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Musicology and Difference

University of California Press

Music history is, among other things, a discourse of myth through which "Western civilization" contemplates and presents itself. This is said, not in order to question the truth value of music-historical narratives, but to emphasize their aspect as stories of traditional form that the culture tells in its desire to affirm its identity and values.

From early on music history has been guided by gender duality in its description, evaluation, and narrative form. Boethius, a principal conduit of ideas about music from antiquity to the Middle Ages, sounded a theme of lament in the midst of a music-historical narrative that would become typical in evaluations of "the present state of music":

Ruder peoples delight in the harsher modes of the Thracians; civilized peoples, in more restrained modes; though in these days this almost never occurs. Since humanity is now lascivious and effeminate, it is wholly captivated by scenic and theatrical modes.1

As in this passage, gender typically plays its role in concert with dualities of ethnicity, nationality, or raceall dichotomies of self and Other that are linked as markers in the pathways and panoramas of understanding in our culture. The wording of my title hints at my sense of gender as the archetypal duality.

This interpretation arises from my experience with a particular collective discourse of music historythe story of medieval chantand I shall try to give an account of how certain canonical beliefs about that subject have come to be formed, and what their broader associations are.

Boethius, "De institutione musica," trans. Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), p. 81.

But there is a backdrop in "an ancient mythology that explains human consciousness as divided in two permanently antagonistic parts . . . a mythology in which reason and sensuality are mutually opposed, and that opposition is characterized as the duality of the masculine and the feminine."2 The linkage of the duality of the rational and the sensual with that of the masculine and the feminine is a fact embedded in Western tradition. Here I shall be concerned to show how that linkage has been active in categories of music history and criticism.

Yet a third topic arises as underpinning for this central one. Gender duality, functioning as a structure of music-historical interpretation, depends on the-largely unreflectedidentification of gender attributes in music. I want to consider such identification as it has been practiced historically, and to bring out the dilemma into which it leads as it is put into service in recent attempts to ground a feminist music criticism. The question of whether music can have an immanently masculine or feminine character that transcends history and culture brings forward anewwith highly specific ideological motifs and motivesalready much-debated issues of aesthetic theory concerning what music conveys, expresses, and represents, and how one can know about such things. I shall ask whether, thus transformed, these issues merit the privileged status to which they seem to have been raised, and also whether their newly explicit ideological dimension exempts them from critical reflection, for that is the implication of some of the writings on the subject.

Finally, the issue of essentialism, which is raised by the practice of gender identification in music, points to the same issue with respect to race. The two modes of essentialist thinking have the same culture-historical background, they have played parallel and linked roles in the criticism and historical narrative of the arts, and they have functioned under the same ideological tenets.

The story that serves as my gateway may seem out of the way, to say the least: the modern reception-history of the liturgical chant of the medieval Western Church. I shall refer to it simply as "plainchant," following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the writer with whom that history began.3 Example 1 shows two stylistically different versions of an Introit antiphon, a chant that accompanied the entrance of the celebrant into the church and his procession to the altar to begin the Mass. The two versions belong to different medieval traditions. One, the Old Roman tradition, was sung only in Rome, and then only until it died out in the twelfth century. We

Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 1112.

Rousseau's Dictionnaire de Musique (Paris, 1768) includes an article entitled Plain Chant (pp. 95105).

Example 1
From the Introit antiphon  Rorate caeli desuper , in the
Old Roman and the Gregorian tradition.

have the chant from notated manuscripts written in Rome in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The other version belongs to a tradition that was transmitted in writing rather uniformly throughout most of Western Europe and the British Isles from the tenth century on; it has come down to us as Gregorian chant. There is no evidence that melodies of this

tradition were sung in Rome before the arrival there of some French chant books in the twelfth century.

The Old Roman melody is quite recursive. It turns on itself repeatedly in numerous circular figures which create an overall melismatic texture. The melodic line shows an overall direction, but it is highly decorated. The outlines of the Gregorian version are sharper. It, too, is ornamented, but not as uniformly so. On the whole, whereas the decorative figures determine the character of the Old Roman version, in the Gregorian version it is the overall melodic shape and direction that stand out.

Students of medieval plainchant are in agreement that this difference is characteristic of the two traditions. They are also in agreement that the difference of style has something important to do with the origins of plainchant and its early history in the Middle Ages. And since plainchant is the earliest European music known to us, the questions raised by the difference we have observed open out to nothing less than questions about the origins and nature of European music. And the disagreements that take over at this pointdisagreements over how the style difference came about, how to characterize it, whether either version can be identified as original and the other somehow derivative, and just what all this can tell about the history as a wholeare argued out with a vigor that is worthy of the rank to which this subject has now been elevated. I shall sample some of the interpretations that have been offered and consider what they portend for vital matters of cultural identity that are at the center of my subject.4

Here is Bruno Stdblein, a preeminent German plainchant scholar, writing about Old Roman chant: "Endless streams of melody that overflow the boundaries of textual divisions, . . . melodies that spread over their texts like a chain of pearls or a voluptuous gown . . . soft, elegant, charming and graceful, without sharp edges or corners."5 Their style is "naive, youthfully fresh, blossom-like, the expression of a general Italic, folk-like feeling."6 The Gregorian melodies, by contrast, are "disciplined and ordered, a product of rational thinking." They are "clear, sculpted configurations, systematically chiselled; a system of musical rhetoric reigns in them." They display a...