Music and Ethics by Marcel Cobussen and Nanette Nielsen (review)

This book passes time between two bombs: the flying bombs of 9/11 described at the beginning of the first chapter, and the fictional bombs of Eva Hoffman’s novel Appassionata analysed at the end of the last chapter. As such, it is built on the peace—on the silence—between two explosions, and returns again and again to emphasize the relation between listening (itself silent in principle) and sound. It is on the back of this time between bombs (a metaphor for the sonic as much as a current reality in too many parts of the world) that the Ur-imperative taken by Marcel Cobussen and Nanette Nielsen from Peter Szendy, namely ‘One must listen’ (p. 59), passes for meaningful. Passing time between bombs is thus waiting for something to happen, awaiting action.

Such is the problematic nature of ethics, and in this book on Music and Ethics the reader’s attention is drawn repeatedly to the relation between waiting and action, between judgement and justice. It is the precise way in which Cobussen and Nielsen phrase the passage from the one to the other that is of central interest. ‘How does musicking become ethical?’ is the question on their lips. In this respect, it is unsurprising that this book has appeared now, for it seems to be saying and implying what lots of people are thinking.

At various strategic points they write that their aim is to change the musicological agenda, to invigorate the academic study of music with a sense of its ethical value and potential, to re-tool the discourse of musicology and expand its vocabulary, and—most importantly—to change the attitudes of musicologists. In principle this is a valid and worthy aim. Given that they want to have an impact upon musicology at large rather than just a small epistemological corner of one of its subdisciplines, it is worth pausing to note that simply changing the assumptions of discourse about music does not automatically change the argument or the terms on which it is conducted and managed. In this respect, certain arguments in Music and Ethics are made a little too quickly, where it would have been in the long term more productive to argue the case (rather than take it as read) that the proposition is true or that the proposal is plausible.

For example, the blurb on the dust jacket begins by trying to assert the following: ‘It seems self-evident that music plays more than just an aesthetic role in contemporary society.’ This seems a sensible conclusion. However, notwithstanding the casual, utilitarian function of syntax in scholarly writing, the immediate proximity of and tension between ‘seems’ and ‘self-evident’ betokens an underlying anxiety about the high-speed epistemological travel that the authors set in motion for themselves by transforming their final conclusion into an initial assumption. More productive would have been the pursuit of an answer to the question like, ‘Does music have more than aesthetic significance in society?’, where the answer is not given in advance. After all, they allude to various possible answers to this question in the many and varied examples that are adduced of music’s complex imbrication in and impact on the musical world, from Valery Gergiev’s brusque assertions about Prokofiev and Stalin (p. 13) to Frank Zappa’s provocative stance on music-related legislation in Joe’s Garage (p. 15 n. 3) to Keith Rowe’s provocative anti-listening stance in his improvisations with John Tilbury (pp. 85–8), and their explicit and useful discussions of politics straddle significant stretches of chapters 2, 3, and 6.

Taking a hint from Alain Badiou that there is no universal theory of ethics, Cobussen and Nielsen claim that ‘We seek, rather, to unravel various “ethical moments”, which involve, on the one hand, ethical issues that warrant musical discussion and, on the other, examples of music that invite ethical explication’ (p. 1); ‘our approach’, they say...