The aural always requires a greater leap of faith. To confirm is to see with one’s own eyes; to hear is open still to the vagaries of interpretation, an act inextricably bound up with hearsay and rumor. Sight carries authority. It imparts what we “know” of the world. We seek visual, not aural, verification. Written, not oral, contract. It is an inherent prejudice that underlies all facets of literate societies, or so contends John Shepherd in his new book Music as Social Text.
Shepherd’s book is one of several books to appear within the past year that could collectively change the way we think and talk about music. As recently as 1985 Joseph Kerman could write in his engaging polemic against musical academia Contemplating Music: challenges to musicology that “… nearly all musical thinkers travel at a respectful distance behind the latest chariots (or bandwagons) of intellectual life… Semiotics, hermeneutics, and phenomenology are being drawn upon only by some of the boldest of musical studies today. Post-structuralism, deconstruction, and serious feminism have yet to make their debuts in musicology or music theory.” Today, Kerman could no longer make that assertion.
Kerman has been central in “calling to task” the field of musicology. Until recently musical discourse appeared impervious to the reexamination of critical practices and social constructions discussed in the other arts. Unlike literature or the visual arts, music was, and has remained, fragmented into compartmentalized specializations: theory, analysis, history, ethnomusicology, and criticism—the latter seldom practiced and much maligned. Indeed criticism was subsumed under the rubric of analysis, and analysis defined solely as the detailed explication of the formal, compositional structures of a codified canon.
As Susan McClary writes in her new book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, “… music has been, and continues to be, almost entirely exempted from criticism as it is practiced within other humanities disciplines: even those scholars who produce work resembling that of the old-fashioned New Criticism of literary studies still count as radicals in musicology.” The prevailing view became that if music is only “sounding form” the only meaningful study of music is formalistic. As Kerman wrote elsewhere, “Analysts avoided value judgments and adapted their work to a format of strictly corrigible propositions, mathematical equations, set-theory formulations, and the like—all this, apparently, in an effort to achieve the objective status and hence authority of scientific inquiry.” Kerman demonstrated, however, that the true intellectual milieu of analysis is not science but ideology, an ideology that viewed individual creative genius and the formal unity of a composition as central to validating a certain body of works. The music of John Cage, or John Zorn—not to mention Looney Tunes cartoons composer Carl Stalling—had no place in this body of works.
Shepherd and McClary–along with Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music and Richard Middleton’s Studying Popular Music—introduce a wealth of intellectual and critical approaches into musical discourse with ramifications, as yet, not fully envisioned. There’s no general consensus among these works, nor even agreement with many of Kerman’s original assessments—far from it. However, each attempts to explore new avenues for the assessment of musical meaning.
Aesthetic theory has long turned on the distinction between the representational and abstract in art. At the outset of the 20th Century visual art sought to “free” itself from the tyranny of depiction. With the abandonment of any obligation to representation, all “art aspired to the condition of music.” Meanwhile, musical discourse suffered under the conceit of relegating all questions of meaning to the realm of extramusicality; meaning lay in the musical processes themselves. The social, the political—even the emotional—lay outside the domain of music proper; all musical analysis assumed the sterile specter of science.
The mistake of musicology was to confuse representation with signification. To assert that music does not “represent” the material world in the same manner as the visual realm does not preclude meaning; alternative forms of signification constitute the very raison dêtre of abstract expressionist painting. While music may not contain meaning in the same way language does, it is not meaningless. “Meaning is not inherent in music,” McClary writes, “but neither is it in language, both are activities that are kept afloat only because communities of people invest in them, agree collectively that their signs serve as valid currency.”
In a manner not dissimilar to how Roland Barthes’ seminal work S/Z demonstrated the semiotic strategies underlying the construction of “realism” in the novel, a new generation of musicologists are explicating how associated musical conventions give music its meaning—a task made possible, as McClary notes, by the influence of contemporary cultural theory on musical discourse: “For if the principle obstacle to dealing with music critically has been its claim to the nonrepresentational, then critical and cultural theories make it possible to challenge not only the more superficial aspects of music… but, more important, its very core: its syntactical procedures and structural conventions.”
Why this interest in developing a new musical discourse? It may be a response to the increasing rift between popular culture and our inherited musical institutions; the adherence to a conservative, static definition of culture by musical institutions has led to their alienation from society at large, supported more as civic duty than as the expression of a people’s cultural ethos. Music may very well be the lone remaining discipline where critics view “popular culture” as oxymoron. That musicologists view it with suspicion should come as no surprise, for no other art form, save film, must so directly address questions of commodification and individual autonomy as music.
However, others would assert that the causes of the dilemma is much more deeply rooted in music's alliance with mathematics since ancient Greece, and inextricably bound up with the development of music notation. Music possesses the most systematic and precise vocabulary in all the arts for the description and analysis of its object. Yet, as philosopher Stanley Cavell has noted, “Somehow that possession must itself be a liability;” a liability that has forestalled the development of alternative musical discourses. Originally created as a mnemonic aid and tool for cultural preservation, the system of musical signs, symbols, and abbreviations became a hermetic language symbolically manipulated by composers and analysts for their own varying purposes. As McClary asserts, “by insisting emphatically on its ‘rational’ dimension; by laying claim to such presumably masculine virtues as objectivity, universality, and transcendence,” music became divorced from its social context and fabricated as an abstract, masculine discourse. Questions concerning class, nationality, gender, and the pleasure we experience in music were relegated to the trash bin of musicology.
With the introduction of recording technology the limiting effect of music notation has decreased, and those aspects of music inadequately conveyed by notation in the past have been slowly reintroduced into the sonic discourse. It was not mere "chance" that led John Cage to literally "deconstruct" the piano through its preparation in order to "open up" music; to alter the piano had social and historical connotations as well as musical value. Neither is it mere chance that this new sonic discourse attempts to answer many of the same questions raised by Cage a generation ago; it is now clear that if musicology is to come to terms with music, it must first come to terms with society.
This review originally appeared in the journal High Performance.
