Trivial pursuits

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Williams, Peter

I suppose Kramer's new-old romantic approach is different in that Vogler, or his culture, did not have constant recourse to matters overtly sexual. And the alibi for this newer approach must be that our lives too - yours, dear reader -- have constant recourse to matters overtly sexual, in the mind or in the body, so let's all be frank about it. But though no logician, I suspect a fallacy in what seems to be the underlying crypto-- syllogism here: Music is Human, Human is Sexual, ergo Music is Sexual.

Except for this element, it is hard to see much difference between Vogler in 1802 improvising a `sea combat, complete with drum-rolls, movement of ships, engaging of the enemy, cries of the wounded' and Kramer's idea in 2002 that in the last song of Dichterliebe, `the jilted poet assumes a hypervirile posture and repudiates both femininity and art', and that the song-cycle's unique piano postlude `indicates that the poet is still in love; his anger is a disavowal that fails as we listen'. Fascinated to know what a hypervirile posture is (and put in mind of the immortal words, `I'll have what she's having'), I am also puzzled why a bit of mild motivic derivation in Schumann's Carnaval is described as 'a cryptographic epiphany' that `flickers by'. I would think that virile flickering was beyond even Vogler to improvise.

The Schumann chapter ends with an interesting link made to another poem of Browning, but in no way that I can see does this `explain' anything about either music or poem, or give any 'meaning' to either except what a poet might have actually felt. Or did he? Does a poet state facts and express feelings or does he write poetry? That a poet makes use of some music remains peripheral to both. How could it possibly be otherwise? No amount of cutesy allusion here, a reference to Victoria's Secret, which every red-blooded American knows as a saucy (female) lingerie shop in his local mall - helps answer this question.

Like much else in New Musicology, this book needs trimming. There is no more discipline in its impressionistic and novelty-seeking prose than in its literary allusions. But I see this as symptom of a bigger self-indulgence: the never quite getting round to pursue a real philosophy of music, one which examines the world of imagination that is the mode of musical experience, and searches for some kind of Unified Theory which can apply as much to a Gregorian alleluia as to Dichterliebe.

So much brought up here, from Harpo Marx's obscene salami to the `staggering condescension' in a remark of Charles Rosen (a point in which I happen to agree with Kramer), is intolerably peripheral. For instance, having long tried to think out for myself what is so special about one of the world's greatest songs, `Mack the Knife', I looked for enlightenment but found that the ten pages devoted to it, complete with references to Adorno, Barthes et al, took me no farther, especially when they aspired to be technical with talk of added sixths, etc. I have no idea whether what the book says about Coltrane is useful, but the discussions of Bartok's last quartet or Strauss's Metamorphosen are not far off the ignoratio elenchi, an `argument irrelevant to the object in view' (OED).