Music and Marx

Ideas, Practice, Politics

Regula Burckhardt Qureshi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136541353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Well-known contributors analyze the ways in which Marxist thought enters into music discourse. Exploring everything from Marxism in hip-hop to feudal properties of Hindustani music to revolutionary music of Central America, the essays in this book find surprising, paradigm-shifting revelations. This book will revolutionize the way music production and consumption is viewed. First published in 2002.

PART I

Commodification and Music Scholarship

1

Music Scholarship, Musical Practice, and the Act of Listening

DAVID GRAMIT

Produced by the experience of the game, and therefore of the objective structures within which it is played out, the “feel for the game” is what gives the game a subjective sense—a meaning and a raison d’être, but also a direction, an orientation, an impending outcome, for those who take part and therefore acknowledge what is at stake.… Indeed, one has only to suspend the commitment to the game implied in the feel for the game in order to reduce the world, and the actions performed in it, to absurdity, and to bring up questions about the meaning of the world and existence which people never ask when they are caught up in the game-the questions of an aesthete trapped in the instant, or an idle spectator.

—Pierre Bourdieu, THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE

I try to put together the two parts of my life, as many first-generation intellectuals do.… My main problem is to try and understand what happened to me. My trajectory may be described as miraculous, I suppose—an ascension to a place where I don’t belong. And so to be able to live in a world that is not mine I must try to understand both things: what it means to have an academic mind—how such is created—and at the same time what was lost in acquiring it.

—Bourdieu, DOXA AND THE COMMON LIFE: An Interview

What does it mean “to have an academic mind” with respect to music? Does it make sense to speak, with Bourdieu, of “what was lost in acquiring it” if we examine the way music is constructed in musicology? To explore these questions, I will begin by drawing attention to an act that is crucial to musicology but nonetheless often taken for granted within it: the act of listening to music—of listening, that is, with rapt attention to the particular shape and details of particular, unique musical works. As one of the central “objective structures within which the game of musical scholarship is played out, that act is crucial to the subjective sense” of the game and has often come to symbolize proper musical scholarship. But this disciplinary loyalty becomes problematic simply because the game of musicology is not the game of music (a pursuit that has its own sense and structures), even if the two have significant points of overlap. Rather than recognizing the differences between these two practices and reflecting on the significance of those differences for musicological practice, musicology has, I will argue, come to privilege the (scholar’s) act of listening to the extent that other significant elements of musical practice have been rendered all but invisible. To explain this situation of disappearing practices, I will have recourse to Karl Marx’s analysis of the manner in which commodities veil the social relations through which they are produced. From this perspective, what the academic mind “loses” both serves to secure its own institutional position and to naturalize the larger system in which it operates, by so constructing the musical object, the focus of scholarly inquiry, as to locate its significance within the work rather than in the behaviors and relationships that constitute musical activity.

This may seem a meager role for Marx in a collection dedicated to Marx and music, and indeed I make no claim to have forged a theoretical advance that will alter the practice of music scholarship in a way inconceivable without Marx. Rather, I offer the reflections of a music historian whose work centers on musical culture in the society of which Marx himself was a member; considering some of Marx’s ideas in relation to musicological practices can explain something about those practices and their origins, clarify Marx’s own perspective on the place of music within capitalism, and, finally, offer insight into the social position of musicology and the high musical culture it has helped to construct. Before arriving at Marx, however, I will consider the situation of musicology, and of phenomena that may seem far removed from the world of commodities, production, and class relations. As Bourdieu insists, however, ignoring these symbolic practices in search of an objective account of society is ultimately as deceptive as considering only those practices in isolation (see, for instance, Bourdieu 1990: 17 and 136–41).¹

I begin, then, with a consideration of a central feature of what might, following Bourdieu, be termed the “academic mind” within music, the structures of thought that produce scholarship whose musicological legitimacy is unimpeachable, even given recent challenges to methodologies and canons.² I have elsewhere discussed what I believe to be one crucial component of the field’s self-definition (see Gramit 1998a), so I will summarize only briefly here: Acknowledgment of the centrality of the aesthetic experience derived from focused attention to individual musical works is a sine qua non of at least the North American musicological enterprise. This foundational experience has defined the field of musicological study in a way that permits the disciplinary developments and controversies that have been so prominent within the last decade to proceed largely without fundamentally challenging at least this one basic rule of the game. Thoroughly internalized, it is most frequently made explicit when drawn out by a polemical challenge—either in order to defend one’s membership in the field or to challenge that of another.

One such discipline-bounding statement provides an admirably succinct characterization of the mode of attention to music that the musicological enterprise privileges. In the context of a discussion of scholarship that he criticized as failing to take account of “what many of us would recognize as the musical experience itself,” Ralph Locke (1993: 169) defined that experience as “the active and often critical/creative internal participation in the musical artwork.” Although unusually direct, Locke’s statement is by no means unique. Ellen Rosand, also cautioning against trends in recent scholarship, asserts similarly (1995: 11) that scholarship demands “passionate engagement” and “personal involvement” with music, and writes of “returning once again to the musical work, to discover the affective structures of its operation”; Pieter C. van den Toorn (1995: 1) opens his attack on the practices of “new musicology” by invoking “a consuming interest in music” that results in “an effort to draw ourselves closer to a musical context and enhance our appreciation”; Lawrence Kramer (one of the targets of van den Toorn’s attacks), in a polemical exchange with Gary Tomlinson, writes (1993: 27) of “listening with the kind of deep engagement, the heightened perception and sense of identification, that both grounds and impels criticism”; and even Tomlinson, who argues for a methodology that will not necessarily place the criticism of individual works at its center, still acknowledges (defensively) “our love for the music we study,” and “our usual impassioned musical involvements”—which, he maintains, we should “dredge up… from the hidden realm of untouchable premise they tend to inhabit” (1993: 24).

Nor are such statements limited to polemics of recent years. In the 1980s, Margaret Bent defended traditional musicological practices, especially the editing of music, against Joseph Kerman’s advocacy of the primacy of music criticism in part by asserting that editing did indeed involve the crucial element: “learning is a dynamic and shifting consensus of knowledge that includes aesthetic and musical experience as well as data in the traditional sense” (1986: 6; my emphasis). A product of the German academic controversies of the 1960s and 1970s, Carl Dahlhaus’s Foundations of Music History (1983) revolves around the problem of writing a plausible history of music while still acknowledging the necessity of “aesthetic immersion in musical works as self-sustaining entities” (27).³ And, returning to North America, both of the main participants in the most prominent disciplinary debate of the 1960s, Joseph Kerman and Edward Lowinsky, claimed the musical experience as their unassailable starting point: Kerman wrote of a “passion” for the great composers, of “the essential musical experience,” and of “an original commitment to music as aesthetic experience” (1965: 66-67) while Lowinsky countered that “[my] credo has always been: ‘the beginning and the end of musicological studies lie in sympathetic and critical evaluation of the individual work of art’ ” (1965: 226, citing Lowinsky 1961: 72).

Four decades of statements, ranging from almost offhand to fervent and written by scholars of widely differing perspectives, should suffice to make the point: So basic is the aesthetic experience of music—an intense, focused involvement with an individual work of music—to the conception of the object of musicological study that it demands acknowledgment from all sides. In order to establish credibility—even for enterprises (like Bent’s or Tomlinson’s) that focus elsewhere—it is essential at least to suggest that one knows that passionate involvement. To do otherwise is to risk dismissal of the sort given by Charles Rosen (1996: 63) to Tia DeNora: “It would be grand to have a social history of music, but before it can be realized, the sociologists will have to take music more seriously.” This formulation lays out the stakes particularly clearly: focused attention to the music itself is what separates legitimate musical scholarship from work in other disciplines that presumes to touch on music (e.g., “the sociologists”).

So pervasive a structuring value, I would argue, is part of the habitus of the discipline—the structure of thought into which the field disciplines its practitioners and which in turn shapes their perceptions and practices.⁴ If this is so, then even attempts to develop new musicological practices would continue to be shaped by it. And in fact, the unmarked presumption that listening—and in particular, concentrated listening to unique works—is the essential musical act is apparent not only in conventional musical scholarship but also in some of the most prominent recent attempts to depart from those conventions. Given this orientation, it is no coincidence that the most prominent and widely discussed examples of “the New Musicology” have been those that have devoted extensive attention to critical rehearings of canonic musical works.⁵

At this point, I should hasten to assure readers who may be wearying of a long parade of examples—one that could easily give rise to the expectation that the old dispensation is about to be dismissed in favor of a new, music-free music scholarship—that I am by no means arguing that musicologists should stop listening to music or writing about “the notes” (a fear given explicit voice by a professional colleague who heard an earlier expression of this position). Rather, I have simply sought to demonstrate that one particular tenet of music scholarship is both pervasive and naturalized: even if individual examples of scholarship may focus on other matters, musicology is ultimately “about” pieces of music to which we listen intently. It may seem disingenuous to proceed to insert my own statement of loyalty—that I too value both the experience of listening to music and the challenge of exploring how individual pieces “work” in various contexts—but it is nevertheless true. I recognize the pervasiveness of the value not only in the words of others but in my own hesitation in making the value itself the object of some of my scholarship. For surely, I find part of me objecting, listening to music is fundamental, and what we mean by “music” when we name it as the object of our study is self-evident.⁶

And yet, a more reflective part of me insists that it is not in fact so self-evident, and this prompts me to raise the possibility not of a noteless musicology but rather of one that recognizes that the act of listening—especially of listening like a scholar—is only one of the ways through which music becomes significant, and further, that the mode of listening itself can be seen to be as significant as the thing listened to. Before expanding on this position, I will try to convey my sense of its necessity, which arises in part from reflecting on my own experience of music. Simply put, I cannot, with Kerman, claim “an original commitment to music as aesthetic experience,” perhaps because I first encountered music that I learned to value for its own sake not through the act of focused listening but rather through the act of playing—specifically, learning an instrument in an elementary school band program. To be sure, I also learned to listen (albeit not immediately, as anyone who has attended an elementary school band concert will understand), but several other modes of listening seem to me to have been at least as important as that of solitary aesthetic participation in a work: listening in lessons to the voice and sounds of the teacher; listening to myself, practicing, in an attempt to internalize that voice and create those sounds; and listening to others in an ensemble situation, whether the direct interaction of chamber music or the larger and overtly hierarchical band or orchestra. Eventually, I also learned to listen to, delight in, and revere “great works” (just as, eventually, playing came to occupy a less significant role in my conception of music) and even to write about those works and their composers. But anyone who can remember listening as a child to an AM easy listening station believing that this was the “classical music” he was beginning to experience in band will perhaps always remain skeptical that aesthetic listening is the necessary center of music.

By introducing this alternative perspective autobiographically, I by no means wish to argue that we replace the aesthetic experience of music with experiential narrative as the mark of legitimate scholarship. Indeed, even my skeletal summary raises issues that reach well beyond the personal. For instance, simply to compare my account with what for Adorno (1994: 328) counted as a “prototypical” (read “autobiographical”?) initiatory musical experience—“a child who lies awake in his bed while a string quartet plays in an adjoining room, and who is suddenly so overwhelmed by the excitement of the music that he forgets to sleep and listens breathlessly”—is to be made aware of the distinction between what Bourdieu calls (1984: 74-75) “domestic learning” (“acquired pre-verbally, by early immersion in a world of cultivated people, practices and objects”) and a later, scholastically mediated learning open to those of less privileged origin. What I do hope to have suggested is that even if we limit ourselves to activities that fall clearly within the commonsense definition of musical, a perspective that centers on reflective, critical listening, no matter how socially oriented, will inevitably neglect or marginalize much that is essential to music. The physical activity of playing, of training a body to enact music; the institution of the music lesson, with its highly personalized means of reproducing cultural authority; and the relational and hierarchical dynamics of performance: all of these are inextricably linked to the music that has traditionally been the focus of musicology, yet they fade from view when “music” is implicitly defined as the work of a composer for aesthetic contemplation by a listener. And if we consider as well the relations that bring musical artifacts and events (instruments, printed scores, concerts, etc.) into being, the areas occluded from view still further dwarf that which musicology has defined as its object. As an alternative and supplement, then, I am proposing that we consider music as an activity, and musical works as one product of a set of relationships i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Foreword
• Introduction Thinking Music, Thinking Marx
• Part I Commodification and Music Scholarship
• 1 Music Scholarship, Musical Practice, And The Act Of Listening
• 2 Commodity-Form, Disavowal, and Practices of Music Theory
• Part II Capitalism and Musical Poetics
• 3 Modernity and Musical Structure Neo-Marxist Perspectives on Song Form and Its Successors
• 4 The Hip-Hop Sublime as a Form of Commodification
• Part III Relations of Production
• 5 Mode of Production and Musical Production: Is Hindustani Music Feudal?
• 6 The Capitalization of Musical Production: The Conceptual and Spatial Development of London's Public Concerts, 1660–1750
• 7 Marx, Money, and Musicians
• Part IV State and Revolutionary Marxism
• 8 Musicological Memoirs on Marxism
• 9 Making Marxist-Leninist Music in Uzbekistan
• 10 Central American Revolutionary Music
• Contributors
• Index