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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Plastic Resistance A Psychopolitical Analysis of Beethoven Historiography Zubillaga-Pow, Jun Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 Plastic Resistance: A Psychopolitical Analysis of Beethoven Historiography Jun Zubillaga-Pow King’s College, London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 i For Daryl, Luciano, Patrick, and Rui ii Abstract Based on historical and musicological texts and acts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this thesis proposes the concept of plastic resistance as an epistemological method to analyse the psychical and political perceptions of Beethoven’s life and music. Relying on the philosophy of Fichte and Lacan, I contend that the psychopolitics of this reception/resistance history is predicated critically on the musicians’ and listeners’ ability and affect to posit musical semantics unconsciously. I further argue that, during the negotiation of mastery, autonomy and subjectivity, the musical acts of composing, analysing and performing are influenced by psychical and political aesthetics. These affective resistances are buttressed by the psychoanalytical structures of neurosis, psychosis and perversion. The thesis is divided into five chapters with the first two chapters setting the historical and theoretical backgrounds to various subjective actions and reactions that have created or destroyed musical meaning. The rest of the thesis place specific focus on more recent approaches to Beethoven’s piano sonatas and string quartets, as well as the plastic properties of their material resistance. In the first chapter, I trace a macrohistory of Beethoven reception in Western Europe and the United States from the nineteenth century to the present day. After an explication of the theoretical constitutions of the psychical resistance and the musical unconscious, I apply the ideas of inclusive and extractive resistances to show how the different attitudes towards Beethoven’s music result in creative and destructive institutions of musical hermeneutics. I reinforce the thesis of plastic resistance in the subsequent three chapters. First, the act of notation as embodied in sketch processes traverses the imaginary, fantasmatic and hysterical phases, but only a mode of critical mastery can direct listeners towards sound musical knowledge. Second, the dialectical nature of musical meaning readily predetermines the psychotic capacity of the analytic act; analysts arguably become occupied with negotiating their semantic uncertainty with chance operations. Finally, musicians embody a form of performative perversion by externalising their plastic intimacy through affective gestures and subjective speech acts during rehearsals, interpretations, and performances. In conclusion, plastic resistance has exerted a significant psychopolitical force and transformed the epistemologies of Beethoven historiography. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements v List of Figures vi Introduction Beethoven in the Age of Plasticity 1 Chapter 1 Whose Beethoven? 13 1.1 Imperatives for Beethoven Studies and Beyond 14 1.2 Eggebrecht: The Politics of Beethoven’s Rezeptionsgeschichte 21 1.3 Jolivet: Beethoven in War-time Paris 27 1.4 Solomon and Rosen: Driving Styles across the Atlantic 36 1.5 Dahlhaus and Dualismus 42 1.6 Conclusion: Geopolitical Beethoven 53 Chapter 2 Beethoven with Lacan 57 2.1 The Principle of Plastic Resistance 60 2.2 The Institutionalisation of the Musical Unconscious 70 2.3 The Case of Early Nineteenth-century British Institutions 78 2.4 Conclusion: Towards a Psychopolitics of Plastic Resistance 86 Chapter 3 Phantasmal Notations 89 3.1 Dogmatic Fatalities: Mirror, Misrecognition, and Mastery 91 3.2 C. P. E. Bach and Beethoven: Fantasia and Hysteria 93 3.3 Beethoven Hysteric: A Psychoanalytic Study of Sketch Processes 98 3.4 The Discourse of Musical Mastery 104 3.5 The Resistance of the Master Listener 109 3.6 Conclusion: The Mastery of Resistance against Notations 113 iv Chapter 4 Psychotic Nature 114 4.1 Natural Listening 115 4.2 Musical Semblance and Dissemblance 120 4.3 The Psychosis of Analysing Beethoven’s Op. 132 124 4.4 The Aleatoric Ontology of Music Analysis 134 4.5 Formal Analysis and Beethoven’s First Nature 137 4.6 Conclusion: The Psychotic Nature of Beethoven Analyses 144 Chapter 5 Perverse Nomenclatures 146 5.1 Performance as Perversion 148 5.2 Plastic Extimacy: The Auto-ethnography of Performance 153 5.3 Perverting Beethoven: The Extimate Subjectivity of Pronouns 157 5.4 Conclusion: Performative Beethoven 175 Conclusion Beethoven Plastic 177 Glossary 186 Appendix 187 Bibliography 190 v Acknowledgements [Beethoven is] the quintessential great master of music. This is, after all, the culture in which hard work was once prized above all and labour rewarded; you weren’t born to greatness, but were suppose to struggle to achieve it. – Bruno Nettl 2014 marks a full decade since I first arrived into England from Singapore. From York to Birmingham, from London to Oxford, my learning experiences of living in these cities and studying in these universities have been immense and cannot be summarised in any brief manner (including traumatic episodes of homophobic and racist bullying). I would like to show utmost gratitude to my teachers and supervisors: John Deathridge, Ben Earle, Hector Kollias, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Li Yen See, Ng Shau Ching, Phoon Yew Tien, and Martin Stokes, for their guidance and mentorship. Appreciations are also due to David Clarke and Paul Harper-Scott for examining this thesis, parts of which have been presented at the following universities: Hong Kong, Keele, Liverpool, London, Oxford, Oxford Brookes, Southampton and York. I would like to thank members of the staff and audience for their constructive feedback. With the support of the RMA, SMA and BFE, my eight years of university education have also been made possible by family finances and a scholarship from the National Arts Council of Singapore. Finally, I am most grateful for the support from the friends and colleagues I have acquainted with over this past decade and they include Sandeep Bakshi, Brian Bergen- Aurand, Marc Brookes, the late Zhuomin Chan, Jasper Chen, Jason Christopher Chan, Eugene Dairianathan, Huw Hallam, Ray Hay, Ho Chee Kong, Alicia Izharuddin, Jonathan Kuang, Tomas McAuley, Art Mitchell-Urwin, Simon Obendorf, Silvia Posocco, John Sharpley, Asifa Siraj, Diana Soh, Penny Tan, Roy Tan, Thum Ping Tjin, Flora Willson, and everyone else who has made living and musicking irresistible! vi List of Figures 1.1 A selected chronology of single-authored books written by Eggebrecht 24 1.2 Index of ‘Dahlhaus’ in all publications from RILM Abstracts, 1962- 44 2013 1.3 Keyword counts in The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini (2013) 47 2.1 Cover Image of Jacques Lacan’s Le Séminaire Livre 1: Les écrits 57 techniques de Freud, Paris: Seuil, 1975 3.1 The Lacanian discourse of the hysteric 103 3.2 The Lacanian discourse of the master 104 3.3 The Lacanian discourse of the analyst 107 4.1 Beethoven, String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, First Movement, Bars 130 1-11 4.2 Table of chance ontology from different perspectives 134 4.3 Structure of chance ontology in musical and psychoanalytic methods 136 4.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 106, First Movement, Allegro, Bars 0-5 140 4.5 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 57, First Movement, Allegro Assai, Bars 141 76-79 4.6 Natural qualities of the human and the musical 143 4.7 Proportion of first and second nature for composers from the Classical 143 period 5.1 Online photo of Prince Harry. Source: www.tmz.com 146 5.2 Cartoon depiction of a naked string quartet playing Beethoven. Source: 158 unknown 5.3 Table of pronoun occurrences during conversation with the Julliard 160 String Quartet vii Introduction Beethoven in the Age of Plasticity With Beethoven, music first began to find the speech of pathos, of the impassioned will, of the dramatic vicissitudes in the soul of man. – Nietzsche1 Dressed in their most festive attire, a hundred Indonesian school students armed themselves with racks of bamboo rattles shaking out the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony punctuated by occasional bangs on the timpani. Such exotic melodies composed on a faraway land from a distant past became etched firmly in their minds as the heptatonic tapestry began to reverberate through the aisles of the concert hall in Bandung, West Java.2 These melodies were not heard on strings or trumpets, not even on the koto or the valiha, but were resonating powerfully on the Sundanese angklung. Elsewhere in Japan, 168 women gathered in the city of Tokyo and, with their eyes firmly closed, they played a boogie version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on theremins contained within palm-size Matryoshka dolls.3 Further across the Pacific Ocean, five white guys decked out in tracksuits were rehearsing another arrangement of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in Michigan.