Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (review)

Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. By Daniel K. L. Chua. (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. [xii, 314 p. ISBN 0-521-63181-5. $64.95.]

Not so long ago, the idea of absolute music functioned to legitimate music academics who were trained to deal only with "the music itself." Defined as music without any extramusical associations, absolute music required its own professional specialists. That tendency having been pushed to its extreme, it has now emerged as its opposite, so that the study of autonomous art music is currently justified by the way it can be related to extramusical concerns. For example, in 1989, Leo Treitler declared that "At the center [of the idea of absolute music] is the conception of an autonomous instrumental music that is essentially musical because it is not determined by any ideas, contents, or purposes that are not musical" ("Mozart and the Idea of Absolute Music," in Music and the Historical Imagination [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989], 177). Ten years later, Daniel Chua has set out to show that "absolute music is an extramusical idea" (p. 6). He seems to relish the turmoil of a discipline whose boundaries are uncertain by introducing a potentially limitless number of extramusical ideas, which are tamed into a discourse of absolute music by his masterful rhetorical and intellectual virtuosity.

The short but crucial preface prepares the reader for heavy doses of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno and their approaches of constellation, archeology, and dialectic, respectively. Acknowledging these thinkers does not initially give away much, since they have been so influential in recent times as to have become practically brand names. Only in retrospect was I able to appreciate how profoundly Chua has followed through with their ideas. Chua sets himself apart from most other academics by taking seriously the resistance to coherence, synthesis, and totality taught by these writers, thereby putting himself at risk for being read as confusing and contradictory. As he indicates in the preface, readers will have to work harder and more self-consciously to "interpret" his own text. He provides the material to do this: there are thorough footnotes, a good index and bibliography, plenty of illustrations, and provocative music examples; nevertheless, those with traditional expectations of academic authorial responsibility will probably be unwilling or unable to make the effort.

The book is "arranged as a constellation of tiny, fragmentary chapters that gather around the object, often in an extreme manner to exaggerate the tensions between the concepts" (p. xi). There are thirty-five of these chapters, each "on" something, beginning with "On History" and ending with "On Babel." While the chapters are loosely connected, they do form a recognizably chronological narration of the metaphysics of music from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. The chapters are divided into three main parts, "The Garden of Eden," "The Fruit of Knowledge," and "The Tower of Babel"--titles that convey the strikingly religious and apocalyptic version of modernity that frames this history of absolute music. Drawing on Max Weber's writings on modern rationality--so important for both Adorno and Foucault--Chua uses the story of the Garden of Eden to tell how acquiring rational knowledge has cast us out of paradise by disenchanting the world. Knowledge has been gained at the expense of its meaning; "You forfeit absolute music by gaining access to it" (p. 5). The Tower of Babel illustrates how humanity's attempt to reach God from its own standpoint on earth has resulted in chaos and ruins. The absolute music of God's harmonious monochord has been reduced to the absolute drivel of the self-sufficient subjective ego.

Chua marks the first moment of musical modernity at the end of the sixteenth century. The Florentine Camerata's attempt to recover the cosmic dimension of music was accompanied by the discovery of its mundane basis in laws of physics: Vincenzo Galilei's scientific experiments with sound turned musical...