Postmodernism and the Critique of Musical Analysis
2001; Oxford University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/musqtl/85.2.342
ISSN1741-8399
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
Resumoself-justifying arguments. They treat theories as historical truths, mapping them onto history with scant regard for historical specificity. At worst, they have no interest in musical meaning and in fact purposefully exclude issues of musical signification. Analysts have ignored musical subjectivity, persisting in delusion that of music somehow has an immanent status apart from interpretative projections of perceiving subject. Once these modes of analysis are located historically, we see that they reflect social prejudices endemic to their historical context, and therefore innocent observation of structural characteristics masks complicity with cultural imperialism and with actions perpetrated against excluded social others: misogyny, rape, homophobia, racism. The Musical Quarterly 85(2), Summer 2001, pp. 342-366 ? 2001 Oxford University Press 342 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:44:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critique of Musical Analysis 343 Responding to such accusations, analysts complain of misrepresentation, oversimplification, and unacceptable generalization. Pieter van den Toor accuses musicologists who privilege matters of gender, immediacy, and social context over structural analysis of retreating into a kind of socio-political amplification of self';4 Kofi Agawu rejects equation of analysis and modernism as impetuous and inattentive to potential value of analytical information;5 Scott Burham defends Schenkerian analysis against Lawrence Kramer's characterization of Ursatz as faceless deep structure opposing expressive properties of musical surface;6 Derrick Puffett warns of potential descent into mere description, empty rhetoric, and analytical incompetence;7 and Jonathan Dunsby reproaches musicologists for reinstating many of practices that formalist analysis was devised to replace, disguising their true identity with philosophical clothing that is twenty years out of date.8 My purpose here is not simply to contribute further to this debate on one side or other. Parker's rather jaded remarks on dispute, and general emergence of body of work viewing it with measure of historical detachment, suggests that this aggressive phase has already yielded to what might paradoxically be termed postmodern orthodoxy.9 Rather, my aim is to scrutinize philosophical grounding of critique of analysis and musicological pertinence of methodologies that have been appropriated as alternatives. Hostility toward traditional means of analysis has gone hand in hand with readiness to assume correspondences between musicological and philosophical or literary-critical categories. There is an increasing danger that these relationships will ossify into musicological givens before their philosophical appropriateness has received detailed attention. Analysis as Logocentrism Although it is seldom made explicit, objections to analysis stem from single poststructuralist concept: analysis is logocentric. This notion identifies in particular tendency to posit absolute meanings via system of thought that privileges reason over rhetoric, tendency that is fundamental, as Vincent Leitch observes, to metaphysical system that spans from Plato and Aristotle to Heidegger and Levi-Strauss.10 It is, in Derrida's words, the history of (the only) metaphysics, which has ... always assigned origin of truth in general to logos, or, to quote Jonathan Culler, the orientation of philosophy toward an order of meaning-thought, truth, reason, logic, Word-conceived as existing in itself, as foundation.1' Musical analysis, in seeking to explain This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:44:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 344 The Musical Quarterly technical of works as in themselves standing within rational theoretical systems, consorts not only with modernism and its attendant power structures, but with whole episteme of reason-centered subjectivity in general, critique of which constitutes defining characteristic of entry into postmoderity.12 The ideological paraphernalia of analysis-concepts of coherence, unity, organicism, autonomy of work and so forth-falls prey to critique locating these ideologies within particular discursive structure, limits of which we have now exceeded. This notion is basic to postmodern musicology advocated by Lawrence Kramer.13 Drawing together number of parallel strands in postmodern thought, he urges contextual hermeneutics that reinstates questions of musical signification marginalized by analysts. For Kramer, antithesis of music and language, which deprives music of capacity for extramusical signification, can only be maintained within confines of modernist aesthetic and becomes meaningless once we situate modernism as discursive formation. And although Kramer never makes point overtly, his synopsis of ideological constructs through which this antithesis is perpetuated amounts to definition of logocentrism: centrality of reason to modernist project; tendency of musical modernism to construct totalizing historical master narratives; assumption of centered, autonomous subjectivity enabling detached, objective theorizing of phenomena as normative constructs; and preference for constative over performative, for judgments of veracity over judgments of quality.14 Kramer's postmoder agenda effectively deconstructs this concept. Reason is demoted to status of localized theoretical force that is continually threatened by disruptive influence of rhetoric and always contextually contingent. The historical master narrative cedes to form of historiography favoring specificity over generalized hierarchical systems subsuming the local under general. The autonomous, centered subject is revealed as fictitious, and value judgment is elevated above attempt to determine truth content. Above all, musicologists should be concerned to liberate decentered subjectivities that have been excluded by modernism-as Kramer puts it, to enfranchise forces of decentralization that modernism sought (and seeks) to contain.15 The accusation of logocentrism forms tacit basis for many less overtly postmoder attacks on analysis. Joseph Kerman's elevation of criticism to position of privilege, and many subsequent efforts to bring hermeneutics to center of musicology, exploit an essential component of Derridean deconstruction of logocentrism, in that they seek to privilege forms of rhetoric over rational structural analysis.16 The hisThis content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:44:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critique of Musical Analysis 345 toricist tendencies of recent musicology also yield characteristic features of critique of logocentrism: shift from investigation of facts or objects to analysis of discourse; recognition of fictive nature of historiography, and of central role of interpretation; an emphasis on discursive specificity over historical metanarrative. In this context, Kramer's concern that analysis ignores musical signification becomes complaint of solipsistic ahistoricism. Thus for Gary Tomlinson: [A]nalysts tacitly and arbitrarily assign to works they study meanings that arise from their own analytic ideologies. These are mostly rooted in Romantic ideas of genius, organicism and absolute expression; so in an ultimate analytic tautology we find Monteverdi madrigals, Bach fugues, Schumann songs and Mahler symphonic movements all embodying Schenker's (and their analyst's more or less conscious) watered-down Hegelianism. This is ethnocentrism with vengeance. And it is not trap that analysts can hope to avoid without ... some effort at cultural
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