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Reviewed by:
  • Interpreting Music by Lawrence Kramer
  • Michael Spitzer
Interpreting Music. By Lawrence Kramer. pp. vii + 322. (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2011, £16.95. ISBN 978-0-520-26706-0.)

Interpreting Music is as thoughtful and thought-provoking a book as one would expect from this prolific and influential author. In addressing Lawrence Kramer’s latest volume, it is hard not to respond to his oeuvre as a whole, because it develops by now familiar arguments, and one wouldn’t wish to fight old battles, especially since the cavalcade has moved on—away from New Musicology to newer fields. As a sign of the times, there is a seasonal garnish of neuroscience, cinema, and iPods, with a sharp barb or two towards the Bush administration. All present and correct are the qualities noted of Kramer’s impeccable writing: grace, deftness of touch, wide reading. Interpreting Music deploys a strategy that worked especially well in Kramer’s second and third books: Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley, 1990), and Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 2005). These earlier texts pulled together strands of intellectual history into a ‘trope’; borrowed an analytical study by an established music theorist; and then played off one against the other. His outsider status as a Professor of English gave Kramer perspective on thes musical field, while his reliance on second-hand analysis compensated for his limited musical expertise. The books touched a nerve, and Kramer’s hermeneutic windows opened many doors. Kramer’s strategy in Interpreting Music remains much the same, but is far less successful, chiefly because the balance has tilted quite far from music towards interpretation, from specific works to general reflections on the big themes of musicology.

These themes, disposed in sixteen shortish chapters, are all-encompassing: Hermeneutics, Language, Subjectivity, Meaning, Metaphor, History, Influence, Deconstruction, all the way to Performance and Musicology at the end. As before, Kramer rounds up the usual suspects—anything that bears upon the defunct (he claims) notion of the ‘purely musical’, including the discipline of music analysis. As ever, Kramer’s system (and it is a system, whatever he might say contra systems, à la Nietzsche) is effective, although strictly within limits and with diminishing returns. Each chapter begins with a precis of a philosophical position, often associated with a commanding intellectual figure (Wittgenstein is Kramer’s man of the moment), and what Kramer has to say seems initially reasonable and pithy. We start to scratch our heads, however, once we stand back and try to fit all these positions together, and one could spend all day taking Kramer to task for his questionable readings. Perhaps any precis of an intellectual figure or philosopher is necessarily selective. But this raises the question: why construct a book in this way? Interpreting Music starts with an onslaught on Gadamer’s emphasis on the authority of texts—at the expense, Kramer demurs, of their interpreter’s subjective freedom. This is unfair, especially coming from a critic who rarely steps out of the canon of authoritative musical masterpieces. Kramer makes the common mistake of forgetting that Gadamer’s Truth and Method chiefly concerns legal and historical exegesis, not the interpretation of aesthetic texts, which are surely a different kettle of fish. Another example: Kramer holds huge store by Wittgenstein’s pragmatics of ‘showing over telling’ (p. 33), which he [Kramer] attempts to elaborate into a ‘demonstrative theory of the aesthetic’. By this light, it is the job of a musical interpretation—via words or film or physical gesture—to point indexically at a passage in the music, so that we become aware of its particularity, rather than seeking to conceptualize its meaning in more abstract, technical, or systematic ways. Again, the claims are attractive, and delivered with Kramer’s customary [End Page 607] smoothness and polish. And again, one worries that the patina covers the cracks. Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy jars with Kramer’s attack elsewhere on declarative propositions and his defence of ‘ambiguity’; Wittgenstein and Adorno (Kramer’s champion of ‘particularity’) make strange bed-fellows. Yes, these two philosophers are kindred spirits in their critique of conceptuality (see Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)). But Kramer never delves...

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