Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History: The Austro-German Tradition from Hegel to Freud by Ian Biddle, and: Music and the Politics of Negation by James R. Currie (review)

While the number of scholars writing on music and politics continues to mushroom, relatively few of them, I suspect, see their work as a form of political activism. Aside from those researching pressing questions of racial identity, gender, and sexuality, most musicologists are content to approach politics purely as a spectator sport, or to segregate any personal political commitments from their research. Those who do seek to create politically useful work in the field of musicology may seem doomed to failure, particularly if their focus is on Western classical music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, above all, the canon of instrumental works at its heart. Much effort has been devoted on the one hand to exposing the dubious ideologies that helped shape this musical tradition, and on the other to idealizing the utopian values supposedly embedded in it. Yet to regard these kinds of approaches as meaningful forms of political praxis would surely be delusional. Rather than transforming consciousness, such work may seem to some to offer merely a kind of shadow-boxing or impotent wish-fulfilment, borne out of the sterility of contemporary political life and a desire for relevance or street cred.

These issues, and the impulse to provide a new model of politicized musicology, resonate through both the texts under review. One is a product of British critical musicology, by a pioneering figure within the discipline’s rather belated interest in masculinity and the politics of identity. The other is a similarly late-flowering child of American New Musicology, alternately biting and caressing the hand that feeds it. Both authors are furiously intelligent, Žižek-obsessed, openly gay, post-Marxist mavericks, who cast themselves self-consciously as outsiders aiming to disentangle musicology from its complacent affirmation of the existing order. As well as challenging the reader to reflect on the political functions and limitations of musicology, both texts raise further far-reaching questions for the discipline. To varying degrees, both Ian Biddle and James Currie seek to destabilize musicology’s predilection for historicizing and contextualizing music. Indeed, in both cases their programme for reconfiguring music as a political force entails liberating it from the constraints of historicist and contextual interpretation. For both authors, resisting historicism is necessary for past works, discourses, and debates to be put to work in the present, enabling at least the possibility that the scholar activist might displace the antiquarian.

Biddle’s introductory chapter is a thought-provoking and lively read (and seems intended to garner a wider readership than the book as a whole). Part diatribe, part confessional, and somewhat tangential to the chapters that follow, it aims both to cut classical music down to size and to trounce the ‘tweedocracy’ of privately educated, white heterosexual males who wield musicology as an instrument of domination and oppression (p. 18). Fair enough, although more than a few passages in the chapter had me wondering whether it was written back in the 1990s, in the first flush of the New Musicology, rather than in 2010. This sense of revisiting an earlier moment in the discipline’s history, it turns out, is crucial to Biddle’s project, although it is only in his epilogue that this programme is stated overtly:

The queerness of this book, then, has been not so much in its explicit adherence to a queer politics, fundamentally committed though it is to that politics, but in its commitment to estranging our relationship a second time with the Austro-German nineteenth-century tradition, a second time that is after Kramer, McClary, Subotnik and others were able to...