Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music (review)

This is an immensely frustrating book to read, and it must have been a frustrating book to write. Among philosophers deeply concerned with music, Peter Kivy is one of our most prolific. He has affirmed many times the position of "enhanced formalism." Recognizing that music does communicate something other than form, he aims to go beyond the simplistic descriptions of formalism in writers such as Eduard Hanslick yet also declares himself contrary to naive efforts in recent musicological literature to assign "representational, narrative, or semantic content" to "absolute" music ("music without text, title, or program"). In Antithetical Arts he considers, in particular, the writings of Anthony Newcomb, Fred Maus, Gregory Karl, and Jenefer Robinson, all of whom have tried in various ways to assign narrative interpretations to movements of string quartets or symphonies that ostensibly have no titles or programs. He demonstrates convincingly, yet again, that these efforts are usually doomed to failure or to produce trivial results. I wish he had also discussed what is, in my view, the most successful of these efforts, Owen Jander's description of the second movement of Beethoven's Fourth Concerto for piano and orchestra as a musical representation of Orpheus facing down the guardians at the gates of hell. (See Jander's original article, "Beethoven's Orpheus in Hades: The Andante con moto of the Fourth Piano Concerto," in 19th-Century Music of 1985.) What gives Jander's description such force is the absence of any analysis whatsoever that helps us to understand better Beethoven's art in this piece.

Whether in this book Kivy advances the dialogue between these antithetical positions is another matter. He expresses vehemently his own frustration at the lack of dialogue between writers about music and philosophers ("The conclusions of philosophers seldom make much impression on anyone except themselves"). The situation must seem especially depressing to someone whose many books are devoted precisely to addressing issues of contemporary practice in writing about music. But I want to assure Kivy, whom I have met but cannot say I know well, that many of us pay close attention to his arguments, learn from his reviews of historical practice and philosophical thought, and yet sit quietly on the sidelines as some of our colleagues practice a kind of "criticism" of which we rarely approve. That the analyses of Shostakovich's music Kivy condemns depend heavily on the largely discredited Testimony, so-called memoirs of Shostakovich, as edited by Solomon Volkov, comes as no surprise. And yet, what does one make of the musical "quotations" found in Shostakovich's pieces or the composer's use of a sonic representation of his own name (just as Bach used the famous "B-A-C-H" in The Art of the Fugue)? These practices cry out for explanation. Can "enhanced formalism" provide us everything we need?