The University of Chicago Scenes of Feeling: Music
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SCENES OF FEELING: MUSIC AND THE IMAGINATION OF THE LIBERAL SUBJECT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC BY DAN WANG CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2017 © Copyright Dan Wang 2017 All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………….iv Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..vi List of Musical Examples ……………………………………………………….vii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………..viii Introduction Music, Feeling, and the Political 1 Chapter 1 Figaro and the Form of Shock 25 Chapter 2 Opera as a Form of Life: 64 The Ban on Love and Tannhäuser Chapter 3 The Structure of Romantic Affect: 114 Soundtracks and the Intimate Event Chapter 4 The Voice of Feeling 178 (Three Speeches by Colin Firth) Conclusion 218 Bibliography 223 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS These acknowledgments have to begin with Edmund J. Goehring and Emily Ansari, my Master’s advisors at Western University, who first made me think I could do a Ph.D. in musicology. The project has changed a lot since then, but I think (I hope) that its itinerary can still be traced. Enormous thanks are owed to my dissertation committee for providing the many different kinds of help that are needed to shape an impulse into a form. Martha Feldman, for good talks and for being a consistent supporter and reader over the years. David J. Levin, for timely boosts of confidence and for modeling the fun that academic life can have. Daniel Morgan, for unhesitant support and for his reassuringly pragmatic attitude in the last stretches. Lauren Berlant, who read with me and who didn’t give up on drafts. Finding her writing in a second- year seminar was an experience I’d had only once before, when reading someone was at the same time discovering what academic scholarship could be about, could do. As for her mentorship—thanks for helping lost grad students feel seen. Berthold Hoeckner, my advisor, now a friend, was this project’s constant companion for over seven years. It was in his densely curated and intellectually spacious film music seminars (which I attended long after they stopped giving me credits for them) that I learned so much of what this project is about. Dissertations need a mirror, and Berthold was there from the start to the finish, doing the hard work and putting in the time that can’t be defined by any job description. Thanks to you all. I’m also very happy to acknowledge my less official “committees.” Big thank you to my reading group—Berthold Hoeckner, Elizabeth Hopkins, Chaz Lee, Zachary Loeffler, Bradley Spiers, Lindsay Wright—for reading lots of drafts. And to my Asian reading group—Vinh Cam, Tien-Tien Jong, Chaz Lee, Shirl Yang—for opportunities to play and think in an undisciplined way. This dissertation might not have been imaginable if these groups hadn’t first modeled its possible audience. Also, shoutout to my Sunday morning basketball people—Vinh Cam, Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz, Noah Hansen, Rafeh Quershi, Shirl Yang—for much-needed relief from sitting in the last year of the dissertation. Other people who read and helped with different parts of this dissertation include Abigail Fine, Patrick Fitzgibbon, Hannah Frank, Jonathan de Souza, Martha Sprigge, Mari Jo Velasco, and uncountable others who may not have read this document but whose presence enriches it. iv These include the many people who provided valuable comments in my repeated visits to the Music History & Theory Workshop, the Theatre and Performance Studies Workshop, and the Mass Culture Workshop. Chapter 4 was originally written as an essay for The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, where my editors were Nina Eidsheim and Kathy Meizel. Many thanks to them for their patience as I made sense of those ideas at an early stage, and to Oxford University Press for permission to re-use that material here. A few more personalized thanks: Marcelle Pierson, who likes work and also likes not working—I’m still learning about all of that. Thank you for pragmatism, companionship, and all the de-escalations that made writing possible. Anthony Aceti, who first got me on to movies in undergrad, and who’s been watching and talking about them with me since. Let’s go see some more! Victoria Thurmond, who lives by the rhythm of plants and whose daily presence is a reminder that academia is not the world. Thanks for many kinds of support over years of dissertation writing (and especially near the end), for asking good questions about academic work that I can’t answer, and for the adventures. And, finally, it gives me enormous pleasure to say thank you to my family. My brother, Andy Shang, whose equanimity I aspire to. And my parents, Jenny Shang and Sanmin Wang, who moved from China to Kingston, Ontario in the winter of 1989, and in bringing me with them inaugurated many of the questions that occupy the pages that follow. This is a public and written moment to express something intimate and inexpressible about gratitude, being there, hearing and changing (not easy), happy Skype faces, and still being there. v ABSTRACT “Scenes of Feeling: Music and the Imagination of the Liberal Subject” traces the aesthetic and political implications of the idea, prevalent in Western liberal cultures since the Enlightenment, that self-definition and social transformation occur as felt and visceral experiences. Since operas such as The Marriage of Figaro (1786), but also as recently as films like The King’s Speech (2010), the endpoint of a narrative is imagined to be the moment when individual redemption and social repair converge in a scene saturated with music and feeling. I argue that the scene is a crucial aesthetic form for the liberal imagination, since it allows abstract values like self-determination and empathy to be represented in a fantasized zone of contact whose scale is visceral, bodily and intimate. Within this form, the genres can vary: different chapters explore scenic thinking in relation to romantic love, political transformation, and the aspiration to the presence of “living in the moment.” Chapter 1 considers how feeling and expression acquired the normative burden of representing the truth of the self; it does so by tracing developments in operatic form and culminates in a reading of The Marriage of Figaro’s closing scene. Then, each of the subsequent chapters extends the analysis toward the present while also revisiting different facets of the Figaro case: Chapter 2 considers the relation between political knowledge and epiphany in two operas by Richard Wagner; Chapter 3 explores the epistemology of the soundtrack in Hollywood romantic comedy; and Chapter 4 addresses, in three films in different genres that star Colin Firth, the generality of the liberal scene in which a lyrical voice establishes the sound of a repaired social collectivity. vi LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES 1.1 Gioachino Rossini, The Barber of Seville: “Fredda ed immobile”……………………. 35 1.2 Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, La serva padrona: “Uberto, pensa a te”………………….. 45 1.3 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni: The Commendatore’s voice……………... 45 2.1 Richard Wagner, The Ban on Love: Isabella sinks down in silence…………………….. 83 2.2 Richard Wagner, The Ban on Love: Temporal scales…………………………………… 89 2.3 Richard Wagner, The Ban on Love: Friedrich’s triplet sixteenth-notes…………………. 90 2.4 Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser: Pizzicato strings……………………………………….. 101 2.5 Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser: “Discreet background accompaniment”……………..... 101 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. A collective moment (and movement) of listening in The Shawshank Redemption. ...... 9 Figure 2. Silvan Tomkins’s graph of affects. ................................................................................ 43 Figure 3. Uberto and his manservant hearing a disembodied voice. ............................................ 44 Figure 4. The camera swivels around Neo as the time of representation slows, showing the eddies of air carved out by bullets. ............................................................................................... 92 Figure 5. Veronica sings “Merry Christmas” at work. .............................................................. 128 Figure 6. Kathleen types an e-mail in her apartment. ................................................................. 130 Figure 7. Andrew listens to Louise as he reads the latest letter. ................................................. 139 Figure 8. Nickie Ferrante sees the painting, and the story hits him. ........................................... 152 Figure 9. You’ve Got Mail’s opening sequence. ......................................................................... 159 Figure 10. Kathleen hangs ruby slipper ornaments on her Christmas tree. ................................ 165 Figure 11. Jamie and Aurelia at the end of Love Actually, their eyes locked on each other. ..... 179 Figure 12. Lionel and Bertie in The King’s Speech, a microphone bisecting their eyeline. ....... 201 Figure 13. The king’s speech, with expressive markings. .......................................................... 203 viii Introduction Music, Feeling, and the Political Self-Evidence This dissertation is about how feeling became centrally important for narratives of self- becoming in Western cultures. “Narratives of self-becoming” are narratives that end with the satisfying clarity of self-definition, but this definition can involve other people: for instance, in the idea that one becomes whole in the two-as-one fusion of romantic love,