Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature

Cameron Bushnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136264634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book reads representations of Western music in literary texts to reveal the ways in which artifacts of imperial culture function within contemporary world literature. Bushnell argues that Western music's conventions for performance, composition, and listening, established during the colonial period, persist in postcolonial thought and practice. Music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods (Bach through Brahms) coincides with the rise of colonialism, and Western music contains imperial attitudes and values embedded within its conventions, standards, and rules. The book focuses on the culture of classical music as reflected in the worlds of characters and texts and contends that its effects outlast the historical significance of the real composers, pieces, styles, and forms. Through examples by authors such as McEwan, Vikram Seth, Bernard MacLaverty, Chang-rae Lee, and J.M. Coetzee, the book demonstrates how Western music enters narrative as both acts of history and as structures of analogy that suggest subject positions, human relations, and political activity that, in turn, describes a postcolonial condition. The uses to which Western music is put in each literary text reveals how European art music of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries is read and misread by postcolonial generations, exposing mostly hidden cultural structures that influence our contemporary understandings of social relations and hierarchies, norms for resolution and for assigning significance, and standards of propriety. The book presents strategies for thinking anew about the persistence of cultural imperialism, reading Western music simultaneously as representative of imperial, cultural dominance and as suggestive of resistant structures, forms, and practices that challenge the imperial hegemony.

1 Introduction

Beyond Contrapuntalism: A Politics of Alterity in World Literature

[B]y not taking account of the imperialist structures of attitude and reference they suggest, even in works like Aida, which seem unrelated to the struggle for territory and control, we reduce those works to caricatures, elaborate ones perhaps, but caricatures nonetheless.

—Edward Said, Culture & Imperialism¹

Joseph Goddard’s 1907 treatise The Rise of Music traces music history from ancient to modern civilizations, building upon an understanding of progress as evolutionary progress and reading the history of Western music as a history of empire. The subtitle also subtly introduces the notion that music represents the achievement of empire itself: “a Careful Enquiry into the Development of the Art from the primitive puttings forth in Egypt and Assyria to its Triumphant Consummation in Modern Effect.” In the narrative of this history, the mantle of past imperial musics leads naturally to this tale’s heroic figure: Western Music. Whereas geography and ethnicity contain and describe primitive music, neither place nor race binds or defines “triumphant” Music. From the music of past empires during a long pre-Christian period—Egyptian, Jewish, Assyrian and Babylonian, Greek, and Roman—emerges simply Music. The “triumphant consummation” into modernity of a Christian era needs no national, ethnic, or imperial modifier. Only an epigraph from Tennyson’s poem “Eleänore,” depicting the transcendent spirit of England as musical, alludes to the British Empire: “Motions flow / To one another, even as though / They were modulated so / To an unheard melody” (IV, 61–64). Dedicated to Queen Victoria, this early poem repeatedly describes a “serene, imperial Eleänore.” Unearthly origins, divine bearing, and an “ambrosial smile” place Eleänore among the gods and equate her with the Muses; Eleänore personifies England, and she is Music. The nation takes on the qualities of music; expansive, inexpressible, and eternal, it is uncontainable as “unheard melody.” Ruth Solie notes that Goddard’s “assumption is clear that music has progressed in a continuous, goal-directed manner from some inferior original state to the obviously superior and ‘more-developed’ state known in his time” (Solie 297). Not only are the music of Goddard’s time and place (European art music) and his national residence (England) equal inheritors of imperial genealogy, but more subtly, the British Empire is, in his progressive narrative, the logical site of Western music’s triumph. Goddard’s treatise proclaims that the rise of music follows the rise of empire, culminating in a simultaneous apex intertwining Western music and British Empire.

The specific kind of music that has come to be called “Western”—differing from Indian and Middle Eastern music, which also might legitimately claim the antecedents Goddard enumerates—traces its genealogy to the great ancient societies. Western music comes by its imperial credentials as part of the flows of history, a formula repeated in manual after manual.² Without exaggerating the significance of these pedagogical manuals, we can see that they record (and create) the commonsense understanding of Western music as superior and as an imperial right. Music not only accompanies celebrations of empire, but also reflects its values. Western music is, in short, complicit with imperialism. It is curious, then, that postcolonial critics have paid it so little attention.

This book identifies a new field of empire studies and defines a methodology for its investigation: it proposes strategies for reading representations of Western music in literary texts of the long millennial period to reveal the ways in which artifacts of imperial culture function within contemporary world literature. Western music’s conventions for performance, composition, and listening, established during the colonial period, persist in postcolonial thought and practice as, in Edward Said’s phrase above, structures of attitude and reference.³ I take as a central premise that music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods (Bach through Brahms) coincides with the rise of colonialism and the emergence of the age of empire, and that Western music, like Verdi’s Aida, contains imperial attitudes and values embedded within its conventions, standards, and rules.⁴ Further, I understand these attributes of classical music to be reflected in the worlds of characters and texts and to engender effects that outlast the historical significance of the real composers, pieces, styles, and forms.

This study focuses on literature employing Western music as theme or structure, centrally, as in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, and Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes, and, less centrally, as in Chang-rae Lee’s Gesture Life and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In these works, analogues of Western music enter narrative as effects of history and analogies to society and suggest subject positions, human relations, and political activity, which, in turn, describe a postcolonial condition. This book does not set out to construct a history of European art music, but rather seeks to understand how contemporary authors and readers currently view this music. For example, reading in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet a tongue-in-cheek dialogue between eighteenth-century composer Gluck and his librettist, I focus on the characters’ and the novel’s depictions of Gluck as a pushy opera composer who demands a happier ending for the story of Orpheus: “Hey, Calzabigi, what’s this ending you’re giving me here? Such a downer, I should send folks home with their faces long like a wurst?” The intonation of Jewish New Yorker, of course, does not belong to the “real” Gluck, who at the time he composes Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) is a Viennese Kapellmeister, but the demand for change is historically accurate: Gluck and Calzabigi are embroiled in the aesthetic turmoil that produced what became “reform opera” that excluded “florid excrescences” of Italian opera, “imitate[d] the restraint and concentration of French classical tragedy,” but did not escape “the Metastasian convention of the ‘happy ending’” (Hammelmann and Rose 611).⁵ Rushdie capitalizes on the idea of change inhering in movement from one state to another: Orfeo not only takes as its theme the traversal from hell to heaven, but it also transcends stylistic borders between Italian and French opera. In employing this cloying, cajoling voice, Rushdie displaces Gluck from Europe to the New World, makes Gluck successful in persuading the librettist to write a happy ending, and portrays thematically and structurally a movement between worlds that is no longer tragic. Rushdie’s references to Gluck and Orfeo underscore his favorable view of moving between worlds and occupying transitional positions. The novel only tenuously refers to the historical man and opera, but it uses “Gluck” and “Orfeo” to point to transitional figures and otherworldly locations, two subjects dear to Rushdie and taken up by postcolonial theorists.

The uses to which Western music is put in each of the literary texts discussed in the chapters that follow tell us something about how European art music of the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries is read and misread by postcolonial generations, revealing mostly hidden cultural structures that influence our contemporary understandings of social relations and hierarchies, norms for resolution and for assigning significance, and standards of propriety. The book presents strategies for analysis and reading, for thinking anew about the persistence of cultural imperialism, and for reconsidering modes of being and acting in the world.

Turning Empire on Its Ear notes the irony of a persistent cultural imperialism that prompts postcolonial resistance. Although the book considers European art music from an earlier historical period, it reads classical music not as material history, but as representations whose effects might be read in the literary output of the long millennial period. Western music functions in the literature anchoring this project as a perceivable “totality.” It operates as a metonym for a totalizing system based in European culture whose societal logic is often ungraspable in everyday experience. Western music, to be sure, even in its “classical” form, is not, in actuality, a complete and bounded system. New classical music is being written every day that stretches the bounds of the field.⁶ However, Western music functions in these texts as a limited “universal”—as a microcosm of a dominant European culture with distinct norms and practices for composition, performance, and listening—that produces both individual and textual responses.⁷ Further, these norms—the acceptable ratios of musical tones, the rightness of certain combinations of simultaneous sound, the necessity and function of silence, the gestures toward the ephemeral and unspeakable—suggest modes of resistance to the very European culture which Western music represents. In short, this project reads Western music simultaneously as representative of imperial cultural dominance and as suggestive of resistant structures, forms, and practices that challenge imperial hegemony.

Western classical music is a neglected site in contemporary literary analysis, but one essential to the project Theodor Adorno sets out: to think in ways that escape conceptualization and thus the constraint of existing societal and cultural understandings. The non-representational qualities of Western music as a material art, as well as its specialized vocabulary, its necessary technical competencies, and its increasing isolation from everyday life have drawn little critical attention from poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists. However, writers, especially those writing so-called “oppositional” literature,⁸ have employed European art music in order to trace its influences and effects in themes and in textual aesthetics. In the chapters below, each considering works from the long twentieth century, I investigate the following questions about classical music’s composers, pieces, theories, and performance practices: what effect does a thematic allusion to, for example, “Bach” or “Chopin” have in twentieth-century literature? What does an author gain in singling out particular forms of musical practice, such as ornamentation, tuning, or articulation? What does it mean for a text that its protagonist works in a medium (i.e., sound) that can never be fully explicated in the confines of the literary medium (i.e., the written word)? And most simply, why does “oppositional” literature include references to Western classical music at all?

In this literature, Western music represents imperial attitudes and values that are present in the disciplines of music theory and practice; their literary portrayal reveals unmarked normative modes of social engagement and subjectivity. I read music within a text, from proper name (Bach, Chopin), to genre (nocturne, fugue), to technique (tuning, articulation), to argue that these musical codes collectively identify an epistemology and ordering system unlike the particular rationality of the linguistic text, one that operates as a totalizing social system within, but separate from, the narrative. Reading the responses to Western music from protagonists and texts alike serves to instruct the imaginations of readers in alternative systems of thinking, relating, and acting in the world. Turning Empire on Its Ear asserts that literary theorists, even as outsiders to the field of musicology, gain from acquaintance with European art music a way to understand the continuing and surreptitious hegemony of European culture.

Edward Said’s broadly productive notion of contrapuntalism, a reading strategy informed by the structure of musical counterpoint, grounds my work. Said’s contrapuntalism finds in counterpoint—a compositional method in which equal, independent, but interdependent melodies sound simultaneously to create an intricate intertwined whole—the structure for the simultaneous reading of multiple accounts of a historical moment or a cultural event in order to understand the moment or event in all its complexity. I both continue and depart from this foundation: on the one hand, I identify other aspects of musical structure, genre, and history that are equally rich and suggestive as reading strategies. For example, Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes suggests a theory of ornamentalism, which I derive directly from Said’s idea that musical form suggests practices of reading. In this instance, MacLaverty’s novel describes a compositional method rising from differing methods of Baroque and Irish ornamentation (i.e., “grace notes”) in order to pose in musical terms a strategy for political reform in Northern Ireland. The Northern Irish Catholic protagonist, Catherine McKenna, scores music for “Protestant” Lambeg drums in a contest piece, Vernicle, which must feature “ethnic” elements, even though their sound has always terrified her because of their use in Orange Day marches. In the second half of the piece, Catherine contextualizes the drums with other sounds in order to control their force. She adds breath sentences to undercut and “church” bells to overpower. The drums are embellished, and the original is heard differently. This practice of elaboration forms the basis of the concept “ornamentalism,” which involves a process of supplementing a dominant theme in order to change the way it is perceived. “Ornamental” thinking suggests to Catherine a way to reconceive the symbols of entrenched sectarian prejudice of her Northern Ireland home; more generally, the process offers a way to modify perspectives toward existing political ideologies. On the other hand, I suggest that music as theme affects the very form and organization of the literary text itself. For example, the practices of intonation suggest a method for asserting order on perceived chaos and a theoretical infinity of tones. Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner takes as a sub-theme the Western system of equal temperament tuning and its significance to piano tuning. Tuning inscribes a practice of moving from disorder to artificially imposed order in which disorder eventually returns in the absence of continual maintenance of the art of tuning. As such, tuning also underwrites the trajectory of the novel from the instability of an unknown system (Burma recalled in its non-Western sense of time, its strange images, and its ability to distort the protagonist’s perspectives) to the certainty of the British war effort, but comes back to the initial uncertainty, with the understanding that the once-strange now operates as the protagonist’s reality. The Piano Tuner discusses the mechanics of the dominance of equal temperament tuning, but also demonstrates the extent to which this tuning is socially and culturally determined. When the piano tuner travels from London to Rangoon, his life’s work of tuning to a system of “right” tones is challenged by his realizations that the tones he rejects for the French Erard piano are the very ones that he hears as music in his new surroundings in Burma. Tuning becomes a method of thinking about and interrogating ideas of what is true, right, and good, not only for the Western music he knows, but also for the British Empire of which he is an uneasy resident.

Generalizing from the above examples, my methodology involves reading the normative practices and theories of Western music as structural analogies for the larger realm of cultural discipline governing individual and social behavior and interaction, but also for the possibility of individual resistance to that cultural governance. Turning Empire on Its Ear insists that cultural politics cannot be divorced from the aesthetics of its literary representations and finds in the language of Western music theory a discursive tool for expanding the vocabulary of theoretical inquiry.

Turning Empire on Its Ear takes as central two premises about representations of Western classical music in literature: first, they create or highlight tensions in protagonists’ social circumstances in referring to an extensive, disseminated, colonial history; and second, they pose analogies for literary consciousness and suggest alternative processes of thought both for characters and for readers in facing intransigent social and political problems. Given that language is notoriously unsuited to talking about or expressing music, the question of how musical representations function needs to be addressed. It is important to note what may be the obvious: representations of music in literature are not sound, nor do they attempt to be. Even when Salman Rushdie threads his sentences with rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, he does not expect that they will coalesce into songs, but he undoubtedly hopes that readers’ imaginations will be ignited, that consciousnesses will be stirred, by lyrics posing as prose. For example, the fans of Rushdie’s rock ‘n’ roll superstars encourage them to stay together, stealing their lines from rock lyrics: “Don’t throw your love away” and “Instead of breaking up, we wish that you were making up again” (8). In other words, literature does not try to make music, but rather demonstrates how literary consciousnesses are shaped by music, shows how music influences thought, and crafts a model in narrative for readers’ engagement with alterity. Representations of music mine a deep, cryptic history of compositions and composers, theories and disciplines. This set of conventions and practices produces literary effects that might be read as shaping subjectivity, as symptomatic of social tensions, and as highlighting disjunctions between cultural practices (Culler 70).

This book situates itself within postcolonial theory to offer reading strategies that attempt to negotiate historical reference and poetic structures of narrative that reveal Western music as bringing past hegemonic practices into the contemporary moment, creating within literature effects that might be read in the structures of consciousness and of text. It asks what meaning might be derived from reading the disjunctive histories that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music introduces into late twentieth-century narratives; it seeks to show how Western music inflects narrative structures by alluding to conventions of another disciplinary order. In short, this book calls for a blend of hermeneutic and poetic approaches. It is in the intersection of music’s meaning and music’s structures—both contextualized by the literary work itself—that demonstrate Western music both as a cultural figure dominating contemporary thinking for centuries and as a figure of subjectivity that resists this cultural domination from within the dominant itself. The general approach of finding in cultural hegemony the seeds of its own destruction is not new. However, what I bring to the attention of literary critics is that Western music is one form of an occluded imperial hegemony and that this music affects protagonists as a system of regulations and conventions, while posing to protagonists and readers alike a system that escapes the dominant system of its representation. The remainder of this section turns first to the findings of contemporary musicologists and music sociologists who identify music’s effects upon individual subjectivity and social relations. Although this book does not read the effects of real, materialized music, investigating instead the literary effects of music in representational forms, the reading of music in its real-world instantiations buttresses my own readings of Western music as analogy to subjectivity and social relations, and as influence to states of consciousness, inside and outside the text. Finally, I sketch briefly a history of Western music in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial settings around the world, primarily in the British Empire, to identify a tradition of national and imperial uses.

MUSIC AS A SOCIAL PRACTICE

Although music has long been considered an art affecting individual emotion, it has only recently been understood as a “powerful medium of social order,” a means of both individual and social r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• 1. Introduction: Beyond Contrapuntalism: A Politics of Alterity in World Literature
• PART I. The Amateurs
• PART II. The Virtuosi
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index