Music and the Politics of Negation

James R. Currie

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253005229
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Over the past quarter century, music studies in the academy have their postmodern credentials by insisting that our scholarly engagements start and end by placing music firmly within its various historical and social contexts. In Music and the Politics of Negation, James R. Currie sets out to disturb the validity of this now quite orthodox claim. Alternating dialectically between analytic and historical investigations into the late 18th century and the present, he poses a set of uncomfortable questions regarding the limits and complicities of the values that the academy keeps in circulation by means of its musical encounters. His overriding thesis is that the forces that have formed us are not our fate.

1

Veils

(Mozart, Piano Concerto K. 459, Finale)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Once a year we acknowledge our love for others by making them queen of a touchingly comic realm of pantomime fanfares from plastic trumpets, cakes aglow with candles, champagne overflowing from popping bottles. But what are we really doing at this birthday party? Only the morally Spartan would insist that the event is solely concerned with celebrating the particularity of a dear friend, for surely we are also celebrating the reciprocity of love: that I love my friend not only for who she is, in and of herself, but also for what she enables me to actualize surprisingly from out of myself; I celebrate her because she makes celebration overflow from out of me, like champagne from popping bottles at a birthday party. And so in 2006 we raised a glass to Mozart (250 years old!) and made a toast: to the “who he is” that allows this celebrating somebody else from out of us to emerge.

If Mozart can still activate a celebration within our being, then that is indeed remarkable. But it is also somewhat disturbing, a fact that encourages me to kick-start this book into motion with a hysteric line of attack: for we are all participants in a world that, even though it has had 250 years of opportunity to listen to Mozart's music, is nevertheless catastrophically broken. Just one quotation is needed here, from Derrida, over fifteen years ago, when many in the West might not have imagined how bad things were about to become:

It must be cried out…never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on earth.¹

So thank you Mozart! But for what exactly? For helping us to preserve the fundamental humanity that glows from out of the heart of our celebration of you? Or for helping us to forget the fundamental inhumanity of a world that, in our day-to-day lives, we are inextricably implicated in sustaining?

MIRROR MOZART

Mirror Mozart on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? It is a relative given of reception history that each age seems both to ask this question of Mozart and also to find the same answer: “You are the fairest.” Maybe this narcissism that Mozart's music can inspire in us is not only a negative shadow cast by historical relativism. Maybe Mozart's music does, in fact, have the ability to reveal a certain best in us–not just our best, but a best that is indistinguishable from the best that other ages have had to offer. Maybe we are the fairest not because we are human at a particular time and place, but simply because we are human, per se. Maybe Mozart's music is the mirror that reflects not us, but the universal within us.

In the still pervasively postmodern climate of contemporary academia, such statements are unfashionable, if not deemed politically irresponsible. To talk about the universal is to avoid the matter at hand. At best, the universalist is inconsiderate, like someone lecturing about metaphysics to a mother trying to cook dinner for three screaming children. At worst, she is someone who puts Mozart on and turns up the volume while violence takes place outside her front door. Within the court of postmodernism, the notion of the universal has been found guilty of war crimes (both literally and metaphorically). However, as my essay will show, this should neither lead us to conclude that postmodernism has had an unfruitful relationship with mirrors, nor that it would reject the concept (in the style of Jeff Koons) of a mirror-coated Mozart.² Although postmodern thinking in general would undoubtedly reject the notion that Mozart's music reflects the universal in man, a certain line of inquiry within musicology can in contrast validate a particular set of reflections between Mozart and the postmodern present. In this essay, I examine these reflections so as to negotiate my opening challenge regarding how Mozart's music is to be celebrated in the face of the political catastrophes of the present. Organizing my discussion around the metaphor of the mirror, I start by outlining the reflections between art and politics that postmodernism has set in place. This is followed by an improvisation on some suggestions from Wye Jamison Allanbrook concerning Mozart and postmodernism, in which I discuss the late eighteenth-century discourse regarding learned and galant styles via an extensive reading of the stylistic processes of the finale of Mozart's Piano Concerto in F Major, K. 459. To conclude, I suggest why certain political situations demand that mirrors should be smashed or veiled and what that might mean in terms of the relationship between Mozart's music and the possibility of a better world, should we even consider it still appropriate to talk about such things in the same breath.

POLITICAL REFLECTIONS

At the end of the eighteenth century, after nearly two uninterrupted centuries of confidently reflecting how the West wished to understand itself and its art, the metaphor of the mirror started to tarnish. Instead of grounding the understanding of reality, reflections (particularly of the self) acquired the potential to cause great anxiety, exiling the human subject from out of the validating home she had once found in the recognition of her own appearance and the appearance of her world, and into a realm of the uncanny, the Unheimlich, where the comforts of home became the horrors of alienation. Like ghosts, reflections of the already existent were things to be avoided at all costs–a warning that the Romantics were to communicate particularly through Doppelgänger, that cast of terrifying reflections that Romantics allowed periodically to haunt and sometimes penetrate the secure limits of narrative and discourse. However, contrary to a common understanding of Romanticism, one might provocatively argue that the problem was not so much a fear of what unexpected horror might suddenly stare back at one from the mirror's surface. It was not that we might suddenly come face-to-face with the Other looking over our shoulder; Glenn Close in the famous bathroom scene finale to Fatal Attraction, dribblingly mad, wielding a kitchen cleaver. Rather it was that there might not be anything more than what one already saw. Looking into the mirror we see ourselves looking back at ourselves looking at ourselves in the mirror, ad infinitum; an unending ricochet between reality and reflection stretching without variation into a future of the infinite same. Horrified, we smash the mirror, but are then confronted by an even greater trauma: that our terrifying anxiety is but a trick played by the light on a flat surface. For the Romantics there had to be depth, for in the depths lay the possibility that there might be something more to life than the merely apparent. The exploration of depth did, of course, run the risk of confronting unforeseen, even annihilating, terrors, but it was a risk that had to be taken in the name of a certain political hope.³ As is now well documented, Romantic music became a prime medium by which such depths could be fathomed. Romantic hermeneutics, remaining consistent to this discourse, argued that what was most important about this music was not its immediately heard surface but the secrets that it kept hidden down below. And so Keats was famously to write in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.”

Thus, at the very moment that music assumed her position at the top of the hierarchy of the arts, her acceptance song became inaudible, a state of affairs that causes eyebrows to be raised among certain critics. But as Allanbrook asks rhetorically: “Should one really be disturbed to think that music could concern surfaces?”⁴ Indeed, why shouldn't the tangibility of music's surface, its inextricable embodiment in audible sound, constitute the alpha and omega for celebrating it in the first place? Surely we should work with the already existing plenitude of music as it is, rather than, to appropriate E. T. A. Hoffmann, the “infinite longing” created by the question of what it might be hiding.⁵ As Susan Sontag famously once put it: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”⁶

Such statements have the quality of calls for hedonistic luxuriation in the merely sensuous, for an aestheticization of all existence including thought. Undoubtedly, there is an element of this in certain postmodern writings, most notably the later work of Roland Barthes. Critics of postmodernism, such as Eagleton, are then perhaps right to question the political validity of such positions.⁷ But across the disciplines, postmodern suspicions regarding the hermeneutic impulse toward depth and the art that encourages it have also been motivated by perfectly justifiable political anxieties.⁸ On the one hand, postmodernists often suggest that the tendency to talk first and foremost of what lies beneath the surface of art may be analogous to the means by which, time and again in the sphere of our political consciousness, our gaze has been directed away from the self-evident political and economic inadequacies of reality and redirected toward claims either of an underlying political order or of a more broken (but strangely invisible) part of reality that has greater moral and ethical claims on our attention. Thus, in part, postmodernism seriously entertains the notion that analysis of depth may be isomorphic with the disavowals of consciously constructed projects of political oppression. In doing so, it is strangely in accordance with the Enlightenment critique of authority that tends to work on the assumption that arcane mysteries are merely functional, acting as smokescreens for the machinery that supports the elite and inequality. (As I soon articulate in more detail, postmodernism, irrespective of its suspicions regarding metaphysics, is somewhat like the Enlightenment in this regard; it seeks to shine a certain light onto all existence, thus banishing the smoky theatrical shadows that are so much a part of depth's dramatic success.)

On the other hand, postmodernism has been concerned not only with how depth obfuscates the problems of our political reality, but also how it disempowers us by training us in a second nature, whereby we then assume that the first move to be made in negotiating the difficulties of our world (whether personal or political) is to look for an underlying cause or origin that must be known or confronted before further progress can be made. In the collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for example, such depths, whether they occur in the scene of psychoanalysis or broader social dialogues, are considered chimerical; they are dangled in front of us as unattainable goals that merely make us forget that we could, to use their terminology, “become” the skills of which we are already in possession (on our surface, as it were) but whose revolutionary potential we have as yet failed to activate.⁹ In following this line of thought, postmodernism has shared similarities with the methods of critique that led Marx to assert, for example, that religion was the opium of the people.

So postmodernism's famous celebration of surface is not just to be taken as an avoidance of seriousness (although, taking its cue from Dada and surrealism, it has at times made a form of political commitment out of its rejection of what normatively constitutes seriousness in art). In fact, its call for depths to be collapsed into completely self-present surfaces issues from the radically democratic project that it claims lies at the heart of most of its discourses. In the context of postmodernism, we should aim at hiding nothing, and also at making everything as available as possible. On a musical level this can lead, as in Alfred Schnittke's discussion of the “polystylistic method,” to talk of a kind of “documentary objectivity of musical reality, presented not just as something reflected individually but as an actual quotation”; the third part of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia has thus been explained not just as a collage of quotations, but also as “musical ‘documents’ from various ages–reminding one of the cinema in the 1970s.”¹⁰ On the other hand, this discourse of availability helps to explain postmodernism's reassertion (purportedly in contradistinction to modernism) of the virtues of pleasure, quotation, citation, representation, communication, convention, functionality, sociability, dialogue, style, self-evidence, mass culture, consumer-oriented values, and popularism. To take but one musicological example, Robert Fink writes that Schenker “had no interest in analyses that appeal to the general experience of listeners untrained in structural hearing.” By comparison, “our more democratic, materialist era may demand a stricter accountability to listener response–and thus to musical surface.”¹¹ Hence the value of a supposedly postmodern musical style such as minimalism: “Minimalism is so obviously flat that even the most flexible depth theorist must quail before it: what is there on this surface that needs generating or explaining through a theory of structural levels?”¹² By maximizing visibility we move toward maximizing availability, and the more of the world that is made available, the more likely it will be that we will move toward an equality of representation and a respect for difference, which, by implication, should eventually result in an equality of human rights and economic distribution. Postmodernism seeks to transform the entirety of social existence into one massive surface by relocating the economically and representationally dispossessed from the invisible depths, where they act as a foundation, and on to the visible surface; by comparison, to date the economically and ideologically dispossessed have provided a supportive foundation enabling the minuscule minority of the world's privileged to have something on which comfortably to rest. If this relocation could be achieved, then a certain conceptual gravity would take over, since putting a foundation on the place that the foundation is meant to support would cause the entire structure to fall down to the same flat surface of equality, thus creating–to invoke a phrase of McClary's again–a pile of rubble in which to revel.¹³

Whereas Romanticism banishes mirrors since they threaten to eradicate the possibility of a redemptive something else offered by depth, postmodernism seeks to better the world precisely through making all of its surfaces as reflective as possible. In so doing it strives to guarantee that there will be no place where the world cannot be confronted by itself, no gated mirror-free community where the agents of oppression, domination, and inequality can hide from the reflection either of their own agency or from the reflected images of their victims. Total “mirrorization” of the world will in essence erase censorship, leaving oppression standing naked. It is in the context of this discourse of reflective surfaces that we can most fruitfully understand the deeply political implications of postmodern art's most characteristic feature: its pluralistic, collage-like surface, constituted from a kind of euphoric babble of samples, fragmentary representations, quotations, vignettes of ironic mimicry, straight-faced pastiche, (mal) appropriations, snap-shorts, objets trouvés, and stylistic clashes between trash and transcendence. Like an enormous (global?) disco ball, the polyglot surface of postmodern art is, in a sense, coated with a collage of mirror-coated fragments, endlessly reflecting anything and everything that comes within the enormous orbit of its voraciously mimetic appetite. As Schnittke puts it with regard to the “polystylistic method”: “It widens the range of expressive possibilities, it allows for the integration of ‘low’ and ‘high’ styles, of the ‘banal’ and the ‘recherché’–that is, it creates a wider musical world and a general democratization of style.”¹⁴ Since everything gets reflected, yet no reflection gets to dominate (since all are fragmentary), the mirror-coated surface of postmodern art thus provides us with a powerful analogy for the characteristic dynamic of any democratic politics of difference: that our fundamental right to be represented must always resist the hegemonic tendency that encourages us to turn our representations into rolls of wall paper with which we then set about covering every surface of discursive space. Unlike paintings, which do not change, and encourage us through static images to entertain narcissistic delusions of permanence and universality, images caught in mirrors are images that can never be caught. The people reflected there are either constantly twitching and moving about as they try (always unsuccessfully) to get a complete picture of themselves, or someone walks between them and their reflections, thus momentarily projecting them into that supposedly primary ethical realm, where someone else must be acknowledged. Mirrors do not humiliate but create humility. Reflections should make us reflect.

POSTMODERN MOZART

Let us now invite Allanbrook to do the honors and ask the question: “Is Mozart himself post-modern?” In balancing an awareness of historical relativism with a pragmatist's preference for the functional rather than truth-value of assertions, Allanbrook's answer reveals her postmodern inclinations: “Frankly I like this seemingly absurd idea, or at least I have learned something about Mozart and his contemporaries by entertaining it.”¹⁵ Mozart's music, like postmodern art, is mirror coated, and endlessly draws on the “universe of topoi,” in V. Kofi Agawu's phrase, that “thesaurus of characteristic figures,” in Leonard Ratner's terms, that music in the early eighteenth century developed “from its contacts with worship, poetry, drama, entertainment, dance, ceremony, the military, the hunt, and the life of the lower classes.”¹⁶ It is drenched in reflections.

Allanbrook's stylistically exquisite work combines sophisticated interpretations of Mozart's stylistic discourse that are contextualized within eighteenth-century thought with an approval of the values that she finds therein (a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Veils
• 2. Dreams
• 3. Exile
• 4. Enchantment
• 5. Forgetting
• 6. Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author