Music, historical knowledge, and critical inquiry: Three variations on the Ruins of Athens

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 61-76

  Kramer, Lawrence ^a  

^a FORDHAM UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249457927     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498004     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. See Robert Morgan, "Critical Inquiry and the Future," Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 421-23
2. For some exceptions, see Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, 2001)
3. and Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley, 2004)
4. together with Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley, 2004). McClary's book is a concerted effort to reread the culture of an era on the basis of musical evidence
5. David Clarke seeks to retain autonomy as a Utopian "moment" within music's social entanglements but at the cost of so historicizing the concept as to return autonomy to the social matrix it supposedly escapes; see David Clarke, "Musical Autonomy Revisited," in The Cultural Study of Music, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (New York, 2003), pp. 159-70
6. Nicholas Cook rightly observes that music supports both the realization of meaning via usage or interpretation and a positive perception of meaning as unrealized potentiality. But by identifying the latter with music's traditional ineffability, he risks a conceptual drift to the equally traditional depreciation of all meaning as a poor translation of the authentic-ineffable; see Nicholas Cook, "Theorizing Musical Meaning," Music Theory Spectrum 23 (Fall 2001): 170-95
7. Carolyn Abbate, a partisan of the ineffable, stigmatizes all hermeneutics as "metaphysics" and identifies "real music" with performance. "It is virtually impossible," she writes, "to sustain such speculations while playing or absorbed in listening to music that is materially present.... As long as I was dealing with real music in real time, I could not establish the metaphysical distance" required (Carolyn Abbate, "Music - Drastic or Gnostic?" Critical Inquiry 30 [Spring 2004]: 510-11)
8. For the record, I don't have the same problem. Thoughtful listening or playing does not alienate me from the material reality of music or from the appearance of meaning in forms other than discursive flashes and fleeting impressions that are at one with the sounds and may come to inflect both reflection on them and later listening or playing. The absorption Abbate describes is not native to music; it is a limited and limiting cultural practice. For further discussion, see Kramer, "Music, Metaphor, and Metaphysics," The Musical Times 145 (Autumn 2004): 5-18
9. Anthony Tommasini, "What's So Gay about American Music?" New York Times, 24 Oct. 2004, sec. 2, p. 27
10. Arnold Schoenberg, "Criteria for the Evaluation of Music," Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Leo Black, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley, 1984), p. 127; hereafter abbreviated "C."
11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 18
12. Ludwig van Beethoven, The Ruins of Athens, op. 113
13. Complete Works, 66 vols. (New York, 1968), 27:29
14. The westering trope has literary roots in the eighteenth-century genre of poems on the history of poetry; on this topic, see Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Blake and the Progress of Poesy," Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven, Conn., 1970), pp. 193-205
15. Cook, "The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813-14," Nineteenth-Century Music 27 (July 2003): 22
16. On the question of recapturing or "revoicing" the past in pastoral, see Paul Alpers, "'The Philoctetes Problem' and the Poetics of Pastoral," Representations, no. 86 (May 2004): 4-19
17. G. W. F. Hegel, "Classification of Historic Data," Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (1899; New York, 1956), pp. 103-4; trans, mod
18. Lord Byron, "The Curse of Minerva," Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page and John Jump (Oxford, 1970), ll. 1-2, 8-10, 63-74, pp. 142-43. It is worth noting in passing that Byron, like Kotzebue, represents the judicial murder of Socrates as the tragic peripeteia of classical Athens
19. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 2:622, 890
20. For closer discussion of both passages with reference to subject, voice, and the sign, see Jacques Derrida, "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), pp. 92-94