Music and Text: Critical Inquiries.

Winn, James Anderson

In his introduction to Music and Text, Steven Scher declares that its fourteen essays "demonstrate how musical and literary studies can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary critical theory and interpretive practice" (p. xiv). As the authors in this collection too rarely acknowledge, other "common grounds" are possible. For the scholar engaged in studying the explicit historical interactions of music and poetry in the troubadour repertory or the Renaissance madrigal, "contemporary critical theory" may not be nearly as important as the critical theory and creative practice of those earlier eras themselves. But as John Neubauer suggests, "genuinely successful interdisciplinary studies of a 'margin' will have to convince the scholars at the center that questions at the margin are actually central to their field" (p. 3). By adopting the protective coloration of a now-dominant theoretical discourse, these authors evidently hope to seem mainstream, central, "with it." For those coming from departments of literature, such a hope is entirely understandable, since most literary scholars still regard books or articles containing music notation as marginal, despite the irrefutable fact that the histories of music and poetry are intertwined. Marshall Brown, for example, describes music as "written in a script that is arduous to learn" (p. 75). Arduous by comparison to what? Greek? Sanskrit? I would argue that our common staff notation, in its precision, economy, and simplicity, is one of the great semiotic achievements of Western culture, and I would urge those seeking advanced degrees in literature to learn it. Musicologists, though frequently described in this volume as resistive to interdisciplinary ideas, are remarkably cheerful about learning languages, and actually far more interested in textual matters than they were twenty or thirty years ago. "Contemporary critical theory," though often effectively deployed in these essays, is not the only telephone exchange for interdisciplinary discourse.

Reception theory, evidently applicable to both literature and music, proves fruitful for several authors. Charles Hamm explains how Lionel Richie, in a song called "All Night Long (All Night)," "deliberately created a generic piece, constructing it in such a way as to make it accessible to audiences of various cultural backgrounds, while at the same packing it with details allowing it to be culture-specific at different moments of reception" (p. 37). In one striking moment of reception, South Africans heard in this song a political message Richie may not consciously have intended. Peter Rabinowitz addresses similar issues more generally, drawing amusing and instructive examples from popular guides to classical music, which reveal the essential incompatibility of two common accounts of sonata-allegro form, one emphasizing thematic complications, the other emphasizing a conflict between keys. Although these rival accounts "posit two different 'coherences' for a given moment ... they have seemed (to different listeners, at least) equally satisfactory ways of mapping out the terrain of sonata form" (pp. 51--52). As Rabinowitz concludes, "part of 'the music,' as the composer originally intended it, lies in the commonplaces and metaphors listeners were likely to use to organize their aesthetic experiences" (p. 55).

If this is true of sonata form, it must be true a fortiori of such literary constructs as "the lyrical mode," which Paul Alpers discusses in the least ambitious essay in the collection. Modestly declaring that he "will not try to say anything about the musical term 'mode'" (p. 59), Alpers misses the chance to consider how the literary use of the term, however vague it may be, relates to the long history of the claim that various musical modes (harmoniai in the ancient Greek world) excite or represent various emotions. Marshall Brown, who is much more comfortable with comparisons, has some useful observations on the polarities that order nineteenth-century novels and symphonies, and their dissolution in the early twentieth century, when "literature was striving toward the condition of music, just as music was striving toward the condition of language, and these apparently opposite strivings arose out of a single impulse, to substitute embodiment for denotation in order to restore expressivity where formal control had been lost" (p. 85).

The search for an appropriate language in which to discuss instrumental music, posed by Eduard Hanslick as a choice between "dry technical designations" and "poetic fictions," is a problem acknowledged in many of these essays. Thomas Grey, who quotes those phrases from Hanslick (p. 93), provides a critical taxonomy of the leading metaphors in nineteenth-century music criticism. Although it is easy to smile at the elaborate narrative "programs" provided for the Beethoven symphonies by writers convinced that these works must tell stories, Grey reminds us that the best of these narratives rest on perceptive insights into the structure of the music. Anthony Newcomb mines the same vein in a discussion of "narrative archetypes" in Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony, enlisting Tzvetan Todorov, Paul Ricoeur, and Peter Brooks in support of an analogy between the form of that symphony and the "spiral quest" plot of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. In an essay rich in local insights, Newcomb shuttles back and forth between the technical and the metaphorical. Discussing the fourth movement, for example, he identifies as "striking instances of the yearning toward D ... the two climactic moments ... when the D--F#--A--B pitches fundamental to the first movement's diatonic-pentatonic D major hang for long periods suspended in acute tension high in the texture, [only to] sink back into the key of Db" (p. 131). Although the emotive force of the word "yearning" may save it from being "dry," this kind of analysis is certainly "technical," and carries with it all the advantages of verifiability that we associate with that mode: we may check our scores in order to confirm Newcomb's observations. His next paragraph, however, invokes Friedrich von Schiller's notion that the artist's task is to lead us "who no longer can return to Arcadia, forward to Elysium," on the way to a conclusion that is certainly a "poetic fiction": "Although one may long for the primary, diatonic D major innocence of the opening of the symphony, one can only recover it tarnished by chromaticism and in the darker, perhaps richer hues of Db" (p. 132). In order to confirm this conclusion, we need to accept the claim that one key is more "innocent" than another, or at least to locate the notion that keys had emotional characters among the "commonplaces and metaphors listeners were likely to use to organize their aesthetic experiences" (Rabinowitz, p. 55).

I do not mean to criticize Newcomb, whose account of Mahler I find quite persuasive; my point is that the problem Hanslick identified is still with us: in discourse about music, a middle ground between verifiable technical observations and impressionistic metaphorical claims remains elusive. Lawrence Kramer, who discusses "representation" in the famous opening section of Haydn's Creation, the "Vorstellung des Chaos," displays wonderful skill in crafting convincing Schenkerian diagrams of the strange harmonic motion of the piece, in placing Haydn's programmatic gestures within a historical context controlled by John Milton, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and the long Pythagorean tradition, and in demonstrating how Haydn's contemporaries heard the piece with apposite quotations from poems in its praise. Nonetheless, he must at times simply appeal to the reader to accept his interpretation:

Here a solo flute emerges pianissimo high

above sustained string harmonies and

slowly descends by step to the cadence

(mm. 55--58). I do not think it is fanciful

to hear this phrase as a representation of

the descent of the unvoiced Word "[f]ar

into Chaos and the world unborn" (Mil-

ton, Paradise Lost, VII.220). (P. 148) Every detail in the first sentence can be verified in the score: instrumentation, dynamic marking, tempo, melodic line. But as Kramer's apologetic rhetoric signals, none of the claims in the second sentence can be verified: there will surely be readers who do think that hearing this phrase as a representation of a specific line in Milton is "fanciful." Such readers will also resist the closing generalizations of this essay:

Music becomes representational not in

direct relation to social or physical reality

but in relation to tropes. A musical like-

ness is the equivalent of a metaphor, and

more particularly of a metaphor with a

substantial intertextual history. Once

incorporated into a composition, such a

metaphor is capable of influencing mu-

sical processes, which are in turn capable

of extending, complicating, or revising

the metaphor. Thanks to this reciprocal

semiotic pressure, musical representa-

tion enables significant acts of interpre-

tation that can respond to the formalist's

rhetorical question, "What can one say?"

with real answers. (Pp. 161--62) A reader not prepared to accept the identification of the descending flute line with the Miltonic phrase might justly complain that "fanciful" or personal interpretations are not "real answers." Although Kramer's essay is one of the most serious contributions to this volume, both in its specific insight into Haydn and in its general contemplation of the problem of musical representation, its rhetoric is finally one of persuasion rather than proof.

As scholars have long recognized, claims about meaning in music operate differently when the music in question has a text, and the next five essays all deal with texted music. David Lewin uses the harmonic motion in one scene of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro as a key to character psychology. Edward T. Cone qualifies and refines his own influential work on lieder in The Composer's Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), arguing that we should treat "the protagonist [of a song] as the conscious composer of words and music alike" (p. 179). Claudia Stanger applies concepts derived from structuralism and semiotics to a song cycle by John Harbison, plotting some of the compositional elements of Harbison's music onto a "semiotic square" derived from A. J. Greimas. Ruth A. Solie, in a spirited and challenging feminist analysis, describes Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe as "the impersonation of a woman by the voices of male culture, a spurious autoibiographical act" (p. 220). Ellen Rosand gives a richly illustrated account of the representation of madness in opera. Different readers will respond differently to these essays (I found those of Cone and Solie the most stimulating), but everyone should recognize that these writers can appeal to a kind of evidence not available to Newcomb or Kramer. The sung text, even when it is confused, inaudible, or ironic, provides significant information about the composer's intended meaning; analysis in such cases, though inevitably subjective, involves less guesswork than analysis of untexted gestures in instrumental music.

This volume comes equipped with its own review, in the form of a sophisticated "Commentary" by Hayden White, who is especially concerned to make explicit the methodological assumptions that some of the authors leave implicit. White's conclusions, made from within the world of modern theory, closely resembles the one I would urge from outside that world:

The very effort to import literary theory

into musicology implies fundamental dif-

ferences between literature and music. It

is unlikely that any set of critical or the-

oretical principles devised to deal prima-

rily with verbal discourse can effectively

address the principal problems of mu-

sical criticism and theory. What literary

theory and criticism can contribute to

musicology and music criticism is insight

into the nature of discourse in general.

It would follow that musicology could

profit from this exchange only insofar as

music could be considered as a form or

mode of discourse. And in that case the

exchange would run both ways, for if

music were a form or mode of discourse,

then literary theory would have as much

to learn from musicology as music crit-

icism has to learn from literary studies.

(Pp. 318--19)

For the most part, the authors in this important collection, whether trained as literary scholars or as musicologists, are concerned to explore the consequences of "import[ing] literary theory into musicology." The next phase of the interdisciplinary dialogue that has grown between these fields must be the exploration of what literary studies have to learn from music.