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Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge

University of California Press

Early in 1992, The New Republic published an omnibus review of four recent books by American musicologists under the headline "The Strange New Direction of Music Criticism." The books in question, by Carolyn Abbate, Susan McClary, Rose Subotnik, and myself, are really too diverse to be lumped together so casually, but they are like-minded enough in taking "classical" music out of its cloister to have sent a common signal. Or, rather, to have touched an uncommon nerve: as the headline indicates, the review was no Schumannesque praise of new paths but a warning against being seduced by these books, even those the reviewer rather liked, into straying from the straight path to the strange.1

But was this new direction really so strange? Was it even really new, or more like a renewal of something lost or forgotten? From one standpoint, nothing could be more ordinary than what these books have in common. The new direction in musicology as I understand and support it is simply a demand for human interest. It chafes at the scholastic isolation of music, equally impatient whether heaps of facts or arcane technical anatomies furnish the scholar's frigid cell. "Talk about music," the demand might run, "should bear the impress of what music means to human subjects as thinking, feeling, struggling parts of a world."

But not just any impress will do. The demand for human interest should lead to a revaluation of impressionistic, figurative ways of de-

scribing music, but that will not be enough to satisfy it. The object sought is meaning: concrete, complex, and historically situated. The search runs counter to the widely held principlehalf truism, half aesthetic idealthat music has no such thing: that, as Theodor Adorno put it, "Time and again [music] points to the fact that it signifies something, something definite. Only the intention is always veiled."2 The best way to satisfy the demand for human interest is not to prove this powerful statement false but to reveal it as a historical truth. If the intention is always veiled, that is because we accept a conceptual regime that allows us to experience the human interest of music but forbids us to talk about it. It is because we acceptperhaps even while rejecting it elsewherea hard epistemology that admonishes us not to impose our merely subjective interpretations on the semantic indefiniteness of music. When it comes to musical meaning, the famous dictum of the early Wittgenstein has long been exempt from critique: "Where one cannot speak, there one must be silent."3

This admonition cannot, I think, simply be discarded as a once-estimable but now naive error. Its underlying intention, to make sure that claims to knowledge are open to genuine collegial debate, would be difficult to abandon responsibly. But hard epistemology is oppressively and even phobically narrow in its notion of contestable knowledge. Seeking to protect truth from human fallibility, it defines subjectivity as the negative of objectivity and denies the legitimacy of any claims to knowledge in which traces of the subjectthe historical claimanthave a constructive role. In its zealous will to truth, it promotes the rhetoric of impersonality into an epistemological first principle. (The resulting oddities merit separate study. The hard epistemology of eighteenth-century science, for example, took experimenters' reports on their own bodies to be untainted by subjectivity if the experimenters were genteel males.)4 A more flexible approach might accordingly begin by separating the concept of knowledge from the rhetorical opposition of personal and impersonal expression and resituating it in the historicity of human subjects and their discourses. What if our subjective interpretations of music do not falsify its semantic indefiniteness but recognize its semantic capacities as a cultural practice? What if these interpretations are, not substitutes for a lack of knowledge, but contestable, historically conditioned forms of knowledge?

Hard epistemology depends on oppositions of fact and value, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, that may seem commonsensical but do so only because the routines of their enforcement have long since dulled our ability to see them otherwise. In order to empower new musicologies, to move from the negativity of critique to the positivity of human interest, we need to defamiliarize and deconstruct those oppositions as they apply to music. We need to reconsider what the disjunctive "and" means when we speak of music and language, or the musical and the extramusical, or subjective musical response and objective musical knowledge. There is no problem about acknowledging that each of these contraries has real historical import. The idea is not to make them disappear, which they are unlikely to do. The idea, rather, is to relativize them: to reduce them from first principles to contingent moments, temporary limits, in an ongoing conceptual dynamic.

The best means to do this, I would suggest, lie in the conceptual and rhetorical world of postmodernism. The aim of the present chapter is to characterize that world and to show its specific pertinence to understanding music. The characterization will proceed along broad lines. It will seek to establish an orientation, not to work up capsule summaries of the various modes of deconstruction, feminist theory, archaeology and genealogy of knowledge, psychoanalysis, ideology critique, neopragmatism, history of sexualities, popular culture studies, and so on that make up the crowded field of postmodernist discourses. The characterization will also be somewhat idealized. It will try to encourage, by envisioning, a generalized climate of postmodernist thought that is at best still nascent. At the same time, it will fight shy of promoting that contradiction in terms, an official or normative or definitive postmodernism. The specifically musical half of the chapter will address the disciplinary oppositions mentioned earlier and connect their postmodernist undoing to past and possible future ways of thinking about music.

For those who care about "classical" music, the possibility of tapping new sources of cultural and intellectual energy may come not a moment too soon. It is no secret that, in the United States anyway, this music is in trouble. It barely registers in our schools, it has neither the prestige nor the popularity of literature and visual art, and it squanders its capacities for self-renewal by clinging to an exception-

ally static core repertoire. Its audience is shrinking, graying, and overly palefaced, and the suspicion has been voiced abroad that its claim to occupy a sphere of autonomous artistic greatness is largely a means of veiling, and thus perpetuating, a narrow set of social interests.

In its present constitution as an object of knowledge and pleasure, classical music holds at best an honorific place on the margins of high culture. No one today could write a book such as The Song of the Lark , Willa Cather's novel of 1915: a book that translates the traditional narrative of quest romance into a young woman's career as a diva, a book that climaxes at the...