Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representations by Leo Treitler (review)

Reflectiveness is to be expected from musicologists in their eighties; a few years on from the revised edition of With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made (Oxford, 2007), Leo Treitler has now assembled a collection of twelve essays—all but two published before (sometimes more than once), but with certain revisions—as his contribution to an on-going series of volumes, edited by Robert S. Hatten, with the grandly synoptic title of Musical Meaning and Interpretation.

Treitler’s reflections on this persistently provocative theme are nothing if not wide-ranging, and the essay, originally from 2002, placed last—‘Facile Metaphors, Hidden Gaps, Short Circuits: Should We Adore Adorno?’—dramatizes that width by moving from an initial reminder that ‘Europeans began writing down music in the ninth century’ (p. 253) to the somewhat downbeat claim that ‘Adorno’s holistic view of culture and society’, which can be characterized as aspiring to constitute ‘the basis for a healing of the parturition that accompanied the age of enlightenment’, is ‘artificial, counterfeit’ and ‘falls far short of portraying the experience of music in the world as the alternative we seek to the tradition of approaching music as an autonomous phenomenon’ (p. 264).

Representing or interpreting music remains a problem to the extent that any agreement about the extent of its autonomy or otherwise, or indeed of how any such autonomy might be constituted once it has begun to be thought about and those thoughts put into words, seems certain to remain a remote possibility as long as the subject is actually written about by musicologists and others. Treitler remains commendably alert to the multiple ironies that ensue, and the essay from 2007 with the title ‘Being at a Loss for Words’ usefully reminds his readers that ‘music is far from alone in its ineffableness, which is neither its unique problem nor its unique appeal’ (p. 46). Words themselves, so often caricatured as models of absolute and perfect clarity when set against those inherently vague and concept-evading musical sounds, actually have a ‘multivocality’ which Treiter boldly sees as ‘not only common but essential for communication’ (p. 48). Indeed, this essay, and perhaps the whole book, might even have been given the alternative, colloquial title, ‘Know what I mean?’

Treitler has never been shy of taking on philosophers as well as musicologists in his pursuit of the conclusion ‘that music is not transparent, and arraying its vocabulary to have all musical signs pointing to the conceptual signified somewhere outside the music is at odds with our experience’; not just at odds with our thinking, in other words, but with something more basic, something aimed to challenge current pieties about regarding ‘music as cultural, social or political practice’. From Treitler’s humane perspective, that piety is understandable, ‘in view of the long neglect of such associations. But the tendency has been toward the drowning out of music by meaning’ (p. 14): and in concluding that ‘the meaningfulness of this music [the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio, D929] is immensely enriched through this conspiracy of incompatible realms, producing as powerful a metaphoric effect as any that I can think of in language’ (p. 21), Treitler outlines an interpretative methodology of a certain modernistic quality which the book as a whole is not designed to pursue systematically but which remains central to the highly diverse materials that it does include. That diversity also happens to be larded with some spell-check resistant mistakes, the worst of which is a reference to Berg’s citation in Lulu of ‘Wagner’s Wedding March from Tannhäuser’(p.31).

There is also an idealistic quality to the consequences of the aim to work with the connectedness between music and meaning. Discussing, as he does more than once, the use of the term ‘mesto’ in notated musical scores, Treitler, after citing Carl Dahlhaus, says this: ‘Mesto, in other...