Why classical music still matters

Why Classical Music Still Matters

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages

  Kramer, Lawrence ^a  

^a FORDHAM UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84887355090     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (90)

1. Statistics. See Alan Kozinn, "This Is the Golden Age," New York Times, May 28, 2006, AR 1, 18.
2. Opera. Although this book sets it aside except for some passing mentions of Wagner, another does just the opposite: my Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
3. Julian Johnson. Who Needs Classical Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
4. Structural listening. See "Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky," in Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 148-176.
5. In New Orleans. Stephen Kinzer, "As Tourism Halts in New Orleans, Musicians Play On," New York Times, September 25, 2001, E2.
6. "Simply myself." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1764-1770), trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1953), 17; translation slightly modified.
7. Categorical imperative. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 96.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright with Heikki Neiman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 51.
9. see also 38, 83, and, perhaps most memorably, "A theme has no less a facial expression than a face" (52; my translation).
10. Carl Einstein. "Methodological Aphorisms," October 107 (2004): 147.
11. Poetry inspired by the late quartets of Beethoven. The first quotation from Burnt Norton, the second from The Dry Salvages, respectively the first and third of Four Quartets, in T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963), 178, 199.
12. The same realization. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1962), part 2, no. 13, p. 94; my translation.
13. Walter Benjamin. "Fate and Character" (1921), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 308.
14. Matthew Arnold. "Memorial Verses," from Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 109.
15. Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 121.
16. Never happened-yet. Hugh McDonald recounts this anecdote in his "Schubert's Volcanic Temper," Musical Times 99 (1978): 949-952.
17. Otto Wagner. Quoted in Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1980), 74.
18. Nietzsche. From The Case of Wagner (1888), in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 187.
19. W. B. Yeats. "Among School Children," in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1967), 245.
20. We can recognize a work of music. For a history and critique of this concept, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
21. Shooting script. Nicholas Cook, "Music as Performance," in The Cultural Study of Music, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (New York: Routledge, 2003), 204-214.
22. ". could scarcely believe their ears." Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924), trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1967), 637; translation slightly modified.
23. Catalog copy for the. Victrola. From the Web site Nipperhead.com, on which photographic reproductions of each page of the 1923 and 1924 catalogs are available.
24. Rainer Maria Rilke. "Gong" (1925), in Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, bilingual edition, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984), 282; my translation.
25. ". a moment of eternity." Cook, Cultural Study of Music, 208.
26. The music is half a century old. On the "late Romanticism" of Rachmaninoff's style and its key role in Brief Encounter, see the first chapter of Peter Franklin's forthcoming Seeing through Music: Reading Film Scores across the Great Divide.
27. ". The music is most important changes"; "vibratos, trills." Program note to Grammaire des rêves, in Kaija Saariaho, New Gates, Mode CD 91 (1999).
28. "The music is the most eminent composer." Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (New York: Norton, 1969), 112-114.
29. ". The music is the castrati disappear." "The Romantic Song," in Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 287.
30. Better than he knew himself. Friedrich Schleiermacher, "The Hermeneutics: Outlines of the 1819 Lectures," part 1, sec. 18, trans. Jan Wojcik and Roland Haas, New Literary History 10 (1978): 9, reprinted in Vincent B. Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory (New York: Norton, 2001): 621.
31. Music could do that as well or better. For details pertinent to Schubert, see my Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102-103.
32. ". one transforms oneself into the other." Schleiermacher, "The Hermeneutics," part 2, sec. 6, in New Literary History, 14, and Norton Anthology, 625.
33. The self in its totality. Barthes, "Listening," in The Responsibility of Forms, 254-256.
34. A patient's hysteria. Lisa Feuerzeig, "Heroines in Perversity: Marie Schmith, Animal Magnetism, and the Schubert Circle," 19th-Century Music 21 (1997): 223-243.
35. "Come over to Schober's." Otto Erich Deutsch, ed., Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, trans. Rosamund Ley and John Nowell (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1958), 137-38; translation slightly modified.
36. Strophic variation. For musical details, see Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter's Journey: Schubert's Winterreise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 76-80.
37. The ear was not a passive organ. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 27. Kierkegaard, this statement is meant to seem true from a point of view, in this case aesthetic, that may not be his own.
38. ". are cradled into poetry." "Julian and Maddalo," l.545-1.546, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 125.
39. "What is a poet?" Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 43.
40. The world of absorbing particulars. See my Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 143-45, and "'Little Pearl Teardrops': Schubert, Schumann, and the Tremulous Body of Romantic Song," in Music, Sensation, and Sensuality, ed. Linda Austern (New York: Garland Press, 2002), 57-74.
41. "Doomed to death." Pierre Bourdieu, "A Lecture on the Lecture" (1982), quoted in Andrea Fraser, "'To quote,' say the Kabyles, 'is to bring back to life,'" October 101 (2002): 7.
42. Gilbert Ryle. The Concept of Mind (1949; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Ryle meant "the ghost in the machine" to be derogatory; in my usage it is not.
43. A large, unwieldy machine. On the significance of the machinic quality of the nineteenth-century piano and its relation to subjectivity, see Richard Leppertz, "Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt," in Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 200-223.
44. The attitudes of a specific type of self. The role of music in the history of subjectivity is a topic in which I have long shared an interest with Susan McClary. For recent examples of her approach, see her Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
45. Part of a séance. For more on this topic, and pianistic subjectivity in general, see chaps. 2 and 5 of my Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 29-50, 68-99.
46. Make the keys bleed. From Heinrich Heine, "Florentine Nights," in Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, ed. and trans. Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), 634.
47. The recent literature on Lisztian virtuosity is substantial. In addition to the chapters by Richard Leppert and myself, cited above, see Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
48. Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and.
49. Derek B. Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 128-154.
50. Filippo Marinetti. "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909," in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassilki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 251.
51. Owl's Clover. From pt. 4, "A Duck for Dinner," in Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: Knopf, 1957), 62.
52. Moments of "bedazzlement." Olivier Messiaen, Lecture at Notre-Dame (Paris: Leduc, 2001).
53. "four of his wildest children." Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (New York: Norton, 1969), 140.
54. Evocations of a serenade. On the vocal character of the nocturne, see chap. 2 of Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 30-61.
55. "death dances, St. Vitus dances." Robert Schumann, Jugendbriefe [Youthful Letters] (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1910), 272.
56. "'That's by him, all right!'"; "'This is by Frédéric Chopin.'" Schumann, On Music and Musicians, both 138 (translation of the first quotation slightly modified).
57. Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
58. "I lay my ten fingers." György Ligeti, program note to Ligeti, Works for Piano: Etudes, Musica Reservata, György Ligeti Edition, no. 3: Sony CD SK62308 (1996); subsequent quotations from the same source.
59. Schumann. said it was not music. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 142.
60. Horace. From "Mihi est nonum," Odes, bk. 4, no. 11.
61. ". the wicked Gauls." Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York: Schirmer, 1977), 204.
62. The precariousness of ordinary life. For more on this topic, with specific reference to the first of the two trios (nicknamed the "Ghost") and the year 1808.
63. see my "Saving the Ordinary: Beethoven's 'Ghost' Trio and the Wheel of History," Beethoven Forum 12 (2005): 50-81.
64. The narrative of the Pastoral Symphony is far simpler. It does, though, have a complex backstory. For different versions, see Raymond Knapp, "A Tale of Two Symphonies: Converging Narratives of Divine Reconciliation in Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth," Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000): 291-343.
65. Richard Will, "Time, Morality, and Humanity in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony," Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 271-329.
66. ". no longer an orchestra." Hector Berlioz, "Rossini's William Tell," in Source Readings in Music History: The Romantic Period, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York: Norton, 1965), 70-71.
67. Royal Cyclorama. Anonymous, Description of the Royal Cyclorama or Music Hall (London: J. Chisman, 1848).
68. Impersonal, amoral force. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
69. We like a storm. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, bk. 2, sec. 28, "Nature as Might.".
70. The order of art itself. E. M. Forster, "Art for Art's Sake," from Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951), 98-104.
71. They "resonate" with it. New York Times, Arts, May 18, 2002.
72. A few years later, the 9/11 connection could be made more candidly. According to Jonathan Prince, the show's creator and one of its executive producers, "The 60s really began with the assassination of J. F. K, just as our era began with 9/11. Back then, like today, we had a Texan in the White House telling an anxious nation that an unpopular war would soon be over." Quoted in Seth Margolis, "The 60's Saga Continues," New York Times, Television, January 2-8, 2005, 4.
73. "far-stretching beauteous landscape." "The Return of the Heroes," l.56, in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 361. The poem makes a pro forma effort to include the former Confederacy, but the allegiance of its landscapes is plainly to the Union and its extension into the west.
74. Friedrich Schiller. On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), trans. Reginald Snell (New York: Ungar, 1954).
75. ". until fate strikes me." E. M. Forster, "What I Believe," from Two Cheers for Democracy, 81.
76. ". Fafner will destroy us." Forster, Two Cheers, 80. (Forster writes "Fafnir.").
77. "the nicer knowledge"; "closely the ear attends." Wallace Stevens, "The Pure Good of Theory" (1945), in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), 332.
78. "The Prologues are over." Wallace Stevens, "Asides on the Oboe" (1940), Collected Poems, 250.
79. "the willing suspension of disbelief." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: Literary Life and Opinions, chap. 14.
80. William Wordsworth. "The Solitary Reaper," from William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 319.
81. Bach added in his own hand. Quoted in Michael Marissen, The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 113-114.
82. Milton. "At a Solemn Music" (1632-1633), line 6, from Paradise Regained, the Minor Poems, and Samson Agonistes, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1937), 207.
83. T. S. Eliot. "The Dry Salvages," from Four Quartets, in Collected Poems, 1909-1963 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963).
84. Christopher Smart. "A Song to David," stanza 77, from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., 2 vols., ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2000), 1:2855-2856.
85. The faculty of attention took on new prominence. See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 11-80.
86. "every crossing of the street." Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis in Mental Life" (1903), trans. Edward A. Shils, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassilki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52.
87. Bach revival. For details, see Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press 2005), 138-185.
88. ". smoothly flowing rhythm." Simmel, "The Metropolis in Mental Life," in Modernism, 52.
89. Johann Georg Sulzer. "Expression in Music," from General Theory of Fine Art (1771), in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, ed. and trans. Peter le Huray and James Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 99.
90. Mikhail Bakhtin. "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-1935), in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342-348.