Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History

Of course Lawrence Kramer has always been concerned with issues of musical meaning; that's where he, and the New Musicology in general, came in. But his new book turns meaning into the topic rather than a ubiquitous concern. Essentially it consists of a series of topical and case studies proceeding in more or less chronological order from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth, during the course of which a general model of musical meaning unfolds: the extent to which it adds up to a 'history' is something I shall come back to at the end.

Readers of Kramer's previous books will find themselves at home here, especially in the opening chapters; indeed, in his Introduction, Kramer says that Musical Meaning constitutes 'the third step in an intellectual trajectory started in two of my earlier works' (p. 7), namely Music as Cultural Practice 1800-1900 (Berkeley and Oxford, 1990) and Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995; reviewed, respectively, in Music & Letters, 73 (1992), 126-8, and 78 (1997), 127-9); it might be added that it also takes up some issues relating to mixed media from his first book, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984). So, for instance, the opening chapter unpacks a plausible but unsupported suggestion by Edward T. Cone that Schubert's A flat Moment musical (D780 No. 2) somehow reflects the composer's awareness of his incipient syphilis: Kramer reads a musical process centred on C flat as 'infecting' the piece's structure, as well as marshalling circumstantial evidence of the connection. Another chapter explores the 'songful' quality of Schubert's Heidenröslein, showing how it neutralizes or even legitimizes the sexual violence symbolized by the picking (i.e. deflowering) of the rose—but also how Schubert's high Gs inject a note of strain that undermines this songfulness in performance, so hinting at an element of critique absent from Goethe's poem. (The possibility of reading the song as if it were just about a rose is not considered: nobody, Kramer says, would be so simple as to think that—though in that case, it seems odd that it's the boy who gets pricked, so to speak.) Such readings, in effect turning on a deconstructive lever (though it would be old-fashioned to call it that), are classic Kramer, and in a sense are no more and no less about musical meaning than they always were.

There is one chapter that is actually a substantially rewritten version of an earlier piece ('Carnaval, Cross-dressing, and the Woman in the Mirror', from Ruth A. Solie's 1993 collection Musicology and Difference (Berkeley, 1993)): it offers a reading of Schumann's composition as an experiment in mobile subjectivity, pervaded by mirror-based imagery. The new chapter, as Kramer himself says, is more problematized and historicized than the old one, in other words more deeply embedded in period ways of thinking and hearing—but perhaps not in such a way as to satisfy Leo Treitler, whose criticisms of the original essay Kramer quotes and rebuts. Treitler's basic objections are that Kramer's interpretations are imposed rather than historically grounded, and depend on a degree of verbal elaboration that renders their relevance for the listener questionable. Kramer replies that meaning cannot be reduced to perception ('Listening is not the sum total of musical experience, just its indispensable core', p. 119), and that interpretation cannot be reduced to historical fact: elsewhere in the book Kramer remarks that you can study music at the documentary or the hermeneutic level, and continues: 'In my view the documentary level is meaningful only in the context of the hermeneutic, and it is therefore the latter that concerns me here' (p. 218).

There is an in-principle sense in which Kramer is obviously right about this—in Dahlhaus's terms, it takes interpretation to turn data into fact—but in a practical, historiographical sense it's a matter of balance: the relative weight to be given to documentary or other evidence and to critical interpretation (between bottom-up and top-down approaches, in other words). And even at the end of the book I am left with a feeling that there is a contradiction between the two principles that, in the opening chapter, Kramer says will govern his readings: on the one hand, he says, his interpretations will aim to reconstruct 'the kind of sense that the work could have made in that context, under those conditions', but on the other hand that doesn't mean that they 'will avoid using conceptual resources that postdate the work' (p. 20). And he tries to synthesize these demands by saying that 'The intent is to say something consistent with what could have been said, whether or not it actually was'. This argument, which turns on the distinction between potential and actual meaning, is coherent enough, and yet it starts out on a slippery slope at the bottom of which lie questions such as how Beethoven would have composed the Ninth Symphony if only he had had access to fully chromatic orchestral instuments (or for that matter a synthesizer). How can you answer that? The fact is that he didn't, and if he had then he wouldn't have been the historical Beethoven but a different one. Whatever their heuristic value, questions such as this are fundamentally unhistorical.

It is my impression that Kramer is more successful in carrying off the historiographical balancing act in some of these case studies than in others. For example, I see the study of the 'Moonlight' Sonata as one of the successful ones: he traces the changing reception of Beethoven's 'Sonata quasi una fantasia'—the way in which critical emphasis shifted from the last to the first movement, the development of its nocturnal and hence serenading associations, its association with Giulietta Guicciardi, once identified as the 'Immortal Beloved'—and the result is a satisfying accommodation of historical documentation and critical interpretation, generously laced with relevant literary and pictorial materials. It's a rich concoction from which you gain a real sense of witnessing musical meaning in the making.

Less successful, in my view, is a study of Liszt and the tension between the values of musical autonomy and virtuosity. This isn't because of any basic implausibility in Kramer's argument (as he says, Liszt exemplified both of these contradictory impulses), but simply because this much more extensive topic cries out for a degree of evidence-based historical interpretation beyond what Kramer is in a position to provide. He suggests that Liszt was the source of the tradition of 'facial rhetoric' associated with later virtuosity (p. 76), and perhaps he was, but such a claim really needs to be tested against—to take just one obvious example—the tradition of Italian violin performance that runs back from Paganini (Liszt's immediate model) to Tartini, Corelli, and other virtuosi of whose variable habits of gesticulation and facial expression there are many contemporary accounts. Again, Kramer's discussion of the mutually defining concepts of star and fan—in the historical development of which he uncontroversially sees Liszt as a key figure—could have been usefully developed through reference to studies of this phenomenon in present-day popular culture.

Really I am trying to make two points here. The first is that, as the New Musicology ceases to be an oppositional discourse and becomes simply musicology, one increasingly wants to see readings that are critical and musicological in the fullest sense of both words. The second is that, as I see it, there is scope for setting musical meaning more fully into the context of contemporary performance and reception, understood as socially contingent cultural practices. That of course sounds a very New Musicological injunction, and yet the extent to which most New Musicologists have put it into practice is questionable. Kramer naturally addresses specific performances when he writes about John Coltrane, and he has some interesting things to say about recordings of classical music, but they tend to be relegated to the endnotes: his discourse generally addresses 'the music itself', as embodied in the score rather than in the contingencies of specific performances.

Then again, it would be possible to take a leaf out of the ethnomusicologists' and cultural theorists' book (after all, they were talking about musical meaning before New Musicology had ever been heard of) and trace the creation and maintenance of meaning through ethnographies of music in everyday life; as the last four words indicate, I am thinking for example of the work of Tia DeNora, but a more directly relevant example might be the work on punk culture that Dick Hebdige carried out in the 1970s. Hebdige used the term 'bricolage' to describe the way in which punks constructed a distinctive subcultural identity through the appropriation and recombination of elements of mainstream culture, but the phenomenon is closely related, if not identical, to what Kramer calls 'debricolage'—which he describes as a 'trope that I do not think has been previously recognized, although I would welcome the discovery that, in one way or another, it has been' (p. 245; Kramer distinguishes debricolage from bricolage on the basis that the former involves the symbolic rather than actual scarcity of the 'right' materials, but that equally applies to Hebdige's interpretation of punk culture).

In particular I can imagine the thesis of Kramer's final chapter—a full-frontal assault on the sacred cow of originality, along with its attendant demons, influence and the great composer-being developed along these lines. The central trope of this chapter is the revenant, 'one who haunts, who returns, who walks again' (p. 261), by which Kramer means the composition that acts as a throwback to the past (as illustrated by Kramer's piano piece of the name, included with the book in the form of a bonus CD); the development of this idea leads him to characterize melody as a sign of absence, for 'When someone composes a melody, his or her disappearance from the melody is always already invoked', as a result of which melody is 'an essentially cenotaphic form, memorializing the absent dead' (p. 279). It seems to me that this poetic, perhaps extravagant notion could be turned to practical advantage as a new, dare I say original, approach to the analysis of performance (which is after all the specific form in which this absence is presented, or perhaps one should say performed). Moreover, the phenomenon of the revenant is ubiquitous in popular culture, where star quality and epigonism frequently go hand in hand, and might be said to reach its height in the culture of sampling; more generally, despite the hype, it is to popular culture that one might most profitably look for a musical economy that does not circulate round concepts of originality, influence, and great composers. There remains, of course, a mismatch between the reality of such cultural practices and the received discourses of musicology. We badly need an aesthetic that takes seriously the pleasures associated with everyday commodities, prominent among which, of course, is music.

All this said, it should be recognized that Musical Meaning does reflect a new depth of engagement on Kramer's part with popular musical culture and in particular black culture, which he explores through a study of concerthall appropriations of 'Africanisms' (it is here that Kramer talks of debricolage), and through a reading of John Coltrane's performances—but Kramer makes them sound more like critiques—of jazz standards, almost invariably (as he points out) the work of white composers and lyricists, and sometimes endowed with distinctly racialist overtones. The most important new element in the book, however, is the coherent, if not very explicit, model of musical meaning that it embodies. In his Introduction, where he explains how Musical Meaning relates to his earlier books, Kramer locates the central emphasis of the new book in music's essential ambivalence: on the one hand music presents itself as autonomous (or meaningless), on the other as contingent, greedy for meanings generated in relation to specific contexts. This dual aspect forms a kind of leitmotiv running through Musical Meaning, as represented for instance by the tensions surrounding virtuosity (Kramer reads Liszt's B minor Sonata as an attempt to reconcile autonomy and contingency).

But it is discussed most centrally in two chapters on music and mixed media, the essential process of which Kramer explains as a kind of looping pattern: music, which seems to create its own meaning, in reality receives it from the 'imagetext' (a term he adopts from W. J. T. Mitchell, referring to the dominating visual and verbal stratum of discourse) but transforms it, giving rise to a composite meaning that goes beyond that of music or imagetext alone. A particularly interesting aspect of Kramer's approach is what he calls the musical remainder, that is to say the excess of potential meaning not absorbed within the media blend and hence available for contingent signification. For Kramer, this model of meaning in mixed media is the model of musical meaning in general, and not by chance, for as he puts it, mixed media 'is actually the primary form of music both historically and epistemologically' (pp. 146-7). That's something I've said, too, and there is a kind of symmetry between Kramer's book and my own Analysing Musical Multimedia: I wrote a book on what Kramer calls mixed media and found myself talking about meaning, whereas Kramer writes a book on meaning and finds himself talking about mixed media. Moreover, Kramer's basic model of musical meaning—what he sometimes refers to as an 'ascription' model—is essentially the one which, in my book and a follow-up article on meaning, I traced back from Scott Burnham and Peter Rabinowitz (who talks about 'attribution' in much the same way that Kramer talks about 'ascription') to Hanslick and George Sand (what Karol Berger calls the 'Chopin/Sand' theory of musical meaning).

There is a difference, however. For Burnham (whom Kramer repeatedly criticizes, though his name is mentioned only in the endnotes), music has its own voice: meaning—and this is of course the Hanslick line—must be musical before it can be extra-musical, and for Hanslick, as for Suzanne Langer and countless other writers, such meaning is ultimately grounded in music's relationship to what Langer called the 'general forms of feeling', as instantiated in 'the so-called "inner life"' or the expressive body. As a result, music's overall meaning might be described as resulting from a kind of dialogue between the music and its interpre tants (Burnham speaks of 'engaging that voice in ways that reflect both its presence and our own, much as we allow others a voice when we converse with them'), or more prosaically it may be conceived as a layered construction based on associations and homologies between the musical and the extra-musical; this is the basic thinking that led me to theorize multimedia in terms of 'free, variably hierarchical negotiation among the media', as Kramer accurately describes it (p. 151).

There is something undeniably ramshackle about such thinking: the 'general forms of feeling' is an irremediably obscure concept, and the distinction between musical and extramusical has often been deconstructed. I would hate to have to defend it before Kramer, who remains as suspicious of ineffability as ever, and for whom Burnham's position 'both overstabilizes musical sound and musical experience and underestimates their semantic fluidity' (p. 309 n. 15). Yet there is a counter-argument: that the priority of the imagetext, which Kramer simply asserts as known fact, is a result of the complicity between the non-musical media and the critical discourses used to represent them (there is nothing to stop words expressing nonverbal meanings, as Kramer says, but they still express verbal meanings more readily). It's hard to see that this epistemological stand-off—essentially between what Kramer calls ekphrastic hope and fear—is capable of resolution. Fortunately it does not in the end much matter, because the process of interaction between music and broader cultural meaning, as elegantly captured by Kramer's image of the loop, remains in place either way.

In all, then, this book is vintage Kramer, full of the verbal pleasures, imaginative twists, and quotable quotes that characterize his writing, together with a truly Schenker-like ability to slip instantaneously from the smallest details to the largest cultural or even political issues. Indeed Musical Meaning reaches new heights of discursive playfulness, especially in the final chapter, built round two intercalated texts (a main one and a second in italics), not to mention the recording of Kramer's Revenants—as he explains, a non-verbal parallel to his critical discussion of the same topic. But there is one further question about the book that I promised to address: can it really be called a history of musical meaning?

I would say no, for three reasons. The first is that there is no such thing as 'musical meaning': there are diverse, maybe only loosely related, varieties of musical meaning, and this book covers only one area within a larger, and largely uncharted, terrain. Second, an essentially slicehistorical approach (i.e. a series of case studies) needs a firmer, or at least more systematically drawn, theoretical basis in order to cohere into the narrative construction we call history—or perhaps, in view of what I have just said about the multiplicity of meanings, a construction of competing or simply different narratives. Third, and possibly overlapping with the second, a history proper of musical meaning(s) would surely give greater weight to the historical development of thinking on the subject, to 'folk theory' so to speak, and attempt to draw on this for its basic interpretative frameworks: there is little of the historical distance in Kramer's work that you find in, to draw the obvious comparison, Gary Tomlinson's. It's true that Kramer is writing about a substantially living tradition, in other words as an insider, in so far as the idea of the insider is compatible with a postmodernist perspective—but then, the book's exclusive focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries itself imposes a further limitation on its scope as a history of musical meaning.

But then, Kramer doesn't call his book a history of musical meaning: the subtitle is 'Toward a Critical History'. And it is certainly a step in that direction: anybody contemplating a real history of musical meaning—which would certainly be a giant leap for musicology—would undoubtedly need to read Kramer's book first. So, in the end, it does exactly what it says on the tin.