Music and the Politics of Negation by James R. Currie (review)

In his book, Music and the Politics of Negation, James R. Currie employs the following sections: Veils (Mozart, Piano Concerto K. 459, Finale); Dreams (Fugal Counterpoint); Exile (Haydn, String Quartet Op. 33, No. 5); Enchantment (Mozart, La clemenza di Tito); and Forgetting (Edward Said). Currie’s overarching enterprise has been to elevate music from the rubble of its political setting. As James Garratt said in his review of the book, where he compared it with “Music after All” (Journal of the American Musicological Society 62, no. 1 [Spring 2009]: 145–204), “the version of this argument presented in Music and the Politics of Negation is considerably more nuanced” (Music & Letters 94, no. 3 [2013]: 528). Nevertheless, the unprimed reader of the book may experience a jolt when Currie equates the “smugness” of current musicology with the self-congratulatory stance of late capitalism—a state that he rightly opines is unwarranted with the current situation of the world, post-collapse of Eastern European communisms and, principally, post-fall of the Berlin Wall: catastrophic political instability, the global financial crisis, coldly indifferent markets unmasked, the fragility of democracy, and the failure of the Left in Britain.

By Currie’s account, the new or postmodern musicology’s “transhistoricalness” causes it, ironically, to enact the psychoanalytic condition of “projectional disavowal,” through replicating “the structural dynamics of the very object that it nearly always rejects in order to validate itself” (p. x). This leads to a “politics of exclusion”—of “music and politics” (p. x). In what can be seen as an updated application of Fredric Jameson’s insights in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991]), Currie specifically situates the new musicology’s identity politics as a reflection of the heinousness of this phase in our political history. Currie leads us through analyses founded on “typical” new musicology paradigms—while yet managing, simultaneously, to champion the revivification of aesthetic autonomy—all of which arrive at some point of negation, so that negation of egregious political situations can occur through music. I would have welcomed more teasing-out of the charge that the new musicology has a “general sense of political well-being” (p. x). Nor was I explicitly shown this “structural replicating.” One might ask whether aligning the new musicology with its dominant political context just because both came into being at the same time is not in itself an act of historicizing!

In his analysis of works from the classical era, Currie’s argument is that straying from established forms equates with political activism—an example of which is the analogy that concerto form embodies the dynamic of individual versus society, which Currie explores through the Finale of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in F major, K.459, and which provides a parallel for our contemporary situation. Currie addresses Wye J. Allanbrook’s “postmodern Mozart” (“A Millennial Mozart?” Mozart Society of America Newsletter 3, no. 2 [Summer 1999]: 2–4) at length here. This trope might well smack of a restaging of Susan McClary’s and others’ approaches—and indeed, Currie informs us that his own approach is not an argument against those who have inspired him (“Berthold Hoeckner, Michael Spitzer, Daniel Chua, Lydia Goehr and Martin Scherzinger” [p. xv]). These are all authors who would be described as new musicologists or, in the U.K., as part of the British critical musicology approach. (It is refreshing to this reader that there are only two references, judiciously selected, to Gilles Deleuze.) But Currie then proceeds to refute his own slant here by uncovering its innate instability. This push-me–pull-you dynamic continues as the manner in which Currie presents his arguments. His approach has the effect of creating a pageturner while at the same time leaving one with a sense of almost being thwarted; this is mitigated, however, by the realization...