Musical Elaborations in Sound and Sight in the Work of Charles Seeger and Hans Richter

Introduction to Counterpoint and Context

In his extensive efforts to counter what he referred to as “the universalizing discourses of Europe and the United States,” Edward Said recognized the need for and explored the possibilities of a “different kind of reading and interpretation” (Culture 50). In that exploration, he noted that “our interpretive change of perspective allows us to challenge the sovereign and unchallenged authority of the allegedly detached Western observer” (51). As is suggested in this statement and in his designating Culture and Imperialism as “a kind geographical inquiry into historical experience,” much of Said’s work employs the language of the visible realm to counter “the universalizing discourses of Europe and the United States.” Implicit in his argument for a change of interpretive perspectives is his recognition that a thorough critique of universalizing discourses requires a supplement to or something beyond the perspectives available through the language of the visible. The change of perspective Said described in Culture and Imperialism, for example, and discussed elsewhere entailed a shift from a visual to an audible perspective when he turned to music in general but especially counterpoint for an interpretive model.

The change advocated by Said has significant affinities with a robust undercurrent in the history of philosophy/theory in which there have been challenges to the dominance of sight (as, for example, in Said’s reference to “the sovereign and unchallenged authority of the allegedly detached Western observer”) over sound as key to understanding. Jean-Luc Nancy, to whose work I will return, is among current writers offering such a challenge. In Listening he asks, “Why and how is it that something of perceived meaning has privileged a model, a support, or a referent in visual presence rather than in acoustic penetration?” (2–3) A version of that question became important to Said’s cultural criticism as well as to the earlier innovative undertakings of two artists/cultural critics, some of whose work I will examine in this essay: composer and music theorist Charles Seeger and painter and filmmaker Hans Richter.

When Said began his pioneering work on counterpoint in music as providing models for critical thinking and reading beyond the realms of music, he made clear his desire that the tools and discipline developed in such thinking and reading practices should by no means be confined to the study of aesthetic productions out of their contexts in the political/social world, but should be considered contrapuntally as acting in and on that political/social environment. Said encouraged the reading and rereading of “cultural archives” “contrapuntally,” by which he meant in part exercising a disciplined “awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (Culture 51). Called for in this description is the requirement of serious attention to the politics of times and spaces. However, the attention required is necessarily split, divided among multiple forces operating sometimes in opposition to, sometimes in juxtaposition to, sometimes in consort with each other.

A virtue of counterpoint as a potential model for critical thinking is, as Said fully recognized, the fact that in its requiring divided attention to multiple forces it is suited to attempts to address ubiquitous complexities encountered in the cultural archives and day-to-day politics in multiple areas of the globe. While acknowledging that it is in many ways an unenviable life, it is the life of the exile that Said proposes as a model for a significant type of contrapuntal awareness. Exiles, Said argues, may not occupy an ideal political and social location, but they do maintain a privileged perspective that can illustrate ways in which we might better account for the experience of the Other within our own worldview and critically scrutinize prevailing orthodoxies that promote divisions between the dominant culture and the Other. In “Reflections on Exile,” Said writes, “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home: exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of...