For New Musicology: A Farewell

Anahid Kassabian
University of Liverpool
May 2011

1

I want a different form for this essay not cavalierly, or out of sloppiness, but because I want to avoid falling into the trap critical musicology got caught in that I am trying to write about. Surely writing a critique of a form is not best, or only, done within the form being critiqued? My critique is a small one, but also a very large one, depending on how you think about it. It is simply this: new musicology (and by extension critical musicology, as well, though this would be a much larger argument than an article) stems from importing 'Theory', and literary and film theory in particular, into the study of music; therefore, critical musicology, as it came into being, relied so heavily on thinking about narrative, and theories based on narrative(s),[4] that it avoided noticing too loudly that such theories might limit the way they work on musics that are not born from analogues of linear narrative form. I intend to focus in particular here on the works of Susan McClary, for multiple reasonsI certainly do not mean to contribute to the frustrating sense that one sometimes hears that this intellectual 'movement' was a blip, or small, or did not have a wide range of involved scholars with many different and significant ways of thinking about music. My reasons for focusing on McClary are, rather, as follows. Firstly, of all the new and critical musicologists, her work has had the most influence on my own, especially as a feminist. Secondly, it is the closest to the theories I brought to my own thinking on musicology, steeped as I was simultaneously in literary and film theories (as I will explain further). Thirdly, as one of the most influential thinkers in this area in the US setting, I think her work deserves particular attention. Fourthly, unlike most other theorists in these traditions, her work ranges across a wide range of periods and types of objects of study, which I find appealing and intellectually challenging, but it is also a useful feature for my critique here. Finally, as the theorist who has drawn the most frequent and vitriolic critiques, I hope this one will show what a serious, engaged, thoughtfuland dare I say it? lovingcritique might be.

2

I have chosen to write in a form more like a collage; constructed of various kinds of 'raw footage', as it might be called in film, it takes advantage of the fact that Radical Musicology is an online journal to offer multiple connections among different 'clips'. Reading it requires more activity than usual on the part of the reader and will be, I hope, a nonlinear process. There are passages that I have called clips (units of thought), talking head clips (units of thought expressed in a more traditionally academic, authoritative tone, for reasons that I hope will be apparent), and flashbacks (memories of moments in my own engagements with particular ways of thinking and particular questions), all with alternative paths in the form of links through them.[5] My insistence on a less linear form is made possible because while print is a linear form, hypertext is not. While hypertext might be less common for academic articles, it is probably something you are used to--your responsibility, as in most settings where web navigation is asked of you, is simply to follow your interests. If you want to follow a particular line of thought, click on the drop-down menu at the end of each 'clip' and you will be offered links to any of the themes in the piece. (They are: feminist film theory (within which, Teresa de Lauretis' Alice Doesn't), narrative/narratology (within which, linear narrative), contextual approaches, textual approaches, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (within which, Enlightenment individual subject), Susan McClary's Feminine Endings, form/formalism, art music studies, popular music studies, graduate study, representation, and tonality). When each term appears, it will be in red, as a reminder that it connects to other 'clips', but it will not be a live link. You will be able to link from the menu at the end of the clip to other units on the same topic. As is usual with links, you will be able to see what you have already read and what you haven't. If you want to be less imaginative and read straight through, please do feel free, although I fear it may not be the most satisfying way to experience this piece. The drop-down menu will also offer you a link to the conclusion, if conclusion there can be. This essay is an account of my relationship to new musicology and to McClary's work, after all, and that relationship is not over simply because I am thinking in different ways. It is a deeply embedded part of my thinking, and always will be. So any conclusion is only fragmentary, partial, temporarybut isn't that true of all 'conclusions'? [The author takes a deep breath and crosses her fingers.]

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[begin clip a: Feminist film theory, graduate study, critical musicology] My relationship to musicologyand therefore critical musicologyis almost certainly different than yours. I tell you this with neither pride nor shame, but to help what I'm about to say make more sense.

4

After a number of false starts across the disciplines as an undergrad, I studied journalism with the intent of becoming a music and theatre critic. During those years, I encountered feminist film theory and cultural studies, and I began to think about why they were both so silent, except perhaps for Dick Hebdige's Subculture, though that was more about style and behaviour than any sounding objects and their sounds.[6] I started writing some essays for film modules on film music, which sent me looking for academic work on music like the things I was reading on film and literature.

5

This was the beginning of my study of musicology, which was for many years a very private one: when I approached music departments, around 1985 or so, about the possibility of doing graduate study there, no one was willing to take on a project about film music. It was insufficiently serious stuff. So I applied and was accepted to an interdisciplinary literature programme. After arriving, I went and spoke to the music department, who also thought Stephen Sondheim was insufficiently serious stuff, and thus began the project of finding and reading what eventually became critical musicology on my own. [end clip a]

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[begin flashback 1: Feminist film theory, Susan McClary] In the mid-1980s, I met a student who shared some of my interestsI wish I could remember his name now to thank him!at a Midwest Sociological Society conference, and he sent me an article from Hurricane Alice: A Feminist Quarterly by Susan McClary. At this time, I was wallowing in feminist psychoanalytic film theory, and this was the first piece that offered me an inkling that there were things out there like what I was looking for. It felt, without exaggeration, like being thrown a life saver. [end flashback 1]

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[begin talking head clip *: Representation] There is an ongoing problem in the study of music in relation to many other areas in the study of culture(s). Most other practicesliterature, painting, film, sculpture, and even dancehave a much clearer relationship to the problems and possibilities of representation, and so most theorisations of the arts have, at least until recently, presumed the following story about it: First, everythingby which we mean words and imageswas representational, and then radical artworks began to call that into question. But the story in music is less clear. The relationship between music and representation has never really been taken for granted, except in very particular historical and/or geographical settings. But in most cultures at most times, it seems to be the case that, strictly speaking, music is not understood as a representational form. There are many examples to dispute this, from the 17^th and 18^th century 'doctrine of affections' to classical Hollywood film music to Steven Feld's writings about Kaluli song.[7] The point is, however, that there is not and cannot be a presumption that music is representational, and this has made music's participation in the 'theory' boom difficult. [end talking head clip *]

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[Begin clip b: Popular Music Studies, Textual approaches, Contextual approaches, Critical musicology] In the late 1980s, popular music studies, especially in its institutional form as the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, was the only space that was clearly open to work on film music. At film studies conferences in those years, film music panels were in the dreaded Sunday morning slot, when everyone is either gone or asleep or hung over. The discipline wasand in the main still is!--clear that film sound and music scholarship is peripheral to the real work on visuals, medium, narrative, history, and so on, as if these have nothing to do with sound or music. So I consistently went to IASPM US and tried to go to as many international IASPM meetings as I could. But the disconcerting thing was, most of the work happening there was on rock music. Moreover, there was a kind of ideological battle staged there over and over, between textual and contextual approaches. There were sociologists, media studies scholars and others who were primarily interested in and working on the contexts of the production and consumption of rock. There were a small group of textual 'absolutists', as I saw them, though they would themselves probably not see their work that way. But there was as little consideration of context in their work as there was text in the other group. I was certain them, as I still am, that only work that does both is beginning to get at something serious. So while I learned a lot at the IASPM conferences, it didn't give me much material to feed my own thinking directly. There were, however, a very few people involved in textual analyses of sounding musical objects/events (ie recordings, performances) in a way that was informed by cultural theory from across the disciplines. In the US, that work was done primarily and most significantly by Rob Walser and David Brackett, though there were a number of people who did some work of this kind.[8]

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Oddly, critical musicology, which was in this period called 'new musicology' in the US, didn't have an established presence beyond a few individuals in popular music studies. I believe that to be the case in the UK as well, but not having been here through the 90s and 00s, I would want to do more archival research of conference programmes and journal tables of contents before making that claim firmly. [end clip b]

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[begin talking head clip **: Representation] Representationality became an important issue in the various disciplines that study cultural practices in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism, and they put meaning on the agenda across many scholarly fields. In music, this took multiple forms. This was the major historical impetus for critical musicology in general and new musicology in particular. The study of representationality, referentiality, and meaning was, however, easier in disciplines like literature and art history than in music. The absence of an iconic system of musical meaning in Europe and Euro-North America, on the one hand, and of a semiotic system (outside of classical Hollywood film music) in its art music on the other, made this moment somewhat more difficult for music scholars than for our colleagues across the arts and humanities.[9] [end talking head clip **]

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[begin clip c: Rise of the Novel, Formalist, Novel, Enlightenment Subject] Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) is a landmark book in this discussion. At that staggeringly early point, in the heyday of New Criticism, with its insistence on formalist, aesthetic study, Watt was able to write a book about, as he puts it in the preface, the rise of individualism as a political philosophy and as an organising principle for the birth of a new literary form, the novel. He says:

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In 1938 I began a study of the relation between the growth of the reading public and the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England... Defoe, Richardson and Fielding were no doubt affected by the changes in the reading public of their time; but their works are surely more profoundly conditioned by the new climate of social and moral experience which they and their eighteenth-century readers shared.[10]

13

Watt's work influenced much of the thought in literary theory and criticism on novels, especially from the 1970s onward. His insights and perspectives offered a different way of thinking about the relationship between art and sociality, and he in part enabled future work that understood the linear narrative form of the novel, of which we might see the Bildungsroman as the quintessential form, as an analogue of the individual journey of the Enlightenment subject. (As an aside here, there is an important case to be made that Theodor Adorno made some version of these arguments about, for example, Beethoven, before Watt, but Watt was the beginning of a line of thought in literature, whereas Adorno's insight was not taken up in musicology until much later.) [end clip c]

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[begin clip d: Narratology, Alice Doesn't] One way for musicology to connect to the new theories growing up across the disciplines was through structuralist narratology. In particular, Susan McClary's work in Feminine Endings is underwritten by Teresa de Lauretis' work in this area. De Lauretis is a feminist theorist who often wrote about film; her first book, and the one on which McClary drew, was Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema.[11] In it, de Lauretis uses structuralist narratologist Jurij Lotman's essay, 'The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology', where he argues that:

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The elementary sequence of events in myth can be reduced to a chain: entry into closed space - emergence from it (this chain is open at both ends and can be endlessly multiplied). Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as 'a cave,' 'the grave,' 'a house,' 'woman,' (and, correspondingly, be allotted the features of darkness, warmth, dampness) (Ivanov & Toporov, 1965), entry into it is interpreted on various levels as 'death,' 'conception,' 'return home' and so on; moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical.[12]

16

From this, de Lauretis argues that narratives have a fundamentally gendered structure: male figures are agents of narrative, and can move through plot-space, which is represented in various ways by female figures. She makes this move by combining the insight in the quotation above with this one:

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It is not difficult to notice that characters can be divided into those who are mobile, who enjoy freedom with regard to plot-space, who can change their place in the structure of the artistic world and cross the frontier, the basic topological feature of this space, and those who are immobile, who represent, in fact, a function of this.[13]

18

In other words, if closed space is 'woman', and only some characters are mobile, it stands to reason that the character who moves through narrative space is male, and the space itself, including its obstacles, is female.

19

To this, McClary adds a discussion of the processes of tonal, and especially nineteenth century, music on the one hand, and an analysis of discourse about music on the other. Through this, she argues that the subject of a sonata form composition is the male narrative agent changing, quite literally moving through the piece, leaving any trace of the female to be moved beyond and left behind.[14] [end clip d]

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[begin clip e: Feminine Endings, Critical Musicology, Enlightenment, Form, Tonality, Rise of the Novel] There is a part of me that feels terribly guilty for still being attached to thinking of this kind, and to Feminine Endings in particular. I know all kinds of critiques of itsome of which I agree with, and some I don'tbut it seems to me that there is a missing category of thought in all of them, and perhaps in musicology more generally. To look to literature again, there is no expectation that a theoretical work will enable subtle criticism of each and every novel/poem/play. Theory works on a different level than criticism, and at their best, they engage each other in a dialogue that creates a genuine conversation.

21

Critical musicology, it seems to me, has often been accused of being unsubtle, or as the critics often put it, insensitive to the details of works; often, too, it has been accused of overreading. Predictablyif one knows the histories of feminist scholarship in other disciplinesFeminine Endings is the work that drew the most vitriolic of these accusations. Call me an unreconstructed structuralist if you will, but I think those critiques miss the point: in general, through a great deal of discursive labour over long periods of time, we have come in western European cultures and their North American outposts to think of the movers of stories as male. And while the analogy between Enlightenment linear narrative forms and tonality needs careful thought, I think McClary's tour-de-force piece in Cultural Critique from 1986, 'A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement 2', makes a very powerful case for that analogy; I think of it as the musicological articulation of the argument Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel began in literature.[15] Rather than insisting on a flattening of all tonal music, it describes the landscape on which works play themselves out, and it offers a clear and compelling way of hearing the social world in a musical one. I have no doubt that it needs to be heard alongside more subtle, supple analyses of particular works and particular periodswhat it offers is an understanding of the basic worldview embedded in the body of music in question, which is a very, very different matter from what an individual piece can or does communicate. [end clip e]

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[begin flashback 2: Feminist film theory, Alice Doesn't, Feminine Endings] I had a complicated relationship to undergraduate study; I was once a composition student, and before that a farm labour organiser, a sound and lights technician, and a biochemistry student. By the time I got moderately near to finishing a degree I was thinking of a career as a music and theatre journalist, so I was a media studies major. In taking some required classes, I came into contact with feminist psychoanalytic film theory, which changed my life forever. Here was a way to think about all the issues that concerned me, and most especially a theory of how we come to believe things that are not in our self-interest that didn't seem reductive. (As a lifelong Marxist, I always felt that false consciousness, even in its most sophisticated forms, makes the working class or the masses dupes of those who own the means of production. I would now say that psychoanalysis does something similarand has a similar vanguardist edgeeven if more complicated and somewhat more subtle, but this is a matter for another time.) Most importantly for this moment, feminist psychoanalytic film theory turned out to be the prerequisite for my love affair with critical musicology. I had, for instance, already read Alice Doesn't before I read Feminine Endings. [end flashback 2]

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[begin flashback 3: Graduate study, Popular music studies, Critical musicology] By the time I was looking at graduate programmes in 1984-5, I looked at three types: film, music, and interdisciplinary cultural theory. It became clear very quickly that neither film nor music departments would take a film music project seriously, so I applied to four interdisciplinary programmes. Of those, two had roots in literature (Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and Comparative Literature and Theory at Northwestern University), whereas two had more sociological influences (History of Consciousness at University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham). I expected to be accepted to the latter programmes, because my undergraduate study had been in media studies, sociology, and journalism; I believed the literature programmes to be longshots. But the exact opposite happened: I was accepted by the literature programmes, and offered full funding (which is more common for US postgraduate study than is generally believed in the UK), and rejected by the other two. I came to believewhether rightly or wrongly, I will never knowthat those rejections were because I wanted to study Hollywood films, including some 'middlebrow' ones, and not oppositional cultures, or working class or non-white cultural practices. Cultural studies did not always make a welcoming home for studies of mainstream popular culture,[16] and this has had some important consequences for the history of popular music studies and its relationship with critical musicology. [end flashback 3]

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[begin talking head clip ***: Formalist, Narratology, Popular music, Art music, Textual approaches, Contextual approaches] One of the drawbacks to formalist study is that it presumes the formal procedures of the work in question to be of interest. In the art music canon of the tonal and post-tonal periods of European and American art music histories, and in some (though not all) art musics of the non-western world, form is of at least some interest in considering how works operate, whether the questions being considered are aesthetic, cultural, narratologicalall of which overlap in various waysor any of a number of other perspectives. But 'western' popular musics, like many, though by no means all, non-western popular musics, do not in general derive their interest formally, except in improvisational terms. More frequently, the important axes of analysis are the groove or beat of the song or genre, the timbral elements in use, or the relationships between various intra- and extra-musical matters, such as groove and dance practices, or production and playback in clubs, and so on. This has led to two challenges in popular music studies: the first is that popular musics do not readily appear to be of scholarly interest to those whose interests lie in theories and methods developed in relation to art musics,[17] and second, there has been a genuine pressure to develop approaches that combine textual and contextual approaches.[18] [end talking head clip ***]

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[begin clip f: Formalism] One of the intriguing things about new musicology is the question of its relationship to formalism. It was critical, from some perspectives even overly so, of formalist scholarly approaches in historical musicology and music analysis/music theory, insisting instead that works must be understood and thought in relation to the social forms and processes in which it was and is constituted. From a certain perspective, however, the works of the most well-known new musicologists, including McClary, were formalist in their own right. This is certainly counter-intuitive, so some explanation is necessary. While she was and is assiduous in her insistence on the relationship between music and its social context, she read that context first and foremost from and into the large scale formal features of the works she was considering. Thus, her critique is simultaneously both trenchant and guilty of precisely the thing she was critiquing. There is no real discussion in her writings, for example, of recordings and recording techniques, or of timbre, or of architecture, or any of the other non-formal matters that one might study in canonical Euro-American art musics, and she is by no means alone in this regard. [end clip f]

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[begin clip g: Novel, Tonality, Enlightenment subject, Form, Feminine Endings] There is another question about new musicology, and that is the question of period. If we take McClary and Lawrence Kramer as the main figures in US new musicology, they are also only two among many scholars who worked in what became this tradition. Their work does, however, represent the spread of period in a particular way: while Kramer is quite focussed on the nineteenth century, McClary has written substantial pieces about Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, and others. [19] There is, however, little work in new musicology on pre- or post-tonal repertoires, which quite obviously work with different ideas of form. (McClary herself wrote a bit on post-tonal works; see below.) Were there new musicological works on some of the more cyclical forms of early music, for instance, they might offer insights into rock and pop forms. Similarly, scholarship on why and how block forms came into the twentieth century repertoire might be helpful for work on contemporary dance music. There may be work like thisI can't imagine that there isn'tbut it didn't become the centre of the field, and so didn't have significant theoretical impact. What we got from new musicology, if I may be so reductive, was an understanding of the parallel between linear narrative forms such as the novel, tonality, and the Enlightenment discrete individual subject. While this is a lesson of enormous importance, it has been critiqued from several directions, including its inability to account for different readings[20] and its focus on form. The discussion of linear narrative as a gendered form, for instance, makes it difficult to theorise how women artists in general, and feminists in particular, might work within linear forms. (In this sense, it is important to note that McClary's chapters in Feminine Endings having to do with women artists focussed precisely on non-linear, late twentieth-century works by Laurie Anderson and Janika Vandervelde, and not, say, Francesca Caccini or Clara Wieck or Lili Boulanger.[21]) [end clip g]

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Conclusion

The project of new musicology was crucial to the development of critical musicology as we know it today. The focus on the relationship between form and context was new and exciting, and it made possible a set of insights and perspectives that it is unimaginable to be without now. To be able to think of the political and social ideologies embedded in musical form is, to my mind, the single most important development in late twentieth-century musicologyit enables a whole new perspective on how and what music might 'represent' or 'mean'.

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It is only available, however, as an approach to works that share the formal characteristics and terrain that it has studied. While McClary has been the most wide-ranging thinker among the new musicologists, thinking about many different kinds and periods of musical activity from the sixteenth century to the present, her work has focussed primarily on the distinction between linear and non-linear, tonal and non-tonal forms. There is no question, to my mind, that linear narrative form is central to western thought writ large, but it is also clear that most Euro-American popular musics are not linear in their narrative form, that most musics from the rest of the world are also not linear in form, that at least one story of the Euro-American art music of the twentieth century is the dissolution of linear narrativity, and that that dissolution has taken various forms that have had important expressions in musical practice.

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But even more than that, the centrality of narrativity more generally is in question, being replaced, I have argued elsewhere, with a regime of sensory experiences and affective engagements.[22] There are vast ranges of examples of this shift: in my own forthcoming book, I've written about science-fiction/action films; TV musical episodes and series; diasporan music engagements; video art from across the Armenian diaspora; domestic, retail, and personal musical environments; and world music in coffee shops. But you only have to look and listen a bit to hear many more examples: dubstep and wobble performances; holographic, scent, and surround sound technologies for film; certain branches of electroacoustic composition; sound art and installations; and arcade, 'traditional', and motion-sensor-based video games are just a few of them. All of these practices do not offer themselves up to be studied from new musicological or critical musicological perspectives. They are not subject to being thought about in terms of the relationships between forms and social contexts. They don't yield to purely or even primarily textual analysesalthough they wouldn't yield to primarily contextual analyses either. What they need is a subtle ear, attached to an open and accepting body that thinks and feels, and then considers those sensory experiences in ways that hear the engagement as what we might call, after Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, an assemblage of complex sounding operations, rich contexts, and listening bodies.[23]

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I have loved new musicology long and well, but it cannot help me write about all of these musical practices I hear around me. Its reliance on narratology and theories based in narrative as an analytical premise not only leaves out most kinds of music across the world and throughout history, but also fails to offer a way forward into the growing arena of scholarship on affectivity and the sensorium,[24] places that my listening body is pulling me with sound after sound after sound.

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