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Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject by Michael L. Klein

2017; Music Library Association; Volume: 74; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2017.0089

1534-150X

Steven D. Mathews,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject by Michael L. Klein Steven D. Mathews Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject. By Michael L. Klein. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. [xii, 191 p. ISBN 9780253017208 (cloth), $40; ISBN 9780253017222 (e-book), $39.99] Musical examples, works cited, index. Michael L. Klein's latest book, Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject, discards traditional avenues of music theory and instead penetrates musical subjects primarily through the writings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Following twentieth-century French philosophy, which is not new to musicology, is an uncommon path for the subjects of music theory and analysis in the early twenty-first century. Although the monograph contains fewer than 200 pages, all six chapters include innumerable nuggets of mind-altering, and often sobering, musings that challenge previous interpretations of musical works (and texts) ranging from Franz [End Page 78] Schubert and Frédéric Chopin to Witold Lutosławski and Kaija Saariaho. Klein's intimate and piercing writing (à la Slavoj Žižek) elucidates Lacan's layers of subjectivity by repeatedly emphasizing central terms, using literature and recent films as intertextual examples, and placing interrogative subheadings within each chapter. In short, and in the form of a chiasmus (just one of many), Klein tries "to clarify what Lacan's model of subjectivity means for our approaches to music, and what music means for our approaches to Lacan" (p. 2). In the first chapter ("Music and the Symptom"), Klein introduces Lacan's symptom and three orders of subjectivity—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—through the early discourse of music theory and hermeneutics. An article by Edward T. Cone that presents two contrasting modes of interpretation—structural and expressive—in the context of Schubert's Moment musical no. 6 in A♭ Major provides Klein's starting point (see Cone, "Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Hermeneutics," 19th Century Music 5, no. 3 [Spring 1982]: 233–41). Near the beginning of his Moment musical, Schubert writes an odd passage in the relative minor that features an unresolved E♮ in the top voice, an E♮ that Cone calls a "promissory note, a pitch or chord that withholds its voice-leading obligations until a later passage" (p. 10; original italics). To transform this observation into expressive meaning, Klein remarks that "Cone whispers the words syphilis, desolation, and dread at the end of his study" (p. 7; italics in original). Klein views Cone's initial approach as unnecessary, however: "Structural analysis as the first step toward hermeneutics is a hopeless methodology because it only reinforces the idea that meaning works like an equation in which a structural detail here is equivalent to an extra-musical meaning there" (p. 11). The latter attitude becomes a theme throughout the book. Following Lacan, who believes "the task of analysis involves making the symptom speak, rendering it in language," Klein considers the "strange and unsettling passages in Schubert's Moment musical [as] symptoms demanding interpretation" (p. 17). In the final parts of the chapter, Klein confronts Johannes Brahms's beautiful Clarinet Sonata in F Minor, op. 120, no. 1, with Lacan's three orders of subjectivity. In the second chapter ("The Acoustic Mirror as Formative of Auditory Pleasure and Fantasy: Chopin's Berceuse, Brahms's Romanze, and Saariaho's 'Parfume de l'instant'"), Klein borrows the phrase "acoustic mirror" from critical theorist Kaja Silverman to describe musical passages by Chopin, Brahms, and Saariaho that reflect the period just before Lacan's "mirror stage" of human development (p. 40). Chopin's Berceuse, op. 57, projects stability and comfort: "The simple rocking of tonic and dominant harmonies for nearly the entirety of the piece makes it easy to forget that we are hearing a series of variations: we relive the fantasy of maternal swaying" (p. 44). Klein writes of an enduring "nostalgic fantasy" that persists following our entrance into culture through language (i.e., the Symbolic) because "there is no way for us to cross the boundary from the Symbolic back to the period before the first formation of the ego" (p. 46). In Klein's second example, Brahms's Romanze in...