Trivial pursuits

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Williams, Peter

Musical meaning: toward a critical history Lawrence Kramer University of California Press (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 2001); ix, 335pp; L37.95/ L15.95 pbk. ISBN 0 520 22824 3 / 0 520 23272 0.

PETER WILLIAMS is puzzled by the luxuriously extra-- musical, cryptically allusive and maddeningly paradoxical pre-occupations of a 'pivotal' New Musicologist

CONSIDER the dilemma of a journal-- editor receiving this book, written, according to its cover blurb, by 'a pivotal figure in [...] the controversial New Musicology, integrating the study of music with social and cultural issues'. Does he send it to one of the like-minded group of New Musicologists, many of whom are cited in the book and will cite it in turn in their next publication, en route to their next conference? Or does he go to other musicians, who, though keen to learn wherever they can, regard the time a book of this kind requires as a poor investment when life is short and music long, puzzling and very demanding?

To me, promoters of New Musicology, in their very search for `social relevance', often give the appearance of living in a world of their own making - Swift's flying island of preposterous theorists comes to mind - and one about which they are impenitently defensive. Not a little of the present book is a defence against previous criticism, not really answering it but absorbing it into further theory developed by means of often obscure language and that most maddening tool of the wannabe-subversive litcrit world, the paradox. (Aphorisms come a close second.) Much of Kramer's language suggests to me a poet manque, writing in an impressionistic way when what is needed is a focused look at whether one particular Emperor has Fine Clothes or not. At other times on this particular flying island, there are many references to trivia and ephemera (the X-- files, NYPD Blue), obligatory and even ostentatious, showing that one's feet really are on the ground and that the cushy North American campus is no mere ivory tower.

Although the subtitle mentions history, the book's concern is music of the post-Classical Period, and the only 'history' obvious in its coverage is the chronological traversing of some 150 years of music by means of a series of case studies. Around these, various ideas are developed in a prose that is clearly committed and luxuriously peppered with references outside music, such as one finds in cultural theory, current aesthetics and much of what one might call Philosophy Lite. The case-studies, some of them familiar already, are Schubert and his syphilis, love-life as exposed in the 'Moonlight' Sonata and in Heidenroslein, Liszt as virtuoso performer (i.e. sharing his body as pianist), Schumann's Carnaval, an operatic potpourri (somehow involving Harpo Marx's salami), mixed media, death etc. (I think), Black music, `Mack the Knife', Coltrane and the `Myth of Originality' (this last, about a CD that is included in the book - see below).

Presumably the later chapters are meant to grow from the earlier, but the variety of cultural ideas makes the book hard to summarise. (I am reminded of Hannah Arendt's remark about the ineffable Adorno, that `such a mishmash of anything that comes to mind is unbearable'.) Some readers might be able to find a theme running through it that they find useful - the locating of music in a bigger scheme of things as `pieced together by one particular interpreter' - but others will find little that is not persistently peripheral.

THE theme amounts to this: that nonmusical things can be found, somewhere, somehow, in music, by a listener bringing to it knowledge, associations, mood-at-the-time, bits of psychoanalysis, personal hangups, idees fixes, etc. So they can. But what I see as most interesting about the book's revelations is that they belong very much to the period of the music being looked at, except that now they are updated with respect to the prurient pre-occupations de nos fours.

For instance, the enlightening apercu that medical symptoms of syphilis, such as the `cycle of deep bone aches' that affects the victim, bear 'a family resemblance' to the 'rhetoric' of Schubert's Ak Moment musical, whose 'parallelisms' (?)'taint' its various sections. (This is not very clear. Some litcrit quarters regard clarity as fascist, a token or fetish of fascism.) Now it was especially in Schubert's lifetime that much was made of music being `more the expression of feeling than depiction', so a contemporary of his like J.-J. Momigny had no problem in hearing Mozart's D minor Quartet as expressing `feelings of a beloved on the point of being deserted by her hero'. Of course, Momigny does not go on about Dido's sexual proclivities and endeavour to trace them in Mozart's notes, but doubtless one could.

Or take a poet from the same 150 years and quoted (why?) by Kramer: Robert Browning. Now in a poem about music's then arch-pictorialist, the charlatan Abbe Vogler, Browning had spoken of the 'C major of this life' (one of his typically obscure expressions) much as German scholastics of an earlier generation had seen triads as - what else - the Holy Trinity made manifest. Vogler used to imagine all kinds of graphic things in his ridiculous improvisations, fooling about with stormy pastoral symphonies and the like, but Browning went further, to imagine the 'meaning' of his tonic chords. Poets do such things, so sometimes do aestheticians, and so does Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. But Joyce puts this fancifulness where it belongs: Dedalus is musing about the 'meaning' of tonic chords in a brothel.