Music, metaphor and metaphysics

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Kramer, Lawrence

On the one hand, we're told, if we fall into the trap of using 'vague metaphorical language' we will say too little. The music will be lost in the verbal shuffle; its formal, genuinely musical identity will go unacknowledged. So warns Peter Williams in a recent critique of cultural musicology.4 On the other hand, if we fall into the trap of relying on 'metaphysics', the ensemble of fixed assumptions, values, and principles that no interpretation can ever avoid, we will say too much - much too much. The music will again be lost; both its material, acoustic presence and its susceptibility to varied realisation in performance will go unacknowledged. So warns Carolyn Abbate in a recent critique of - cultural musicology.5 One error fails to meet the stringencies of form, the other fails to acknowledge the contingencies that unsettle or undo form. Whatever is said is said wrongly.

Too much, too little; metaphor, metaphysics; eether/ayther, needier/ nyther: should we just call the whole thing off? What's a body to do?

ONE THING NOT TO DO is declare that ideal interpretive distance represents a middle course or happy medium and just go on talking. The happy medium is pretty much nowhere, or nowhere interesting. If understanding music in the sense of interpreting it in worldly terms, the mandate of cultural musicology, is to get anywhere, what it has to do is reorient the problem of interpretive distance. It has to think of the search for such distance in terms, not of traps to be avoided, but of opportunities to be embraced. Metaphors animate and renew meanings; metaphysics supplies tools to think with. Metaphors can expand into metaphysics; metaphysics can crystallise into metaphors. The traps identified - this time around - by Williams and Abbate are only apparent. The critiques they represent depend on a fundamentally flawed conception of language that, in turn, flaws the conception of music. The problem of ideal interpretive distance cannot be solved by attempting to avoid either metaphor or metaphysics - terms, I would suggest, that can never be avoided, are not expendable, are deeply interrelated, and need not operate to the detriment of 'the music', whatever we mean by that notoriously uncertain term.

The key to keeping one 's balance here is to set up a kind of dance, part pas de deux, part tango, between metaphor and metaphysics. The idea is to keep them moving and intertwining at all times. But what does this metaphor suggest? What metaphysics does it import?

By way of answer, let me propose a number of theses. Afterwards, each in turn will be developed further with some help from Bergman, Strindberg, Chopin, and one or two others.

First, statements about musical meaning are not empirical hypotheses. As interpretive statements, they belong to a distinct, distinctive sphere of concepts and practices not beholden to empirical standards of truth.

Second, musical meaning is not a theoretical construct. It is an everyday reality, a true common practice. Musical meaning is something we have long had trouble thinking about, but no trouble at all living with.