tools' (i.e. the parameters of the music itself), there are many accepted, differing methodologies.¹

Joseph Kerman's seminal publications How We Got Into Analysis and How To Get Out (1980) and Musicology (1985) began a substantial weakening of faith in the methods of analysis, and a shift in focus towards the 'cultural' values to which it has, by custom, dichotomously opposed itself. In this essay, I will take the look at the contributions of two authors who helped shift musicology out of the analytic paradigm by borrowing ideas from literary theory, whether to present a method of discussing social context – Lawrence Kramer's Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, or to present a different model of how we may look at the 'music itself' – Rose Rosengard Subotnik's Deconstructive Variations. I will use these texts to illustrate issues raised by the paradigm shift, and to suggest ways in which these problems, which are still pertinent today, may be resolved.

In the first chapter of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, Kramer accuses analysis as having, in its “zealous will to truth” promoted the “rhetoric of impersonality into an epistemological first principle”, and states that within musicology, the concept of knowledge needs to be re-situated within the historicity of human subjects and their discourses (Kramer 1992: 2). Kramer 'undoes' analysis's rational foundation by asserting that by adopting a scientific manner and presenting its results as objective, analysis disguises its roots in the subjectivity of the analyst and makes implicit the value judgments on which it constructs its claims to knowledge. “For what if”, Kramer asks, “interpretations are...contestable, historically conditioned forms of knowledge?” (my italics). This position is supported by many later musicologists, who have gone even further in trying to show that the 'purist' techniques of analysis have a strong root in the ideology surrounding the Western concert tradition and the culturally constructed notion of instrumental music as transcendental (Levy 1987, Tomlinson 2003).

Kramer proceeds to argue for a musicology that makes the historical – with all its contingencies, subjectivities and cultural constructs – an object on which to focus rather than deny. He outlines scope for engagement with feminist theory, popular culture, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, the histories of sexualities and other forms of postmodern knowledge. The essential principle of Kramer's musicology is that it should be a 'dialogue of listening' between critic and the composer, who provokes questions by making their music behave in a certain way, and trusts the listener to hear the music within a field of rhetorical, expressive, and discursive behaviours. He states this is especially appropriate to 'representative' music; representation is one of the sites where culture enters music, and music enters culture. In his third chapter, Kramer presents a detailed analysis of Haydn's The Creation, using both Schenker and Tovey to help elucidate the manner in which Die Vorstellung des Chaos conveys its representation of the origins of the universe, accounting for the appropriate musical parameters. For example, Kramer takes the use of melody to be appropriately fragmentary (as one might expect in a partly-formed universe) and also locates a 'chaos motive': three notes ascending a minor third in a double dotted rhythm (e.g mm.22-24). He explains how Haydn treats the motive to explicate chaos's urgent desire to be lifted into the cosmos, but also to thwart their aspirations, as they greet the cadences in bars 39 and 49.

Kramer’s notion of 'subjectivity' here and in the rest of the book becomes obfuscated and problematic in its application. For all his apparent understanding of the problems of the enlightened postmodern academic, he appears to limit discussion of the (co-dependent and co-extensive) relationship between subject and object only to disciplinary classifications of knowledge – equating 'subjectivity' with the cultural and historical, in marked opposition to the 'objective' which he relates to quantitative and quasi-mathematical data. Although initially he undercuts the traditionally conceived notion of objective by pointing out its origins in subjectivity, he takes up the same authorial stance and manner of looking at the object that has traditionally been used by analysis. That is, although he considers 'extra musical' factors, he does so through from the perspective of someone who claims they have access to the music as it 'really is'.

Since not all of Kramer's arguments are fully justified by his musical examples (Pasler 1997), one could argue that a more nuanced application of postmodern knowledge would have been slightly more cautious in conducting a 'dialogue' with the music. For, without any semantic capacity of its own, music is inarticulate in refuting the meanings the theorist gives it.² In Kramer's studies, the distinction between finding meanings and creating them is markedly obscure. This is demonstrated especially when he argues that the musical portrayal of 'chaos' extends towards a notion of 'limitlessness' he turns to quoting the literary theorist Slavoj Žižek, rather than providing a musical example as justification for his ideas. Behind this example lies a deeper epistemological issue: when discussing music, is there ever a distinct difference between meanings which are found and meanings which are made, or is there only a gradient? I will return to the role of social context later in this essay; to delve further into the complications postmodern theory illuminates between analysis, the academic, and the 'music itself', I will now turn to Rose Rosengard Subotnik's Deconstructive Variations.

The poststructuralist concept of deconstruction, engendered by Jaques Derrida, has no universally agreed upon definition or form of application. In fact, deconstruction is resistant to any notion that would 'fix' its interpretation, precisely because its 'central principle' (for lack of a more appropriate term) is what Derrida called Différance – the notion that there is always some difference, some delay, between the meaning intended in an utterance made by a subject, and the meaning received in its interpretation by another (Glendinning 2011: 54). The issue is more complex, vast and discursive than this small outline makes clear, but for the purposes of this essay, this does not matter: Subotnik makes no claim to provide a full account of any deconstructionist’s work; rather, the book is an account of the results of the application of certain 'deconstructive' ideas to a musical text.³

The chapter that most concerns us, entitled “How Could Chopin's A-Major Prelude be Deconstructed” presents two, in-depth readings of Chopin's Prelude op. 28, no. 7, which are incompatible: as Subotnik observes, “characteristically, a deconstruction results in (at least) two coherent readings of a single text that coexist but cannot be reconciled with each other” (Subotnik 1996: 66). The first, more 'congenial' reading – the one that Subotnik states the prelude “assigns priority to,” and therefore presents as the foreground layer of meaning – construes the prelude as a unified whole. It is divided into 'primary' material, which is tonally located in the key of A major, and 'supplementary' material, the climactic chord on the first beat of measure 12 (chord V of B major). The supplementary material is defined as such since the piece would still work as a composition if phrase 6, which contains the chord, behaved like phrase 2; although Subotnik is keen to remind us the chord is complementary, not inessential.

Subotnik claims the workings of the prelude “suggest themselves very powerfully... as a metaphor for free choice.” By rupturing the A major tonality, chord V of B (analogous to a subjective individual) effectively symbolizes the power of the freely acting subject to have an impact on its environment. Yet, through its identity as tonally different, it clarifies its own secondary status, and thus confirms the governing constructive role of the tonic, A, just as the freely acting subject depends on some united, governing, rational framework in order to render its actions intelligible.

In the second 'deconstructive' reading, Subotnik rips apart the unity she previously constructed. By replacing the tonal lens she uses to view the prelude with one that focuses on parameters our academic tradition may have conditioned us to marginalize, we can construe phrase 6 and the climactic chord it contains not as a consequential partner of phrase 5, but as itself, an antecedent. Thus, we may hear chord V of B-minor as a dramatic and rhetorical projection of strength, which is disjunct from the rest of the piece also in terms of its extended range, increased dynamic, and the fact that the chord is often performed slower tempo, and rolled (for pianists whose hands do not span a compound major third). In breaking the symmetry of the 'sensuous' antecedents and 'logical' consequents, the framework of order in the first reading is dissolved, and the prelude's is rendered contingent; a structure which, like human life, may or may not possess meaning.

There are a number of issues that arise from this interpretation. The first is similar to the problem encountered within Kramer's analysis: in her analysis she reaches outwards to explain the prelude in light of metaphoric associations it has no power to contest. In extension, Subotnik's interpretation (of both the two readings, and the relationship between phrase 6 and the rest of the musical material) as oppositional appears forced. A unified prelude and an un-unified prelude might be unreconcilable, but do they constitute a binary opposition? As Brian Hyer observes of deconstructive readings more generally, “deconstructionists sometimes force mere differences into oppositions in order to preside, triumphantly over their undoing” (Hyer 1998: 414).

The main issue, however, is illuminated by questioning whether Subotnik's readings actually are deconstructive. As I have stated, what deconstruction exactly is falls outside the boundaries of this essay, and Subotnik herself never claims to have presented an (again, for lack of a better term) authentic deconstructive model. Yet what Subotnik's analysis reveals is a weakening of faith in the tools of analysis: an unclear stance on which parameters should be used to dissect the prelude into its 'essential elements' (necessary in order to explain its inner workings). In both readings phrases are taken as stable constituent objects, with phrase 6 as the climax; however, phrase 6's classification as antecedent or consequent is dependent on whether we view the prelude in a predominantly tonal sense (as in reading 1) or whether we include the (traditionally secondary) parameters of range and dynamic. A third view, articulated by Brian Hyer in light of what he considers the prelude's 'terseness', is that there are not eight phrases but two (antecedent) phrases (with cadences). And Kevin Korsyn contends, in his survey of analyses of Prelude no. 7, and the rest of Opus 28, there are, in fact, four different ways of reading the preludes: as unified monads, with separate systems of internal workings, as nomads, as a cryptocycle, or as an ironic cycle, depending on which way each prelude's internal workings are defined in relation with the others' (Korsyn 2003: 101).

Implicitly demonstrated by the multiplicity of readings – whether contained within the work of a single “author” or not – is this: the results of analysis are dependent on the questions analysis asks, and the parameters through which it chooses to view the work. As Adam Krims has observed, those working within the field of New Musicology, despite their critical sophistication, often take for granted the essentialist premise that music analysis may reveal something objectively present in the 'music itself' (Krims 1998: 304). In this sense, Subotnik and Kramer's analyses are more structuralist than poststructuralist, but then so is all analytical theory: analysis itself seems to encourage us to essentialize analytical 'tools', whilst poststructuralist thought contests metalanguage and its essentialist tendencies, and tends to militate against methodological closure. Indeed, if there ever was a binary opposition that needed to be undone, it would have been between the 'objects' of analysis and their expression in language.

Are analysis and postmodern knowledge radically incompatible, then? Kofi Agawu argues: yes. Analysis needs neither cultural context or postmodern knowledge; theory works best when questions about its objects are consigned to the periphery, and when matters of social context form a separate discussion: “The musical text...together with an explicit methodology, form the basis of theorizing.” In this sense, analysis needs no justification and should carry on as it has done before (Agawu 1993: 89-98).

This barefaced rebutal resulted in a discursive stalemate with Joseph Kerman, whereby both theorists fought from positions constructed on different axioms, “misrecognizing the two disciplines dependency on each other, as they misrecognise the sources of their own identity”. Agawu undermines his argument by presenting a historical case for it, and Kerman tries to construct a unified identity for all historical critics by attempting to detach historical criticism from theory entirely, obscuring the identities of theorists he admires by reclassifying them as resembling something like a critic (Korsyn 2003: 88). Korsyn sets forth a list of reforms the academy should undertake to end the stand-off and let the two disciplines continue in parallel, with separate methodologies and separate concerns. By this, all of music's aspects would be represented through undertaking relative positions in a larger discourse with no singular or permanent centre.

However, what I propose as a better solution to Korsyn's notion of parallel paradigms is implicit within the writings of Kramer and Subotnik, but never brought to explicit attention: “[For] what if”, Kramer asks, “we see the music, not as the site where its contexts vanish, but precisely as the site where they appear?” In Kramer's “dialogue of listening” he does not undergo the process of listening to specific performances and documenting the results, but conducts a hermeneutic analysis of music as a text, and discusses it in relation to reminisces of performances he has attended previously, or vague, unspecified, imaginary performances. Likewise, although Subotnik points to issues within performance (the difficultly of the rolled chord for her small hands, the fact that performers often slow down as they approach it with dread), specific performances are not delineated.

However, refocusing on real performance events allows us to relate music to social and cultural forces in a more concrete manner. To take an obvious example, depending on their cultural conditioning, a performer may choose to roll the climactic chord in phrase 6 of Chopin's A-Major prelude or not; they may find the passage tricky and attempt it rather slowly; they may, even chose to play the phrase as a disjunct from the others which surround it, since personally, they understand the prelude to be a metaphor for the contingent nature of all human life and understanding.

Therefore, we should try and understand music by relating the specifics of a performance to the larger cultural contexts in which they are imbedded, for instance: styles, genres, performing trends and performance occasions. Undoubtedly this creates a more realistic vision of music's relation to the social and cultural than Kramer's; however, those who have written on it often fall into a similar interpretive trap. Writers such as Small (1998) and Attali (1985) take these microsocialities as the sole locus for theorising the social in music, idealizing them through a metaphysics of presence (Born, forthcoming). Accounts like this run the risk of determining the musical event as a product of social or ideological forces, when these “social forces” are what should be explained.

In advocating a performance approach, I am not stating that performance is any more resistant to the sort of interpretations music receives when conceived of as a text. However, performance does limit these types of interpretation through offering a solid and accessible contextual framework that we can study, empirically, through ethnography.

Nicholas Cook and Georgina Born's “Relational musicology” is a theoretical paradigm that advocates such an approach. Recent work within the field holds that meaning emerges in encounters between people, and is not wholly determined by the musical score, social structures or ideologies. Instead, these are seen to forge the conditions for the encounters in which culture is negotiated and reshaped by agents. Through a strong ethnographic approach which engages with individuals to study these negotiations in rehearsal and performance, and an assessment of findings it in relation to larger social theories, we find an empirically sound way of relating musical practices to their social and cultural context.

Born (2007) argues that it is productive to analyse music's myriad socialities in terms of four planes of social mediation: 1) Micro-socialities 2) Imagined communities 3) How it refracts wider social identity formations, and 4) Forces of production. This framework goes some way to eliminate reductive accounts of music's relation to the social by holding interactions between these planes (and the extra-musical factors that they incorporate) are irreducibly complex, and all four planes have the ability to animate music's aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions. The anti-reductionist gains of analysing both the autonomy of distinctive planes of music's social mediation and, thereby, cross-scalar relations between them include the potential for contradiction and disjunction. For performance does not only traverse wider social relations, but it has the ability to catalyse or act on them, to invert or contest hierarchical social orders. Genre, for example, is commonly explained as embodying an assured linkage to the politics of the communities that construct it (e.g. Negus 1999). However, this does not explain its power to affect either the reproduction of identity formations, or a redirection or novel coalition of such formations. Genre should therefore be analysed as an evolving constellation constituted by the mutual mediation between two self-organizing entities (music and identity formations), (Born, forthcoming).

Relational musicology advocates reshaping the boundaries of the epistemic field, revealing the concealed ideologies of individual branches, and extending other branches to form hybridized and multivalent approaches (Born 2007). In this sense, there is room here for analysis to be brought back into the picture, as well as occupying an isolated position within the field as Agawu and Korsyn suggest.

The manner in which analysis has previously aggregated with different methodologies has been problematic. Analytical methods have been used in ethnographies as a manner of recording performances. However, too often these transcriptions attempt to totalise the experience of the individual musicians making up the ensemble and abstracts it from the social processes in which it is embedded, creating a new reified text which translates rather than explains the experience (Cook 1999: 261). 'Structurally informed performance' (as urged by Berry or Namour) has also been problematic. It is prescriptive rather than descriptive in nature, and although it presents viable options it cannot justify why these are necessarily better than other options discovered through performing.

Cook defines the score not as a textual object with all its meanings located within it, but instead as a script for social interaction, which gives us only a certain amount of information to obey in performance, and leaves the rest as ambiguous, delegating decisions to performers who will negotiate to fix them for performance (forthcoming). Through this 'relational' paradigm, we can work towards creating different forms of analysis, which does not 'blindly' dictate performance methods, but poses questions to performance, and engages with responses. This approach also offers the capacity to shift analysis away from the purely tonal, and consider other important musical parameters, including those not present when we consider music as a text such as gesture and movement.

In conclusion, postmodern knowledge might not have taken musicology in the direction it originally intended, but opening musicology to literary theory and deconstructive approaches planted the seeds for the development of the study of music in relation to the social and cultural, and the expansion of analytical methodologies. In particular, I advocate Nick Cook and Georgina Born's approach of Relational Musicology, in light of its nuanced and realistic understanding of the complex relationship between music and the social factors it aggregated with, and its ethnographic focus on 'real' (rather than abstracted) forms of social and cultural knowledge. Hopefully, this will enable us to make a swifter shift away from the large body of introspective discourse characteristic of musicology's last twenty years and engage in a new yet enlightened focus on our “object” of study.

3434 Words. 

 

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Born, Georgina, “For a relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn”, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, (2007) Vol. 135, no. 2, 205–243

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(forthcoming: 2012).

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Hyer, Brian, “Review: Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society by Rose Rosengard Subotnik; Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge by Lawrence Kramer,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 409 – 424

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Kerman, Joseph, “How We Dot into Analysis and How to Get Out,” Critical Enquiry 7, (1980), reprinted in Write all These Down: Essays on Music, (Berkely: University of California Press, 1999), 12–32

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Kramer, Lawrence, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, (University of California Press: 1992)

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1Analysis is reflective of modernist values more largely, in that it prizes the rational, the constantive, the quantitive, the scientific and the masculine.

2Nicholas Cook explores the complex interactions between music and text in 'Theorising Musical Meaning', Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 170-195

3The other attempts at applying deconstruction (which encounter the same problems) are: Snarrenberg (1987) Scherzinger (1996) Kramer (1990) Littlefield (1996).