From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (review)

This book brings together writings by Derek B. Scott on a wide range of subjects—Monteverdi, Mae West, British dance band music of the 1920s and 1930s, Bruckner—many of which have been published in earlier versions. This diversity of subject matter is contained within a narrative that seeks to articulate a shift from the erotic to the demonic and reflects upon something called 'critical musicology'.

Ideology and style form the key issues in Scott's project, with the 'critique of musical styles as discursive codes' being shaped by 'semiotics and poststructuralist theory' (p. 3). The key element in this process is clearly the active presence of ideology, a term that seems to mean many different things in many different contexts, and appears in some of the most unexpected places, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us: 'It [ideology] seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would clearly expect it to dwell' ('The Spectre of Ideology', in id. (ed.), Mapping Ideology (London and New York, 1994), 4). The different meanings and contexts of ideology are effectively summarized by Terry Eagleton in his survey, which Scott refers to and which is still the most authoritative source on the topic. Eagleton describes ideology as a 'text, woven of a whole tissue of different conceptual strands', and it is 'traced through by different histories' (Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York, 1991), 1). This view of ideology as text, a textual ideology, leads to a multiplicity of meanings and definitions, some of which Eagleton randomly lists, beginning with 'the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life', and including 'systematically distorted communication', 'forms of thought motivated by social interests', and 'the conjuncture of discourse and power' among others (ibid. 1-2).

Scott provides his own working definition of ideology: 'the study of how meanings are constructed within signifying practices and how that impacts upon our understanding of the world we live in' (p. 8). This definition is close to the first provided by Eagleton, 'the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life', but through its references to 'meaning', 'signifying practices', and 'the world we live in' it clearly looks to Roland Barthes's Mythologies (London, 1973), originally published in 1957, within which the ideological/mythical construction of many different objects and practices was revealed through an explication of structure that betrayed the ideological presence and nature of structuralism. I find this model of ideology interesting but problematic. Scott suggests that this is his 'working definition', but I am not sure that an ideology that so clearly reveals itself to the user, becoming a model that is applicable to various cultural contexts, remains as ideology. In contrast, I see this working definition as an interpretative strategy that has its own underlying ideological pressures, leading to the question of what is the ideological process that results in the proposal that 'meaning' can be constructed through something called 'signifying practices' and then 'impacts on our understanding of the world we live in'.

Given the now seemingly recurrent nature of the contemplation of the nature and identity of something still loosely known as musicology, Scott's reflections upon 'critical musicology' are of interest: 'Critical musicology has revealed what it means to regard musicology as an intertextual field and why this, rather than the notion of a discipline offers a more productive epistemological framework for research' (p. 4). Clearly for most contemporary researchers involved in music this statement should articulate a basic truth. The notion of an intertextual field suggests interrelationships and mobilities that could not be easily contained within disciplinary borders and neatly highlights the textual nature of the subject and its discourse. It also positively restates the benefits and challenges of an interdisciplinary perspective and further reflects Eagleton's version of ideology as a 'text, woven of a...