Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship

Two decades after the publication of several landmark scholarly collections on music and difference, musicology has largely accepted difference-based scholarship. This collection of essays by distinguished scholars is a major contribution to this field, covering the key issues and offering an array of individual case studies and methodologies. It also grapples with the changed intellectual landscape since the 1990s. Criticism of difference-based knowledge has emerged from within and outside the discipline, and musicology has had to confront new configurations of difference in a changing world. This book addresses these and other such challenges in a wide- ranging theoretical introduction that situates difference within broader debates over recognition and explores alternative frameworks, such as redistribution and freedom. Voicing a range of perspectives on these issues, this collection reveals why differences and similarities among people matter for music and musical thought. olivia bloechl is Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge, 2008) and is writing a book on Opera and Politics in Old Regime France, which has been supported by an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship. melanie lowe is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University. The author of Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony (2007), she is widely published on Haydn and other eighteenth-century subjects, topic theory, music in American media, teen-pop culture, and music history pedagogy. jeffrey kallberg is Professor of Music History and Associate Dean for Arts and Letters at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (1996), he has also published on Verdi, Sibelius, and on the intersections between music and the history of sexuality. He has served as Vice President of the American Musicological Society, and earned National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim Fellowships.

Edited by olivia bloechl University of California, Los Angeles melanie lowe Vanderbilt University jeffrey kallberg University of Pennsylvania University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Rethinking difference in music scholarship / edited by Olivia Bloechl, University of California, Los Angeles; Melanie Lowe, Vanderbilt University; Jeffrey Kallberg, University of Pennsylvania. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-02667-4 (Hardback) 1. Difference (Philosophy) in music. 2. Music–Social aspects. 3. Music–Philosophy and aesthetics. 4. Gender identity in music. 5. Music and race. I. Bloechl, Olivia Ashley, 1975– editor. II. Lowe, Melanie Diane, 1969– editor. III. Kallberg, Jeffrey, 1954– editor. ML3916.R49 2014 780.7–dc23 2014020423

ISBN 978-1-107-02667-4 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. For Ruth Solie

Contents

List of figures [page ix] Notes on contributors [xi] Acknowledgments [xvi]

1 Introduction: rethinking difference [1] olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

2 He said, she said? Men hearing women in Medicean Florence [53] suzanne g. cusick

3 Race, empire, and early music [77] olivia bloechl

4 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear [108] bonnie gordon

5 Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn’s instrumental music [133] melanie lowe

6 Different masculinities: androgyny, effeminacy, and sentiment in Rossini’s La donna del lago [170] heather hadlock

7 Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly: tonal language and the power of Cio-Cio-San [214] judy tsou

8 Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within [238] sindhumathi revuluri

9 “Diving into the earth”: the musical worlds of Julius Eastman [260] ellie m. hisama

10 Synthesizing difference: the queer circuits of early synthpop [287] judith a. peraino vii viii contents

11 “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop [315] charles hiroshi garrett

12 Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre [338] nina sun eidsheim

13 Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism [366] gary tomlinson

14 Difference unthought [382] jairo moreno

Index [422] Figures

3.1 Jean Berain, Costume de “Mauresse,” Paris, Musée de Louvre, Collection Rothschild. [90] 3.2 Louis-René Boquet, Africaine et Africain, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra. [92] 3.3 Louis-René Boquet, Africaine, for the Prologue of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Naïs (1764 revival), Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes. [94] 3.4 After Louis-René Boquet, Didon, Stockholm, Kungliga biblioteket. [96] 3.5 After Louis-René Boquet, Africaine, Stockholm, Kungliga biblioteket. [97] 9.1 Unidentified friend of the Eastman family, Julius, Frances, and Gerry Eastman. Undated; no photographer identified. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Julius Eastman. [265] 9.2 Morton Feldman seated at piano surrounded by Creative Associates (Julius Eastman, Jan Williams, William Appleby, David Del Tredici) (1972); no photographer identified. Courtesy of University at Buffalo, Music Library. [268] 9.3 Julius Eastman (November 1989). No photographer identified. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Julius Eastman. [271] 9.4 Julius Eastman, Evil Nigger, 0:00–1:50. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Julius Eastman. [275] 9.5 Eastman, Crazy Nigger, 0:00–9:00. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Julius Eastman. [278] 9.6 Pitch structure in Crazy Nigger, 37:00–47:30. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Julius Eastman. [279] 9.7 Eastman, Gay Guerrilla, 0:00–2:45. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Julius Eastman. [281] 9.8 Eastman, Gay Guerrilla, 18:30–23:00. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Julius Eastman. [283] 10.1 Gary Numan, The Pleasure Principle (1979). Licensed courtesy of Beggars Banquet Records Ltd. By arrangement with Beggars Group Media Limited. www.beggars.com [291] ix x list of figures

10.2 Walter Carlos (1968). GAB Archive/Getty Images. [299] 10.3 Karl Dallas, “Human Synthesizer Changes Sex,” Melody Maker (June 16, 1979). Copyright Karl Dallas, http://houstonmedia.tv [300] 10.4 The Human League, Reproduction (1979). Licensed courtesy of EMI Records Ltd. [308] 10.5 Yazoo (also Yaz), Upstairs at Eric’s (1982). Licensed courtesy of EMI Records Ltd./ Rhino Entertainment Company/Joe Lyons. [312] 12.1 From Lilli Lehmann and Richard Aldrich, How to Sing, new and rev. edn. (New York: The Macmillan Company, [1902] 1921), 19. [350] 12.2 From Lehmann and Aldrich, How to Sing, 43. [351] 12.3 From Lehmann and Aldrich, How to Sing, 99. [351] 12.4 “The Family Group of the Katarrhinen,” © The British Library Board. Artist unknown in E. Haeckel, Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1902). [352] 12.5 A panoptical schema of evolutionary progress. © The British Library Board. J. C. Nott and G. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Gramb and Co., 1854), 458. [353] Contributors

olivia bloechl, Associate Professor of Musicology at UCLA, is a critical historian of early modern music, with broad expertise in baroque opera, postcolonialism, and ethics and politics of music. She is the author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and is writing a book on Opera and Politics in Old Regime France, which has been supported by an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship. suzanne g. cusick, Professor of Music on the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, has published extensively on gender and sexuality in relation to the musical cultures of early modern Italy and of contemporary North America. Her current book project explores the relationship among the erotic, the sonic, and the political in early modern Florence, through a retelling of one of the city’s most notorious sex-and-singing-nun scandals. nina sun eidsheim is on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Musicology. As a scholar and singer, she investigates the multisensory and performative aspects of the production, perception, and reception of vocal timbre in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. She is currently working on two books, entitled Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and Measuring Race: Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal Postmodern Culture. In addition, she is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Ques- tions Across Disciplines. charles hiroshi garrett is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. His graduate work at UCLA was supported by an AMS Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, as well as an AMS-50 Fellowship, and his dissertation received the Wiley Housewright Award from the Society for American Music. xi xii notes on contributors

His book, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (2008), received the Irving Lowens Memorial Book Award from the Society for American Music. He co-edited the collection Jazz/ Not Jazz: The Music and its Boundaries (2012) with David Ake and Daniel Goldmark, and he served as editor-in-chief for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edn. (2013), which was published as Oxford/Grove Music Online. bonnie gordon is Associate Professor of Critical and Comparative Studies in the McIntyre Department of Music at the University of Virginia, where her interests center on experiences of sound in early modern music- making and the affective potential of the human voice. Her first book, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women (Cambridge University Press, 2004), frames the composer’s madrigals and music dramas as windows into contemporary notions of sound, body, voice, and sense. She explores similar issues in publications on contemporary singer-songwriters Kate Bush and Tori Amos, and she has also co-edited a volume of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural essays entitled The Courtesan’s Arts (2006). Her newest projects are Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds, which places the castrato alongside other animate and inanimate mechanistic phenomena, and Soundscapes in Jefferson’s Virginia, a study of music-making and sound experience in early America, based on the Jefferson Music Collections at Monticello and the University of Virginia.

heather hadlock, Associate Professor of Musicology at Stanford University, specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, feminist criticism, and gender studies. She earned her Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University in 1996. Her current research encompasses operatic masculinities, opera in the digital age, and divas and technology. She is the author of Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offen- bach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (2000). Her research on gender in opera and vocal music appears in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Cambridge Companion to Rossini (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds (2003), Berlioz: Past, Present, Future (2003), and Siren Songs (2000). She contributed the annotated bibliography on “Women and Music” for Oxford Bibliographies Online: Music (2011), and has articles and reviews in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, repercussions, Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, and the Journal of Musicological Research. Notes on contributors xiii ellie m. hisama, Professor of Music at Columbia University and affiliated faculty in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, publishes widely on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, post-tonal theory, American music, popular music, gender and feminist studies, critical studies of music and race, and the social and political roles of music. She is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (2001), and co-editor of Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies (2005) and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (2007). The recipient of several major fellowships, she is founding editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music, and became editor-in-chief of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture in 2013. jeffrey kallberg is Professor of Music History and Associate Dean for Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. melanie lowe is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University and affiliated faculty in the Programs in American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. Author of Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony (2007), she is widely published on Haydn and other eighteenth-century subjects, topic theory, music in American media, teen-pop culture, and music history pedagogy. jairo moreno is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (2004), and has published in Music Theory Spectrum, The Musical Quarterly, The South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Journal of Music Theory. He also addresses the intersection of aurality, politics of aesthetics, and Latin-American popular music in the US during the long twentieth century in his forthcoming Syncopated Modernities: Musical Latin Americanisms in the U.S., 1978– 2008. He is the recipient of the Society for American Music’s 2005 Irving Lowens Memorial Article Award (“Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz”), a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities at Yale University, an ACLS Fellowship (2009–2010), and a National Humanities Center Fellowship (2012–2013). A former professional musician, he is bassist on five Grammy Award-nominated recordings with the late Latin and Jazz percussionist Ray Barretto (Blue Note, EMI-France, Concord, and Fania labels, 1989–1997), and has appeared on numerous other recordings. xiv notes on contributors

judith a. peraino is Professor of Music at Cornell University. Her publications include articles on medieval secular songs and motets, Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, and the rock artists Blondie, David Bowie, and PJ Harvey. She is the author of two books: Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (2006), winner of the Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society, and Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (2011). sindhumathi revuluri is Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University. Her primary research focuses on music and empire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, and she also writes and teaches on global pop music, music and media, and critical approaches to musicology. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the French Govern- ment (the Bourse Chateaubriand) and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation (the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies). In 2009–10, she was a fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania. Her published work appears in the Journal of Musicological Research, the Journal of Asian Studies, Current Musicology, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and The Oxford Hand- book of Mobile Music Studies, Volume I (2014).

gary tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Human- ities at Yale University and directs the Whitney Humanities Center there. Recipient of numerous awards, including MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he has written on topics ranging from early modern Italy through the history of opera, from anthropological method to cultural critique and poststructuralist theory, and from Aztec and Inca song to Miles Davis. His books include Music in Renaissance Magic (1993), Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (1999), The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (2007), and Music and Historical Critique (2007). His newest book, 1,000,000 Years of Music, on the evolutionary emergence of music, will be published by Zone Books in 2015. judy tsou is Head of the Music Library and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Music at the School of Music at the University of Washington. Her research centers on the intersection of race and gender in music, as well as on archives and virtual music. She has co-edited an award-winning volume of essays, Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music (1993), and published articles on archives, race in Tin Pan Alley Notes on contributors xv music, and women academics in mid-twentieth-century America. She is working on a project on the rights and access of online-only music. She won the Susan Koppelman feminist editing award for Cecilia Reclaimed, and the Special Achievement Award from the Music Library Association for her work on the merger of the MLA and the US Branch of the International Association of Music Libraries. Acknowledgments

A project like this requires the assistance and support of many people, foremost among them the contributors, whose dedication, erudition, and patience made this possible. The editors would also like to thank the eminently professional staff at Cambridge University Press, especially Victoria Cooper, as well as the anonymous readers. We are grateful as well to Robert Fink, Bonnie Gordon, Raymond Knapp, Andrea Moore, Jairo Moreno, Jessica Bissett Perea, Timothy Taylor, and Gary Tomlinson for graciously reading and commenting on the introduction and other essays, in some cases across multiple drafts. Olivia Bloechl would like to acknowledge participants in her graduate seminars on “Ethics of Musicality” and “Politics of Difference” at UCLA, whose lively engagement with this material provided much food for thought. Deepest thanks are owed, finally, to our teacher, mentor, and friend, Ruth Solie, to whom this volume is lovingly dedicated. Cambridge University Press gratefully acknowledges the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, the Division of Humanities at the Univer- sity of California, Los Angeles, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania for subvention toward the production costs of this book.

xvi

1 Introduction: rethinking difference olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

When the artist abandons the region of his forefathers in order to conquer a new territory, then the historian of art does not allow the old to become deserted and desolate, but at the same time takes upon himself the dual task of assisting, with his army of helpers, the artist in the occupation by lending a hand in making the newly acquired soil arable, and setting up the equipment needed to construct a new work. Guido Adler

The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou)

Few music scholars today would wish to think of themselves in Adler’s terms, as auxiliaries in the service of empire. And indeed, neither Western music nor its means of self-renewal are as they were in 1885, when Adler published his celebrated manifesto for the new science of musicology.1 The music disciplines too have developed in ways that Adler could never have imagined, although he was prescient in many respects. Yet Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s critique of the human sciences as “inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism” resonates uncomfortably with Adler’s san- guine appeal to occupation as a metaphor for musical and musicological progress.2 The history of domination, appropriation, and misrecognition that Smith recalls, though specific in many respects to Maori and other indigenous peoples, speaks as well to injustices suffered by other oppressed groups in the modern/colonial world.3 One of these – misrecognition – has

1 Erica Mugglestone and Guido Adler, “Guido Adler’s ‘The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology (1885): An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 13 (1981): 16–17. 2 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, New York, and Dunedin, NZ: Zed Books, 1999), 1. 3 The “modern/colonial” world refers to Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views From South 1:3 (2000): 533–81; and Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking 1 2 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

been the topic of considerable debate in musicology, in the form of critical scholarship on identity and difference.4 In the 1990s and 2000s, an extensive literature on difference and music appeared in North American musicology and ethnomusicology, building on earlier critical turns in both disciplines. In musicology, a turn toward situated criticism, critique, and cultural history in the 1980s opened the way for research on aspects of difference.5 Musicology and Difference (1993), edited by Ruth Solie, was the first collection expressly dedicated to the topic of difference, asking us to consider “whether and in what circumstances the differences between and among people are worth taking seriously” in music scholarship.6 Its erudite introduction and many of its essays had a profound influence on the field, and related collections soon followed on gender, sexual difference, exoticism, postcolonialism, and race.7 These and other such topics have since emerged as recognizable specialty areas, with dedicated conferences, journals, and professional society committees and study groups. At present, scholarship on aspects of difference has achieved the status of a flourishing minority area of research.

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–45. Simply put, this framework recognizes that changes experienced in some places as modernity were experienced elsewhere as coloniality, and that the latter was an enabling condition of the former. See also Bloechl’s essay in this volume, “Race, Empire, and Early Music,” n. 73. 4 Our discussion will focus on the discipline of historical musicology, partly because of the editors’ and contributors’ predominant affiliation, but also because difference has had a distinctive history and a more prominent role there than in the other music disciplines. While we recognize the significance of work on difference in ethnomusicology and music theory, their respective literatures are beyond the scope of this introduction. 5 For example, Leo Treitler, “History, Criticism, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 3 (1980): 193–210; Gary Tomlinson, “The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology,” 19th-Century Music 7:3 (1984): 350–62; Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 6 Ruth Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 1. 7 Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998); Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Julie Brown, ed., Western Music and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Introduction: rethinking difference 3

The editors of this volume felt that the time was ripe to take a fresh look at how difference figures in music and musicological thought, two decades after the appearance of Solie’s landmark collection. In addition to paying tribute to this collection and its editor, we felt that a new volume was called for because of several developments since its publication. First, social, cultural, political, and legal configurations of difference have changed considerably since the 1990s, and this affects how music is practiced and understood now – both globally and in the US, where the editors and contributors are mainly located. New ways of theorizing difference have also emerged and are changing how the increasingly pluralist discipline of American musicology engages with music. Second, with disciplinary recognition has come a vigorous reaction from conservative colleagues who object to critical scholarship on difference for intellectual reasons, political reasons, or both. Recognition has also brought with it the backlash of appropriation and depoliticization. Finally, significant criticism has emerged from liberal and leftist thinkers across the humanities, questioning the wisdom and legitimacy of a strategic focus on difference in progressive scholarship. Particularly important are questions regarding the ethics and politics of such critique. It is fair – and, we think, necessary – to reflect on the extent to which the critical study of difference equips the discipline to address injustices in its own and other domains under present conditions. These developments pose real and vital challenges for the field, particularly for new scholarship engaged with difference, yet no recent theoretical overview exists that could serve as a resource. This introduction is an attempt to address that need, together with the essays that follow. Readers familiar with Musicology and Difference and similar collections from the 1990s will note some continuity with these earlier models, as well as some divergence. As in earlier collections, the essays gathered here focus mainly on music and social difference, including gender and sexuality, which were predominant concerns of 1990s critique. (This introduction too is strongly influenced by feminist theory, especially in its political theoretical framework.) Interestingly, in a number of the essays, gender, in particular, is an integrated element of other topical discussions rather than an independent focus, in contrast with earlier collections.8 Moreover, race and

8 This may reflect the fuller disciplinary absorption of gender-based critique, or possibly the stigma that has attached to feminism in recent years, which makes it more acceptable, and perhaps more effective, to critique gender “under cover,” as it were. Alternately (and more optimistically), it may reflect the positive influence of feminist and race critical intersectionality, which we discuss below. 4 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

coloniality receive much more attention, reflecting broad changes in the discipline and beyond over the past two decades. Other essays reach past these familiar social dimensions, addressing difference in such wide-ranging contexts as democratic deliberation, hominin evolution, and cyborg embodiment. Finally, in what is perhaps the most striking departure, several essays take difference-based epistemologies of music to task for neglecting sameness and even universality as significant aspects of musical life. No consensus about the form or value of differential knowledge emerges from this conversation across the essays, nor have we sought to impose one in the introduction. Instead, we take a step back from American musicology of the past few decades – the most proximate disciplinary context of most of the essays – to reframe difference as one important aspect of the political as it touches musical life and musicological knowledge. Specifically, we introduce a recognition framework for difference-based critique and, with input from recent ethical and political theory, explore alternatives to recognition, such as redistribution, representation, and freedom. Our aim is to reexamine and, wherever possible, clarify some key premises of differential thought in musicology, while offering new perspectives that may help to revitalize what remains a very important, yet in some ways stalled critical debate. We begin by examining the legacy of thinking about difference in musicologies past and present, and then survey newer critical paradigms that are emerging or gaining prominence in the field. In the concluding sections, we address some of the more powerful recent objections to a critical focus on difference, before indi- cating what we see as its limits and suggesting possibilities for musicology going forward.9

Conceptual foundations

Difference is a broadly relevant concept, so what do we mean when we invoke it in thinking about music? In the humanities and social sciences, the most common critical usage refers to differences among and within groups, and the cultural meanings and values that attach to these differences. A basic musicological proposition is that differentiation

9 Summaries of the volume’s essays are inserted at topically relevant points in the discussion, rather than addressed collectively in a separate section. Introduction: rethinking difference 5 affects musical dispositions and capacities as well as choices and actions, such as creation, listening, or judgment. This understanding of difference is influenced by debates in linguistics, literature, anthropology, sociology, political theory, and law. Philosophical reflection on difference and its correlate, identity, also deeply informs musicological discourse (often in unacknowledged ways), as does the long tradition of Western reflection on the same. Indeed, a need to formulate alternatives to philosophies of identity as sameness – in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, idem-identity – has driven much academic theorizing of difference over the past century.10 The impetus for such theorizing has been at times epistemological and at times political, but the most prominent work on difference in the past fifty years has proceeded from a politicized awareness of injustice carried out in the name of sameness and universalism. This broad critical project – grounded in experiences of injustice and unfreedom, and historically allied with emancipatory struggles – remains a foundation for musicological scholarship on difference and connects it with likeminded research in other fields. Viewing identity via a critical concept of difference involves conceiving it temporally and contingently, as a particular understanding of a self, another person, or a group that is formulated relative to others. This bare definition needs development in order to be meaningful, but we are already far from theories of identity as stable essences (although we are not yet speaking of them as constructs). The contingency of identity may be linguistic (designation as “this, not that”), psychological (emotional identification with or against others), social (identification as like or unlike others), or historical (identification with or against a particular past or ancestry). These and other domains have been important sites for humanistic and social scientific reflection on identity, but most contemporary discussion has focused on social identification on the basis of religion, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and so forth, as well as on the cultures particular to some identity groups. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah analyzes social identities as having a three-part structure, in which “a classification of people as Ls is associated with a social conception of Ls, some people identify as Ls, and people are sometimes treated as Ls.” This nominalist account nicely encompasses elements of social identity and identification that are often treated in isolation: their discursive or other cultural mediation, including through

10 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–3. 6 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

stereotypes or other labels; their narrative elaboration through available stories; their internalization by some labeled individuals, in ways that may shape self-characterization, feeling, and action; and patterns of behavior toward those labeled.11 Many scholars have criticized the identity-based analysis and activism of the past few decades as essentialist, or as concealing heterogeneity within a group. While liberal-minded thinkers have long been suspicious of group identification as constraining individual freedom and autonomy, poststructuralists have also challenged substantive conceptions of identity, arguing that they are discursively constructed, fragmented, and inseparable from power structures; Marxists, on the other hand, have critiqued them as reifying social relations. The predominant alternative has been identity constructivism of various sorts. At base, this family of theories posits a social and relational construction of identity and, thus, difference, with no a priori determination. In addition to epistemological concerns, constructivists often worry that ascribing a substantial essence to identities risks reinforcing structures of oppression and domination historically based on identity realism. In response, some scholars in ethnic and postcolonial studies have defended a “strategic essentialism” aimed at mobilizing activism or analysis in certain delimited situations. This concedes the non-realist nature of identities, but claims them as fictive realities for oppositional purposes.12 Others adopt a post- positivist realism that acknowledges some insights of constructivism, while insisting on identity as a “social fact that is causally relevant” for experience.13 Finally, some have questioned the analytical utility of identity concepts all told, proposing a range of concepts in their place.14 As these debates have been amply explored elsewhere, we will not continue them here, but simply address particular positions as they emerge in the discussion.15 One predominant strand of American critical musicology has posited a close relationship between identity and musicality and has advocated

11 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 65–71. 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 13 Satya P. Mohanty, “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On ‘Beloved’ and the Postcolonial Condition,” Cultural Critique 24 (1993): 70. 14 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper offer an insightful, if somewhat iconoclastic critique in “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47. 15 Ruth Solie, “Introduction,” in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference,3–8. Introduction: rethinking difference 7 sympathetic, authentic understanding of plural musicalities – and, thus, of difference – as an ethical good. Witness Philip Brett’s cautious recommendation in 1994 that musicologists cultivate a queer “sense of difference” as “valuing, exploring, and trying to understand different things, people, and ideas, in terms that are closer to the way in which they perceive themselves.”16 This pluralist musicological ethics is typically joined to a political claim – sometimes explicit, more often not – that institutionalized exclusion, devaluation, and neglect of certain differentiated musical subjects or objects are forms of injustice. Suzanne G. Cusick makes just such a claim in a 1999 essay on “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” where she argues that the marginalizing of gender (and the resulting marginalizing of women, women’s music-making, “women’swork,” and the musically “feminine”) within the intellectual microcosm that is musicology helps to sustain the gender system itself, with its intentional devaluing of practices that might be mistaken for “women’swork.”

This devaluation, she implies, harms women within and beyond the academy, and feminist musicological efforts offer a partial remedy: “to the extent that ‘woman’s work’ and the culturally ‘feminine’ are revalued in...music, our status as ‘women’ in real life is likely to be subtly improved.”17 While political theorists parse justice claims differently, one prominent model distinguishes this politics of recognition (claims for subjective acknowledgment, valuation, and accommodation) from politics of redistribution (claims for fair distribution of resources) and of representation (claims for inclusion in framing and decision-making).18 Recognition is a theory of subject formation with a long history, stemming especially from Georg W. F. Hegel’s account of the master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), but with significant development and expansion from the 1930s onward.19 For present purposes, we will define

16 Philip Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” in Brett, Wood, and Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch, 10. 17 Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford University Press, 1999), 475, 497. 18 This model is developed in Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 11–40; and significantly revised in Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 100–15. 19 See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1980); Patchen Markell, “Recognition and Redistribution,” in John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, eds., The Oxford 8 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

it as a reciprocal, contested process of regarding and evaluating others under a pragmatically significant description: that is, “a description that makes a difference in the way its bearer is treated, perhaps even shaping the terms in which she understands herself, and which thereby helps to configure her powers and possibilities.”20 Likewise, we will use “misrecognition” to mean harms resulting from a failure or denial of reciprocal recognition. Generally speaking, difference-focused musicological critique has been driven by efforts to remedy misrecognition in music history, historiography, and to a lesser extent professional life, although it has also sometimes addressed maldistribution or malrepresentation.21 One example of misrecognition, familiar in the wake of US multiculturalism, is the tacit expectation by many scholars that musicologists who are visible racial minorities will study “their own” musics (e.g., musics racialized as brown, black, Native, or just non-white) rather than musics attributed to white European and Euro-settler groups. As has often been pointed out, this expectation is non-reciprocal: scholars who are visible majorities are generally licensed to study whatever musics they like and face little sanction for crossing racialized genre boundaries. Misrecognition, in this case, involves a racialized “description,” based partly on a perception of physicality that “makes a difference in the way its bearer is treated”: specifically, that denies respect for intellectual autonomy, typically lowers status (especially if “white” genres carry greater prestige), restricts disciplinary participation, and thus limits agency and freedom.22 Likewise, we might think of the difficulties encountered by biographers of musically creative women whose lives, as Solie memorably noted, do not conform to the stories told about the lives of musically creative men, especially canonic Western classical composers.23 Because these stories – of “great men,”“visionary geniuses,” or “heroic individuals”–turn out to be gender- and culture-specific, skilled female musical creators often fail to register as “composers,” as “women,” or both. Since the bearers of

Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 450–69; and Simon Thompson, The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). 20 This definition is adapted from Markell, “Recognition and Redistribution,” 450. 21 Maldistribution can be defined as unfair or unequal distribution of resources, and malrepresentation as inappropriate exclusion from framing and decision-making. 22 Markell, “Recognition and Redistribution,” 450. 23 Ruth A. Solie, “Changing the Subject,” Current Musicology 53 (1993), 55–65. Introduction: rethinking difference 9 these descriptions are generally historical figures, harms may include a posthumous denial of respect or esteem, of canonic status, or of the aesthetic or commercial value of a legacy. But this kind of misrecognition also potentially harms the living, as posthumous struggles over artists’ archives and reputations can attest: it matters if a valued composer is found, say, to have been gay or queer, in as much as his or her valuation rests on a description as straight in a heterosexist society. Below we will take up some recent challenges to this and other politics of recognition, but for now, it will help to keep this orientation of the field in mind. Critical analysis of identity and difference may have emerged only recently in the music disciplines (with the turn toward recognition paradigms in the 1990s), but difference has a much longer history as a category of musical thought in the West. This history has been documented in many separate studies, but it is worth revisiting some of its more significant moments in order to contextualize recent difference-based musicological critique. Broadly speaking, difference has figured in modern music scholarship in two ways: as a relational matrix for musical knowledge and as a discursive topic. As we will see, while critical knowledge of difference in musical life is a distinctly late-modern development, its antecedents go back very far indeed.

Genealogies of musical difference

Differentiation – in its many forms – is a broadly shared process, and it arguably affects musical creation and reflection in every society. However, not all societies take difference and identity as significant sources of musical knowledge. We may regard this as a distinctive (though not exclusive) trait of modern, especially Western discourses of music. Like other aspects of modernity, differential epistemologies of music did not appear ex nihilo, but emerged with the colonial/modern world system in the sixteenth century.24 As Janet Abu-Lughod has demonstrated, regional world systems – and thus long-distance sociocultural exchange – long predated Europeans’ development of global commercial circuits around

24 Gary Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” in The Cultural Study of Music, ed. Martin Clayton (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 31–44; Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Olivia A. Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–32. 10 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

1500, but the latter facilitated worldwide contact and exchange as never before.25 With global European expansion and trade came unprecedented human migration – voluntary, coerced, and captive – and with migrants came foreign musical materials, practices, and ideas.26 Zones of transient musical encounter and exchange developed along trade corridors, and more permanent mixed musical communities emerged in conjunction with music institutions established in settlements and missions.27 With travel reports flowing back to Europe in ever greater numbers, continental writers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were increasingly aware that global musical practices varied widely. Neverthe- less, they initially found much in common between their own and other people’s musical practices.28 Comparative rhetoric was the norm, as writers sought correspondences among the musics of geographically dispersed groups. For instance, it was commonplace to compare festive song in indigenous American societies to that of European peasants, or to equate entranced vocalization in Asia, Africa, Europe, or the Americas.29 Such comparisons identified similarities – some real, many specious – among global musical practices, but they also universalized late-medieval hierarchies of rank and gender and a Christian pneumatology and morality, as well as the value systems they encoded. Thus, in nearly every society they encountered, early modern writers tended to value the literate, institutionally organized musical traditions of privileged groups more highly, while

25 Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford University Press, 1989). 26 Robert Stevenson, Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960); Robert Stevenson, Renaissance and Baroque Musical Sources in the Americas (Washington, DC: Organization of American States, 1970); Ian Woodfield, English Musicians in the Age of Exploration (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1995); María Gembero Ustárroz, “Circulación de libros de música entre España y América (1492–1650): notas para su estudio,” in Early Music Printing and Publishing in the Iberian World, ed. Iain Fenlon and Tess Knighton (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2006), 147–80; and David R. M. Irving, “The Dissemination and Use of European Music Books in Early Modern Asia,” Early Music History 28 (2009): 39–59. 27 Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008); Bloechl, Native American Song; David R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Kristin Dutcher Mann, The Power of Song and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Berkeley, CA: The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010); and Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, eds. Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 28 Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” 32–34. 29 Bloechl, Native American Song,35–106; and Olivia Bloechl, “Wendat Song and Carnival Noise in the Jesuit Relations,” Native Acts, ed. Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 117–43. Introduction: rethinking difference 11 devaluing the music of nomadic peoples, the non-literate, women, laborers, slaves, non-Christian religious professionals, and trance adepts. Only at the turn of the eighteenth century did new social classificatory schemes emerge that correlated global cultural value and timeliness (“modernity”) with proximity to Europe, and cultural non-value and untimeliness with distance (“coloniality”).30 Older structures of difference persisted, but they were transformed in Europe and, especially, the colonies, as the old conjunction of gender and rank began to incorporate the dimension of race, in something like the modern sense. European and settler music epistemologies transformed as well, accommodating the new, virulent intersectionality of gender, sexuality, class, and race that would become a structural feature of coloniality/modernity.31 By 1800, literate Europeans commonly regarded their own cultivated music as inherently different from that of peoples in other places and times: not just because of their distinct morphologies, but, more fundamentally, because of a new transcendentist conception of music and its concomitant aesthetics. As Gary Tomlinson writes, music lodged itself at the heart of a discourse that pried Europe and its histories apart from non-European lives and cultures. Perched at the apex of the new aesthetics, it came to function as a kind of limit-case of European uniqueness in world history and an affirmation of the gap, within the cultural formation of modernity, between history and anthropology.32

This conception of the uniqueness and superiority of Europe’s cultivated music became hegemonic in nineteenth-century musical thought as an aesthetic universalism, and it authorized the emerging distinction between historical and comparative or systematic treatment of the world’s musics, with history reserved for written, occidental music. Nineteenth-century historiographies – whether positivist, historicist, or Marxist – shared a sense of historical change as a unified, teleological process culminating in the modern West. They designated certain nations and races as possessing history in this Hegelian sense, and others who did not. Darker-skinned individuals and groups were notoriously denied historicity, under the influence of the period’s biological ethnic racism.

30 The classic study is Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 31 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22:1 (2007): 186–219. 32 Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” 32. 12 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

Women, members of the working classes, rural peasants, slaves, non- Christians, and others – all commonly referred to as “races” in this period – were also generally denied history.33 In national or general histories of music, the music of subordinated groups was usually excluded from serious consideration or, in the case of national histories, relegated to the less prestigious (though politically instrumental) categories of popular or folk music. Examples of this kind of thinking abound in the nineteenth century, but the racial classification of music and musicality in Fétis’s Histoire générale de la musique (1869) is representative, regarding music as “the product of human faculties which are distributed unequally among peoples as well as individuals.”34 Racist elements of Fétis’s musicology – his idealization of “Aryan” music, or his correlation of skull size with musicality – were grounded in the evolutionary science of his time.35 Evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer also developed essentialist notions of sex-role specialization that gave scientific imprimatur to women’s exclusion or denigration as musical thinkers or high-level public practitioners. Although Euro-identified musical thought in this period was far from unified, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musicologies typically affirmed (or at least did not seriously challenge) oppressive social structures, including chattel slavery, androcentrism and heterosexism, white supremacy, and capitalist imperialism. These structures exerted ideological pressure, to be sure, but they also shaped the basic conditions for musicological knowledge production. One of the most basic conditions – at once obvious and invisible – was the systematic relegation of care, service, and materially productive work to women and poor or racialized men, freeing scholars (at the time, mostly white, middle- to upper-class men) to research and write about music. European industrialization and overseas colonization furnished other pragmatic conditions for the emergence of the modern music disciplines, the latter establishing travel networks, language communities, and institutions that allowed music scholars to gather information and artifacts from around the globe. A particularly

33 Ruth A. Solie, Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 77–78. 34 François-Joseph Fétis, “Préface,” Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’à nos jours, vol. I (Paris, 1869), i, cited and translated in Jann Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129:1 (2004): 26. See Nina Eidsheim’s discussion of Fétis in her essay in this volume, “Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre.” 35 Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments,” 27. On evolutionism, see Alex Rehding, “The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53:2 (2000): 364–85. Introduction: rethinking difference 13 stark example, commented on at length by Edward Said, is the research expedition of Orientalists that accompanied Napoleon’s ultimately unsuc- cessful invasion of Egypt (1798–1801).36 A multivolume compendium of the team’s researches, the Description de l’Égypte (1809–22), included four treatises on ancient and contemporary Egyptian music by the musician- scholar Guillaume André Villoteau. And the global redistribution of resources and wealth under imperialism supported many a musical or musicological institution, a phenomenon that has received less scrutiny than one would expect given its prevalence.37 Professionalization of the music disciplines in the late nineteenth century also had long-lasting effects on the social conditions of music scholarship and its treatment and conceptualization of difference.38 As we have seen, a long tradition of musicological thought predated this development, and music scholarship continued to flourish outside learned institutions and publications through the twentieth century.39 However, the gradual process of professionalization brought changes to musicological practice within and beyond the academy, along the lines of those set out by Max Weber with regard to the modern priesthood.40 With this rationalization of musical knowledge emerged one of the most powerful structures of difference for late-modern musical thought in Europe and North America: the distinction between credentialed and non-credentialed musical thinkers, with greater power and prestige accorded to the former.41 It also effected a detachment of musical thought from musical life that persists to this day. Although professionalization benefitted the development of Western musical knowledge, it initially held little advantage for music scholars from marginalized social groups, whose scholarly prospects diminished or were unchanged. Before the Second World War, the limitation of professional qualification to those with advanced university training excluded most

36 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 73–92. 37 Jann Pasler points, for example, to the Paris Conservatoire’s reception in 1886–87 of a very valuable collection of Indonesian instruments for its instrument museum, donated by the Minister of the Interior in the Dutch Indies. Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments,” 36. 38 The first professorship of music history and aesthetics was established at the University of Vienna with the appointment of music critic Eduard Hanslick in 1861, and comparable positions were established across Western Europe in the following decades. 39 Solie, Music in Other Words,44–84. 40 George Ritzer, “Professionalization, Bureaucratization, and Rationalization: The Views of Max Weber,” Social Forces 53:4 (1975): 627–34, esp. 631. 41 Ana María Ochoa Gautier sets out a different genealogy of musical knowledge in Latin America in “Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America,” Social Identities 12:6 (2006): 803–25. We are grateful to Jairo Moreno for noting this regional distinction. 14 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

women, the poor, men of color, and many non-Protestant men from practicing as credentialed academic professionals, with the exception of some possessing extraordinary abilities, tenacity, and – nearly always – the support of powerful white men. For example, in the United States, white women had little opportunity to work as university professors outside of women’s colleges, and women of color or non-Protestant women almost none.42 While women were sometimes admitted to scholarly societies, musicological societies generally limited their access in the early years because of music’s insecure place in the academy.43 Likewise, in imperial Germany, Jewish men were hired to university posts in limited numbers, but the situation worsened dramatically after the First World War: of the approximately 150 musicologists who left Germany beginning in 1933, only two (Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel) were university professors.44 Many scholars who were excluded from academic positions for social reasons contributed musical thought in other venues, such as musical societies, libraries and archives, general music periodicals, folklore, travel writings, correspondence, personal memoirs, biographies, and even fiction. For example, the first African American musicologist, James Monroe Trotter, produced the massive compendium of black musical life, Music and Some Highly Influential Musical People (1878), yet he never held an academic position. Instead, he supported himself as a civil servant in the Boston Post Office, and in 1887 was presidentially appointed as the Recorder of Deeds in Washington, DC, a post traditionally held by African Americans.45 Women who may be considered early musicologists or music scholars in this expanded sense include Florence May (d. 1923), Lina Ramann (d. 1912), Marie Lipsius (d. 1927), Marie Bobillier (pseud. Michel Brenet, d. 1918), Maud Cuney Hare (d. 1936), Zora Neale Hurston (d. 1960), and Sophie Drinker (d. 1967). While a few white women – such as Yvonne Rokseth (d. 1948) and music anthropologist Frances Densmore

42 On the women’s colleges, see Helen Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). 43 Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” 471–98. 44 Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 95–98. 45 Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Robert Stevenson, “America’s First Black Historian,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 26:3 (1973): 383–404; Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., “Cosmopolitan or Provincial?: Ideology in Early Black Music Historiography, 1867–1940,” Black Music Research Journal 16:1 (1996): 11–42. Introduction: rethinking difference 15

(d. 1957) – were able to support themselves as institutionally employed scholars, most women relied on other paid work or subsidy.46 Intellectuals from colonialized populations also began producing scholarship in a Western vein with the accelerated establishment of European-style educational institutions, music societies, and periodicals in the colonies in the nineteenth century. Most never held university positions before decolonization, but some achieved regional and international renown. The career of the musicologist Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore offers a particularly distinguished example.47 A Brahmin aristocrat educated at the British-style Hindu College in Calcutta, Tagore pursued intensive independent study of Indian and Western musics, and his Bengali-language writings on music were instrumental in the late-century North Indian renaissance. Tagore is also credited with writing one of the earliest general music histories by a colonial scholar, the Universal History of Music (1896). This study, along with his other English-language writings, profoundly influenced European comparative musicologists such as Von Hornbostel and Sachs, whose four-part taxonomy of musical instruments was ultimately based on an Indian classification system documented by Tagore.48 Another eminent subaltern scholar, Francis LaFlesche (Omaha), is well known to Americanists for his collaboration with Euro- American music anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher (d. 1923) on a study of Omaha music and lifeways (A Study of Omaha Music, 1893). LaFlesche also conducted extensive independent research on the music of the Osage that remains an important resource to this day.49

46 Rokseth was the first woman to hold an academic university post in musicology, with her appointment as a maître des conférences at the University of Strasbourg in 1937. Leo Schrade, “Yvonne Rokseth: In Memorium,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 2:3 (1949): 171–74. In 1907, the veteran ethnologist Densmore was appointed as a Collaborator at the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, an appointment that she held for the next fifty years. Willard Rhodes, “Densmore, Frances,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/ music/07571 (accessed March 30, 2013). 47 Charles Capwell, “Marginality and Musicology in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta: the Case of Sourindro Mohun Tagore,” in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 228–43; and Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford University Press, 1997). 48 Joep Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c. 1780–c. 1890,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 64; and Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, “The Beginnings of Organology and Ethnomusicology in the West: V. Mahillon, A. Ellis, and S. M. Tagore,” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 8: Issues in Organology (1990): 67–80. 49 Margot Liberty, “Francis LaFlesche: The Osage Odyssey,” in American Indian Intellectuals of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Margot Liberty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 51–69. 16 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

Music scholarship by members of subaltern and oppressed groups did not necessarily diverge, politically or intellectually, from hegemonic Western musical thought, especially before the international ferment of radical thought that accompanied the global liberation movements around the First World War. Indeed, these scholars had to internalize hegemonic codes and values (such as “great men and works” narratives) to some degree in order to participate in public intellectual discourse at all. As Antonio Gramsci pointed out in the context of 1920s Italian fascism, capitalist civil societies – and, by extension, capitalizing colonial societies – exert tremendous pressure on and through intellectuals to collaborate with dominant groups.50 In many instances, though, intellectuals and artists from oppressed groups have found creative ways to make relatively hostile epistemologies speak to their conditions, concerns, and intellectual or artistic traditions. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s theory of African American “Signifyin(g)” or Gerald Vizenor’s (Anishnaabe) coinage, “survivance,” are well-known examples of resistant epistemological and performance tactics, but the richness of the critical language, even just in English – appropriation, accommodation, hybridization, ambivalence, creolization, decolonialism, and so forth – suggests the range of adaptive cultural responses to asymmetrical power.51

The rise of difference-based musicological critique

The public emergence and international dissemination of self-consciously oppositional musical thought would await the mass emancipatory movements of the twentieth century. We will refer to these multiple kinds of thought in the aggregate as “critique” or, following Foucault, “subjugated knowledges” of music.52 Of course, musical critique in a more general sense is hardly an invention of late coloniality/modernity: musical thought and thoughtful practice have offered ways of making the world otherwise – under different degrees of constraint, and with varying efficacy – throughout the

50 Antonio Gramsci, “Hegemony, Intellectuals, and the State,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 2nd edn. (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 210–16. 51 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Gerald R. Vizenor (Anishnaabe), Manifest Manners: Narratives of Post-Indian Survivance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994). See also Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 69. 52 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 7–8. Introduction: rethinking difference 17 history of Western capitalism and empire, even as these regimes became increasingly adept at burying, parrying, and absorbing resistant action. Yet historian Robert Young rightly notes the unprecedented incidence and success of twentieth-century emancipatory movements: the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and its extension in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere; anti-colonial liberation movements across the global South, accelerating after the First World War and culminating in the post-Second World War period; and national feminist, indigenous, and civil rights struggles against internal oppression (or internal colonialism), including in the new postcolonial nations.53 These and many lesser-known movements mobilized what Foucault calls “disqualified”–that is, non-erudite, local, differential, and marginalized – knowledge of struggles, and in some cases produced new intellectual traditions of critique, especially varieties of Marxian and socialist critique, anti-colonialism, feminism, anarchism, and postcolonial and racial nationalisms.54 Cultural politics played an important role in many emancipatory movements, and music was among the expressive forms that they politicized. As the Irish socialist James Connolly wrote in a preface to a 1907 collection of freedom songs, “no revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression...Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement.”55 But politicizing culture – in our case, music – involved more than discovering its instrumentality for radical and socialist activism. More fundamentally, it involved the critical functions of asking “what practices, habits, attitudes, comportments, images, symbols, and so on contribute to social domination and group oppression,” and calling “for collective transformation of such practices.”56 Karl Marx’s “discovery of power in the social” in the nineteenth century had opened vast areas of life to political scrutiny, and while orthodox European Marxism prioritized the economic, many later forms of critique (including the Frankfurt School, Maoism, and the British cultural materialists) saw culture and the arts, including music, as legitimate objects of political inquiry.57 The Maoist ideal

53 Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 170. 54 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”,7–8. 55 James Connolly, “Revolutionary Song,” in James Connolly: Selected Political Writings, ed. Owen Dudley Edwards and Bernard Ransom (London: Cape, 1973), 376. 56 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 86. 57 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 66. 18 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

of cultural revolution, in particular, had a profound effect on mid-century liberation struggles elsewhere in Asia and in Africa and Latin America, and was a formative influence on revolutionary tricontinental intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Che Guevara, as well as on 1960s North American social movements and on members of the European Left, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida.58 Without getting into the considerable controversy that cultural politics provoked on the left, we should note that the emancipatory movements’ politicization of expressive culture laid the groundwork – distantly, to be sure – for the academic turn to cultural studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century and, thereby, the critical turn in American musicology in the 1990s.59 Most participants in these later academic formations were not Maoist, revolutionary, or even particularly radical; yet many of the ideas and perspectives they developed were genealogically indebted to this history of struggle. The politicization of the cultural, broadly construed, in the early twentieth century also permitted renewed concern with the subjective dimension of political struggle. With the extension of emancipatory activism and critique into areas of life that classic liberalism deemed private – and thus apolitical – it became possible for as intimate a process as recognition to admit a politics and, eventually, to emerge as a politics in the 1960s and after. Intersubjective recognition was a particular focus of radical Francophone existentialists and phenomenologists in the 1940s and 1950s, especially Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon, who critically reinterpreted Hegel’s idealist ontology of the subject as self-consciousness, in the shadow of mid-century colonial and racial brutality, androcentrism, fascism, and genocide. Whereas Hegel had conceived of recognition as an agon within consciousness, these thinkers were influenced by Alexandre Kojève’s anthropologized and social interpretation of recognition as a struggle between two or more consciousnesses.60 Each of them was concerned, at base, with the human condition as situated among others in an unequal world – a world that increasingly seemed to degrade the possibility of being human – and they were skeptical to different degrees that the Hegelian

58 Young, Postcolonialism,7–8, 182–88. 59 Michael Denning argues that the other half of the “double genealogy of cultural studies” was the rise of mass culture as “a relatively autonomous region of social life” after the Second World War, which reformed “the disciplinary landscape of the modern state and university.” Michael J. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 3. 60 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Introduction: rethinking difference 19 ideal of freedom through mutual recognition could be realized under contemporary conditions, or even whether it was desirable at all. For example, when Fanon wrote about the nauseating experience of being hailed on the street as a “negro,” he was insisting, pace Hegel, on the irreducibly political situation of recognition, albeit in an expansive sense of the political – its “epidermalization”–that encompassed the sociality of psychic and bodily experience: “‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’.” Then,

Nausea... I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.”61

“I was battered down by tom-toms”... Music and sound, like other expressive forms, could convey the force of racial misrecognition: in this case, the burden of excessive differentiation. On another occasion, he refused a request to respond “on behalf of negro music” to a racist criticism of modernist jazz, rejecting both the premise of racial musical difference and what he saw as the temptation of compensatory identification with a politicized aesthetic (in this case, négritude).62 Fanon saw all too clearly the damage done by the denial of mutual recognition under the French colonial regime, but he was suspicious of difference-based politics, seeing the desire for recognition itself as a pathology of subordination.63 Yet he also maintained that dialectical self-realization in the context of anti- colonial struggle was potentially liberating. In an address to the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in 1959, he again noted some white critics’ distaste for bebop, which he heard, in contrast, as a sonic expression of “hope” that “forces back the racist universe.”“And it is not utopian to suppose,” he writes, “that in fifty years’ time the type of jazz howl hiccupped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of negritude, and who are faithful to this

61 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986/2008), 84–85. 62 Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks, 176. See Jeremy F. Lane, “Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz, and the Rejection of Négritude,” in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South, ed. Martin Munro and Celia Britton (Liverpool University Press/The Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2012), 129–46. 63 Fanon’s critique of recognition is adapted and developed in Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 20 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

arrested image of a type of relationship.”64 Fanon’s characterization of pre-bop, especially Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans jazz, as an “arrested image” of domination may not be entirely fair, but it does capture a mode of hearing music as a power-suffused relational action and social representation, which anticipates much recognition-based critique later in the century. “Hot” jazz, in his account, symbolized the unattainability of fully realized, free humanity in “a colonized and civilized society,” especially by those caught in its structures of racial difference.65 While Fanon was ambivalent at best toward recognition as a politics, many others were drawn to its emancipatory potential in the decades between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, especially the 1960s social movements and their intellectual allies. In the American academy, recognition-based critical thought and activism found fertile ground in the pluralizing environs of colleges and universities in the 1960s and 1970s. Increasing numbers of female, minority, and working- class scholars brought alternative experiences and, often, perspectives to the elite, white, and male enclave of the academy, and the migration (often in exile) of Third-World intellectuals to Western centers of learning pressured universities and disciplines to begin addressing their own colonial legacies. New fields of recognition-based inquiry were institutionalized as the inter-disciplines of ethnic studies, women’s studies, and queer studies. Ethnic studies, for example, got its start in late 1960s San Francisco, partly as a result of Civil Rights movement-inspired student activism on local college and university campuses. These fields contributed unprecedented empirical and theoretical knowledge of social groups whose members had long been excluded from the liberal category of the “human” enshrined in the human sciences. Political orientations within these fields differed internally, then as now, with some scholars advocating acknowledgment and valuation of group distinctiveness, and some seeking equal inclusion and respect for marginalized groups, seeing difference as a source of oppression. These fields have been a major force behind the surge of academic critical interest in identity and difference since the 1980s. New theoretical challenges to the liberal universalism of the human sciences issued from other directions as well. The body of leftist cultural theory emerging in France elaborated radical subjugated knowledges of the West, born of North African decolonization and the 1968 student protests,

64 Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 243. 65 Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks, 82. Introduction: rethinking difference 21 into a thoroughgoing critique of the humanist foundations of its knowledge, morality, and politics.66 Writings by Althusser, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Derrida, Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan questioned the universalism and transparency of such fundamental categories as truth, logos, reason, progress, and the autonomous individual subject. Although their approaches and politics varied, and although some of them remained troublingly silent about France’s brutal regimes of colonization in North Africa, they shared an interest in the linguistic structuring of social and psychological reality and stressed the importance of relational differentiation (“this, not that”) at many levels of existence. The introduction of this body of theory to the United States in the 1970s fueled the “linguistic” or “poststructural” turn of Anglophone scholarship through the 1990s.67 Even prior to its global diffusion, “French” poststructuralist theory was a product of intensive cross- fertilization among oppositional currents, including Eastern European structuralism, Maoism, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, and Franco- Maghrebian diasporic experience.68 This hybrid intellectual genesis – sometimes termed the “creolization of theory”–has been cited against the frequent claim that poststructuralism is a white/heterosexist/bourgeois construct that has little to offer in the way of liberating knowledge.69 Though it is neither necessary nor possible to settle this argument here, the utility of poststructuralism for a wide range of oppositional thought may attest to its liberating potential in some circumstances. Another major contribution to the study of difference came from the so-called “cultural turn” in anthropology, history, and literary studies beginning in the 1970s. In anthropology, Clifford Geertz reworked the anthropological concept of culture in a more humanistic direction, theorizing it as a “web” of symbolic meaning that mediates lived reality. Culture was therefore essentially semiotic, and its proper analysis was not “an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”70 However, unlike hermeneutics, which traditionally

66 Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 1. 67 François Cussett, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 54–75. 68 Young, Postcolonialism, 413–14; Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, eds., The Creolization of Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–36. 69 Feminism and ethnic studies have been particularly suspicious of its critique of the liberal subject of rights and responsibilities, which coincided historically with important legal gains for women and minorities as rights-bearing groups. 70 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. 22 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

assumed a commonality between the interpreter and the text that makes understanding possible, Geertzian cultural anthropology stressed the difference between the ethnographer and his or her informants and saw explicating this difference as the primary aim of ethnology. This emphasis on difference in anthropology had a powerful influence on the disciplines of history and literature. In the 1970s, Western historians developed a range of alternatives to the macrohistorical approaches that had characterized social scientific and Marxian historiographies, partly through adapting a Geertzian culture concept that restored some degree of historical agency to group cultures and to individual actors. Microhistory, history of popular culture, and cultural history sought to recover the symbolic level of social and political life, with a characteristic focus on locality and disadvantaged or unknown individuals.71 The “New Cultural History” that developed mainly in the US in the 1980s and 1990s also employed a culture concept, but was self- consciously poststructuralist and returned to questions of ideology and politics that earlier cultural history often sidelined.72 Women’s history and gender studies were at the forefront of the movement.73 Finally, a related movement in literary studies, New Historicism, emerged in the same decades, in reaction against the ahistorical, formalist tendencies of American New Criticism. The title of its flagship journal, Representations, gives a sense of its poststructuralism, and indeed one of its main innov- ations was its expansion of the range of texts discussed by literary scholars to include popular and commercial literatures, as well as writings not conventionally considered “literature” at all.74 It inherited a historicist periodization and insistence on the distance between the historian and her subject matter. However, its interpretive dimension was as indebted to cultural anthropology as to historical hermeneutics,

71 For example, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978); and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1980). 72 Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). 73 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 74 Harold Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989); and Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 8. Introduction: rethinking difference 23 and its practitioners stressed the intersection (though not indistinctness) of text and world. Their attention to the formative role of power also allied their work with cultural history and with gender, ethnic, postcolonial, and queer studies. American musicology was challenged and transformed by its encounter in the 1980s and 1990s with these varied forms of critical knowledge, which yielded the broad subfield of Critical Musicology (sometimes termed “New Musicology”). Difference was a concern from the first. This is not to suggest that considerations of difference had been absent from musicology up to that point: difference had figured implicitly or explicitly in each of its primary epistemologies through the 1980s.75 Nevertheless, while these epistemologies produced ample knowledge of difference, they disqualified or minimized knowledge produced from difference (with the exception of some Marxian forms of critique). Critical musicology, in contrast, has typically engaged difference meta-analytically as both an object of study and as a basis for alternative epistemologies. Generally speaking, research on difference has aligned with recognition-based critique elsewhere in the academy: seeking equal inclusion by investigating the harmful differentiation of musical subjects or objects, or seeking accommodation of difference by investigating their harmful assimilation. Including and, in many cases, prioritizing marginalized perspectives has been another key feature of critical musicology, influenced initially by feminist standpoint theory. With the greater influence of poststructuralism on the field in the 1990s and after, the earlier emphasis on knowledge situated in “historically shared, group-based experiences” shifted toward thinking from more radically differential epistemologies that took alterity as an ontological

75 Broadly speaking, positivist musicology sought to eliminate the influence of subjective differences on knowledge, appealing to the objective realism of the facts and fundamental laws that it sought to establish. Historicism accommodated variability to a greater extent as an element of human history and knowledge production. It posited the difference of past epochs relative to each other and to the historian’s present, while regarding particular epochs as having some degree of internal coherence. Historicism in musicology has generally limited the influence of the historian’s own values, positioning, and experience on historical knowledge. The major exception has been in historical studies that incorporate hermeneutics or criticism to a significant extent – as in most style histories, or studies of “life and works”– because these epistemologies depend on subjective engagement with their object. Nevertheless, these studies have often sought a general validity, especially where meaning is thought to reside in musical works or artifacts themselves. Like historicism, Marxian critique has analyzed sociocultural difference across time and space, but it has stressed the fundamental influence of class relations on knowledge production and has instituted critical reflexivity as a key method. 24 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

premise, beyond just an empirical given.76 These cast the subject of knowledge as an “undesignatable field of differences, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a descriptive identity category.”77 Many musicologists worried that poststructuralism disabled political critique focused on the existence or attainment of integrated, agential subjectivity, and they may have been right. As Solie wrote in 1993, “The implications of decon- structive philosophies for the committed scholarship of identity politics are perhaps not entirely clear... Could it really be possible to ask such questions as ‘Are there women?’‘Are there gays?’ Do we fare better or worse if the answer is no?”78 One response to such concerns has been recourse to strategic essentialism or post-postivist realism, as described above.79 Another response – influenced, in some cases, by poststructuralist thought – has been to deploy dialogical models of knowledge, shifting the critical focus away from the identity of the knowing subject and toward the form, ethics, and politics of its communicative engagement with others. Hermeneutical and anthropological currents in musicology have been the main sites where dialogical recognition paradigms have flourished. We will return to the problem of difference in critical hermeneutics below. Conceptions of power and the political have also been central to critical musicology. As with the New Cultural History and New Historicism, the predominant conception of power in the field has been more Foucauldian than Marxian or Weberian, even in studies that draw eclectically on political concepts from other critical traditions (most commonly, Marxian “ideology,” “dialectic,” or “hegemony”). Power in Foucault’s formulation is productive, normative, delinked from intention, and diffused in the social world, rather than a willful exercise of rule, law, violence, or wealth by individuals, classes, or institutions. Thanks to the influence of Foucauldian thought, as well as the 1960s social movements, there is a widespread tendency in musicology (as elsewhere) to equate the political with social power structures and relations, effectively finding the political almost everywhere.80 This is implicit,

76 Patricia Hill Collins, “Comment on Heckman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Where’s the Power?,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22:2 (1997): 375 (emphasis in the original). 77 Mary Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 132–33. 78 Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference, 19. 79 For the latter position, see Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., “The Pot Liquor Principle: Developing a Black Music Criticism in American Music Studies,” American Music 22:2 (2004): 284–95. 80 Wendy Brown, “Power after Foucault,” in Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory,65–84. See also Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 22–23. Introduction: rethinking difference 25 for instance, in Susan McClary’s broad argument in Feminine Endings that “music is always a political activity, and to inhibit criticism of its effects for any reason is likewise a political act.”81 By this she does not mean that music is only political, but rather that it is inseparable from power. This idea of the political as the omnipresence of social orders of power contrasts with the classic Western conception of it as the “human negotiation of the powers, governance, and values of collective life,” a conception whose modern liberal iterations rigorously distinguish private from public life, designating the latter as the domain of politics.82 While the politicization of “non-political” domains such as music has vastly enriched critical thought in the past half-century, it is worth asking, with Hannah Arendt and others, if our critical discernment and capacity to intervene are not diminished somewhat when the political is collapsed into the social.83 What happens, for example, to our ability to engage with music and musical thought as practices of political collectivities – however tentative and contingent – as well as of sociological groups and social subjects?84 Can we preserve the advantages of politicizing music as a dimension of social life, while recognizing the distinctiveness of its involvement with such longstanding political problematics as freedom, sovereignty, tyranny, legitimacy, belonging, democracy, deliberation, and so forth? Melanie Lowe’s essay in this volume, “Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn’s instrumental music,” addresses the political in this vein, taking a fresh look at the relationship between common-practice European music and processes of liberal democratization in the late eighteenth century. Lowe notes the tendency for musicologists to idealize the compositions of Franz Joseph Haydn and his Viennese contemporaries as monuments to nascent republicanism and to Enlightenment principles of tolerance and equality, overlooking the continued salience of absolutism and hierarchical social organization. This line of criticism generally assumes a Habermasian conception of the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere as a space for rational democratic deliberation, irrespective of differential rank, political privilege, or economic status. Lowe questions the utopianism and late modernity of the Habermasian model and brings recent critical revisions of Habermas to bear on the form, content, and contexts of

81 McClary, Feminine Endings, 26. 82 Brown, Edgework, 75. 83 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958/1998), 22–78; Brown, Edgework,60–82; and Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. 84 This paraphrases Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 24. 26 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony and the “Gypsy” Piano Trio. The Haydn who emerges in her analysis is neither the dominated subject of absolutism nor a crypto-revolutionary, but a politically pragmatic artist whose music symbolized and may have helped to engender practices of publicity that gave rise to new orders of power as well as possibilities for emancipation. Our ability to engage political questions such as these – particularly with regard to such venerable musicological icons – is thanks to musicology’s turn toward critiquing music’s involvement in social and political life, beginning in the 1980s. Among the extra-disciplinary critical idioms that musicologists absorbed and adapted in the 1980s and 1990s, ideology critique and discourse critique were by far the most prevalent. One of their main targets was the classical music canon, whose aesthetic selection was critiqued as reflecting and upholding social inequalities, rather than as expressing a universal, immutable sense of the good.85 Canon critique generally took one of two forms: a reformist position critiquing the exclusion of socially differentiated composers whose works might otherwise qualify aesthetically, and then advocating for their inclusion; or a more radical position critiquing canonicity itself and its values as inherently unjust, because arbitrary or ideological. The former critique inspired a host of “minority histories” (in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s sense), which explored the music of marginalized and differentiated social groups in a bid for disciplinary inclusion.86 For example, research on African American musics first began to gain prominence within the discipline in the 1990s, building on Eileen Southern’s landmark study, The Music of Black Americans (1971), and the output of the Black Music Research Journal (est. 1980). Initially, scholars focused mainly on the blues, spirituals, and especially jazz, which was itself undergoing canonization.87 The more thoroughgoing critique of canon also opened the way for the study of popular and vernacular musics, which had mainly been the province of ethnomusicology. The 1980s and 1990s also saw women’s music history projects, biographies of individual women composers and artists, and, somewhat later, studies of gender, which not only expanded the discipline’s topical range, but prompted efforts to develop more radical historiographies

85 Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–43. 86 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 97–113. 87 See Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Krin Gabbard, ed., Jazz among the Discourses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Introduction: rethinking difference 27 and critical methods.88 (Not incidentally, these decades also saw increasing numbers of women entering the field and being promoted to tenure, which itself changed the discipline.) Sexuality was a secondary topic in several of these studies, but gay and lesbian studies and queer theory entered musicology on its own terms with the 1994 edited collection, Queering the Pitch. While much of this early work focused on the non-heterosexual identity of musicological objects (musicians, composers, audiences) and/or of scholars themselves, more recent studies have often mobilized a reclaimed sense of the derogatory term “queer” as the basis for critical perspectives on musical normativity. Two essays in this volume, by Suzanne G. Cusick and Heather Hadlock, build on this tradition of critiquing music’s involvement in power-suffused social orders of sexuality and gender. Cusick’s essay, “He said, she said? Men hearing women in Medicean Florence,” explores the politicization of sexualized aurality in 1620s Florence. Drawing on her original work with Tuscan judicial archives, she sets out a micro-history of a case involving a noble music-lover, Sinolfo Ottieri, accused of illicit sexual relations with one of Florence’s most beloved singers, Maria Vittoria Frescobaldi, a cloistered nun and a student of the composer Francesca Caccini. Cusick notes that Ottieri and Frescobaldi both testified that their relationship was musical, not sexual. Yet because Tuscan legal processes institutionalized a heterosexist mode of hearing women’s voices as deceptive and inviting sexual encounter, the law was unable to comprehend the pair’s erotic, but evidently non-sexual aural and vocal exchange. In the end, Ottieri received a strikingly harsh punishment for an aural transgression that, in hindsight, hardly seems criminal. Cusick argues that this seemingly disproportionate punishment was a response to the political threat posed by his non-normative melophilic sexuality, which raised the specter of an emasculated Tuscan male political elite during a sensitive period of transition to a female regency. Hadlock’s essay “Different masculinities: androgyny, effeminacy, and sentiment in Rossini’s La donna del lago,” on the other hand, engages a spectrum of masculinities and their relative proximity to authority and

88 Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, ed., Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Karen Pendle, ed., Women & Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); McClary, Feminine Endings; Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference; Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, eds., Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 28 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

power. She explores Italian operatic representations of heroic masculinity in the early nineteenth century, taking Rossini’s melodrama of 1819 as a case study. The opera’s unusual constellation of musico-tenor-tenor complicates the expected love triangle of “hero-heroine-rival,” and offers a rich example of how stage conventions for presenting gender and sexuality were intertwined with vocal conventions in the period’s musical theater. Hadlock focuses on the perception of effeminacy in contralto Rosmunda Pisaroni’s trouser-role portrayal of Malcolm Graeme and sees it as signaling a mimetic crisis in late sentimental culture: because the older sentimental model of heroism was based on sensibility rather than on action and self-determination, it became feminized within the emerging bourgeois gender order of the early nineteenth century. She concludes that this re-gendering of sentimental operatic masculinity created conflicts with the period’s compositional and theatrical codes for representing heterosexual attraction. Like several other contributors to this volume, Hadlock employs critical interpretation as a key method: in this case, in order to understand the differential characterization of masculinity in Rossini’s opera. This method was a signature innovation of critical musicology beginning in the late 1980s, when a critical hermeneutics developed that grafted a Geertzian culture concept, poststructuralist theories of meaning, and post-Marxian theories of power onto the existing humanist tradition of musical interpretation. Critical hermeneutics was far from a unified practice, then as now. Its practitioners approached interpretation as a self-consciously subjective act that often appealed for its legitimacy to subordinated musical experience and knowledge (especially from feminist and queer perspectives), in addition to musical analysis and description. At basis, critical interpretation proceeds from an awareness of cultural or historical difference between the interpreter and his or her object, and this self-conscious engagement with “otherness” ideally informs the resulting understanding in a deep way. As this suggests, arguments for the value of critical interpretation have often relied on an analogy between processes of mediated understanding and politicized processes of dialogical recognition. Not everyone accepts this analogy, and the form, ethics, and politics of difference-based interpretation have been vigorously debated.89 Particularly strong disagreement has emerged between scholars seeking to overcome cultural-historical

89 For one argument against this analogy, see Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xi–xxxii. Introduction: rethinking difference 29 difference through informed, sensitive interpretation and those who are wary of such efforts as epistemological oppression.90 Since the early 2000s, anti-racist and postcolonial approaches have gained momentum in the music disciplines, as allied but distinct responses to the living legacies of racism, racialized slavery, and empire. Specialists in African American music have led the way in bringing critical thought about race to musicological study, joining a conversation ongoing in other fields, especially popular music studies, cultural history, and communi- cations.91 In some ways, this parallels the shift from “women’s” to “gender” studies and from “lesbian/gay” to queer studies in the 1990s, although Guthrie Ramsey, Jr., is right to point out that, in the US at least, theorizing race has lagged behind these other critical projects.92 The edited collections Music and the Racial Imagination (2000) and Western Music and Race (2007) advanced the conversation considerably, featuring a wide array of essays on race and racism in international contexts.93 Despite this florescence of research (and despite expressed goodwill on the part of many musicologists), racial critique and the study of racialized musics still encounter some resistance and neglect in a field that remains largely white and culturally Eurocentric. Nevertheless, we are heartened to see the greater prominence and breadth of critical research on race and racialized musics among younger scholars in particular.94 A number of

90 For the former position, see Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, and McClary, Feminine Endings; for the latter, Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 247–52; and, from a different philosophical position, Carolyn Abbate, “Music – Drastic or Gnostic?,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 505–36. 91 See Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, 2003); Ronald M. Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Kyra D. Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (New York University Press, 2006); George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, eds., Blackness in Opera (University of Illinois Press, 2012). 92 Ramsey, Jr., “The Pot Liquor Principle,” 288. 93 Radano and Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination; and Brown, ed., Western Music and Race. 94 For example, Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children: The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965–1966,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2005; Charles Daniel Carson, “Broad and Market: At the Crossroads of Race and Class in Philadelphia Jazz, 1956–1980,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008; Loren Kajikawa, “Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’: Signifying Whiteness, Rearticulating Race,” Journal of the Society for American Music 3:3 (2009): 341–63; Loren Kajikawa, “The Sound of Struggle: Black Revolutionary Nationalism and Asian-American Jazz,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and its Boundaries, ed. 30 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

the essays in this volume also address the problematic of racial difference, offering a variety of methodological approaches and cases. Most musical scholarship thus far has focused on race in late modernity, but Olivia Bloechl’s and Bonnie Gordon’s essays examine racial thinking in the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. In “Race, empire, and early music,” Bloechl argues for the legitimacy of using “race” as a critical category of early musicology, a position counter to the prevailing understanding of race as a purely modern social construct. She draws support from historiographies of race in pre-revolutionary Europe and the colonies, as well as from modern racial theories, both of which shed light on the racialized horizons from which we engage early music. As a case study, she examines racialized performance in the Old Regime, focusing on blackface costuming in French ballet and opera. From the period’s costume designs emerges a history of shifting racial configurations that parallels broader socio-historical trends in many respects. Gordon’s essay, “What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear,” considers the racialization of music and heightened sound in Colonial-era Virginia. Building on her original research on Jefferson’s archive and music collections at Monticello, she analyzes the role of musical sound and thought in the Jeffersonian project of nation building. Race and racialized slavery emerge as central components of this cultural political project, though their salience is often apparent only in the silences of Jefferson’s musical writings and collections, both of which emphasize European and Euro-settler musics. Gordon draws on archaeological and historical evidence of African American music-making at Monticello that supplements the silences of Jefferson’s musical archive, and she concludes by reflecting on the legacies of his selective, racialized hearing in present-day Virginia. Three other essays in this volume address racial configurations in twentieth-century opera, minimalist music, and hip hop. Judy Tsou’s essay, “Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly: tonal language and power of Cio-Cio-San,” examines the tonal differentiation of characters in Puccini’s opera. Like Hadlock, Tsou employs critical interpretation to elicit social meanings from Puccini’s musical idiom. Quite a few scholars have scrutinized the authenticity of the composer’s borrowings from Japanese and other East Asian music, often critiquing their deployment as stereotyped and exoticist. Tsou, however, focuses on Puccini’s manipulation of

David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 190–218; and Jessica Bissett Perea, “The Politics of Inuit Musical Modernities in Alaska,” Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2011. Introduction: rethinking difference 31 divergent pitch systems – late romantic tonality, non-functional harmony and whole-tone scales, and composed and borrowed pentatonicism – and the differential logic of the resulting tonal palette. She points out that the music for the titular character vacillates between late romantic tonal lyricism, which suggests a kind of assimilative “recognition” of the character, and her predominant idiom of whole-tone or pentatonic melodies, which Tsou hears as a sonic representation of her racialized “Oriental” difference. Ellie M. Hisama’s essay, “‘Diving into the earth’: the musical worlds of Julius Eastman,” takes us into the late twentieth century, exploring the life and music of an important, but unjustly neglected composer of American minimal music. Although Eastman was a talented member of the new music scenes at Buffalo and New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Hisama argues that he experienced professional marginalization during his lifetime as an African American gay man in a predominantly white, male, and homophobic new music scene. In “‘Pranksta rap’: humor as difference in hip hop,” Charles Hiroshi Garrett explores how humor provides a means of navigating the race and gender politics of hip hop culture. He looks first at the Beastie Boys, a trio of white, Jewish rappers who have relied heavily on humor to mark their outsider status while mitigating claims of racial inauthenticity. He then turns to the triumphant career of Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, showing how her humor – especially when aimed at the rapper herself – has functioned as an artistic expression of “old-school” legitimacy and as a means of empowerment for a businesswoman in the male-dominated music industry. Garrett concludes by addressing the proliferation of hip hop parody, noting that while it relies on racial and gender stereotypes for much of its humor, it also offers outsiders the possibility to negotiate otherwise prohibitive social differences from within hip hop culture. Nina Sun Eidsheim takes the critical study of race in yet another direction with her essay on “Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre.” Rather than addressing musical performance practices, discourses, or repertories, she focuses on racialized pedagogies and auralities of the voice. She combines anthropological, phenomenological, and historical methods, drawing empirical support from her ethnographic research with classical voice teachers, as well as from histories of Western vocal pedagogy and science. Focusing, with her informants, on the production of vocal timbre, she perceives a subtle “pedagogy of whiteness” at work in contemporary North American voice training. Specifically, she finds a remarkably resilient phenomenology of race as “an essential, timbrally present quality” of singing bodies. As she demonstrates in a review of vocal scientific writings from the 32 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

eighteenth century onward, this racial micropolitics of timbral recognition is part of a history of disciplinary production of raced bodies and subjects. As with racial critique, postcolonialism – a fixture of humanities in the US since the 1980s – has only recently achieved some prominence in the music disciplines. Postcolonial critical thought, as Young aptly defines it, “involves a political analysis of the cultural history of colonialism, and investigates its contemporary effects in Western and tricontinental cultures, making connections between that past and the politics of the present.”95 Each of these attributes is significant: postcolonial critique has focused on politicized culture, emphasized colonialism’s multidirectional effects, and is typically skeptical of historicist or modernist temporalities as legacies of empire. A number of musicologists have engaged in a sustained way with postcolonial theory, especially as represented in Edward Said’s classic writings and, more recently, in the work of the Subaltern Studies group, especially its poststructuralist wing.96 Others have contributed excellent historical and ethnological research on music and empire, which, though inspired by postcolonialism, engages postcolonial theory to a lesser extent.97 The most pronounced influence of postcolonialism is felt in the many musicological studies of exoticism and Orientalism in Western classical and popular music.98 This research has changed how we understand musical evocations of foreign or non-modern difference by pointing out their deep connections with Western colonial and imperial projects. At its best, then, research on musical exoticism and Orientalism preserves and extends postcolonialism’s critique of empire, although with disciplinary incorporation there has been a tendency to adapt these Saidian concepts as a depoliticized framework for music analysis or criticism.99

95 Young, Postcolonialism,6. 96 Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History”; Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World; and Bloechl, Native American Song. 97 For example, Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments”; Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Irving, Colonial Counterpoint; and Ruth E. Rosenberg, “Among Compatriots and Savages: The Music of France’s Lost Empire,” The Musical Quarterly 95:1 (2012): 36–70. 98 Susan McClary, Georges Bizet, Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1997); Derek B. Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” The Musical Quarterly 82:2 (1998): 309–35; and Ralph Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 99 For related critiques, see Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Sindhumathi Revuluri, “Review of Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflection, by Ralph P. Locke,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64:1 (2011): 253–61. Introduction: rethinking difference 33

Sindhumathi Revuluri’s essay in this volume (“Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within”) takes a postcolonial approach to folksong collections and harmonizations at the fin de siècle. As a case study, she looks at Ravel’s Chant populaires, a collection of harmonized European folksongs that were winning submissions to the Maison du Lied’s 1910 folksong competition. The new piano accompaniments for such collections typically amplified the national character attributed to European folk melodies, but Revuluri proposes that the period’s pervasive musical exoticism also shaped the arrangements’ political representation. She argues that the fantastic, caricatured quality of their accompaniments owes much to exoticist musical stereotyping, which she repositions as a normal rather than exceptional French compositional practice. This is even evident in the “Chanson française”–presumably a self-styling of the collection’s French arranger – in whose pristine berceuse style she hears a similarly exaggerated mimicry of French civility and universality. “Mimicry” here is no mere imitation, but an ambivalent recognition of the other as, in Homi Bhabha’s words, “almost the same, but not quite.”100 Applying Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry to metropolitan self- representation – here, the French folksong arrangement – is a poststructuralist move premised, in this case, on the understanding that French imperialism had a complex, constitutive relation to French nationalism. This proposition revises the standard interpretation of folksong collections as a straightforward musical expression of nationalism, seeing their portrayal of national characters as also influenced by colonial cultural politics. Other new critical approaches to difference are now emerging in music studies. Particularly promising are critical trans-border theories developed in the 2000s, especially minor transnationalism and transcolonialism.101 Minor transnationalism, as conceived by literary theorists Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, incorporates the best insights of earlier theories of globalization and transnationalism, but shifts the focus from majority/ minority interactions (in US parlance) to “horizontal communication amongst minorities” within and across national boundaries. A related concept, transcolonialism, designates “shared, though differentiated, experience of colonialism and neocolonialism (by the same colonizer or different colonizers),” typically by border-crossing agents.102 Both minor

100 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 86. 101 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 102 Lionnet and Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism, 7, 11. 34 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

transnational and transcolonial approaches offer insight into shared or allied subaltern experience of the colonial/modern world, and both question the overwhelming focus in critical discourse on “vertical” power relations of dominance and resistance (which, though important, are far from the whole story). On another front, transgender and gender-queer research, which developed out of a conjunction of feminist and queer theory in the 1990s, has begun to transform both feminist and queer critical paradigms, including those in musicology.103 While the intellectual work before the 1990s primarily addressed psychological and medical issues of transsexualism, poststructuralist epistemologies in post-Cold War queer and gender studies had a profound impact on trans inquiry and activism. Politically engaged and rooted in problems of embodied difference, transgender critique addresses a multiplicity of differential power structures and their tangible operation on actual, rather than hegemonically ideal bodies. Despite their obvious political synergies, the relationship among feminist, queer, and transgender scholarship has also been antagonistic at times. Feminist mobilization on the basis of unified gender categories (especially “woman”) or queer stances against heteronormativity, to offer only two examples, can often reveal uncomfortable, inherited prejudices regarding forms of embodiment and subjectivity that, in Susan Stryker’s words, cut “across existing sexualities” and coherent gender identities.104 Yet, from a transgender perspective, what is at stake is nothing short of viable personhood with its dignity, protections, and privileges. In her essay “Synthesizing difference: the queer circuits of early synthpop,” Judith Peraino draws on both queer and transgender studies to explore the danceable but often dystopian musical genre of synthpop. Wendy Carlos – the transgender composer of 1968’s hit classical album Switched-On Bach and of the original soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange – is the central figure in Peraino’s argument that the musical instrument of the synthesizer has been associated with gender and sexual difference ever since its mainstream emergence in the 1960s. Situating Carlos’s career within a broad overview of the genre,

103 For example, Judith A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); and Alexandros N. Constansis, “The Changing Female-to-Male (FTM) Voice,” Radical Musicology 3 (2008), www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Constansis.htm (accessed July 29, 2014). 104 Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10:3 (2004): 214. Introduction: rethinking difference 35 she finds a shared tendency among synthpop artists to subvert playfully the late modern alignment of gender and sexual normativity with an idealized notion of humans as fundamentally distinct from machines. In effect, she discerns a cyborg queerness at the heart of synthpop: a queerness in which sexuality is detached from ontologized identity and desire is dislocated from gender. Finally, like transgender studies, the burgeoning field of disability studies – which in the US emerged from the Disability Rights Movement in the late 1960s — is concerned with issues of embodied difference and its relation to normative personhood and legal rights. Also like transgender studies, critical scholarship on disability eschews medical or physiological scientific concepts of impairment as deviance, instead fostering more liberating disability paradigms.105 Although disability studies has had a presence in the American academy since the 1990s, its impact has only recently begun to be felt in musicology. However, Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus’s path-breaking edited volume, Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (2006), has demonstrated the relevance of disability critique for music studies, showing how constructions of musical meaning are shot through with cultural attitudes about bodily difference, including differences of ableness.106 The years since the appearance of this landmark volume have seen a steadily rising interest in issues of disability in musical life.

Challenges to difference-based critique: ontology and ethics

Critical epistemologies of difference have by now been criticized from nearly every conceivable perspective, both in the academy and in the mass media. In this and the following section we consider a few of the more trenchant criticisms in three domains – ontology, ethics, and politics – that are particularly relevant for music studies. In conclusion, we offer some provisional thoughts about how musicology might engage these debates.

105 Michael Oliver, Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Dianne Pothier and Richard Devlin, eds., Critical Disability Theory: Essays in Philosophy, Politics, Policy, and Law (Law and Society Series) (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2006); and Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (University of Chicago Press, 2006). 106 Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus, eds., Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2006); Alex Lubet, Music, Disability, and Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); and Joseph N. Straus, Disability in Music (Oxford University Press, 2011). 36 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

One broad criticism pertains to the constructivism of research that stresses the social and acculturated nature of human life. Some form of this constructivist premise underlies most liberal and leftist scholarship on difference, where it serves as a bulwark against harmful ideologies (e.g., “scientific” sexism and racism) that appeal to our biological and psychological existence for justification. However, recent decades have seen a “biological turn” in the human sciences characterized by an evolutionary psychological or gene-centered understanding of human nature, often construed as innate and universal; a tendency to locate human nature or selfhood in the brain; and a reliance on brain-imaging technologies to reveal essential attributes of selves and species.107 Music research influenced by the “biological turn” challenges the ontological premise of human difference, arguing that it overlooks or denies shared biological, psychological, cognitive, or evolutionary life conditions that are at the basis of musicality or musical behavior.108 Many in the humanities may recoil from the naturalist premises of much research under this heading, given their political misuse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.109 Gary Tomlinson, however, points out in his essay for this volume (“Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism”) that the most promising examples of “biological-turn” research refuse an overly reductive nature/culture distinction regarding the human capacity for musicality.110 Tomlinson proposes a “humanistic evolutionism” that takes “biocultural coevolution” as a basic paradigm, in which genes and culture are understood as intertwined factors in human emergence and development. While this implies the existence of certain shared features of human embodied life – including a propensity for music-making – Tomlinson is wary of any implication of behavioral determinism. He cautions that the foremost innate, distinctively human

107 Susan Oyama, Evolution’s Eye: A System’s View of the Biology-Culture Divide (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 108 Cognitive musicology, for example, draws on psychological and neuroscientific paradigms to ask whether music arises from basic shared structures of human minds or brains. See Eugene Narmour, The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity: The Implication- Realization Model (University of Chicago Press, 1992); Marc Leman, Music and Schema Theory: Cognitive Foundations of Systematic Musicology (Berlin and New York: Springer, 1995); and Robert J. Zatorre and Isabel Peretz, eds., The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (Oxford University Press, 2003). 109 Nicholas Cook recalls this history in “Border Crossings: A Commentary on Henkjan Honing’s ‘On the Growing Role of Observation, Formalization, and Experimental Method in Musicology’,” Empirical Musicology Review 1:1 (2006): 7–11. 110 See also Gary Tomlinson, “Evolutionary Studies in the Humanities: The Case of Music,” Critical Inquiry 39:4 (2013): 647–75. Introduction: rethinking difference 37 trait that we share is the ability to respond flexibly to our circumstances, “and so to produce difference.” With regard to music, while humans share certain biological musical capacities, these are neither timeless nor immutable (seen in the long perspective of evolutionary time), as they are responsive to the cultural legacies that shape human circumstances and environments. Humanists, he argues, have an obligation to engage these shared capacities – and thus, human sameness as well as difference – rather than to allow the predominant ignorance or devaluation of culture’s evolutionary role to persist. As a scholar who has thought critically about difference for decades, Tomlinson is well aware of the risks borne by general statements about human sameness that carry a scientific imprimatur. His point that “our disciplinary programs need not be dictated in reaction to” cultural conservatives is a welcome call to free ourselves from an unwonted narrowing of our intellectual horizons by legacies of oppression, even perhaps where these legacies remain institutionally constraining. As such, he asks us to act and think in accordance with a sense of how things might be, rather than being constrained by how they have been or in many settings still are. A second broad challenge to humanistic theories of difference has issued from moral philosophy, in debates over ethics of alterity and heteronomy that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. At basis, theories of alterity involve a meta-ethical claim that difference is relevant to moral ontology or epistemology, against the modern philosophical tradition of conceiving human moral agents at such a high level of abstraction that only their universality remains in view.111 Among the particularities omitted from universalist conceptions of moral subjects are their relations with others: in some cases this reflects a view of subjects as essentially separate, and in others, a sense that interrelatedness (including interdependence) is irrelevant to or incompatible with moral reasoning. Against this tradition of autonomous ethics – running from Hobbes through Kant to Sartre and Rawls – ethical theories of heteronomy, which necessarily include subjective difference within their purview, see interrelatedness or interdependence as relevant and, in some versions, necessary conditions of moral subjectivity. Philosophical disagreement over the moral salience of difference has had political undertones, although many philosophers (particularly in the

111 Allison M. Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics,” in The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 351. 38 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

analytic tradition) deny any political influence or aim. Moral philosophies of alterity and of heteronomy have historically begun from political disappointment with ethics premised on human sameness or autonomy, and many involve overt political commitments. Some maintain that ethics of sameness or autonomy overgeneralize the identities and experiences of socially dominant groups, and they advocate consideration of a broader range of life conditions in theorizing plural moral subjectivities.112 Multiculturalist and some feminist ethics are the most prominent examples. Others see heteronomy, and thus difference, not just as a product of social life, but as integral to the human condition.113 Criticism of these ethical theories have issued from both liberal and leftist perspectives. For instance, philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues in favor of a feminist ethical universalism (or cosmopolitanism) that she hopes will “make the promise of liberalism real for the world’s women.”114 She has developed a “capabilities” approach that outlines a set of central human functional capabilities that are necessary for basic human flourishing beyond mere survival.115 In effect, this proposes a single, though open- ended and dialogical, norm of good human functioning across cultures and genders. Appiah too has critiqued contemporary ethics of alterity from the perspective of a liberal philosopher and specialist in African studies. He has proposed a reflexive, “rooted” cosmopolitanism that recognizes identities and differences as important sources of value, while insisting on the moral priority of individual dignity and autonomy.116 This version of cosmopolitanism, he notes, values diversity not as an inherent good, but “for what it makes possible for human agency,” warning that “some kinds of cultural variety constrain more than they enable.”117 In recent years, some music scholars have voiced similar concerns. Kofi Agawu offers one of the most perceptive critiques in Representing African Music (2006). He notes that the musicological embrace of value pluralism has not displaced the disproportionate authority of Western

112 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference,99–107; and Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford University Press, 2006). 113 Philosophers in the Heideggerian tradition (Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy) are perhaps the best-known proponents, but psychoanalytic theorists (especially Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan) also developed influential heteronomous ethics. More recent theorists of heteronomy include Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, and Simon Critchley. 114 Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 1999), 10. 115 Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice,39–47. 116 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 212–72; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006). 117 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 268. Introduction: rethinking difference 39 scholars to frame knowledge production (including “the ability to name something as different”), and that egalitarian rhetoric does not eliminate this disparity. He advocates a reorientation toward an egalitarian comparativism involving a commitment to investigate the contexts of distinct musical traditions and an awareness of the “translatability” of many of their deep structures.118 Agawu’s position is comparable in some ways to postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s warning about the injustice of seeking to preserve radical difference rather than welcoming subaltern access to forms of social or political agency (which she terms “the long road to hegemony”).119 Her ethical thought, like that of Derrida, is heteronomous, yet in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), she urges reaching across the divide of difference, toward the necessary impossibility of recognition. Revising her earlier negative response to the question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” she asserts: “we must risk the decision that we can hear the other.”120 Other ethical theorists on the left have lately developed new critical concepts of universality. For instance, since the turn of the twenty-first century, Judith Butler has set out an “ethical ontology” of anonymous, embodied precariousness as “a generalized condition of living beings,” though one that is socially organized and unequally distributed (“precarity”).121 In Frames of War (2009), she makes the stronger claim that awareness of the precarity of another’s life “imposes an obligation upon us” to respond non-violently, although we may not act on that claim.122 Worth noting for our purposes is Butler’s sophisticated effort to base an ethics and politics on a shared ontological condition of human bodies (their vulnerability to and dependence on others), while insisting that the lived vulnerability of each embodied person is unique because socially contingent. Alain Badiou’s ethics of “situated universality” bears a superficial resemblance to Butler’s critical humanism, but his mathematical formalism and post-Maoist politics take his work in a quite different direction.123 In his

118 Agawu, Representing African Music, 165–71. 119 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 310. 120 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 199. 121 Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010), xxv. 122 Butler, Frames of War,23–32. See also Olivia Bloechl, “On Not Being Alone: Rousseauean Thoughts on a Relational Ethics of Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66:1 (2013): 261–66. 123 Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 42–48. 40 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

short volume, Ethics – An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001), Badiou criticizes Levinas’s ethics of alterity as elevating a banal fact of existence – that we differ – into an ontological principle of radical, infinite Otherness, which Badiou dismisses as a dangerous, quasi-religious piety: dangerous, because essentially nihilist and thus incapable of supporting the militant revolutionary politics that he envisions.124 Badiou’s ontology and his philosophy of the event have recently gained some currency in musicology, especially technical concepts like the “state of the situation,”“fidelity to the event,” and political processes of “truth.”125 The response to his critique of identity-based politics has thus far been more muted, but Jairo Moreno’s essay in this volume (“Difference unthought”) addresses this and other aspects of Badiou’s work in a case study of jazz musician and MacArthur Fellow Miguel Zenón. A Puerto Rican migrant to the eastern US, Zenón’s very successful career has required him to negotiate a thicket of identitarian demands issuing from the musical traditions that have influenced him (especially Afro- American-identified modern jazz and Puerto Rican música jíbara), as well as from their representation in official or quasi-official discourse. Moreno finds in Zenón’s refusal of identity-based affiliations and exclusions an “ethics of singularity” motivated not by a prior fidelity to specific groups or to an idea of alterity as a good, but by the possibility of listening as an event that opens to what is nonexistent and even unthinkable under current conditions (including novel configurations of belonging). As will be clear by now, each of the ethical theories we have considered implies a position on the politics of difference. Bhikhu Parekh neatly summarizes the wide range of opposition to difference as an organizing category of political theory, activism, or governance:

For conservatives, [difference-based politics] undermines national unity and social cohesion and is a recipe for chaos. For some liberals, it is collectivist, threatens individual liberty and personal autonomy, and subverts the great universalist heritage of the Enlightenment. For socialists and social democrats, it diverts attention from the great and urgent issues of social and economic justice.

124 Alain Badiou, Ethics – An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 18–39. 125 See Marcel Cobussen, “Noise and Ethics: On Evan Parker and Alain Badiou,” Culture, Theory, and Critique 46:1 (2005): 29–42; Richard Elliott, “Popular Music and/as Event: Subjectivity, Love and Fidelity in the Aftermath of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Radical Musicology 3 (2008): 60 pars, May 17, 2009, www.radical-musicology.org.uk (accessed June 30, 2014); and Jamie Currie, “Music After All,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62:1 (2009): 145–203. Introduction: rethinking difference 41

And for Marxists, it detracts from the class struggle, weakens working-class solidarity, and plays into the hands of the dominant class.126

Turning now to the domain of politics, we will focus on two related criticisms issuing from the left, as these present pressing challenges for progressive scholarship in musicology: first, the claim that politics of recognition makes differentiated forms of human life available for neoliberal regulation; and, second, that it fails to address the root causes of contemporary injustice.127

Challenges to difference-based critique: politics

Foucault anticipated the first criticism nearly forty years ago in his 1976 Collège de France lecture on power and “subjugated knowledges,” surmis- ing that compared to the situation we had five, ten, or even fifteen years ago, things have, perhaps, changed; perhaps the battle no longer looks quite the same. Well, are we really still in the same relationship of force, and does it allow us to exploit the knowledges we have dug out of the sand, to exploit them as they stand, without their becoming subjugated once more?... And, after all, once we have excavated our genealogical fragments, once we begin to exploit them and to put in circulation these elements of knowledge...isn’t there a danger that they will be recoded, recolonized by these unitary discourses which, having first disqualified them and having then ignored them when they reappeared, may now be ready to reannex them and include them in their own discourses and their own power-knowledge effects?128

The nascent changes Foucault discerned are by now familiar, and may be summarized as the propensity of late-capitalist, neoliberal governmentality to appropriate and transform “disqualified” forms of knowledge in order to extend its reach further into non-economic and non-political life domains. Many scholars have tracked the early 1970s macro-economic and -political

126 Bhikhu Parekh, “Redistribution or Recognition? A Misguided Debate,” in Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Minority Rights, ed. Stephen May, Tariq Modood, and Judith Squires (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 199–213. 127 These are by no means the only criticisms worth considering. One that we do not address here is Wendy Brown’s concern that recognition-based politics issues from and reinforces affective structures of ressentiment, which risks perpetuating subordination by fostering attachments to injury. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52–76. 128 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, 11. 42 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

shift – emerging from, but by no means limited to the US – toward globalizing production and competition, “disciplining” markets, imposing public fiscal austerity, and co-opting state institutions to business interests. These changes aimed at increasing corporate profit margins and, more broadly, upwardly redistributing many kinds of resources.129 Many on the left have noted that the heyday of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with the rise of recognition-based politics in the US; some have argued further that such politics drew energy away from activism and analysis aimed at egalitarian redistribution. Underlying quite a few critiques of recognition-based politics is a concern that they have provided legitimation, language, and tools for neoliberal, neoimperial expansion.130 Commonly cited examples are women’s NGOs and the US’s evocation of feminist aims in the lead-up to the Afghanistan and Second Iraq Wars.131 Neoliberalism has also made use of the partial realization of these movements’ demands. The most obvious case is activism for fair cultural or group representation, whose successes are readily appropriated by mass media in forms (e.g., token multiculturalism, homonormativity, “post-feminism”) that have little effect on the status quo and yet diffuse pressure for more substantive change.132 With regard to these critiques, it is true that resistant identification is easily reified and appropriated, and we share the concern that depoliticized recognition may reinforce existing injustice. Indeed, within musicology there is pressure to depoliticize critique stemming from justice claims. Appropriation of musical counter-knowledge can also perpetuate structural inequalities in our organizations or institutions. Tokenism is an obvious and painful example. Equally troubling is the selective absorption of social justice rhetoric and ideas, which has in some ways made it harder to pursue

129 See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003); Brown, Edgework,37–60; and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005). 130 For example, James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century (Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing; New York: Zed Books, 2001). 131 Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009), 162–63; and Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (2009): 97–117. 132 See Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–94; Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds., New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity (Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, eds., The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (London: Zed Books, 2011). Introduction: rethinking difference 43 progressive research, artistry, or pedagogy, or even to name injustice in some contexts, especially as differentially marked individuals. Shih has analyzed this phenomenon in cross-cultural feminist interactions, where an appropriated concept of “cultural difference” paired with “modernist ideology” authorizes Westerners’ response of either “reified absolutism or a been there, done that superiority complex.” She explains,

Either the Other woman is frozen in absolute difference (too difficult and too time- consuming to understand fully) or she is trapped in the earlier phase of the development of feminism (too familiar and thus either dismissed or condescend- ingly told what to do next.)133

Like “cultural difference,” neoliberal discourses of “post-feminism,”“color blindness,” and sexist or racist homonormativity frame similar responses to those who would challenge persistent inequalities in organizations and institutions. Our sense is that such risks should prompt a greater vigilance toward the use of recognition frameworks, rather than foster their abandonment. Oppression on the basis of social identification or other kinds of misrecognition remains a fact of life for many creators, users, and scholars of music. Moreover, while recognition-based critique has had a significant impact on musical thought within and outside the academy, the transformations it has sought are not fully realized, nor are they likely to be any time soon. Finally, while conceptions of injustice and the political should be contested and judged on their merits, the bare fact of thinking from a particular theoretical framework – for example, recognition or redistribution – has never in itself anchored the ethics and politics of musical critique. These emerge instead from its concrete conditions, claims, fidelities, and decisions under constraint, and their public adjudi- cation. Recognition frameworks in musicology need persistent scrutiny to remain responsive, but they continue to allow insight into certain key aspects of musical and political life. That said, we find unified recognition theories – even those as sophisticated as Axel Honneth’s “normative monism” of recognition – to be unconvincing, largely because they are overly reductive.134 One alternative

133 Shu-mei Shih, “Toward an Ethics of Transnational Encounters: Or ‘When’ Does a ‘Chinese’ Woman Become a ‘Feminist’?” in Lionnet and Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism, 77–78. 134 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); and Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 3. 44 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

has been to pair a reworked concept of recognition with a renewed concern for redistribution. The most prominent advocate is feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser, who has called for a “critical theory of recognition, one that identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality.”135 One of the most forceful critics of recognition-based politics in the past few decades, Fraser argues that they mistake the nature of contemporary injustice and are thus an inadequate response. She criticizes difference-focused politics of recognition, in particular, as tending “to reify identity and displace struggles for redistribution” that she finds more challenging to late capitalist political economy. These criticisms echo others who have called for a new socialist egalitarian politics focused especially on redistribution of resources and a more equitable division of labor. Yet Fraser’s critique differs in refusing to reduce justice to either redistribution or recognition as they are usually understood. Instead, she proposes a “perspectival dualist” conception of justice as “parity of participation,” which incorporates aspects of both redistribution and recognition while prioritizing the former. This involves reconceiving recognition according to a “status” model that seeks “the equal standing of partners in interaction” in lieu of the usual model seeking recognition of group identities and cultures.136 We appreciate Fraser’s effort to accommodate recognition of difference, and especially her criticism “of those who use the excuse of its shortcom- ings to retreat from the struggles against racism and sexism,” as one of her critics, Linda Martín Alcoff, has also noted.137 The most thoughtful of Fraser’s critics acknowledge the salience of class and political economy to any adequate contemporary conception of justice, but poststructuralists, in particular, take issue with her dualism and her neat correlation of redistribution and recognition with political economy and culture, respectively.138 Most theorists of difference also reject the widespread trivializa- tion of the “cultural” as a site of political struggle: a tendency that Fraser resists, but does not escape. Finally, many simply disagree with the premise – widely shared by Marxian critics of recognition – that

135 Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 12. 136 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?,60–64. 137 Linda Martín Alcoff, “Fraser on Redistribution, Recognition, and Identity,” European Journal of Political Theory 6:3 (2007): 255. 138 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference; and Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text 52–53 (1997): 265–77. Introduction: rethinking difference 45 difference-based politics necessarily lead to political balkanization, reification of “identities,” and internal group conformism.139 More broadly speaking, a number of political theorists reject the redistribution/recognition binary all told as a framework for conceptualizing justice.140 For example, Iris Marion Young distinguishes between domination and oppression and proposes a plural categorization of the latter as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.141 Other scholars, such as Brown, Zerilli, and Marieke Borren, have questioned the recent focus on social justice to the exclusion of other aspects of the political, such as freedom.142 Their feminist critical reappraisal of freedom appeals especially to Arendt, who famously argued that “the raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.”143 While none of these scholars accepts Arendt’s prescription wholesale, Zerilli for one finds in it an impetus to formulate a non- instrumental, relational conception of political freedom: not as a faculty of the subjective “will whose goal is sovereignty,” but as a practice of “world-building” that is based on “being with others and acting in the public space.”144 These thinkers issue a provocative challenge to the primacy of social conceptions of the political in music scholarship, asking not just what hinders the realization of subjectivity or equal access to resources, but what hinders the ability and, sometimes, the desire to “share in power” or “generate futures” in collectivities?145 If freedom is an ongoing practice,

139 Fraser’s critics include Iris Marion Young, “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory,” New Left Review (1997): 147–60; Alcoff, “Fraser on Redistribution, Recognition, and Identity”; Bruce Baum, “Feminist Politics of Recognition,” Signs 29:4 (2004): 1073–102; and Allison Weir, “Global Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics,” Hypatia 23:4 (2008): 110–33. See also Markell, “Recognition and Redistribution,” 457–63. 140 Leonard C. Feldman, “Redistribution, Recognition, and the State: The Irreducibly Political Dimension of Injustice,” Political Theory 30:3 (2002): 410–40; and Nira Yuval-Davis, “Beyond the Recognition and Re-Distribution Dichotomy: Intersectionality and Stratification,” in Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, ed. Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 155–70. 141 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference,1–65. 142 Brown, States of Injury,3–29; Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom,1–31; and Marieke Borren, “Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom,” Hypatia 28:1 (2013): 197–214. 143 Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 145. 144 Linda Zerilli, “Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom: Rejoinder to Ferree, Glaeser, and Steinmetz,” Sociological Theory 27:1 (2009): 91. 145 Brown, States of Injury,4. 46 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

as Arendt and Foucault would have it, rather than a subjective faculty or a definitive event of “liberation,” we might think of freedom poetically – following Houston Baker and dance critic Danielle Goldman – as the art of moving in “tight places.”146 What might freedom look, feel, or sound like under varying degrees of constraint, and in association with near and distant others? How do the performing arts foster practices of freedom in this sense, as well as practices of domination and, perhaps most disturbing, “attachments to unfreedom”?147

Rethinking difference in critical musicology

Critical musicology has mainly addressed politics in terms of social justice, so it is worth considering what the recent debates over recognition, redistribution, and other paradigms can tell us about how we have parsed the claims that we encounter in our research: specifically, whether conceiving injustice as misrecognition – stemming either from differential identification (the usual model) or from unequal status (Fraser’s model) – is most effective for our analyses. At the least, it seems wise to step back from the well-worn grooves of analyzing “race,”“sexuality,” or “gender” in musical life, to consider whether these categories are best for addressing the politics we encounter. Questioning these categories may be difficult, but it does not need to involve infidelity to the social movements and their intellectual legacies, a fear that has sometimes inhibited thoughtful, committed critique, especially between generations. It does involve reckoning with a concern many have discussed privately: namely, the perception that recognition-based research and activism is no longer as galvanizing as it once was, while the work of ending structural and interpersonal discrimination (within or outside the academy) remains unfinished. This radical aim of reconfiguring the social order, at whatever level, recalls the revolutionary tenor of the social movements and their intellectual echoes through the 1990s; yet it no longer forms our horizon.148 Indeed, even for many progressive scholars, talk of revolution – with its unabashed humanism

146 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 13–19; and Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 6–7. 147 Brown, States of Injury, xii. 148 Brown, Edgework,98–115. Introduction: rethinking difference 47 and utopianism – is uncomfortable or vaguely embarrassing, and certainly anachronistic. To this felt anachronism we may join the fear that music as a knowledge project is not nearly consequential enough to bear such weight, or that its consequence is not of the same order. And for some of us, these negative affects coexist with a longing for the robust political identification and collective resistance associated phantasmatically with the movement past: being able to say “we” as a basis for meaningful intervention.149 (Being members of an after-generation to both 1960s social activism and 1990s academic identity critique undoubtedly affects our perspective here.) Queer theorist Kaitlin Noss notes a similar longing among her even younger lesbian, trans, and genderqueer cohort toward 1970s lesbian feminism, that most abject of movement pasts:

We wonder what might be recovered from this work and what sort of political imaginings might be occurring in our ambivalent desires for the practical magic of that era... Among my comrades these risky desires emerge as we struggle in diverse ways and from different social positions marked by contemporary permu- tations of racism, transphobia, and sexism, navigating the ruins of identity politics now frequently dressed up as niche markets.150

In sum, recognition-based critique in musicology may not be in “ruins,” but it seems in need of repair. Much has been written about repair in recent years, but feminist philosopher Elizabeth Spelman’s account is especially lucid. She points out the mixed, improvisatory nature of repair, poised as it is between outright creation and destruction:

To repair...is to enact a complicated attitude toward the past and the preexistent: Repair is conservative, but also interventionist; humble, but also presumptuous; it honors some moments in the past while erasing others. In its service to the past and the preexistent we find reasons to distinguish repairing something from creating it or replacing it, and in the conservative commitment of repair to continuity we note its difference from destruction.151

149 Our understanding of “negative affect” owes much to Olivia Bloechl’s conversations with Morgan Woolsey at UCLA, as well as to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003); and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The perspectives voiced here are of course our own. 150 Kaitlin Noss, “Queering Utopia: Deep Lez and the Future of Hope,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40:3–4 (2012): 128. See also Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 59–94. 151 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 125–26. 48 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

The impulse to repair acknowledges damage, but refuses to discard the damaged object, perceiving its unexhausted promise and potential for renewal. It is not preservation, but a pragmatic tinkering that dispenses with some elements and strengthens others, in order to adapt the object for new conditions or purposes. (Repair, especially in the Kleinian sense, also sidesteps the Oedipal drama of creation premised on annihilation, which we find unhelpful.) How, then, might we rethink recognition-based musicological critique reparatively, acknowledging the distinctiveness of its formative conditions and their partial continuity with our own? Which elements can we let pass, and which remain vital for the present? If the aim is to recuperate recognition as a basis for musicological critique – and this is only one possible aim – an appealing resource is intersectionality, which by now has largely supplanted the identity/difference paradigm in feminist and anti-racist thought. It was developed by black feminists and critical race theorists in the 1980s and 1990s in order to convey, in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s words, “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience,” in contrast with “the single-axis analysis that distorts” and marginalizes these experiences.152 Since then, the early, additive conception of intersectionality (as a relation of stable identity categories: race plus gender plus sexuality) has given way to a constitutive conception (as a mutually formative relation among identity structures).153 The black feminist model has also been expanded into a more general, transdisciplinary framework capable of addressing multiple identities of many sorts, beyond the particularities of Anglophone black women’s lives. Thus, scholars in such fields as Latin American, decolonial, and Third-World feminisms, indigenous studies, queer and transgender theory, and postcolonial studies have adapted intersectional models to their own contexts, often in transformative ways.154 Hardly surprising, then, is

152 See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67; and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn. (New York and London: Routledge, 2000). 153 Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89 (2008): 6. 154 Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Katrina Roen, “Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 656–65; Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; Renya K. Ramirez, “Learning Across Differences: Native and Ethnic Studies Feminisms,” American Quarterly 60:2 (2008): 303–7; and Quo-Li Driskill et al., eds., Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). Introduction: rethinking difference 49 the debate over the nature of intersectionality that has arisen in the wake of its expanded scope: does it refer to all subject positions equally, including multiply or partially privileged ones, or does it prioritize multiply marginalized subjects, such as queer women of color? Most theorists of intersectionality prefer the latter, seeing plural oppression as salient; but important work is also being done on “the ways in which privilege and oppression intersect, informing each subject’s experiences.”155 Although critical musicology has absorbed some insights of intersectionality – that identities are multiple, and that some subjects are multiply marginalized – the vocabulary and theory of intersectionality are largely absent. This is unfortunate, as recent intersectional theory, in our view, offers an unmatched grammar for parsing simultaneous forms of misrecognition. Its more complex analysis of social injustice provides a response to critiques of recognition-based politics while challenging essentialism and intra-group conformism in identity politics. Moreover, intersectional analysis complements politics of alliance and coalition, opening possibilities for transversal research, teaching, artistry, and activism on the basis of overlapping experience of oppression, comparable marginalization, or shared political aims. Defining areas of similarity while remaining mindful of multiplicity and power differentials are major challenges of coalitional politics, as Bernice Johnson Reagon warned several decades ago in an address to the West Coast Women’s Music Festival.156 Nevertheless, many progressive scholars and activists are pursuing coalition as an alternative to single-axis identity politics.157 In music studies, ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond, for one, has urged a shift from identity- to alliance-based politics in researching indigenous musics, while not losing sight of important differences. A similar paradigm shift may be warranted in other areas of progressive musical research.158 Within a framework of intersectionality and progressive coalition, renewed attention to similarity, comparability, or even universality is

155 Nash, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” 89–90. 156 Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 356–68. 157 For example, Elizabeth R. Cole, “Coalitions as a Model for Intersectionality: From Practice to Theory,” Sex Roles 59 (2008): 443–53; and María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 158 Beverley Diamond, “The Music of Modern Indigeneity: From Identity to Alliance Studies,” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 12 (2007): 1–27. We are grateful to Jessica Bissett Perea for pointing out the importance of alliance models for indigenous music studies. 50 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

not only justified, but necessary. Of course, there are other possible justifications for rethinking the near-exclusive focus on difference in critical musicology, including some put forward by contributors to this volume (especially Tomlinson and Moreno). Particularly intriguing are recent efforts to formulate concepts of the universal that do not lose sight of contingency or difference.159 Thebestoftheseelaborateamore modest, tentative generality arising from some shared dimension of our coexistence without presuming an unlimited duration or extent of commonality. Among the most compelling reasons given for such efforts is the need to articulate normative bases for progressive politics.160 Although we cannot do more than gesture toward such a complex problem here, it is our hope that this volume will stimulate further consideration of how critical musicology might begin to think the general or even the universal – as a strategic appropriation – while resisting its pernicious legacies. Clearly such a critical concept would not be identical with a Kantian liberal universalism, which the social movements rightly critiqued as false; but neither would it return to an orthodox Marxist universalism. Butler proposes one alternate version of the universal as an exceptional, radical event, taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s image of the untimely present as a moment of danger and reparative potential:

Whatever universal becomes possible – and it may be that universals only become possible for a time, “flashing up” in Benjamin’s sense – will be the result of a difficult labor of translation in which social movements offer up their points of convergence against a background of ongoing contestation.161

Can we imagine an anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-heterosexist universality as an opening for transversal musical thought? Might attention to “minor- to-minor networks,” in addition to “major-resistant” ones, highlight forms of commonality and fidelity that sidestep the universal, or that create alternate universals unrecognized by the dominant or mainstream?162 Any such move would necessarily involve more than opposition to

159 See the special issue on universalism in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7:1 (1995); Linda M. G. Zerilli, “This Universalism Which is Not One,” diacritics 28:2 (1998): 3–20; Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 327–58; and Eric Lott, “After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism,” New Literary History 31:4 (2000): 665–78. 160 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 26. 161 Butler, “Merely Cultural,” 269–70; and Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 174–92. 162 Lionnet and Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism,7. Introduction: rethinking difference 51 classic universalisms; it would also offer affirmative insight into more liberating, non-ideal ways of imagining the human, the musical, or other universals.163 After all, if we lay claim to the “human,” the “musical,” or, indeed, the “musicological,” we have a stake in the universal, even those who are multiply excluded from its hegemonic forms. For some, it may be difficult to countenance a renewed concern with universals, having fought hard to make space for difference-based claims and knowledge. And in fact, we are not advocating a return to the universal for its own sake, but are simply acknowledging its importance for any reparative rethinking of difference-based critique. Of course, we might alternately choose a creative rather than a reparative approach to this legacy, seeking to move the conversation about music and difference in other directions. We are especially intrigued by the freedom-centered paradigm discussed above, which is compatible with social politics but does not find its ultimate justification in the social. From this perspective, it is not so much what we claim – whether sameness, difference, equality, or some other good – as the act of claiming that is the political moment in critical musicology. This Arendtian approach invites us to think of the “we” of critique not on the basis of existing commonalities (including of gender, sexuality, or race) but as a fragile outcome of association in common action, which potentially “changes what can be heard as a political claim and also alters the context in which identities themselves are presently constituted as subject/ed.”164 Difference-based musicology created one such counter-public space and, in so doing, changed what could be heard as political. Thanks to this work, we know much more about our similarities and differences and are more keenly attuned to how they matter for our musical and scholarly lives. This knowledge and awareness are indispensable. Yet we wonder if its greatest contribution was not in the predicative act of critique itself: the “we hold” and “we say” of counter-publicity?165 Embarking on a project of differential critique in American musicology of the 1980s and 1990s was a practice of freedom – an artful movement in “tight places”– that holds out to us as well the possibility of beginning something new, in

163 On the non-ideal, see Charles W. Mills, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia 20:3 (2005): 165–84; and Lisa Tessman, ed., Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009). 164 Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 171–77, citation on 23–24. 165 Ibid., 171. 52 olivia bloechl, with melanie lowe

our present conditions. Perhaps political critique of music, then as now, is not only a matter of what weareorofwhatweknow,butofwhatwe do with what we know, which discloses who we are and with whom we are in community. Clearly these considerations take us beyond the parameters of a critical musicology oriented toward difference, but they aim to remain faithful to its musical, analytical, and political interventions, while opening onto other promising possibilities. We hope a spirited debate over such questions will emerge in the coming years, and we are grateful to the contributors to this volume, and especially to its dedicatee, for beginning this conversation with us here, once again.

2 He said, she said? Men hearing women in Medicean Florence suzanne g. cusick

At dusk on Friday July 3, 1620, the son-in-law of Tuscany’s first secretary and one of Florence’s best-known amateur musicians, Sinolfo Ottieri, was arrested in the apartment of a woman widely regarded as among the best singers in Florence. A Medici favorite, she happened also to be a cloistered nun, whose apartment was in the Vallombrosan convent of Santa Verdiana.1 When asked what he was doing there, Ottieri claimed he had entered the cloister the night before solely to hear Suor Maria Vittoria Frescobaldi sing. The scandal that erupted was politically fraught, because of the two protagonists’ prominence and because everyone who mattered, in Florence and abroad, knew that Grand Duke Cosimo II was dying: at any moment, control of the state could pass to a regency led by his mother and widow on behalf of his ten-year-old heir. Within days of Ottieri’s arrest, Grandduchess Christine de Lorraine asserted her well-known will to command, declaring in an audience with papal envoy Piero Valier her desire that Ottieri be made “an example to the world” of the Medici regime’s “righteous justice.”2 Thus charged with the capital crime of sacrilegio stupro (intended or consummated sexual intimacy with a consecrated virgin), Ottieri improbably based his defense entirely on the claim he had made at his arrest. Just as improbably, a phalanx of Florence’s musical elite testified on his behalf, asserting that Ottieri was a lifelong melophile who had declared more than once that he “grounded

1 This very brief account is modeled on that of Francesco Settimanni in his multi-volume Memorie fiorentine, I-Fas (Archivio di Stato di Firenze), Manoscritti 132, 571r., with added details from various witnesses who testified in Ottieri’s civil trial. A transcript of the trial is in I-Fas, Otto di guardia e balìa principato 2793, hereafter I-Fas, Otto, as a set of numbered folios in a fascicle labelled “Ottieri.” 2 I-Rvas, Sacra Congregatione dei Vescovi e Regolari (hereafter SCVR). Positiones. 1620, D–M, letter of Piero Valier to Cardinal Antonio Maria Sauli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, quoting Christine thus: “Monsignore, on my faith, as soon as Sinolfo is in our hands he will receive the harshest punishment, loss of life and more...because one needs to give an example to the world of his [the Grand Duke’s] righteous justice.” All translations are the author’s own unless noted. 53 54 suzanne g. cusick

his pleasure in music, and conversation about it, rather than in carnal satisfactions.”3 After more than a year of exhaustive investigations by both church and state, interrupted by the Grand Duke’sdeathandthe installation of the regency, Ottieri was convicted only of conspiring to enter a convent without a license, a minor crime. Nevertheless, he and Frescobaldi were each sentenced to life imprisonment, he in the Medici fortress at Volterra, and she locked in a cloistered apartment in Santa Verdiana. One could hardly ask for a better story through which to explore the ways that the musical, the erotic, and the political can collide and, in their collision, transform lives and relationships of power. Indeed, many stories besides those of the protagonists converge in the nearly two thousand pages of transcripts, memos, account books and letters that document the scandal. Among them are the story of the blacksmith’s wife, abandoned with four children and a large debt when her husband fled the charge that he had made unauthorized copies of Santa Verdiana’s keys; the story of the jailer’s assistant, tortured for failing to corroborate his colleagues’ false testimony about Ottieri; and the story of Santa Verdiana as a community whose right to self-governance, distilled in monastic custom into metaphors of voice, had been silenced repeatedly by powerful men infatuated with Frescobaldi’s singing, long before the community’scloisterwas violated by police and its material wealth dissipated by scandal. Eventu- ally, I hope to tell all these stories, as narrative pendants to a monograph that reads the scandal’s documentary record for evidence of how elite men in seventeenth-century Italy heard women’svoices,whetherin speech or song. I base this essay on a close reading of the clerical and civil investigations’ transcripts.4 My reading does not aim to determine what really happened in Santa Verdiana on the fatal night, but rather to understand how an incident that both protagonists steadfastly denied was sexual was made to seem like a sexual crime – indeed, was made to seem like a

3 I-Fas, Otto, fol. 30v. 4 As noted above, a transcript of the civil procedure is at I-Fas, Otto di guardia e balìa 2793, hereafter I-Fas, Otto, in a fascicle marked “Ottieri”; that of the clerical procedure is at I-Fas, Tribunale della Nunziatura Apostolica 857, vol. II, hereafter I-Fas, Nunziatura. The latter contains multiple copies of documents related to the case, including interrogation transcripts, memos among church officials regarding security at Santa Verdiana, and a petition from Ottieri’s family and legal representation asking for a fair copy of the official procedure. This fair copy is in two parts, fascicles 18 and 19; the fair copy sent to the civil court hearing Ottieri’s case is fascicle 20. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 55 question of “he said/she said,” despite the fact that it was male authorities of the church, not the allegedly violated nun, who insisted that the crime of sacrilegio stupro had probably occurred. It was these men’s insistence on a narrative for which there was no evidence that led civil authorities to impose a harsh penalty on Ottieri. I try to understand these matters by focusing on the overlap of three aural economies in which men listened to women’s voices – that of the church’s investigatory procedure, that of private musical entertainments that Ottieri and his witnesses described themselves as frequenting, and that of the Medici court, which, in 1621, was under the command of two women acting as de jure regents. The first section of the essay traces the construction of a “she said” narrative from the collective, internally contradictory testimony of nuns who clearly represented competing factions within Santa Verdiana, and from a “confession” coerced through threats of torture and torrents of sonic abuse, a “confession” that the clerical interrogators knew to be false. I suggest that the interrogator, whose role was officially described as that of an auditore (listener), created two documentary “voices” that he longed to hear. One was the collective voice of mostly older nuns who accused Ottieri and Frescobaldi of conspiring to commit a kind of sexual crime that was (and would long remain) a favorite subject of pornographic literature.5 The other was a “voice” that Frescobaldi produced late in her interrogation, one whose self-evidently false, self-humiliating “confession” satisfied both his desire for a nun’s submission to authority and his expectation that women’s voices necessarily deceived. In the second section, I focus on testimony that epitomizes this way that men heard women, given by the monk charged with ensuring the safety and closure of the convent. This monk had failed to heed a warning that something untoward would happen on the fateful night because he assumed that the nun who warned him – the community’s chief financial officer – spoke foolishly. In his testimony, I argue, he betrayed himself as unable to hear women’s speech except as a prelude to what he called “diabolical illusion.” In the third section, I show how closely this monk’s way of hearing women resembled the eroticized modes of hearing women sing on which Ottieri and his friends based his defense. Finally, I speculate

5 Touchstone texts of the literary tradition linking nuns to sexual deviance include Boccaccio’s Decameron (day three), Aretino’s Ragionamenti (part 1), Molière’s Don Juan, and Diderot’s La Religieuse. The first two depict multiple instances of sacrilegio stupro. 56 suzanne g. cusick

on both the gender trouble that such eroticized hearing posed to Ottieri and men like him (pushing them inexorably toward a position of erotic and gender deviance) and the political trouble that vindicating such a way of hearing women’s voices would pose to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1621, at the advent of a de jure regency shared by two women who would, by local custom, issue state commands exclusively by voice. Difference functions in my argument differently than one might expect– especially given how easy it would be to read as gendered the transcripts of a clerical investigation with jurisdiction over cloistered women, and of a civil one with jurisdiction over secular men. Differences abound, to be sure, both within each transcript and between them, but the difference “he said (song)/she said (sex)” is only an insinuation of the clerical transcript – if a strong one. Yet that insinuation can still resonate, reinforced as it is by an accident of this incident’s brief historiography. Only two scholars have written about it, musicologist Warren Kirkendale and historian Manuela Belardini.6 He focused exclusively on the civil investigation, as a document of men’s musical culture interesting to music historians, while she focused on Frescobaldi, using both sets of documents to portray her as a case study of an artistically active nun. Their choices could seem to reflect the two disciplines’ historiographical traditions: musicology has been much slower than history to accept Joan W. Scott’s axiom that gender could be a “useful category of analysis.”7 In fairness, however, it must be said that Kirkendale seems to have had access only to the civil investigation documents, encountered by accident as part of a project meant to survey two centuries of Medici patronage, while Belardini had access to a much wider set of documents, and developed her focus on Frescobaldi from them. Many axes of difference converge in the documents that bear on this incident, not least the difference that separates early twenty-first-century modalities of difference from early seventeenth-century ones. This essay, however, focuses on early seventeenth-century gender difference, as it can

6 See Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence During the Principate of the Medici (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 314–16, where the author inserts details from Ottieri’s trial into his profile of Francesca Caccini, who had been Frescobaldi’s teacher; Manuela Berlardini, “Musica dietro le grate. Vita e processo di Maria Vittoria Frescobaldi, ‘monaca cantatrice’ del seicento Fiorentino,” in Gianna Pomata and Gabriella Zarri, eds., I monasteri femminile come centri di cultura fra Rinascimento e Barocco (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005), 45–71; and Manuela Berlardini, “Maria Vittoria Frescobaldi e Sinolfo Ottieri: una tragedia sulla scena barocca,” tesi di laurea [unpublished thesis], Università degli Studi di Firenze, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, 1989–90. 7 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91:5 (1986), 1053–75. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 57 be discerned from the two investigations’ transcripts. In the first two sections of this essay, I show binary gender difference being produced by the expectations and desires that created male church authorities’ modes of hearing women. In the third, I show secular men skating nervously around the gender implications of their own and Ottieri’s eroticized mode of hearing new music, as they struggled to reconcile their construction of an exaggeratedly heterosexual erotic economy of song, in which men derived erotic satisfaction from listening to women’s voices, with the inevitable implication that their own and Ottieri’s erotic subjectivities were deviant. I suggest that Ottieri was eventually jailed not as the violator of a consecrated nun, but as an erotic deviant whose all-too-public violation of gender and sex norms threatened the symbolic stability of the Tuscan state.

“Assumptions, conjectures and indications”: the construction of a “she said, he said” narrative

The civil and clerical investigations unfolded in tandem, although their documentary traces are preserved in the archives of very different institutions.8 Both the charges and the resolution of Ottieri’s civil trial depended primarily on evidence developed by the clerical investigation of Frescobaldi, which took place first, from July 3 to August 30, 1620.9 When Ottieri’s civil judges eventually sent their sentencing recommendation forward to Medici authorities, in October 1621, they acknowledged that neither investigation had produced irrefutable evidence about his sexual

8 Jurisdictional issues had been loosely sorted out in the first weeks after Ottieri’s arrest; on October 29, 1620, Tuscany’s Auditore Fiscale received notice that the Pope would grant civil authorities formal jurisdiction over Ottieri. That notice was confirmed in a letter from Cardinal Sauli, dated November 12, 1620, a copy of which is at I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 19, fols. 794v–795r. Civil authorities would eventually cite Pope Gregory XIV’s bull of May 28, 1591, as granting legal authority for the arrest, and a Tuscan law issued on October 13, 1557, as the basis of Ottieri’s trial. According to the sentencing memo, that law imposed a fine of 500 fiorini for the crime of unlicensed entry into or relations with a convent, while allowing judges to impose penalties up to and including death and state confiscation of property in cases where the relations had an immodest or sacrilegious intent. The sentencing memo is at I-Fas, Otto, unnumbered folio after witnesses’ testimony, letter of Vincenzo Piazza and Anton Maria Cospi to the Grand Duke, October 16, 1621, endorsed by Maria Magdalena “Tutrice” and First Secretary Curtio Picchena on October 22, 1621. 9 Appointed by Valeri to serve as Auditore, Don Orazio Benindelli heard evidence in Frescobaldi’s case from July 20 to August 30, 1620, issuing preliminary sentences against her and her three accomplices on August 31. A copy of the transcript was delivered to civil authorities on December 20, 1620. They heard evidence pertinent to the charges against Ottieri from January 23 to April 6, 1621. 58 suzanne g. cusick

intentions. The church having failed to order the “obstetrical examination” that Frescobaldi had requested to prove her virginity, the civil judges argued that they could not in good conscience impose the death penalty. Nonetheless, they wrote, because they found the evidence before them to “militate toward many urgent assumptions, conjectures and indications,” they recommended life imprisonment and the confiscation of Ottieri’s property.10 All of the evidence against Ottieri emerged from the testimony of nuns – that is, from a collective of voices on the “she said” side of the usual fault line.11 Yet that collective “she said,” full of “urgent assumptions, conjectures, and indications,” was, in turn, the product of the church authorities’ selective hearing of women’s voices. Some women’s testimony went unchallenged by interrogators, although it was contradicted by other women who were, themselves, repeatedly challenged, including with threats of “harsh interrogation,”“the ropes,” and “torture.”12 The cumulative result was a documentary record full of women contradicting other women, and of women’s testimony so compromised by coercion as to bear an unstable relationship to verifiable truth: the voice of these documents’“she said” narrative thus conformed to contemporary expectations of women’s speech as unreliable. The recognizable gender of the “she said” narrative’s collective voice enabled investigators to elide the inconvenient fact that both parties to the alleged sacrilegio stupro steadfastly denied the crime, sticking adamantly to their shared claim that their relationship was, and always had been, based in song, not sex. The foundation for the “urgent assumptions, conjectures, and indications” was laid by the testimony of several senior nuns, who sketched a damning background story.13 Ottieri, they said, had daily visited with Frescobaldi at Santa Verdiana’s parlatorio for three years, staying so long that he scandalized the community. When the abbess had demanded that Frescobaldi stop seeing him, Frescobaldi impudently announced her intention to disobey. One nun insinuated that there had been other nocturnal

10 I-Fas, Otto, sentencing memo. 11 The fair copy of the entire transcript that was sent to civil authorities on December 20, 1620 is now I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 20. 12 The exact phrases used are “rigoroso examinatione,”“le fune,” and “il tormento.” 13 These were ninety-year-old Piera Cambi, who had been abbess since 1576; seventy-seven-year- old Beatrice Mei, who had been Priora for ten years; and sixty-six-year-old Virginia Rinuccini, who had been the principal portinaia (doorkeeper) for six years. Ottieri was later to quote Frescobaldi’s description of the elderly abbess as “rimbambinata”–mentally returned to childhood. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 59 visits regularly, every week or two.14 Another believed that Ottieri’s desire to place his niece in education at Santa Verdiana was but a ploy to excuse still more parlatorio visits – a ploy the senior nuns had tried to block before their vote to exclude the girl was overturned by Rome.15 Several nuns noted that Ottieri had been suspiciously generous to the community, funding construction of a mezzanine in the choir, providing marble columns for the railing of a terrace outside Frescobaldi’s apartment, giving her paintings, musical instruments, books, and other personal gifts.16 The accumulation of unchallenged testimony suggested, but did not confirm, investigators’ a priori assumption of an amorous relationship between the two. Only after this background had been established did Frescobaldi testify, along with the three nuns who came to be called her “accomplices.”17 When she was first interrogated on July 25, 1620, Frescobaldi told her story of the fateful night. Ottieri, she said, had given her a romanesca to learn and had told her how much he hoped to hear her sing it. When she reminded him that she was forbidden to sing either in the parlatorio or in church, he had remarked that the only solution was for him to come inside the convent.18 From that comment emerged a plot of stolen and duplicated keys, whispered conversations at the grate, and at least one note sent with Ottieri’s servant that had established when and where he should wait for Frescobaldi’s servant, Suora Marta Bigazzi, to let him in. Not until he appeared at Frescobaldi’s apartment door did she and her friends believe it would really happen, and then unexpected noises from below paralyzed them all with the fear that they had been discovered.19 So the nuns shoved

14 I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fol. 556v ff., testimony of Suor Faustina Rinuccini, July 23, 1620. 15 I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fol. 537r–v, testimony of Priore Don Attilio Fantoni, July 20, 1620. 16 Later in the testimony, it emerged that Ottieri had given Frescobaldi two spinets, a harpsichord and an organo di legno, all apparently stored in the loft of her apartment that she used as a music room. 17 Frescobaldi’s three “accomplices” were nuns who had rushed to her aid when the police burst into her rooms to arrest Ottieri, according to the hearsay testimony of Abbess Piera Cambi (who was not present at the arrest), given on July 24; see I-Fas, Nunziatura, fols. 568v–569r. Her testimony was corroborated by Suor Virginia Rinuccini the same day; see I-Fas, Nunziatura, fol. 576v. According to Suor Giacinta Anselmi’s testimony on July 27, the four were imprisoned together for seven days in the convent’s tailor shop, when Suor Maria Grazia Filicai was removed for separate imprisonment. Anselmi herself was moved to solitary imprisonment on July 22. 18 Frescobaldi had been forbidden to sing where outsiders could hear her several times in the 1610s, and several times had succeeded in getting the orders reversed by powerful patrons in Rome. See Berlardini, “Musica dietro le grate,” 53–56. 19 These unusual noises were attributed by Frescobaldi to motion between the kitchen and the infirmary, where the elderly doorkeeper on duty that night, Purita Fortini, was said to be ill. 60 suzanne g. cusick

Ottieri into a dovecote with a book of Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi’s sayings to read, while they stood watch and wondered how they would get him out, undiscovered, the next day. Frescobaldi would be interrogated seven more times over the next month, often in tandem with the three nuns who had been imprisoned with her, and always in circumstances aimed at eroding her story by requiring her to respond to testimony from her companions that contradicted some detail. Thus the accused nuns’ mutual contradiction staged in microcosm the larger contradiction between their continued assertion that Ottieri’s motive had been musical and the senior nuns’“assumptions, conjectures, and indications” that it had been sexual. The production of a collective “she said” voice made of women contradicting women was dramatized after Vespers on Frescobaldi’s first day of testimony, when she was called into the interrogations of two accomplices to contradict them to their faces. Each accomplice had first been “made to hear” Frescobaldi’s contradicting testimony read aloud to her by a scribe, and asked how she would respond if she were to hear Frescobaldi contradict her in person. A few minutes later, Frescobaldi would be brought in.20 In each case, as soon as she was asked if she remembered her testimony, Frescobaldi is said to have “thrown herself, weeping, to her knees” in order to reaffirm her testimony and, at the same time, to try to parse her claims so that they were not direct contradictions. Then the other nun would throw herself, weeping, to her knees, there to recant, acknowledge, and ask pardon for her lie.21 A kind of crisscrossing of interrogations followed, as the investigators picked at minor details of the accounts each woman had given of Ottieri’s night among them. Who was present when Ottieri arrived? What did he eat? Was he ever alone with Frescobaldi? Did she sing and play for him, and, if so, when, in which of her apartment’s rooms, with whom else present? Why had he been introduced into the cloister in the first place? Minor discrepancies among the nuns’ stories eventually emerged around what Ottieri had eaten (two eggs? four? a plate of maccheroni as well?), which of the nuns had been present in Frescobaldi’s apartment when, and whether Frescobaldi had sung some phrases sotto voce at night as well

I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 3, fol. 143v. Fortini died before July 23 from injuries incurred in a fall that Virginia Rinuccini said she had taken eight days earlier. I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fol. 556r. 20 The intervening minutes were filled with less intense questions. 21 Bigazzi’s confrontations with Frescobaldi are at I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fols. 604v–605v and 640v; Filicai’s is at fols. 611v–612r. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 61 as more formally during the day, in the loft that served as her music room.22 Unable to elicit any testimony that pointed to a sexual crime, the interrogator finally turned in mid-August to threats of torture. Bigazzi and Filicai responded to the escalating threats by defiantly repeating their claims that, as far as they knew, the couple had never been alone that night; that Ottieri had entered the convent to hear Frescobaldi sing; and that Bigazzi had been present when Frescobaldi sang for Ottieri, after lunch on July 3, from her loft.23 Ironically, it was Frescobaldi who would break. Entering the interrogation room for the first time in two weeks on August 19, she burst almost at once into tears, which she attributed to remorse, for having caused so great a scandal simply because, as she said, Ottieri had wanted to hear her sing.24 Then, in response to the threat of torture, Frescobaldi “confessed”–to a conversation about kisses at the parlatorio grate, in which she revealed that she thought they could make her pregnant; to having written a letter to Ottieri that called him, incriminatingly, “her husband”; and to having prayerfully entrusted her chastity to the Madonna the night Ottieri was in her rooms. Although Frescobaldi would continue to assert, in the face of repeated, escalating threats of torture, that her relationship with Ottieri was musical, not sexual, she had given her interrogators what they wanted to hear – weeping, remorse, and a confession of sorts. That confession reduced the woman whom senior nuns had described as arrogant, and whom musical Florence knew as the city’s most musically virtuosic nun, to a sexually ignorant, foolish woman, whose chastity had been preserved by the Madonna, not by her own will. Moreover, in “confessing” to talk about kisses, and to the suggestive content of a letter they had already determined to be forged, she had given the authorities something consistent with the “assumptions, conjecture, and

22 Frescobaldi admitted that she might have sung a bit at night: “puo essere che io cantuchiassei da per me sotto voce, ma non formalmente.” I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 3, fol. 148r. 23 Then considered in judicial practice the second level of torture (after the mere threat of torture), “la fune” consisted of tying or harnessing the prisoner’s hands behind her back, attaching the hands or harness to another cable strung over a pulley, and lifting the prisoner up into the air for some period of time. In the third and most intense level of torture, the prisoner thus raised in the air was beaten. The three levels were articulated by Roman jurist Prospero Farinacci in his Praxis et theorica criminalis (1581, rev. 1601 and 1616). The best historical survey of Italian law on torture is Piero Fiorelli, La tortura giudiziaria nel diritto commune. Jus Nostrum 3 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1953–54). 24 Frescobaldi’s outburst would nowadays signal to interrogators that she was ready to “break,” and therefore vulnerable to torture or the threat of it. 62 suzanne g. cusick

indications” they had developed from the senior nuns, which they could turn into a “she said” accusation against Ottieri.25 What did he say? In three days of intense interrogation that began immediately after Frescobaldi’s break, and under repeated threats of torture, Ottieri never wavered from the central claim that Frescobaldi and her accomplices had made.26 He had entered the convent to hear her sing. Confronted with Frescobaldi’s testimony about kisses and the letter – that is, with what “she said” as read aloud by the Nunzio’s notary – he said that she must have been “subornata,” coerced into saying what she knew to be untrue.27 His final words to the church’s interrogators were, “I never desired her, nor [any] ease in carnal things.” Whether he was lying or not, Ottieri, too, had given the judges what they wanted to hear. His consistency, even in the face of torture, produced the stability expected of a man’s “he said” narrative. Thus the gender order of the investigation’s inscribed speech was assured. * This account of the textual production of the gendered voices the authorities wanted to hear may be persuasive, so far as it goes. But it also seems a bit deaf to the way sound and sonic performances were indirectly inscribed in the transcript, in particular, to the ways that listening is inscribed in the text as a tool for producing that collective voice that was to function as a “she said” narrative. Puzzling over how to open my own ears, I was reminded of a passage in Peter Szendy’s 2008 book, Listen. A History of Our Ears: “it seems impossible to listen to someone listening. Common sense would have it that somebody listening doesn’t make any sound; or else, if he [sic] does, it is not only secondary (leaning over, for example, or moving around) and not as a listener. Listening as such is thus silent,

25 Twelve days earlier, on August 7, Berindelli, his notary Michele Stibbi, and four senior nuns of the community had agreed that the handwriting of the letter did not match the known examples of Frescobaldi’shand,theaccountbooksoftheconvent’s linen weaving room that she had kept for her aunt, Suor Clemenza Salvetti, in 1614. See I-Fas, Nunziatura, fols. 100v–101v. 26 Ottieri testified on July 29–30 about the details of his arrest, and on August 13, 24, 25, 26, and 29 about substantive matters. See I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fols. 624v–628v and 663v–670r for his testimony before Frescobaldi’s break, and fasc. 3, fols. 162r–172r for his testimony afterwards. 27 Ottieri also used the word “sibillata,” to have something hissed into one’sear,thus evoking the image of the serpent’s speech to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Unsurprisingly, his insinuations were greeted with renewed threats of torture. Both seventeenth- and twenty-first-century jurisprudence argue that testimony produced under the threat of torture – as Frescobaldi’swas– cannot be taken for truth unless it is corroborated by material evidence. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 63 it cannot be heard.”28 Szendy elegantly parses his own conundrum by distinguishing between listening as the intentional focus on sound (denoted by the French verb entendre) and hearing as the unavoidable sense perception of sound (denoted by the French verb écouter). In his terms, I realized, I want to hear both hearing and listening by reading these documents. What might the interrogation of these nuns have sounded like, if we could listen in? How were hearing and listening inscribed in them, either as part of the practice of interrogation or as a means to construct the intrinsically dubious voice of the “she said” narrative? We cannot (yet) know the resonating properties of the parlatorio, where most of the interrogations took place, although eventually the architects who transformed most of Santa Verdiana’s post-Napoleonic remains into the University of Florence’s School of Architecture may provide clues. We can, however, know that the characteristic sound of the nuns’ interrogations was the alternation of a male voice asking questions and a female voice answering. Each interrogation began with these voices alternating short phrases in a more or less balanced way. After an alternation of questions and answers in relatively brief phrases, each nun would give a long account of the fateful night or, in subsequent interrogations, of whatever matter the interrogator wanted to explore. Afterward, any number of follow-up questions would quickly restore an aural economy of a man’s questions to a listening woman, a woman’s obligatory response to a listening, evaluating man. The alternation of short phrases might have lulled either party (as they do the transcript’s reader) into a sense that even the sharply hierarchical, gendered distribution of power could be safe – because it was so sonically balanced, so predictable. This predictable phrase rhythm, if you will, would be interrupted by the Auditore if he thought the answer to which he listened was a lie. Then, rather than ask a question, the interrogator would make the witness listen to speech in other grammatical moods: he would “admonish and warn” the nun; urge her to free her conscience and tell the truth; command that she hear the previously silent listener, who was the notary, read aloud testimony that had contradicted her own; stage a confrontation between two contradictory nuns, during which each would fall to her knees and “confess” through tears; threaten the witness with “harsh interrogation,” “the ropes,” or “torture,” unless she recanted an account that he would

28 Peter Szendy, Listen. A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 141. I am grateful to Daphne Brooks for reminding me of Szendy’s meditation on a pair of comments by Marcel Duchamp. 64 suzanne g. cusick

summarize and then pronounce unbelievable because it was not true (“vero”) or likely (“verosimile”). These components of the interrogator’s monologue would come in the order listed, first one at a time, but then, if a nun persisted in her story, gradually linked together into a long speech: the adamant Frescobaldi would eventually be made to hear all of it repeatedly.29 In fact, one of the most interesting features of these documents is that some version of the phrase “fattoli sentire”–s/he was made to hear – functions in the interrogation transcript as the textual sign of the Auditore’s effort to break a witness’s story. To put this more bluntly, forcing a witness to hear, rather than to listen with an ear to responding, was the first and primary mode of coercing witnesses whose testimony failed to please. It was an enforced hearing that disrupted the relationship enacted in sound by the Q-&-A, male-&-female, speaking-&-listening, judging-&-responding rhythms of actual interrogation, and that silenced the witness for minutes at a time. Used first as the means by which the nuns were made to contradict each other, and to throw themselves to their knees in tears as they confessed ever changing truths, the enforced hearing was also the medium through which escalating threats and declarative assertions about what was believable and what was not began both to substitute for questions and to coach witnesses toward speech that their interrogator wanted to hear. Forcing these defiantly non-normative women to hear men, until they responded in ways that pleased those men, was the element of the aural economy that the Auditore manipulated to produce the collective gendered voice of the “she said” narrative with which civil authorities hoped to convict Ottieri. It was also, of course, a medium through which to make audible in Santa Verdiana’s aural economy the patriarchal authority of Rome over nuns whose transgres- sions had been facilitated by their community’s lax governance, and by years of secular interference from Frescobaldi’s princely fans. Is it possible to listen to the Auditore’s listening? One way to try would be to read the questions as evidence of his listening: he would presumably

29 Ottieri’s multiple-day interrogation at the very end of the ecclesiastical proceeding also included a lot of listening – to admonitions, threats of torture, quite long passages of testimony read to him by the notary, and, especially, long assertions of the interrogator’s narrative of Ottieri’s intentions before and during his night inside Santa Verdiana. To read this testimony is to experience an effort to browbeat Ottieri by forced listening to speech that presented a reality other than the one he tried to narrate. It seems especially interesting that this man who was so erotically vulnerable to the sound of musical voices was able to resist the masculine speech that sought to erode his reality. Yet he did, to the end. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 65 probe where he doubted a witness’s veracity, before moving to admonishments and threats. Interestingly, however, veracity is not usually the word in the transcript that signals the Auditore’s doubt of what he has heard. Rather, the word that signals dubious listening is as likely to be “verosimile” (lifelike, or likely) as “vero” (true) or “verità” (truth): when he repeatedly dismissed the young nuns’ testimony, enjoining them to confess or face torture, the Auditore dismissed it as not “verosimile”–that is, as not lifelike, or likely. His repeated articulation of verisimilitude as the standard by which he would measure a witness’s veracity implies an a priori skepticism that one might well think desirable in an investigator, but it also implies an inclination to conflate verisimilitude with veracity, the world as he expected it to be with the world as it is.30 This combination of attitudes resonates surprisingly with the attitude of at least one witness whom the Auditore would eventually condemn as a fool – the convent’s prior, Don Attilio Fantoni.

“Exactly because I had been alerted by [them]...I believed myself to be deceived”

As prior, Fantoni was responsible for ensuring that all gates and doors to the outside world were locked.31 On the evening Ottieri entered Santa Verdiana, Fantoni recalled, just as the last bell rang for nightfall, he had been called to the parlatorio grate by two middle-aged nuns, Suor Faustina Rinuccini and Suor Maria Benigna Valori.32 They suspected, they said, that someone would enter the convent church or the cloister that night, and they asked him to stand watch. He asked if everything was locked up properly; they said yes; and he then told them there was nothing to worry

30 For the seventeenth-century canon lawyer Prospero Farinacci, “truth” had to be established by material and circumstantial evidence before torture could legally be threatened; the purpose of torture was to elicit a confirming confession. See Prospero Farinacci, Iuris consulti Romani. Praxis, et Theoricae Criminalis Amplissimae. Pars Tertia, De Reo confesso (Lausanne: Horatii Cardon, 1606), 59. In his article “Torture and Plea Bargaining,” University of Chicago Law Review 46:3 (1978), 3–22, John Langbein points to a centuries-long concern in European jurisprudence that torture – or the threat of torture – could produce verisimilitude rather than truth. 31 For a fair copy of Fantoni’s first interrogation, see I-Fas, Nunziatura, fols. 537r–541v. On the function of the priore in ensuring closure, see Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns. A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2007), 48–50. 32 Rinuccini, then forty-eight, served as the rotaia, in charge of the turnstile through which small deliveries and mail went into and out of the convent. Thirty-eight-year-old Valori served as the camerlinga charged with maintaining financial records. Close friends, they had both slept in Rinuccini’s room for many years, although each had been assigned an apartment of her own. 66 suzanne g. cusick

about. Nonetheless, responding to their insistence, before he went to bed that night he stood at his window for a few minutes. About two hours after nightfall, he saw a figure move silently along the side of the church near the parlatorio, open the church door and disappear. Shortly afterward, two figures emerged from the church, locked the door behind them, and entered the parlatorio. Stupefied, Fantoni waited a few minutes to recover his wits, then went downstairs to listen at the parlatorio door. “Hearing nothing, and finding the door locked,” he went to check that the church door was locked too. He returned to the parlatorio door to listen once more, then used his own key to go inside, where he found the door to the cloister safely locked. Locking everything behind him, he went back to his room to sleep, “thinking that, truly, it had been a vision or diabolical hallucination.” The next day, after morning prayers, he told Rinuccini and Valori that he had seen a diabolical hallucination. Valori, he said, replied, “Signore Priore, that was not something diabolical but something real, because last night when I went to bed, not having locked the window to my cell, which is across from Suor Frescobaldi’s, I saw Signore Sinolfo in there.” Only then, at Valori’s urging, did Fantoni think to notify the authorities of a possible cloister violation, which led to Ottieri’s arrest by civil authorities that evening. The Auditore let Fantoni’s account stand without comment until August 17, when Fantoni repeated his story in another round of questioning.33 Why, the Auditore asked, had he not raised an alarm sooner? Fantoni said again that he had known the doors to be locked at night, so that when he had seen unknown people moving silently about, he had been so “astonished, upset, and beside myself that it seemed to me something that was not verosimile, but rather some diabolical illusion,” an opinion he had confirmed by rechecking the locks when the phantasms disappeared. “Why,” the Auditore demanded, “having been alerted by Rinuccini and Valori, did the witness believe it to be a diabolical illusion and not the truth, as, in truth, it was?” Fantoni replied, “Exactly because I had been alerted by Rinuccini and Valora...I believed myself to be deceived...it did not seem verosimile.”34 Clearly, Fantoni was predisposed to listen for the verosimile, the world as he expected it to be, and to confuse the non-verisimilar (the world that would surprise) with the fantastic. To be sure, this is not quite the same thing as confusing verity and verisimilitude, so it is not quite the same as

33 A fair copy of Fantoni’s August 17 interrogation is at I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fols. 682–686. 34 The whole exchange is at I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fols. 684r–686r. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 67 the Auditore’s slippage during his harangues to obstinate witnesses. Yet there is a surprising similarity between the Auditore’s attitude and Fantoni’s admission that he had believed himself deceived precisely because the two nuns’ alert had challenged his expectation of how the world would be. Fantoni admits here to an almost instinctively skeptical hearing of the nuns’ speech. He heard their speech as automatically not verosimile, and therefore as so self-evidently productive of fantasies as to prevent that listener from accepting the evidence of his senses as truth. Moreover, Fantoni unwittingly reveals his assumption that his automatically skeptical way of hearing (not listening to) women’s speech as a source of sensory deception would, itself, strike the Auditore as verosimile – indeed, as so commonplace a (masculine) aural experience of women that the Auditore might both recognize and share it. Unluckily for Fantoni, the Auditore did not, quite, for Fantoni wound up stripped of both his position as prior and of voice and vote in his home monastery, to which he returned in disgrace.35 Although the misogyny that informed his hearing was thus implicitly condemned, Fantoni’s story serves as one of these documents’ several cautionary tales in which aural contact with a woman’s voice seems to provoke a man to sensory self-deception and to reckless actions that wrought havoc on his own and others’ lives. The protagonist of the most overarching such tale was, of course, Sinolfo Ottieri, a man who could seem, like Fantoni, to have heard women’s voices primarily as sensory experience.

The erotic economy of song

The principal criminal court of Florence considered the charges against Ottieri from January to early April, 1621, delivering its sentencing recommendation to Tuscany’s regent grandduchesses only in late October. What survives of the investigation is a set of interrogations establishing the facts of Ottieri’s arrest and imprisonment, a copy of the propositions (capitoli) his lawyers presented to the court as his defense, and the testimony of six defense witnesses who were asked by the court to comment on those

35 I-Fas, Nunziatura, fasc. 18, fols. 684r–686r. The interrogators scolded Fantoni for his negligence at the end of the August 17 session. He was sanctioned months later, when the final sentences were issued by the Sacra Congregatione on May 8, 1621. A fair copy of Fantoni’s sentence is at I-Rasv, SCVR, Positiones, Sez. Monache, 1632, January–July, no. 3, as part of a dated fair copy of all the sentences included in an appeal filed by the still-imprisoned Filicai. 68 suzanne g. cusick

propositions.36 I focus here not on the way the civil judges heard or listened, but on the way the witnesses described the aural experience of music – that is, on their account of the aural and erotic economies of song in early modern Florence. To a man, Ottieri’s defenders confirmed his defense’s claims. Himself a fine singer and keyboardist who had studied with Giulio Caccini and Alberigo Malvezzi, Ottieri so delighted in music that, to paraphrase singer Domenico Poggi, he could lose himself in it like a madman.37 He was notorious, they said, for retreating from the manly world of business deals in the Mercato Nuovo so he could spend the day talking about music, making music, and listening to music, either at home or in the homes of the city’s singing teachers, music professionals, and musically virtuosic sex workers – on all of whom he lavished extremely expensive gifts (e.g., an organ worth a year’s wages to reward Jacopo Peri for letting him “sit in” on Angelica Furini’s lessons). According to his witnesses, the childless Ottieri was as notorious for coldly refusing offers of carnal intimacy in the homes of sex workers as he was for his insatiable delight in these same women’s vocal performances.38 Thus, they argued, anyone who knew him would believe that he had entered Santa Verdiana only to hear Frescobaldi sing. The very idea that Ottieri and his friends visited the homes of musical sex workers was a dangerous one for his witnesses to introduce, given the long-standing association of singing with sexuality. Because the ornamentation and the phrasing associated with the then-new style of solo song required extraordinary control of the singer’s breath, and the breath was, in turn, understood to control both the singing body’s heat and its sexual

36 I-Fas, Otto, fol. 26r gives the articles of defense; fols. 27r–40r transcribed the depositions of Ottieri’s witnesses, all given in late March or early April, 1620/21: Medici court singer and string player Giovanni Battista Signorini; Medici court singer and teacher Domenico Poggi; notaries (and melophiles) Jacopo Cicognini and Michele Bandini; and melophiles Giovanni Batista Spigliati and Innocenzio Rucellai. For a summary of the legal procedures governing trials like Ottieri’s, see John Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57–77. Brackett makes clear on page 60 that witnesses who agreed to testify in a criminal trial risked indefinite detention until they had testified to the court’s satisfaction, a fact that suggests considerable courage and loyalty on the part of Ottieri’s witnesses. 37 I-Fas, Otto, fol. 27v, “si diletta tanto della musica che s’impazzisce dentro.” 38 Ottieri had been married since 1602 to Tommasa Vinta, daughter of the late First Secretary Belisario Vinta; see I-Fas, Carte Sebregondi, 5483, Famiglia Vinta, and I-Fn (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze), Mag;l. XXVI, codice 68, unnumbered folios, date 1602. See also Giuseppe Fusai, Belisario Vinta. Ministro e consigliere di stato dei granduchi Ferdinand I e Cosimo II de’Medici (1542–1613) (Florence: Libreria Gozzini, 1975). Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 69 readiness, the kind of singing Ottieri and his circle so enjoyed was easily understood as a form of sexual foreplay.39 Presumably, just this chain of associations was a seldom-spoken part of the belief system that made the vocal performances of courtesans and sex workers seem like preludes to the exchange of heterosexual pleasure with their clients. Indeed, in a conception of the erotic focused on genital contact and acts that simulate those of sexual reproduction, even conversation about music among such people might have seemed like the equivalent of “talking dirty.”40 This valence would have been especially strong in light of the carnivalesque tradition in which the verb “cantare”–to sing – was widely understood to substitute for “copulare.”41 If one followed this chain of associations to its logical conclusion, Ottieri’s claim to have loved talking with Frescobaldi about music at the parlatorio grate would seem incriminating, and his desire to hear her sing would seem, at minimum, like a desire to hear in her voice her readiness for a sexual encounter. Ottieri’s witnesses seem bent on making quite a different claim about their friend’s erotic inclinations, however, beginning with the care they took to emphasize that his gifts to musicians were always in exchange for musical, not sexual, favors. Melophile businessman Giovanni Battista Spigliati reported that after many hours of shared music-making at the home of the Schieggia sisters, he had offered to leave Ottieri alone there to take his pleasure. Ottieri asked him to stay, adding that he wanted no other pleasure than to hear the sisters play and sing, since he neither enjoyed nor took pleasure in coito, a fact that, “as if joking,” he suggested might have had its origin in a fall he took while hunting with a shotgun.42 Notary, poet, and sometime librettist Jacopo Cicognini testified that Ottieri had a “taste for visiting the ladies, especially those whom he knew to have talent in singing and playing,” although he behaved in their presence with such modesty that “one knew clearly that he was in love with their virtù,” rather than with the prospect of sexual satisfaction.43 When Cicognini asked Ottieri why he avoided sexual release, Ottieri “shrugged his

39 For more on the sexual valences of early modern singing technique, see Bonnie Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10–46. 40 For alternative conceptions of the erotic, see Jill Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, [1984] 2007), 53–59. 41 See Jean Toscan, “Le carnaval du langage: Le lexique érotique des poètes de l’équivoque de Burchiello à Marino (XVe–XVIIe siècles)” (unpublished thesis, Université de Paris III, 1987). 42 I-Fas, Otto, fol. 37v. 43 Ibid., fol. 30r. 70 suzanne g. cusick

shoulders, saying that he did not ground his pleasure in lascivious acts but in conversation, and in hearing both men and women sing virtuosically.”44 Cicognini went on to describe Ottieri’s desire to hear talented women sing as a manifestation of his “melancholic humor, like an obsession,” so strong that it had led him to excesses like the incident at Santa Verdiana before.45 Cicognini thus implies that Ottieri, like Fantoni, heard women’s voices more than listened to them – that is, that he heard their voices as sensual encounters that could lead to self-deception and, as would be the case here, to self-ruin. While Spigliati’s account implies that the aural experience of women’s singing might have substituted for carnal acts that no longer gave Ottieri pleasure, and thus sublimated what might once have been heterosexual desire, Cicognini seems not to have construed Ottieri’s desire in quite this way. Instead, by quoting Ottieri’s comment about how he grounded his pleasure and linking the desire that emerged from that ground to the melancholy humor, he implied that Ottieri’s drive to satisfy his desire by hearing women’s virtuosic song was both more spiritual and more intrinsic to Ottieri’s being. He comes close, that is, to describing Ottieri’s passion for music as something like an erotic subjectivity – an erotic subjectivity, moreover, that Florentine Neoplatonism linked to masculine spirituality as well as to artistic and intellectual genius, and that the other witnesses acknowledged that they shared.46 Cicognini’s testimony thus casts an extraordinary light on the social network of professional musicians, dilettanti, and musically gifted sex workers among whom Ottieri and his circle moved. For Ottieri and people like him, Cicognini implies, that network may have been constituted – both grounded and sustained – by an erotic economy of aural and vocal exchange that was their primary source of pleasure. Giuseppe Gerbino’s recent reading of Francesco Bocchi’s Discorso...sopra la musica, non secondo l’arte di quella ma secondo la ragione alla politica pertinente (1581) suggests that early modern Italian aristocrats would have recognized an erotic subjectivity grounded in musical pleasure,

44 Ibid., fol. 30v. 45 Ibid., fol. 31v. 46 Ibid., fol. 34v is Bandini’s acknowledgement, fol. 36r is Spigliati’s, fol. 39r is Rucellai’s. On Florentine Neoplatonists’ ideas about the nexus of spirituality, creativity and eros in melancholics, the now classic text is Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). I am grateful to Rebekah Arendt for reminding me just how complex – and how privileged – a claim Cicognini’s diagnosis of Ottieri as melancholic was. Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 71 and that they would have regarded it as a sign of both gender and political trouble.47 For Bocchi, a Florentine political historian concerned with explaining Italy’s political decline, the peninsula’s male elite had increasingly taken excessive delight in music, distracting themselves from the duty to defend the region’s territorial and economic integrity. A political writer and poet of Ottieri’s generation, Lodovico Zuccolo, would echo Bocchi’s concern in 1623, attributing both an excessive love of music and the region’s political weakness to the failed masculinity of its elite: “Italians, while intent in all manners of delicate music, and soft and lascivious poetry, ...divesting themselves of every male virtue and thought of glory, have no goal other than to live in delight and serve in humility.”48 Zuccolo might well have been describing Ottieri or the other melophiles who had acknowledged in their testimony how easily he could deflect their business conversations toward music. They were all, by Zuccolo’s lights, emasculated both by the desire for musical pleasure that bound them together as a social network and by their apparent preference for the company of women. That perceived emasculation threatened the authority of the woman-led regency that took command of the Tuscan state in March 1621, in the middle of Ottieri’s civil trial. French-born Christine de Lorraine had successfully acted as de facto regent in the last two years of her husband Ferdinando I’s reign (1606–8), and intermittently throughout her son Cosimo II’s as well. But the long- anticipated advent of a de jure regency, jointly headed by Christine and Cosimo’s adamantly unassimilated Austrian widow Maria Magdalena, on behalf of a ten-year-old boy, brought significant problems to their and the state’s symbolic legitimacy. Because there was no adult Medici male to embody the state, two women needed to do that symbolic work with bodies that their culture assumed to be weak, vulnerable to invasion, more susceptible than male bodies to deceptions of the senses, and feminizing to men who spent too much time in their presence. Since at least 1617, Christine, Magdalena, Cosimo, and their court had spent considerable energy projecting a public image of the athletic horsewoman Magdalena as an “amazzone di Dio,” whose mind was

47 Giuseppe Gerbino, “Music, Warfare, and the Political Decline of Renaissance Italy,” Musical Quarterly 90 (2007), 578–603. I am grateful to Patrick Macey for drawing this article to my attention. 48 Lodovico Zuccolo, Discorso delle ragioni del numero del verso italiano (Venice: Ginami, 1623), 66, as translated in Gerbino, “Music, Warfare, and the Political Decline of Renaissance Italy,” 581. 72 suzanne g. cusick

so perfectly united with that of her husband that she could rule with masculine authority.49 Three things about the Frescobaldi/Ottieri scandal threatened the authority of the new regency. One depended on the widely known fact that Christine had long functioned as the de facto ruler of Florence’s convents; when it suited her, she routinely overrode local monastic authorities about all sorts of governance issues by intervening directly with whoever was Pope. Santa Verdiana’s all-too-evident lack of security could easily be cited as evidence that Christine would be unable to secure the Tuscan state from invasion if she could not even ensure the security of a convent just across the street from one she visited often. The second depended on the equally well-known fact that the Tuscan state was ruled by oral commands that the sovereign issued to listening bureaucrats; during her long de facto regency, the aural economy of the state had accepted Christine’s literal voice as having sovereign authority borrowed from the body of a Grand Duke. Already undermined by the absence of an adult Grand Duke from whom to borrow sovereign authority for their literal voices, she and Magdalena could ill afford to tolerate the existence of a subculture of elite men, some with close ties to the Medici court, who publicly acknowledged hearing women’s voices as occasions for sensual, erotic delight. The third arose from the commonplace in Mediterranean culture that attributed effeminacy to men who, like Ottieri and his friends, spent most of their time among women. Under a regency, the bureaucrats, diplomats, and state ministers who executed the new regents’ commands would necessarily spend long days at the women’s court, among its singers as well as its sovereigns, and thus these ministers themselves could seem, like Ottieri, either feminized by women’s company or induced to make irrational decisions because they failed to distinguish well between the voices of the court’s commanding and singing women.50 The new regents could do little to defend themselves against insinuations based on Santa Verdiana’s obvious breach of security, but they may

49 For detailed accounts of the regency’s propaganda campaign, both before and after 1621, see Kelley Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art and Patronage in Early Modern Florence (University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 39–60, 191–211. 50 For readings of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero as addressing public fears of the regency’s feminizing effects on Tuscany’s men, see Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, 213–246; and Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Politics, and Gender Politics in La liberazione di Ruggiero,” in Christine Fischer and Irene Minder-Jeanneret, eds., Zwischentöne – Musik und Diversität (Basel: Schwabe-Verlag, 2014). Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 73 well have taken advantage of the Medici court’s traditional oversight of ostensibly independent Florentine bureaucracies to ensure an outcome that would “give an example to the world” of the state’s hostility to aural economies that dismissed the authority or sensualized the sound of a woman’s voice.51 Certainly, the surprisingly harsh sentence recommended by the judges of the Auditore Fiscale strained to reconcile Christine’s demand for “righteous justice,” the regents’ need for an official aural economy in which men would listen to their voices as commands, Tuscan law’s imperative that punishment be proportionate, and the subtly different aural economies to which both investigations’ written transcripts bore witness. The questions of gender, voice, aurality, and state power that undergird their few, dry pages of legal reasoning are too complicated to examine thoroughly here. Instead, I conclude by sketching answers to two questions implied by the transcripts’ evidence about Florence’s aural economies. First, how might acknowledging – or perhaps even participating in – the eroticized aural economy of song evoked by Ottieri’s defense have influenced these civil judges’ disposition of the case? Second, how might acknowledging – or even participating in – that eroticized aural economy have influenced the clerical interrogator’s manipulation of the aural economy of his court? My answers, admittedly speculative, infer that the resolution of the Frescobaldi/Ottieri incident had some utility to the state. In terms of the alleged crime of extremely non-normative intimacy (sacrilegio stupro), judicial acknowledgment of an erotic aural economy of song would suggest that, even if there had been no genital contact, the musical intimacy to which both Frescobaldi and Ottieri confessed had enacted some kind of powerful erotic exchange. Consequently, the crime would seem to have been more serious than the mere violation of cloister without a license, for which a 500-florin fine would have been punishment enough. The question of genital intimacy was irrelevant to the crime of illicit intimacy that had emerged; and therefore no obstetrical examination would ever have been necessary, because Frescobaldi’s biological virginity was not at issue. It would logically seem that a quite harsh sentence was in order; but the nature of the crime was so vague and

51 Indeed, Ottieri had reason to fear the Medici tradition of using the Otto di guardia as a political police: the very officer who led his arrest party was known to have personally strangled Bernardino Antinori, accused of having an affair with Don Pietro de’ Medici, on the order of Grand Duke Francesco I in 1576. Ottieri was held in the section of the Bargello known as the segreta, which was reserved for political prisoners. See Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime, 34. 74 suzanne g. cusick

hard to identify as an object of law or jurisprudence that it would have been inappropriate to assign a punishment as definite as death. The strangely harsh sentence the civil judges eventually decreed for this con- vivial, apparently asexual sensualist, who preferred the company of musical women to that of businessmen, could not have been more precise – isolation in the tower of a military prison, surrounded by men; the sensory deprivation of having to eat military rations rather than food provided by his household, as was customary in city prisons, because his property had been confiscated by the state; and that very confiscation of Ottieri’s property, which ensured that it could never pass along an Ottieri family line through reproductive sexuality. The sentence was, that is, a good “example to the world” of the “righteous justice” that Christine had sworn to exact, as well as a warning to elite men who might have eroticized women’s voices as Ottieri seems to have done. How would the possible participation of both civil and clerical authorities in the erotic economy of song that Ottieri and his defenders described have affected the way those judges heard, or listened to, the testimony of the accused nuns? Could it be that the erotic economy of song was crucial to the verosimile world to which the clerical judges wanted the accused nuns to confess? Might that explain the clerical judge’s apparent suasion by dramatized, tear-filled “confessions?” Might it even explain how Ottieri’s condemnation addressed the Medici bureaucrats’ gender trouble? Imagine that a man’s participation in elite musical culture led him to hear women’s voices erotically; that such hearing became what was verosimile to him; and that the resulting eroticism was both separated from reproductive sexuality and enacted in the ethereal medium of sound. Under such conditions it would be easy to hear women’s speech as the Prior Fantoni did – as sensory stimulation that threatened to deceive the mind. It would be easy, too, to hold Fantoni’s effectively misogynist position toward women’s speech while celebrating the virtuosity of women’s singing – easy, that is, to sustain the well-known contradiction in early modern prescriptive literature and social norms that praised women’s silence except in song. It would be possible to speculate that widespread celebration of women’s singing channeled the sensorily stimulating (therefore essentially deceptive) qualities of female vocality toward musical behaviors that were usually less disruptive of social norms than illicit sexual interaction would have been, the exceptional case of the obsessive melophile Ottieri notwithstanding. In a way, then, the erotic economy of song might be seen as having had a disciplinary function analogous to that of marriage, Men hearing women in Medicean Florence 75 since one of marriage’s acknowledged social functions was to channel women’s disruptive sexuality toward socially useful ends. Interestingly, an erotic economy of song based on men’s hearing of virtuosically singing women emerged in the same generation that saw a radical restructuring of aristocratic marriage practices that denied marriage to all but one son and one daughter, in order to concentrate a family’s wealth. In the early sixteenth century, song may have channeled women’s vocality toward a self-evidently, yet safely deceptive end, but by the end of the century it may also have begun to channel the erotic energies of the many people who were denied heterosexual marriage – perhaps especially the erotic energies of women forced into convents against their will, and of the men who flocked to convent churches to hear them sing. An interrogator or judge who participated in such an economy of song might never think about such things, nor think to adjust his hearing practices during interrogation. He might, as a result, find it hard to listen to any woman’s speech as if it could be true, and he might put pressure on any non-verisimilar utterance by forcing the speaker to hear – to hear the textual authority of the transcript, the judicial power to threaten torture, and the accounts of the verosimile that the court wanted the witness to affirm as true. That enforced hearing would performatively produce one verosimile – the silenced woman. But in this case, the interrogators’ enforcement of silenced hearing on Frescobaldi, a woman whose speech had not conformed to her judge’s expectation, led her to perform a different verosimile – the spectacle of a woman on her knees, “confessing,” begging pardon, and signaling her submission to the authority of masculine speech through her tears. This performance proved so verosimile – so much a performance of the world as the interrogator expected it to be – that the content of the “confession” did not need to be true to be incorporated into the transcript as though it were, where it remained as textual evidence of what Ottieri correctly described as a suborned lie. But to understand fully the aural and erotic verisimilitude of Frescobaldi’s factually false “confession,” one needs to consider issues of receptivity and agency in the erotic economy of song that Cicognini’s testimony implied. In that economy, the stream of pleasure flowed from a woman singer’s throat to a man’s hearing, perhaps listening ear. Cicognini was careful to gender the throat and ear as he did, to ensure that the erotic economy of song he described would seem a likely site for sublimating the more verosimile sexual desires that his friend Spigliati described. Yet the result is an erotic economy that renders hearing, listening men the receptive partners in an erotic act – a position that, in more verosimile erotic exchanges was so 76 suzanne g. cusick

strongly marked feminine that the receptive partners in sodomy were referred to as “donne.” Thus the musical eroticism that Ottieri claimed for himself bore a strong whiff of erotic and gender deviance. In terms of this aural economy, when the interrogator forced the very disruptively virtuosa singer Frescobaldi to perform the verosimile of a silenced woman who, after hearing her interrogator’s torrent of talk, responded with a verosimile “confession,” he was putting her in her erotic (as well as her gender) place, forcing her to acknowledge herself as a receptive partner in the very different and, to him, verosimile aural economies of judicial process and monastic law. Moreover, her “confession” refuted the legitimacy of Ottieri’s defenders’ claims to a decidedly non-normative erotic economy from which men could receive erotic satisfaction as receptive partners to a musician’s song. Frescobaldi’s dramatic, suborned “confession” was thus crucial to restoring a normative gender order in Tuscany in the delicate moment of Christine’s and Magdalena’s shared rule.

3 Race, empire, and early music olivia bloechl

In this essay, I make a case for the critical study of race in early modern European music. Early music historians have increasingly turned their attention to empire, and the last decade has seen a spate of publications on music in global early modern expansion, trade, and the European colonies.1 Not so with race, although by the sixteenth century, racial thinking was already emerging as an adjunct of empire, with influence on colonial music institutions, music education, and musical composition, performance, and reception. Race was also sometimes a factor in metropolitan musical life, especially musical theater. Racial impersonation was customary in European morris dancing and in vocal moresche (as in Lassus’s collection of 1581). Spanish villancicos routinely caricatured black Africans and Afro-Europeans. Operas, masques, civic and court pageants, and comic theater often featured blackface performance. And many court productions had performing or support roles for darker-skinned, racialized domestics, including some who were enslaved. Despite this history, early musicology has rarely focused on race or racism, in contrast with interdisciplinary early modern studies, where research on race has been under way since the 1980s. The main exceptions in a European context are studies of racialized dance and other music

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at a conference on “Music, Gender, and Globalization” at Cornell University, and a symposium on “Music – Race – Empire” at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I am grateful to Melinda LaTour O’Brien, who provided able research assistance, and to Elisabeth Le Guin, Melanie Lowe, Melanie Marshall, and William Weber, who commented on the essay at various stages. Bruce Alan Brown graciously responded to my queries about ballet. All perspectives expressed here are of course my own responsibility. 1 Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2008); Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008); Olivia A. Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008); David R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Kristin Dutcher Mann, The Power of Song and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Berkeley, CA: The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010); and Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, eds., Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 77 78 olivia bloechl

transmitted to Europe through colonial travel and migration (for example, the zarabanda, chacona,orcanario).2 Some recent historical studies have also looked at race in the musical life of colonial societies.3 Yet while the information they have brought to light is very valuable, they generally eschew contemporary theoretical frameworks that would permit a more robust critical perspective on race.4 Critical analysis of early music and race is therefore overdue, and musicologists are well positioned to undertake this project. A number of factors contribute to its timeliness within the field and in the broader humanities. These include increased interdisciplinary awareness of the extent of racialized materials and histories in early modern archives; the influence of ethnic studies, race critical, and postcolonial approaches; the greater racial and ethnic diversity of young scholars and performers of early music; and, not least, a felt pressure issuing from contemporary racial and neoimperial politics, which solicits our concern over the relationship between the present and the musical pasts we research and revive in performance. My discussion here will focus on continental Europe rather than the more obvious colonial settings, in order to challenge a predominant conception of Europe and of early music history as lacking race, which I propose casts them as white in modern racial schemas. The main objection is a historicist one that understands race as a fundamentally late modern social construct. This understanding has some truth to it, as modern race, which arose in the later eighteenth century, is indeed distinctive and achieved a hegemony that earlier racial discourses never did. However, recent historical research has established the existence of recognizably racial discourses of group difference since at least 1500, and numerous studies have demonstrated the presence in Europe of racially marked musical practitioners and the musics they created and enjoyed. In the following section, I give an overview of this research, before turning to a case study of racialized musical theater in the Old Regime: blackface

2 One good example is Rogério Budasz, “Black Guitar-Players and Early African-Iberian Music in Portugal and Brazil,” Early Music 35:1 (2007): 3–21. 3 For example, David M. Powers, “The French Musical Theater: Maintaining Control in Caribbean Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,” Black Music Research Journal 18:1–2 (1998): 229–40; Baker, Imposing Harmony,70–110, esp. 80–86; Geoffrey Baker, “The ‘Ethnic Villancico’ and Racial Politics in 17th-Century Mexico,” in Devotional Music in the Iberian World, 1450– 1800: The Villancico and Related Genres, ed. Tess Knighton and Álvaro Torrente (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 399–408; and several of the essays in Baker and Knighton, eds., Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America. 4 Exceptions include Noel Allende-Goitía, “The Mulatta, the Bishop, and Dances in the Cathedral: Race, Music, and Seventeenth-Century Puerto Rico,” Black Music Research Journal 26:2 (2006): 137–64; and Bonnie Gordon’s essay in this volume, “What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear”, on race in Thomas Jefferson’s writings and musical collections. Race, empire, and early music 79 impersonation in ballet and opera costuming, focusing especially on costume designs by the French artist Louis-René Boquet (1717–1814).5 This and other such cases challenge on historical grounds historicist arguments for the absence of race in early musical life. Nevertheless, as I will argue, the “whiteness” of early modern Europe is a libidinal and political, as well as historical construct, and as such demands critical approaches that are guided, but not bound by historicity. Better historical knowledge, compelling as it is, will not in itself displace the perceived whiteness of early European music, because this perception is not really based on a literal absence of race or racialized people in Europe. It rests instead on a modern correlation of power and prestige with whiteness and a libidinal projection of that racial structure onto the musical past. In the concluding section, I propose a dual approach to the complex problematic of race, empire, and early music. Most immediately and pragmatically, I suggest a program for further historical research on race and early music, which would build on existing work and develop it in several other directions. At the theoretical level, I lay some of the groundwork for a critical global historiography of music before 1800 – a large project that would require far more space than I can give it here – as an alternative to our predominant, Europe-centered approach to the distant musical past. Early musicologists and performers have developed other such “untimely” historiographies, as I will call them, in the form of feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches to early music, which are responsive to the demands of the present while, in the best instances, hewing closely to the contours of the past. In my view, the anti-normative aspects of these historiographies invite future coalitional work on early music that incorporates a robust racial critique.

Historiographies of early modern race

Race emerged as a critical topic in early modern studies in the 1980s and 1990s, buoyed by the contemporary emergence of feminist, queer,

5 North Americans, in particular, associate theatrical blackening (and the term “blackface”) with nineteenth-century minstrelsy, but “minstrel shows did not invent blackface impersonation,” as Virginia Mason Vaughan notes in Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2. My use of “blackface” is meant to signal, at the very least, a technical connection between early and late modern traditions of theatrical blackening, without erasing their historical and political differences. For further reflection on the relationship between blackface in opera and in American minstrelsy, see Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, eds., Blackness in Opera (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2012). 80 olivia bloechl

and New Historicist approaches to early modernity. A number of social and intellectual histories predated this movement, but the first wave of critical research on Renaissance and early modern race came out of literary studies, with a strong emphasis on English literature.6 This orientation still characterizes the field, although since the mid-1990s much more historical and critical work has been done on race in other European and colonial contexts, especially in the Luso-Hispanophone and Francophone worlds.7 Despite the strength of this research, a pervasive understanding of race and racism as essentially modern social constructs has limited their apparent relevance before the late eighteenth century. This historicist objection, voiced by many of the most influential transhistorical theorists of race, reserves the term “race” for modernity, on the grounds that it had different meanings in pre-modern usage and that the biological underpin- nings of modern race concepts did not yet exist. For this reason, most general histories or theories of race begin at the height of the Atlantic slave trade or with developed slave societies in the Americas, overlooking the medieval and early modern worlds entirely.8 Other studies seek its roots in pre-modernity or even antiquity, but while they acknowledge the existence of pre-modern discrimination based on attributed group features, they tend to deny its specifically racial character.9

6 See the bibliography in Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, eds., Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 29–30, n. 4. 7 On race in Francophone contexts, see notes 15–16 below. The literature on European and global Luso-Hispanophone contexts is large, but see R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City (1660–1720) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Santiago Castro Gómez, La Hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e ilustración en la Nueva Granada (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2005); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Colonial New Orleans (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Juan Hernández Franco, Sangre limpia, sangre española: el debate sobre los estatutos de limpieza (siglos XV–XVII) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2011). 8 Gilbert Varet, Racisme et philosophie, essai sur une limite de la pensée (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1973); Michael Banton and Jonathan Hartwood, The Race Concept (Newton Abbott, UK: David & Charles, 1975); Pierre Van den Berghe, Race and Racism. A Comparative Perspective, 2nd edn. (New York: Wiley, 1978); Robert Bernasconi, ed., Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Race and Racism: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006). 9 Christian Delacampagne, L’Invention du racisme, antiquité et moyen âge (Paris: Fayard, 1983); and Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). A notable exception is David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), which traces the origins of race to the development of modern states from the sixteenth century onward. Race, empire, and early music 81

Two of the most cogent transhistorical treatments of race, by Hannah Arendt and by Michel Foucault, take this approach: both write thought- fully about pre-modern “race,” but in the end its historical difference serves mainly as a foil for modern forms of racism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt traces the emergence of a proto-racialism in eighteenth-century French aristocratic histories – where “race” meant a lineage transmitting certain characteristic tendencies – but finds the most virulent, mass form of racism in the ideologies that supported nineteenth- century nationalisms and, especially, twentieth-century imperialism. Foucault covered much of the same ground in the 1973 Collège de France lectures: he distinguishes earlier forms of racial thinking from racism proper, which he sees as a technology of modern state biopower originating with the colonial genocides of the nineteenth century.10 Ivan Hannaford’s Race: The History of an Idea in the West (1996) is a more recent transhistorical treatment, which takes an even firmer stance on the periodization of race or racism: in his view, no recognizable idea of race could exist before the development of secular, scientific epistemologies in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century, and it did not emerge in modern form until the nineteenth century. These and other transhistorical theories address past racial thinking and racisms in order to understand the modern world, and this is appropriate given the severity of modern race-based injustice. However, no purely instrumental account of pre-modern race can do justice to its historical complexity and regional variance, nor to the ethical demands issuing from past histories of race-based oppression. The large literature coming out of early modern studies naturally offers a more textured perspective on these issues, and I will mainly draw from this literature in thinking about race in early music. Of course, controversy over the historiography of race is no less vivid among early modernists. Many of these scholars also insist on the modernity of “race” and “racism,” while others emphasize continuity with the past, arguing that even if discourses of race have changed in some ways, the essential features of racial thinking and racism have remained constant over time.11 Still others occupy a middle

10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 210–41; and Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 11 For the former position, see Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 154–72. For the latter, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 82 olivia bloechl

ground, highlighting historical differences of pre-modern racial thinking – for instance, its characteristic localism, religiosity, climatism, and culturalism – while also stressing its inseparability from past power structures and politics, and its genealogical connections with modern race and racism.12 My own work on early music and race will take this middle approach. Discriminatory concepts of “race” and “blood” were clearly circulating in France and elsewhere (especially Spain, Portugal, England, and Italy) by the sixteenth century, even if they differed in certain key respects from modern ones. These early race discourses were complex and internally diverse, as developing discourses are, but this does not disqualify early racial thinking as a significant phenomenon. As Loomba and Burton point out in their anthology of early English writings on race, “race” is no less protean and incoherent a term in modern usage: it still acts as a “shorthand for various combinations of ethnic, geographic, cultural, class, and religious differences.”13 Racial discourses and techniques were also linked to contemporary social and political orders of power, then as now, although race was by no means as hegemonic as in late modernity. To my mind, then, using “race” as a critical category for early modern musicology is legitimate, as long as modern definitions and theories are in dialogue with historical racial discourses and politics. Analyzing race in early modern musical life thus requires attention to two temporal dimensions: first, how music and music discourses mediated racialized relations in the past, and, second, how modern performance and historiography of early music mediate racial and other social power relations in the present and recent past. Modern racialism is part of the horizon on which we encounter early music and its history, and an overly rigid historicism will limit our ability to reflect on this condition, as I discuss in the concluding section. We need to be able to ask, for example, how early music or music discourses mediated racial fantasy in the past, how they supported or implemented racial techniques of power (where those existed), or how desire, power, and politics shape our music histories now with regard to race. These and other critical questions cross historicist temporal and geocultural boundaries, and they necessarily reach beyond what historical actors could have known about themselves or their actions. Yet, as Loomba points out, these questions “do not lie outside history

12 Ania Loomba, “Periodization, Race, and Global Contact,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:3 (2007): 595–620. 13 Loomba and Burton, eds., Race in Early Modern England,2. Race, empire, and early music 83 either,” and historical methods and materials will necessarily form the basis of any critical engagement with race in early music, as they do here.14 The case study of French musical theater that follows, then, is deeply informed by the distinctive history of race in pre-revolutionary France and the French colonies, while drawing as needed on transhistorical or modern critical theories of race. As the former history may not be as familiar to Anglophone readers, I offer a brief overview of race in the Old Regime before turning to the case of blackness in ballet and opera costuming.

Race in the Old Regime

Although research on race in the Old Regime dates back to the 1930s,15 a wave of studies on race in France before the Revolution has emerged in the last decade, part of a larger body of recent research on early French colonialism and slavery issuing from both sides of the Atlantic.16 I will highlight the work of two scholars, Sue Peabody and Pierre Boulle, who are largely responsible for this resurgence. Peabody’s “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (1996) and her co-edited volume with Tyler Stovall, The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (2003), approach race as an aspect of French political culture and emphasize – as recent French race histories tend to do – its strong connections to colonization, colonial trade, and slavery. Both books devote some space to the question of the historical development of racial thinking and racism. In the introduction to the co-edited

14 Loomba, “Periodization, Race, and Global Contact,” 598. 15 The first major work on race in pre-Revolutionary France was Jacques Barzun’s The French Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), penned at Columbia University in the years leading up to the Second World War. It would be several decades before French-language scholarship took up the topic, but the 1970s and 1980s saw several dissertations and printed studies on race in the Old Regime, in addition to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste, Vol. I: L’Affranchi dans les possessions françaises de la Caraïbe (1635–1833) (Paris: Dalloz, 1967); André Devyver, Le Sang épuré: les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l’Ancien Régime (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1973); Arlette Jouanna, L’Idée de race en France au XVIe siècle et au début du XVIIe siècle: 1498–1614, 2 vols. (Montpellier: Imprimerie Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier III, 1981); and Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et juifs au XVIIIe siècle: le racisme au siècle des lumières (Paris: Tallandier, 1984). 16 Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford University Press, 2002); Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Erick Noël, Être noir en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Tallandier, 2006); and Pierre H. Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin, 2007). 84 olivia bloechl

volume, Peabody and Stovall voice the consensus view of historians that religion, early modern concepts of the “nation,” climatic theories of culture, maternal impression, and naturalized class distinctions all formed part of what we consider “race” discourse in France before the Revolu- tion.17 Peabody herself addresses this question more narrowly in the context of what she calls “The Freedom Principle”: the traditional, intermittently enforced legal maxim that “there are no slaves in France.” In the chapter “Notions of race in the eighteenth century,” she finds a significant shift in juridical uses of the term “nègre,” from its early flexible usage (“designating blackness, but also...specific facial features, geographical origin, and, in some cases, the condition of being a slave”) to its increasingly rigid conflation of phenotype, slave/free status, and social or moral disposition later in the century.18 Pierre Boulle’s more recent book, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (2007), traces the roots of French racialism as far back as the sixteenth century, with early colonization and the Atlantic slave trade, the first emergence of natural sciences and philosophy, and the beginnings of secularization. He notes, as many others have, that the dominant Renaissance understanding of “race” still connoted a royal or noble lineage transmitting certain inherited – although not immutable – qualities through “bloodlines.” As this suggests, early racialism in France incorporated a significant cultural and environmental component, emphasizing the potential for degeneration or improvement through education, diet, and what we would call “lifestyle.” However, from the last third of the seventeenth century onward, a greater essentialism is perceptible in racialized “blood” discourse. Nobility was increasingly represented (from an aristocratic perspective) as immutable and inborn, against the threat posed by the burgeoning robe and rich bourgeois, while at the other end of the social hierarchy, European peasants and non-noble Africans, Native Americans, and Asians were beginning to be classed as distinct “races” identifiable by fixed bodily characteristics. Although Boulle rightly sees outre-mer colonialism and slavery as key to hardening French racial categories around the turn of the eighteenth century, he also points to advances in understanding reproduction (especially ovism), as well as the reappearance of polygenism, which would support the secular racist theories of Voltaire and others.19

17 Peabody and Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty,2. 18 Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France,” 57–71, citation on 71. 19 Saliha Belmessous also sees racial ideologies of physical appearance, including skin color, developing in France around the turn of the eighteenth century, as an import from colonial Race, empire, and early music 85

Like Peabody, Boulle perceives a number of developments signaling the emergence of a consolidated French racism in the second half of the century.20 These include domestic and colonial racial legislation (e.g., in 1762, 1777, and 1778); the appearance of natural “scientific” approaches to race (especially in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, 1749); and anti-abolitionist discourse. Evident in these and other racist discourses was a strong defamatory correlation of darker skin with African origins, slave status, and socially undesirable traits. This provided a rationale for differential political and social treatment, economic deprivation, sexual violence, and other brutality.

Blackness in ballet and opera

I will turn now to a particular instance of racialized representation and performance in the Old Regime: the custom of blackface costuming in French court ballet and opera. Racial thinking is part of French ballet and opera from their beginnings, and the forms of race in these performance traditions are as variable and dynamic as we would expect. Climatic, cultural, religious, and class discourses of race are most prominent in the early years, with a greater physical naturalization of race emerging in the early eighteenth century. Gender also inflected racial representation (and vice versa), although their interrelationship changed across the period, as I discuss below. Each of the constituent arts of ballet and opera developed racializing techniques, with poetry and costume displaying the most overt racial indications. Music and choreography too could indicate racial difference, although the conventional nature of Lullian theatrical music often oriented it toward assimilationism, especially during the height of Louis XIV’s reign.21 Race is perhaps most readily apparent in the ensemble of costuming techniques for depicting blackness in musical theater.22 Especially before

Caribbean and North American societies, in “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy,” The American Historical Review 110:2 (2005): 322–49. Belmessous’s most recent study (Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, Oxford University Press, 2013) appeared too late for consideration. 20 Boulle, Race et esclavage,59–63. Debbasch proposed a similar timeframe for racism in the colonies, in Couleur et liberté. 21 Bloechl, Native American Song, 142–76. 22 For a study of blackface impersonation in Italian opera, see Emily Wilbourne, “Lo Schiavetto (1612): Travestied Sound, Ethnic Performance, and the Eloquence of the Body,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63:1 (2010): 1–43. David M. Powers, From Plantation to 86 olivia bloechl

the eighteenth century, blackness was attributed theatrically to a wide range of personas and groups, from Africans, Americans, and Asians to manual laborers, non-Christians, witches, and infernal supernaturals. This attributed cultural, environmental, and religious or moral blackness was typically represented in costuming as darker (brown- or black-toned) skin. In the case of Africanist23 depictions of blackness, designers often gave figures characteristically sub-Saharan facial features, although this also depended on their rank and theatrical register.24 North African “Moors” were also particularly associated with blackness, so much so that the terms were nearly synonymous in the theater.25 However, the wide- ranging attribution of theatrical blackness suggests that early modern blackface costuming did not necessarily involve racialism, although it often did. Nor is blackness the only racial formation in French musical theater. Race is often present in the costuming of lighter-skinned figures, as in, for example, the early modern pictorial convention of juxtaposing white aristocratic figures with black servants, which carried over into theatrical costume and scene design.26 My focus here will be on theatrical blackness that involved racialism, but I return to the question of racialized whiteness in discussing Boquet’s output. A variety of contemporary sources remark upon the practice of blackface impersonation, but the most vivid documentation is the large number of surviving costume designs from the period. These are tantalizing sources

Paradise? Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014) appeared too late for consideration here. 23 Toni Morrison coined this usage of “Africanist” to refer to constructed non-white “Africanlike” personas and their imaginative uses in Euro-American literature, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–28, esp. 6. I follow the adaptation of this usage to opera studies in André, Bryan, and Saylor, eds., Blackness in Opera,1. 24 Costume designers were far more likely to give comic or low-ranking Africanist figures features like full lips and a broad nose, often in exaggerated caricature. See, for example, the costume study of a turbaned Africanist head in Paris, Musée du Louvre [hereafter ML], Collection Rothschild, DR 1814. RISM sigla will be used for other source citations wherever possible. 25 As the Jesuit ballet historian Claude-François Ménestrier wrote in 1682, “different nations have their own costumes that distinguish them. The Turk has the jacket and turban, the Moor [has] the color black, the Americans their feathered costumes.” Elsewhere he elaborates costuming conventions for “Moors,” noting that they “have short and frizzy hair, black face and hands, they are bare-headed, unless they are given a circlet studded with pearls in the form of a diadem. They should wear drop earrings...” Claude-François Ménestrier, Des ballets anciens et modernes selon les règles du théâtre (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, [1682] 1972), 143, 251. 26 Hall, Things of Darkness,62–122, 211–53; and David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press, 2010), part 1, 126–31, 249–70. Race, empire, and early music 87 for opera and ballet history because they seem to bring us so close to past performances. Yet in addition to artistic representations, costume designs were in many cases also working sketches. Although such sketches are typically detailed and fairly close to what would have appeared in performance, they are not literal representations of stage costumes. While the designs show a variety of costuming techniques for impersonating blackness – masks, black leather or fabric skin coats, body paint, burnt cork, charcoal, or some combination – costume conventions were actually much more rigid than the designs imply. Dancers at court and at the Paris Opéra, for example, generally wore masks before the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and we can assume that this would have been the case even where the designs for a production imply otherwise.27 Costume designs and other sources indicate that the practice of blackface costuming coexisted with the practice of casting darker-skinned performers (with or without blackening or whitening), and we should distinguish between these practices wherever possible, although it is often hard to do so. We know, for example, that black African musicians and dancers sometimes performed in musical theater and ceremonies at courts across Europe from the late medieval period onward, and many of these were enslaved persons brought to Europe as part of the Mediterranean and Atlantic slave trades.28 By the late seventeenth century, free and enslaved black people were present in France in some numbers: many of them had accompanied their masters traveling from the Caribbean colonies, and others worked as high-prestige domestics for French notables.29 Indeed, Louis XIV himself owned black African slaves. Although I have not yet found any record of their serving in particular court spectacles, the fifty-four “Moors, genuine Africans,” whom the king “purchased” in 1680 were intended to serve on the Grand Canal, the site of many such performances.30 Other sources confirm that darker-skinned foreigners

27 Jean-Georges Noverre devoted his ninth letter to this question, in Lettres sur la danse (Stuttgart and Lyon: Aimé Delaroche, 1760; repr. New York: Broude, 1967). 28 See Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Bindman and Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art. 29 Jules Mathorez, Les Étrangers en France sous l’ancien régime: histoire de la formation de la population française (Paris: E. Champion, 1919–21); Marcel Koufinkana, “Esclaves et esclavages dans la France d’Ancien Régime (1600–1794),” 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail, 1989; Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France,” 72–87; and Boulle, Race et esclavage, 123–98. 30 Mercure galant, September 1680, 295–96. 88 olivia bloechl

participated in French court spectacles, perhaps on a regular basis.31 Evidently they sometimes did so alongside lighter-skinned servants and performers in blackface. For example, the Mercure galant reports that a 1683 Carnival divertissement given by the Duc d’Enghien (with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully) included twelve presumably non-black palace servants costumed as Moors, who served a meal alongside “real” Moors dressed in the French style.32 An engraving of the divertissement shows the costumed servants with uniformly blackened faces.33 A long tradition of courtly blackface performance predated the Bourbon ballet de cour and other musical spectacles. The most common late medieval and Renaissance occasion for blackface performance was the moresque or morisca, a repertory of vigorous dances performed by professionals with blackened faces, in comic costumes ornamented with bells.34 During the reign of Henri IV, a Ballet des Nègres was danced in 1601.35 Nine years later, the Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vendôme (1610) opened with a comic entry by a “young Moor” dressed in a ridiculous costume and wearing a “black mask, with gilded eyebrows and mustache.”36 Many more court ballets and spectacles under the Bourbons featured blackened performers.37 Especially valuable are Daniel Rabel’s sumptuous designs for the Ballet de La Douairière (1626), as they show a variety of blackface Africanist figures with good costume detail. The first part of that performance was a ballet des nations, and the African ballet included two entries

31 Marcel Paquot, Les Étrangers dans les divertissements de la cour de Beaujoyeulx à Molière (1581–1673) (Brussels: Palais des Académies; Liège: H. Vaillant-Carmanne, 1932). 32 Mercure galant, March, 1683, 326–27. The same divertissement included a group of “Moorish slaves” in chains at the feet of the princesse de Conti, dressed as the queen of Egypt. 33 Jean Lepautre, Sal du bal donné à la cour pendant le carnaval de l’année 1683, Mercure galant, March 1683, 242. Reproduced in Jérôme de La Gorce, Berain: dessinateur du Roi Soleil (Paris: Herscher, 1986), 106. 34 Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie (Langres: Jehan Des Preyz, 1588), fol. 94r; and Margaret M. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 231–33. 35 A Ballet des Blancs et des noirs was also danced at Tours in 1607, and it likely included blackened performance, although I do not have evidence of that. Music for both ballets is preserved in the Recüeil de plusieurs anciens ballets dancez sous les regnes de Henry 3. Henry 4. et Louis 13. Depuis l’an 1575 jusqu’à 1641/ Recherchez et mis en ordre par Philidor l’Aisné Ordinaire de la Musique du Roy en 1690, vol. I, 10–11, 64, F-Pn, Département de la Musique, Rès. F. 496. See also Marie-Françoise Christout, Le Ballet de cour au XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Minkhoff, 1987). 36 Paul Lacroix, ed., Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri III à Louis XIV, 1581–1652 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968), 1:243. Music for this ballet is in the Recüeil de plusieurs anciens ballets, 1:99–101. 37 In addition to those discussed here, see ML, Collection Rothschild, DR 1552, 1559, 1560, 1590, 1607, 1608, 1670, 1988, and 2616. Race, empire, and early music 89 for blackened dancers and musicians.38 Following the customary récit (sung by a musician costumed as a mandolin-playing “African woman”), the first entry is for a “Cacique” mounted on an elephant, accompanied by drummers and a troupe of “tanned” dancers whose number included “Monsieur,” the brother of the king. This is followed by a combat ballet danced by troupes of female and male Africans.39 An uglier side of this tradition appears in Henry de Gissey’s printed designs for the Carousel of 1662, which included a derogatory portrait of a group of black “Moors carrying monkeys, and leading bears.”40 The caption by Charles Perrault (of Mother Goose fame) suggests that the performers were royal domestics of unknown origins, some costumed as bears, others as slaves.41 While it is impossible to tell whether the performers are wearing face paint, skincoats, or masks, the image is already clearly racist: the Moors’ features are caricatured and the monkeys’ faces are made to resemble their human bearers. French nobility and royalty sometimes dressed in blackface for court musical theater, adopting both high- and low-ranking personas. A striking example is Gissey’s design for a blackened “Académiste de Chiron” (“A scholar of the centaur Chiron”), performed by a teenage Louis XIV.42 In the eighth entry of the ballet for Les Noces de Pelée et de Thetis (1654), the young king danced this role in blackface and feathers alongside Lully (“Baptiste”) and ten other “Académistes” bizarrely costumed as Indians.43 The king also danced the role of a “Maure” in the last entry of the Ballet d’Alcidiane (1658), and a panegyric preceding the entry’s Chaconne des Maures builds on stereotypes associating Moors with ungov- erned sexuality, physical blackness, and slave status.44 A masquerade performed at St. Germain-en-Laye in 1679, at the height of Louis XIV’s reign, featured a role for a “Mauresse” danced by the duchesse de Nemours. In a design by Jean Berain that was most likely for this

38 Designs for these entries are in ML, Département des Arts Graphiques, Album Daniel Rabel, fols. 36–38. 39 Lacroix, ed., Ballets et mascarades, 3:179–86. 40 Charles Perrault, Courses de testes et de bagues faites par le roy et par les princes et seigneurs en l’année 1662 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1670), 55. 41 Perrault, Courses de testes et de bagues,8. 42 Henri de Gissey, Academiste de Chiron,inDescription particulière du grand ballet et comédie des Noces de Pélée et de Thétis (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1654). Reproduced in Philippe Beaussant, Lully, ou le musicien du soleil (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pl. 7. 43 Description particulière. Giocomo Torelli’s scene designs for this entry, showing the dancers, are in F-Pan CP O1 3241. 44 Isaac de Benserade, Ballet royal d’Alcidiane (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1658), 36. 90 olivia bloechl

Figure 3.1 Jean Berain, Costume de “Mauresse.”

performance, the blackened “Mauresse” appears dressed in an elaborate court costume with exotic striped material at the sleeves and bodice, a high feathered headdress, and castanets at the wrists (Figure 3.1).45 The Dauphin himself wore a costume of Berain’s design for his role as a blackened “Indien” in the Ballet du Triomphe de l’amour (1681).46 Berain was the preeminent designer at court and the Opéra during Louis XIV’s reign, and he was largely responsible for bringing the court ballet and spectacle tradition of blackface costuming to French opera. Many of his designs could be cited as sources for operatic blackface costuming, but two for Quinault and Lully’s operas stand out. His scene designs for Cadmus et Hermione (1673) suggest that the troupe of dancing “Africans”

45 ML, Collection Rothschild, DR 1750. La Gorce attributes this design to the 1679 mascarade, in Berain, 109. 46 F-Pn, Cabinet des Estampes, Rés. Fol. Qb 201 (59). Race, empire, and early music 91 in Act 1 wore blackface.47 Berain’s frontispiece for the livret of Phaëton (1683) also includes a darker-skinned page, conventionally juxtaposed with the lighter-skinned royal and supernatural personas.48 Presumably, many other such non-singing roles for members of the corps and minor characters, especially those associated with exoticized locales, would also have involved blackened costuming during Berain’s tenure. In contrast, I have seen no evidence that singing personas – including those from African, Asian, or American locales – wore blackface in performance at the Opéra, although that is possible. In any event, they would not have had blackening masks like those worn by dancers, which would have interfered with singing.49 The remainder of this section focuses on Louis-René Boquet, whose output dominates the second half of the eighteenth century.50 As with Berain, a large number of Boquet’s designs have been preserved, spanning different periods of his long career. Quite a few show blackened figures, many of which can be precisely identified. In addition, Boquet’s designs illustrate a marked shift in the theatrical presentation of blackness across the century, especially with regard to gender difference. This shift is particularly significant for my purposes, as it suggests the influence of changing contemporary ideologies of race on musical theatrical costume design. Earlier artists had sometimes distinguished between masculine and feminine versions of theatrical blackness, but in seventeenth-century designs, darker-skinned female figures usually have blackening on their faces and bodies, just like male figures (see Figure 3.1).51 However, Boquet’s early designs from the 1750s and 1760s exaggerate gender differences in blackface costuming to such an extent that they suggest the influence of a newly acute French anxiety over femininity and racial

47 Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Tessin-Harleman Collection 671. 48 Philippe Quinault, Phaëton (Paris: s.n., 1683), frontispiece. 49 The actor La Grange described singers performing unmasked in Lully’s and Molière’s 1671 tragédie-ballet Psyché at the Palais-Royal: “Up to now the musicians, male and female, did not want to appear in public; they sang in the theatre in boxes with grilles and trellises, but this obstacle was surmounted, and with some slight expense persons were found who sang on the stage, with their faces uncovered, dressed like the actors.” Charles Varlet de La Grange, Le Registre de La Grange, 1659–1685, ed. Bert Edward Young and Grace Philputt Young (Paris: E. Droz, 1947), 1:125–26. English translation in William Howarth, ed., French Theatre in the Neo-Classical Era, 1550–1779 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 219. 50 See André Tessier, “Les Habits d’opéra au XVIII siècle: Louis Boquet, dessinateur et inspecteur général des Menus-Plaisirs,” Revue de l’art ancien et moderne, 49 (1926), 15–26, 89–100, 173–84; and Fr. van Thienen, “Louis René Boquet,” in Miscellanea I. Q. van Regteren Altena (Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema, 1969), 198–203. 51 For example, ML, Collection Rothschild, DR 2516 and 2517. 92 olivia bloechl

Figure 3.2 Louis-René Boquet, Africaine et Africain.

mixture in this period. These mid-eighteenth-century designs established a convention of representing darker-skinned female figures with blackened arms, bodice, and occasionally legs, but with whitened face and décolletage. This formed a stark contrast with darker-skinned male figures, who appear (often in the same design) in total or near-total blackface, including the face itself. In contrast, Boquet’s designs from the last quarter of the century display a more naturalistic racial representation, eschewing the overt artifice of the mid-century designs: Africanist, Indianist, or other racialized female characters now commonly have darker skin tones, including on the face. To be sure, this new mode of racial representation in musical theater reflected a changed aesthetic climate in the last quarter of the century, but I propose that it also reflected the literate classes’ absorption of newly naturalized racial schemas and the emergence of a “scientific” racism. A design showing a male and female pair of “African” dancers will illustrate the first broad moment of Boquet’s representation of race, in the 1750s and 1760s (Figure 3.2).52 The female dancer on the left is wearing

52 F-Po, D2160–5 (1), pl. 14. Race, empire, and early music 93 black, full-length gloves, a black bodice, and black stockings, but her whitened décolletage and face – made up in the French style, with bright rouge at the cheeks – conform to mid-century aristocratic standards of feminine beauty. Other exotic touches include large pearl earrings, the striped material adorning her headdress and overskirt (almost always reserved for exoticized figures), the bells edging her clothing, and the small drum and mallet in her hands. Her male partner, on the other hand, has a blackened face, arms, chest, and legs, creating the illusion of partial nudity, and his costume too has exotic striped material, large feathers, pearls, and bells, as well as small hand cymbals. Other designs from this period show a similar gendered division of racial representation. A design for the 1764 revival of André Campra’s Tancrède shows a “Maure” and “Mauresse” dancing a pas de deux (Act 2), and annotations on the design identify the dancers as Jean Dauberval and Marguerite-Angélique Peslin.53 The dancers’ faces are typecast, and, as this is a line drawing, there is no indication of facial coloring. The costume description does specify a black background (“fond noir”) for the dancers’ costumes, implying the use of skin coats, and the man’s face has caricatured features, with a bulbous nose, large lips, and bulging cheeks, undoubtedly supplied by a mask in performance. Both dancers play percussion instruments (a tambourine and cymbals, respectively). Another design from 1764, for a revival of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ballet-heroïque Naïs, shows a female dancer from the quadrille d’Africains in the Prologue, with black arm gloves and bodice, but whitened face and décolletage. She too plays the cymbals (Figure 3.3).54 Designs by Boquet’s atelier in a 1766 manuscript, sent by Jean-Georges Noverre to the king of Poland, also distinguish between masculine and feminine blackness, although not uniformly.55 Their connection with Noverre’s ballets and their inclusion in a manuscript destined for Poland suggest a transnational diffusion of this mid-century French convention for gendering race and racializing gender in musical theater.56 Opposite-sex pairs with contrasting forms of blackface include an “Africain/Africaine” from the Ballet de la Mort d’Hercule (Stuttgart,

53 F-Po, D216 V-74. 54 F-Pn, Département des Estampes, Tb 20b-Pet. fol. (3). Other examples include F-Pn, Manuscrits occidentaux, Rothschild 1462, Rés. 1519–3–12, dossier XX, fol. 67; and F-Po, D216 O4, pl. 20. 55 Habits de costume pour l’éxécution des ballets de Mr. Noverre, dessinés par Mr. Boquet, dessinateur des menus plaisirs du Roi de France (1766), PL-Wu, Zb. Król. vols. 801–805. 56 This borrows a formulation by Goldberg, in The Racial State, xx. 94 olivia bloechl

Figure 3.3 Louis-René Boquet, Africaine, for the Prologue of Jean-Philippe Rameau, Naïs (1764 revival). Race, empire, and early music 95

1762) and an unattributed “Peruvien/Peruvienne.”57 Other male figures with blackened faces include a “Muet” and designs for two “Eunuches noirs” from the Ballet des Jalousies du Serail (Lyons, 1758), and “Yarbe,” a “Maure,” and an “Esclave Maure” from the Ballet d’Enée et Didon (Stuttgart, c. 1760–66).58 The Ballet d’Enée et Didon also features a female “Carthaginoise” with black sleeves, bodice, and overskirt, but whitened face and décolletage.59 As in Boquet’s other designs from this period, these images do not limit blackening to “African” or “Moorish” characters, but employ it in designs for Americans, East Indians, and East Asians.60 The manuscript also includes designs for comic female figures with blackened faces: “Fatime Africaine” and a “Grecque” from the Ballet des Jalousies du Serail, and an unattributed design for a “Négresse.”61 A markedly different approach to racial representation, including the gendering of race, can be seen in costume designs from the 1770s and 1780s in a manuscript sent to the king of Sweden in 1791. The artifice visible in blackface costuming from the 1760s has disappeared in favor of an increased naturalism. Male and female characters are now either black, brown, or white (including women’s faces), and there is no visible trace of the masks, skin coats, or body paint that must still have been employed in performance. In the case of partially nude male figures, the contours of the body are now much more pronounced, making blackness or whiteness seem an essential bodily trait, rather than a deliberate theatrical effect.62 Female characters can now be fully blackened or whitened, but this racial difference among women is articulated along rigorous class lines: all aristocratic female characters in the manuscript are lighter-skinned – indeed, the light and bright neoclassical design palate for their costumes underscores their whiteness – but the racial identification of démi- caractères, comic characters, and dance retinues varies. Didon (Figure 3.4) and a “Carthaginoise” are both white, for instance, while a comic “Africaine” servant is black (Figure 3.5).63 Gender distinctions are still

57 Habits de costume, PL-Wu, Zb. Król. vol. 801, 28–29; vol. 804, 15–16. 58 Ibid., vol. 801, 64, 68–69; vol. 802, 101, 108–109. 59 Ibid., vol. 802, 107. 60 For example, the “Ambassadeur Indien” in the Ballet d’Alexandre, Stuttgart, c. 1760–66, and an unattributed design for an “Americain” with blackened face. Ibid., vol. 803, 36; vol. 804, 84. 61 Ibid., vol. 801, 56, 63; vol. 805, 27–28. 62 See the designs for two “gladiateurs,” Hilus, Iarbes, and an “Indien,” Habits de costume pour l’Exécution des ballets de Mr. Noverre, dessinés par Mr. Boquet, premier dessinateur des menus plaisirs du roi de France (1791), S-Sk, Cod. holm S 254, vol. 2, 34, 36, 68, 69. The designs in this manuscript likely refer to ballets staged in the 1770s and 1780s, but their later visual style suggests that the atelier updated them for inclusion in the 1791 manuscript. 63 Ibid., vol. 2, 72, 58, 70. 96 olivia bloechl

Figure 3.4 After Louis-René Boquet, Didon. Race, empire, and early music 97

Figure 3.5 After Louis-René Boquet, Africaine. 98 olivia bloechl

fundamental for determining racial representation, since aristocratic male characters can be black, unlike their female counterparts, but here too status inflects race: Didon’s royal suitor, Iarbes, is black, as is one of his warriors (a “suivant d’Iarbes”), but the warrior’s noble posture is undercut by his caricatured facial features and menacing gaze.64 It would be imprudent to generalize too much about theatrical blackness in the pre-Revolutionary period based on one manuscript, and my conclu- sions here are provisional. But the contours of Boquet’s output, with regard to blackface costuming, do seem to parallel the development of racial thinking and racism that historians have proposed for the Old Regime. His predecessors’ designs for ballet, opera, and other musical theater show a greater flexibility with regard to blackface performance: performances often featured male and female blackened figures, occupying a range of social ranks and theatrical registers. This suggests that racial costuming was not yet as ideologically pressing as was the demarcation of rank and gender. In contrast, designs from Boquet’s early period (the 1750s and 1760s) take pains to display the underlying whiteness of female blackened figures at all social and theatrical levels. Their more visible racial artifice speaks to a felt contradiction between idealized femininity – especially French standards of aristocratic female beauty – and blackness. This stage of blackface costuming in musical theater coincides historically with official paranoia over interracial sexuality and marriage in France from the 1760s onward, which led to anti-miscegenation legislation in 1777.65 Finally, the designs from the 1791 manuscript hint at a fuller artistic absorption of a literate racism articulated, in the Revolutionary period, along class lines. In these designs, naturalistic blackface representation is now permissible for comic and middling figures, both male and female, but a stylized neoclassical whiteness remains de rigueur for aristocratic figures, especially women. However, suggestive as these parallels are, we should be careful about tracing too close a relationship with historical shifts in racial thinking. Utilitarian art forms like costume designs responded most immediately to the demands of particular productions and, through them, canons of taste. In the case of eighteenth-century ballet and opera, racial representation would have been guided by an aesthetics and poetics of verisimilitude (vraisemblance), which demanded plausible, rather than true (vrai)

64 Ibid., vol. 2, 68, 71. 65 Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France,” 72–87; and Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism.” Race, empire, and early music 99 representation of different “nations” or distant locales.66 Even reform currents in the last decades of the century did not usher in ethnologically faithful costuming, despite reformers’ calls for greater “truth” in theatrical productions. Indeed, the arch-reformer Noverre himself insisted on a degree of stylization in exotic tableaus. In his 1760 Lettres sur la danse, he speculated that a Turkish or Chinese fête would not please our Nation if it was not artfully embellished, and I am persuaded that these Peoples’ manner of dancing would be incapable of seducing us; this precise costuming and imitation could only offer a flat spectacle, unworthy of a Public which never applauded except when Artists possess the art of bringing delicacy and genius to the different productions that they present.67

In his 1791 treatise on costuming, Noverre retained this principle of vraisemblance for the main characters, while calling for a greater degree of exoticist realism in the rest of the staging: “If costuming is not at all truthful, it should be plausible; if the costumes of the foremost Actors...are always a little neglected on this point out of indulgence, the objects that encircle and surround them must convey the severe character of the faraway nation that the Author has transported to the stage.”68 This lingering preference for the beautiful or the plausible over realism has a strong class charge, but no inherent racial one. The influence of contemporary racial discourse and racism is instead felt in the realization of these ideals onstage in costuming that necessarily involved social representation. Racial difference was powerfully articulated through aesthetic ideals of physical beauty, and gender played a facilitating role, as feminine physicality was the preeminent terrain on which beauty was racialized in the theater. (One of the benefits of a more sustained look at blackface in French musical theater might be the perspective it can offer on theatrical whiteness as a racial and gender formation.) With regard to the principle of vraisemblance, artists’ sense of what was plausibly true in exotic staging was clearly influenced by contemporary racial discourse and may have influenced it in turn. Indeed, we might consider to what extent the difference between the plausible and the true in theatrical poetics opened up a space of racial fantasy, much as it supported the class and gender fantasies of aristocratic theater. Pastoralism was one expression of this

66 See Catherine Kintzler, La Poétique de l’opéra français (Paris: Minerve, 1991). 67 Noverre, Lettres sur la danse, 432–33. 68 Jean-Georges Noverre, Réfléxions sur le costume, S-Sk, Cod. holm S 254, vol. 2. 100 olivia bloechl

poetics of vraisemblance, along with its supporting structures of desire and power. Theatrical blackness, I argue, was another. As this line of argument suggests, eighteenth-century ballet and opera occupied a complex position with regard to contemporary French racial discourses, libidinal structures, and orders of power. Even the crudest or cruelest racial presentation was never simply staged ideology, but a performance that dealt in pleasure, desire, sometimes laughter, and always play. This libidinal and ludic dimension of racial representation in musical theater calls for an approach steeped in history, but also informed by an understanding of how psychic structures shape and are shaped by orders of power. Moreover, as musicologists are well aware, the visual racial coding of costumes and scenery was merely a backdrop for the more ephemeral social mediation of declaimed or sung poetry, music, and dance, none of which are considered here. Any fuller study of race in Old Regime musical theater would of course devote considerable space to these aspects of the theatrical arts, and how they each engaged with racially charged costuming.

Untimely historiographies of early music

The tradition of blackface impersonation I have considered offers a vivid case of racialized content in European musical theater, well before the advent of modern race and racism in the nineteenth century. Blackface costume designs and their stage renditions presented race in ways that were shaped by both metropolitan and colonial politics. Without exception, performances featuring the costumes I have discussed were sponsored by the crown, the hereditary nobility, or their European peers, and were produced at court or in official or semi-official theaters. Under these conditions, racialized theatrical blackness symbolically supported pro- monarchical or pro-aristocratic and patriarchal politics, whether through plays of contrast with non-blackness or through dramas of assimilation. However, it was also complexly linked to the French colonial projects of maritime trade, plantation, and settlement: most saliently in this case, the Atlantic slave trade and sugar economy.69 As my brief discussion of costume design has shown, changes in the visual presentation of blackness

69 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 1997), 277–368; and James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 162–88, 215–24. Race, empire, and early music 101 in French musical theater parallel changes in metropolitan racial discourses, policies, and law, which were themselves influenced by the emergence of racialized slavery and colonization along the Atlantic rim. The division of the earth and its peoples according to race was one of the most enduring legacies of Atlantic colonialism. I maintain that European racial impersonation in the theater brought this colonial division of the earth home, making it available for metropolitan social and political “designs.”70 Among these designs was the organization of French gender difference. I have argued that by at least the mid-eighteenth century, racial impersonation in French musical theater intersected with gender impersonation in a mutually constitutive way, so that to speak of “race” is also to speak of gendered race and racialized gender. Feminist musicologists usually ana- lyze early European gender independently from race, partly because race has been seen as historically irrelevant and partly because intersectional approaches are relatively unfamiliar.71 Yet in some of the costume designs discussed above, aristocratic femininity, in particular, is negatively defined by the absence of blackness, suggesting that, in this context at least, the old conjunction of rank and gender had integrated the dimension of race. How might gender analysis in other early musical contexts benefit from incorporating informed racial critique? More broadly, the dual metropolitan and colonial genealogy of racialized musical theater challenges a historiography of European early music as autonomous from histories of colonialized regions. It also challenges a prevailing sense of this music as occupying a European early modernity lacking race and racism. And it points to the need for historiographies that will incorporate an awareness of early colonial globality72 or, better yet, will reorient our knowledge of early music through counter-historiographies of its development from below: that is, from the difference of coloniality,73

70 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 71 See the discussion of intersectionality in the Introduction to this volume, pp. 48–49. 72 By “globality,” I mean participation in a distinctively early modern global network bound by economic, political, religious, and – to a certain extent – cultural ties. Early colonial globality was not experienced equally in the places it touched, nor by every inhabitant. For many, it had little perceptible effect on daily life; for others, its effects were inescapable. We should not conflate this nascent globality with late modern globalization, and I am not implying the existence of a fully capitalized, neoimperialist globality such as we occupy today. However, there are some commonalities between them, and I find these to be hospitable for thinking about early music in the “untimely” ways I am sketching here. 73 Sociologist Anibal Quijano introduced the notion of the “coloniality of power” and the complementarity of modernity/coloniality from their inception in the sixteenth century, regarding coloniality as, in Walter Mignolo’s words, “the darker side of modernity.” 102 olivia bloechl

as well as from the difference of subjugated European early modernities (for example, those of peasants, women, queer and intersex people, servants, Romas, or Jews). This would free us to conceive of past musical worlds beyond a simplistic version of historicism, whose differential organization of time and space tends to be rigorously Eurocentric.74 As the phrase “early music” suggests, a historicist idea of Europe and its music remains fundamental to musicology, and it proves an obstacle for musicologists seeking to address histories of empire or race. At issue are strong versions of two historicist premises: first, the idea that “early” music history is temporally isolated from modernity and must be understood according to its own categories and values; and second, that it is driven by forces of change internal to Europe understood as a coherent geocultural space. The first premise supports charges of anachronism, which see empire or race as ineluctably modern. The second underwrites a sense of colonization, slavery, or racial domination as matters perhaps important for understanding musical life in colonial locales, but not for histories of metropolitan early music. In either case, the musical past is organized along a global timeline leading to Europeanist modernity, and other musical pasts or presents are cast as untimely relative to modernity or its developmental trajectory. Critical forms of historicism have sometimes been a resource for counter-hegemonic historiographies of Europe. History “from below,” microhistory, historical anthropology, and the “New Historicism” all emphasized the difference of the early modern world in ways that challenged nationalist and other historiographies that sought to claim the period as the origin of European modernity.75 These critical historicisms

Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views From South 1:3 (2000): 533–81; and Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12:3 (2000): 723. Simply put, this recognizes that changes experienced in some places as modernity were experienced elsewhere as coloniality, and that the latter was an enabling condition of the former. 74 For postcolonial critiques of historicism, see especially Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York and London: Routledge, 1990); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1–46; and, in relation to music, Bloechl, Native American Song,11–15. 75 For critical musicologists of my generation, one of the most influential legacies of New Historicism, in particular, was a concern for precision in thinking about historical or cultural difference, as well as an ingrained skepticism toward narratives of continuity or sameness. Yet New Historicism also incorporated efforts to reach across the historicist geo-temporal divide in ways that were openly indebted and accountable to late modernity, although often ambivalently so. Both the effort and the ambivalence are on display in Stephen Greenblatt’s thoughtful essay, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Race, empire, and early music 103 were formative for feminist, queer, and postcolonial history and criticism of early music, which typically pair an understanding of its historical difference with an awareness of its unsettling proximity.76 One of these studies’ most important contributions has been their discovery and validation of “subjugated knowledges” of early musical pasts.77 For example, many have highlighted queer and gender-queer aspects of early music or, indeed, the queerness of early music itself: its non-normativity and lesser cultural, aesthetic, and commercial value – especially in North America – relative to musics redolent of modernity. This quality resonates with many of us who find ourselves similarly positioned (or who, in solidarity, position ourselves) relative to hegemonic Western modernity.78 In fact, this is one reason why, as a queer woman, I am drawn to this music and its history, and why I so often find affinities with others who are similarly drawn to it. Queer and gender-queer artists, scholars, and fans have often creatively appropriated what I am calling the untimeliness of some early musics, finding in them a refuge from normativity and a resource for articulating other knowledges and ethics. If musicologists have begun to reclaim the untimeliness of certain subjugated European early modernities, we have not, for the most part,

Early Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, [1990] 2007), 176–95. I have also expressed ambivalence on this question in the past, and this essay is partly an effort to think with, rather than in spite of that discomfort. 76 For example, Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 35–52; Suzanne G. Cusick, “‘There Was Not One Lady Who Failed to Shed a Tear’: Arianna Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood,” Early Music 22:1 (1994): 21–44; Todd M. Borgerding, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Early Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Benoît Bolduc, “From Marvel to Camp: Medusa for the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 10:1 (2004), www.sscm-jscm.org/v10/no1/bolduc.html (accessed June 13, 2014); Judith A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Bonnie Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World; Bloechl, Native American Song; and Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 77 See Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 7–8. 78 See Suzanne G. Cusick, “Postscript: Dancing with the Ingrate,” in Borgerding, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Early Music, 283–88. In her ethnography of the Boston early music movement, Kay Kaufman Shelemay also reports that “difference” was “articulated by many” of her informants “as a central value of the movement at large.” Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds,” Ethnomusicology 45:1 (2001): 9. 104 olivia bloechl

extended this effort to early coloniality and its corollary, race.79 Coloniality is also untimely relative to modernity, but its untimeliness, as subaltern difference, is distinct from that of internally subjugated European groups and their musical pasts, even as it affects metropolitan centers. Thinking from coloniality – as Quijano, Mignolo, and others have urged – also does a different denormativizing work than thinking from queer or feminist perspectives, because the former perspective is postcolonial or decolonial, while the latter take aim at heterosexist and androcentric orders of power, respectively. A few postcolonial and decolonial theorists argue for the coloniality of gender/sexuality, and some queer theorists have embraced these anti-colonial frameworks.80 But I agree with early modernist Carla Freccero that there is value in acknowledging the specificity and limits of “queer” as “the name of a certain unsettling in relation to heteronormativity,” recognizing that there are other, often allied concepts – such as coloniality –“that convey the work of denormativization, broadly construed, for other domains.”81 I would hope that there is room in early musicology for these and other “untimely” perspectives, and I think there is potential for alliance among them in the form of coalitional scholarly, pedagogical, or artistic projects. However, in my view, the largely unexamined presence of race – and, more broadly, coloniality – in early music history, historiography, and contemporary performance culture is an obstacle to such work, as well as to broader disciplinary change. This is because the idea of early music as inherently European identifies it implicitly with whiteness and with lighter- skinned people of European descent. It is not a matter of denying the European provenance of much of the music that early musicologists study. Rather, I am trying to disentangle “early music” from “Europe,”“white,” and a sense of incipient “modernity,” in order to make room for other, counter-hegemonic historiographies of music before 1800. Our usual historicist purview selects a small set of world provenances as central to early

79 Postcolonial critique of early music is an exception, but this is still an emerging framework in the field. Moreover, postcolonial research – my own included – rarely emphasizes race per se, which partly reflects the distinct intellectual and political histories of postcolonialism and racial critique. A third, decolonial approach typically incorporates consideration of race and empire within a more explicitly activist form of critique. 80 For example, Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22:1 (2007): 186–219; and Qwo-Li Driskill et al., eds., Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). 81 Carla Freccero, “Queer Times,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3 (2007): 485. Race, empire, and early music 105 music, marginalizing the rest of the world’s musics and effectively denying their co-temporality. When this selection is supported by a tacit concept of “white” and by the value and power structures it encodes, early music and its historiography can carry hegemonic force, despite the marginal positioning of many of its practitioners. This is another face of the normativity that queer and feminist musicology has opposed, and it seems to me that this commonality is a natural basis for alliance with anti-racist or decolonial critique. In many instances, the Europeanness of early music also seems to act as a discourse of racial inclusion and exclusion in the present. I can only speculate about this discursive function here, but a brief example will clarify what I mean. A rhetoric of cultural whiteness82 is common in early music promotional rhetoric and imagery, where it is mainly expressed in terms of European heritage or roots.83 European Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou put it thus in promoting the European Day of Early Music (March 13, 2013): “Early music is a central part of our shared cultural heritage as Europeans...a powerful symbol of our civilization and of our common European identity.”84 Talk of heritage and identity is characteristic of cultural revivalist movements like early music, and it can accommodate a range of political positions.85 Yet Vassiliou’s statement outlines a cultural fundamentalism that is widely invoked in European politics, especially in support of anti-immigrant policies (which mainly target poor and, often, darker-skinned migrants from the south).86 The language of

82 See George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006); and Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness as a Strategic Rhetoric,” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage, 1999), 96–103. 83 Ethnomusicologists have noted a similar discourse in the Celtic music revival in the 1980s and 1990s. See Martin Stokes and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003), esp. Afterword by Timothy D. Taylor, “Gaelicer Than Thou” (275–90). Musicologist Melanie Marshall is also researching the racialization of timbre in the British early music movement, including its recent embrace of multiculturalism, in an essay titled (at time of writing), “The Sound of Whiteness: Early Music Vocal Performance Practice in Britain”). I am grateful to Professor Marshall for permission to cite her work pre- publication. See also Nina Eidsheim’s essay in this volume, “Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre.” 84 Androulla Vassiliou, REMA-Réseau Européen de Musique Ancienne, http://rema-eemn.net/- Message-by-Androulla-Vassiliou-.html?lang=fr (accessed June 13, 2014). 85 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Theorizing Heritage,” Ethnomusicology 39:3 (1995): 367–80; and Tamara E. Livingston, “Music Revivals: Toward a General Theory,” Ethnomusicology 43:1 (1999): 66–85. 86 Verena Stolcke coined the phrase “cultural fundamentalism” to name an essentialist position emphasizing “the distinctiveness of [European] cultural identity, traditions, and heritage” and 106 olivia bloechl

race is absent here, as it typically is in cultural fundamentalist rhetoric after multiculturalism. But grouping people by territorially defined, inherent culture, rather than race, is no less essentialized, and social scientists have argued that it may constitute a new cultural rather than biological form of racism.87 We do not need to conflate music festival promotion with rightist cultural politics to wonder whether Europeanist conceptions of early music might sometimes shelter an unwelcome politics of race.88 The hegemonic, libidinal dimensions of this racial structure cannot be addressed merely through writing more inclusive music histories, although this is important. We also need new historiographies and critical perspectives. Toward that end, I propose that establishing the archive of race – including the presence and creative activity of racially marked people – in early music history is the most immediate way to begin countering the field’s “white mythology”89 and one of its most detrimental consequences: the marginalization of “non-white” actors or aspects of their history. Moreover, this historical marginalization likely affects the demographics of early music performers, audiences, and researchers in the present, thereby making teaching early music history that much more difficult in a racially diverse North American university setting. So I would like to point, in conclusion, to several potentially fruitful areas of historical research on race in early music, in the hopes of laying the empirical groundwork for the kind of theoretical and critical work I am also calling for. The first area is human migration and the musical “migration” and mixture it fostered: in particular, global travel of musicians, composers, instrument makers, or other musical people, and their encounter with local racial or caste schemas. One obvious trajectory is migration between Europe and colonialized locales, but equally important is migration involving other powerful urban centers, such as Beijing, Constantinople, or Delhi. (Clearly this would require a not-inconsiderable comparative facility.) A second, related area would involve the demographics of musicians, composers, patrons, librettists, designers, or other artists,

assuming “the closure of culture by territory.” Verena Stolcke, “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe,” Current Anthropology 36:1 (1995): 2. 87 Alana Lentin, “Replacing ‘Race’, Historicizing ‘Culture’ in Multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39:4 (2005): 379–96; and Alana Lentin, “Post-Race, Post Politics: The Paradoxical Rise of Culture After Multiculturalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37:8 (2014): 1268–85. 88 It should be clear, but bears underlining, that this is not about morally condemning the early music revival movement or the scholarship coming out of it. There is a morality to race and racism, of course, but it is the politics of race that interest me most here. 89 Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” in Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–72; and Young, White Mythologies. Race, empire, and early music 107 with a view toward expanding our understanding of the social relations involved in musical production. A third would involve racial, ethnic, or caste legislation, jurisprudence, and police or penal activity regarding music. A fourth area is the role of race in music institutions (including guilds, confraternities, theaters, etc.) and their functioning. Finally, research on racial representation – in discourse, iconography, or performance – could help us understand how music mediated and contributed to racial configurations and politics. Documenting these racial dimensions of global early modern/colonial musical life could begin to dismantle mythologies of racial absence – or “whiteness”–in early music.

4 What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear bonnie gordon

In 1791, when Thomas Jefferson traveled to Philadelphia as the US Secretary of State, he left his eldest daughter Martha in charge of his younger daughter Polly. Martha worried that Polly did not practice enough music: “As for the harpsichord though I put it in fine order it has been to little purpose till very lately. I am in hopes she will continue to attend to that also.”1 Martha (Patsy) Jefferson had lived in Paris with her father from the ages of twelve to eighteen, and had attended numerous musical events there and developed into an accomplished harpsichord player. Much of the extant music in Jefferson’s collection belonged to her.2 In addition to news about harpsichords and musical education, Martha and her father exchanged letters about events unfolding in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now known as Haiti: “Nothing can be more distressing than the situation of the inhabitants, as their slaves have been called into action, and are a terrible engine, absolutely ungovernable...An army and fleet from France are expected every hour to quell the disorders.”3 Jefferson was worried about a series of revolts that culminated in the Haitian Revolution, which would lead to the elimination of slavery in the colony and to its permanent independence from France.4 There is some indication that the revolts that so concerned Jefferson might have been catalyzed by the incantations of a mixed-race Vodou priestess, one hot night in August 1791. The legend, which has loomed large in the

1 Martha Jefferson Randolph, to Thomas Jefferson, January 16, 1791, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, eds. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 2 The Jefferson girls both underwent a process of gender socialization much like that elaborated by Ruth A. Solie in her essay, “‘Girling’ at the Parlor Piano,” in Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 85–117. 3 Thomas Jefferson, to Martha Jefferson Randolph, March 24, 1791, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. 4 See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd edn. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963); Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); and David P. Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the 108 Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 109 national Haitian imaginary, states that the woman – usually referred to as an “African priestess”–sacrificed a pig representing the forest’s free spirit. Participants reportedly soaked their fingers in the pig’s blood and inaugurated a revolution that had been brewing for two years.5 I take the contrast between the cultivated European music of Martha Jefferson Randolph and the incantations of the imagined Vodou priestess as points of departure for discussing the racialization of sound and noise in Jefferson’s Virginia. Like most of Jefferson’s daughters and grand- daughters, Martha was an accomplished musician whose ability to read and play Western classical music, as well as Irish and Scottish folk songs, mattered for her self-presentation as a genteel white woman. Colonial Americans, especially those of Martha’s ethnicity and class, embraced cultivated and Euro-folk music, in part because European culture was gradually becoming racialized as white. The need to identify these sound traditions as white was related to the ongoing racialization of Afro- diasporic musics as black – and, thus, as other – in a multiracial slave society. As the settler population took on the task of nation building in the early Republic, they did so in part by marking themselves as metropolitan and cultivated, in opposition to the subordinated, enslaved, black, and mixed-race populations. This essay argues that music and noise in Jefferson’s world was bound up with that nation-building project, which incorporated racial difference as a complex but integral component. It considers the role of sound and musical aesthetics in the emergence of race as a political and social category, particularly in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and in the milieu of his Virginia plantation, Monticello. In this context, both European- and African-derived musics became thoroughly racialized as “white” and “black,” respectively, and became part of the discourses surrounding racial hierarchies and chattel slavery. In sum, I argue that the silencing of “black noise” in Jeffersonian Virginia mirrors the effective silencing by the West of the Haitian Revolu- tion, both in its immediate aftermath and in the interim. Distinctions between music and noise cannot be separated from race, in either of these contexts.6 As Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman write, “Black noise

5 See Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (University of Chicago Press, 2007). 6 In this essay, I mostly refer to racialized phenotype (blackness). The essay at times also moves toward discussions of racialized geographical origins (“Africa”) and social status (enslaved, descended from slaves, associated with slavery, or – more recently – minoritized). 110 bonnie gordon

represents the kinds of political aspirations that are inaudible and illegible within the prevailing formulas of political rationality.”7 This essay listens to Jefferson’s erasure of black sounds in conjunction with the sonic resonances of the Haitian Revolution, in order to understand the silencing of Afro-diasporic music in colonial Virginia from a broader, hemispheric perspective. I tune into four connected mechanisms for silencing. First, I will argue that Jefferson silenced the sounds of the enslaved. Jeffersonian sources effect a repressive and discursive silence or erasure, in that his music collection and his writings about sound lack almost any reference to the sounds of the enslaved population at Monticello. Second, US slave laws and jurisprudence restricted musical practices, especially drumming. Third, extra-legal (social or non-state violent) restriction by slave owners of musicking of all kinds also regulated sounds. Finally, modern historiographies of Jefferson, the slave south, American music, and black music have achieved a kind of diachronic silencing. Jefferson’s archive provides an ideal case for examining the entangle- ment of music and sound with power structures in a racist chattel slavery society.8 His repressive musical discourse – shaped by his status as a slave owner with absolute power over the persons he owned – involves a quasi- sovereign legalistic exercise of power. In fact, his inability to hear the sounds of the enslaved allowed him to write those who labored for his livelihood out of citizenship and ultimately out of the status of human. At the same time, Jefferson lived in a world in which sonic practices served as productive disciplinary regimes: bells regulated time and human labor on plantations, and fifes and drums animated military defenses against slave rebellions. The essay begins, then, by discussing the music that Jefferson did hear and noting the ways in which it was racialized as white. I go on to discuss noise as a theoretical category, taking the soundscape of the Haitian Revolution not just as part of a history of political unrest, but as a kind of sonic unrest that threatened the binary categories of music and noise, white and black, that Jefferson and others like him worked so hard to uphold.

7 Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” Representations 92:1 (Fall 2005): 1–15. 8 My conception of power is indebted to Michel Foucault, as in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980). What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 111

Making white music and black noise

Before turning to the racialization of black music in Jefferson’s world, it is important to note the obvious but often unstated fact that cultivated and folk Euro-settler musics were equally racialized, as white. As numerous studies of settler colonialism have noted, settler populations worked to differentiate themselves from dispossessed peoples – in this case, the enslaved African Americans and Native Americans.9 In the slave south, as settler colonialists began the project of nation building, leaders like Jefferson understood the importance of building a white cultural identity through – among other things – music. The musical world of Thomas Jefferson has for the most part slipped between disciplinary cracks. Music studies have always been Europe- centered, and even ethnomusicology, which for a long time defined its topic of study in opposition to the West, disregarded music in the United States. But anyone who has visited Monticello or Googled the nation’s third president, knows that the author of the Declaration of Independence played the violin well, claimed to practice for three hours a day, and owned some very impressive harpsichords. In a much-quoted 1778 letter to Giovanni Fabbroni, an Italian naturalist and economist, Jefferson explained that music is “the favorite passion of my soul.” By this, he clearly meant European music. He went on to ask Fabbroni to find musicians who could make an orchestra at Monticello.10 And, writing in 1785 to his friend Charles Bellini while in Paris, he explained, “The last of them, [music] particularly, is an enjoyment, the deprivation of which with us, cannot be calculated. I am almost ready to say, it is the only thing which from my heart I envy them, and which, in spite of all the authority of the Decalogue, I do covet.”11 The music that Jefferson collected likewise remains obscure within the music disciplines. American music studies generally focus on the twentieth century; and most of the music Jefferson collected is, by received aesthetic

9 On settler colonialism, see Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review 106:5 (December 2001): 1692–720; and Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, eds., Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 10 Thomas Jefferson, to Giovanni Fabbroni, June 8, 1778, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. 11 Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Bellini, September 30, 1785, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. 112 bonnie gordon

standards, not very good. It thus stands well outside the Western musical canon. Some of his favorite composers included Campioni, Hayden (not Haydn), and Schobert (not Schubert). None of these composers can compete with Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven in the annals of music history. The folk tunes too elude scholarship: they are too stylized and Euro-derived to entice ethnomusicologists, and too “unrefined” to entice historians of Western art music. Rather than simply amassing printed music, Jefferson had it bound into volumes, in an attempt to preserve sheet music and smaller works.12 Among other things, the volumes contain old editions of music from London’s pleasure gardens, such as Thomas Arne’s Thomas and Sally,a volume of music for Spanish guitar, French harpsichord sonatas, and arrangements of popular Scottish ballads for various instruments. The collection also includes manuscript music notebooks that his wife and in-laws owned and used to copy favorite tunes, exercises, and other musical notes. His wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, copied keyboard exercises, popular songs, and short pieces by the likes of Handel and Arne. It also contains a large hardbound book inscribed “John Wayles,” who was Jefferson’s father-in-law. This eclectic volume mixes drinking songs and selections from popular ballad operas. The drinking songs, with titles like “Come Fill Me a Bumper” and “Sparkling Champagne,” are pasted on the back pages, taken from a newspaper called the Bristol Journal. Finally, Jefferson’s well-known scrapbooks record numerous musical performances.13 The collection, like Jefferson’s writings, lacks almost any reference to the sounds of the enslaved population at Monticello, comprised mostly of individuals of West African descent. Despite the demonstrable presence of enslaved musicians, Jefferson mentions African Americans making music exactly twice in his entire large and well-catalogued collection of written materials. Enter the problem of archival silence. Historical musicologists are a source- and text-based discipline, and we depend on written archives. Yet the sounds of non-white musicians are often absent from the colonial written record, because of racialized structures of preservation and value. In listening to this silence, I take my cue take my cue from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, which works to render audible historical

12 Helen Cripe, Thomas Jefferson and Music, rev. edn. (Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2009). 13 For an extensive discussion of Jefferson as collector, see Emily Gale, “A Presidential Songcatcher: Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks,” paper presented at the symposium Soundscapes of Jefferson’s America, University of Virginia, March 2010. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 113 omissions of the Haitian Revolution.14 Unlike the American and French revolutions, the Haitian Revolution did not make it into histories of that great age of revolution until the 1970s. For a long time, this black revolution remained tacit in the annals of western history, in part because it was enacted by largely non-literate slaves (and thus was not preceded or backed by a learned public oppositional discourse). Likewise, the music and sound of the enslaved remain tacit because they existed outside the written tradition and the written record. Trouillot starts with the assumption that if there is silence, there must have been silencing, and he takes the Haitian Revolution as an exemplary silence in history. The Revolution was all but unthinkable in its own time, as few beyond enslaved Haitians could imagine black slaves having the desire, will, and capacity to overthrow a colonial power. For Trouillot, this historiography exemplifies the power of the archive to define what is and is not a legitimate object of research and mention. Indeed, revolutionaries who were enslaved enter into the written historical record of the Haitian Revolution only during interrogations by French officers. The powers of technology, literacy, publication, and information were at the time all owned and operated by the French colonial powers. Thus, in Western historiography, the Haitian Revolution, in contrast to what is imagined as the enlightened movements of the French and American Revolutions, was imagined as one of animalistic slave violence. In the story of the Haitian Revolution, silence is a metaphor for the erasure of history and the archives. But the story of Jefferson and black noise is also one of literally blocking noise. Theorists of audio culture tend to posit noise as arising in the nineteenth century with the noise of capitalist industry. Yet noise has been a tacit organizer of sonic space – and of the powers implied by those spaces – for much longer. Jefferson is a prime example. His listening practices effectively marked African American sounds as noise, not music. While he used music of the European elite and folk traditions for nation building, he erased and excluded the sounds of the African American cultures that surrounded him as a symbolic way of denying them citizenship and status as humans.15

14 See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995). 15 One exception to Jefferson’s exclusive listening was his accommodation of Native cultures–but he heard them only because propping them up served to counter European claims for the inherent degeneracy of the New World. 114 bonnie gordon

Jefferson believed in quietude. As Mark Smith and others have argued, southern planters understood quietude not just as the absence of sound, but also as the placid tranquility of their own order.16 Noise, on the other hand, symbolized rebellion, dissent, and chaos. Historical descriptions of the Haitian Revolution, for example, commonly stress noise. A white French prisoner who was taken prisoner in Haiti wrote that, “Hearing the noise they were making, I jumped out of my bed and shouted: ‘Who goes there?’ A voice like thunder answered me: ‘It is death!’ At the same time, I heard a considerable number of gunshots and the voice of hordes of blacks who filled the house.”17 And in Virginia, Nat Turner’s rebellion began with supernatural noise. While working in the slave owner’s fields on May 12, Turner “heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.”18 In Western culture, noise has long been associated with discord, chaos, rebellion, and otherness. Plato made a distinction between music and noise, relegating to the category of noise the clamorous sounds of those who did not fit his moral and political order. Indeed, Plato’s worries about sound might well come out of the mouths and pens of nervous twentieth- century critics of rock and roll, jazz, or hip hop: “The introduction of novel fashions in music is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of society, whose most important conventions are unsettled by any revolutions in that quarter.”19 For Plato, music’s ability to inflame the passions led to massive injustice, conflict, and an explosion of laws that futilely attempted to control society. In the 1980s, Jacques Attali, riffing on Plato, argued that the process of distinguishing music from noise allows the consolidation of community:

Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political. More than colors

16 See Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 17 As cited in Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 50. 18 Nat Turner and Thomas Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, VA. As Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray (Richmond, VA: Thomas R. Gray, 1832), 9–10. 19 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 115. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 115 and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony.20

Attali’s ideas explain Jefferson’s attitude towards sound and the plantation in some important ways, especially his concept that sound can orchestrate social codes. If a historical politics of exclusion has marked African American sonic and political spaces as negative, those negative spaces were and are far from silent. And here I am thinking of negative space as what Fred Moten has explained as the tendency of black aesthetics to project unintelligible gestures that white hegemonic logics use to confirm the irrationality of blackness.21 In historical terms, to hear these negative spaces or hear the sounds rendered unintelligible – and thus not worthy of mention – means staying attuned to the sounds that Jefferson must have heard but never discussed. Despite the fact that Jefferson spent hours riding through his plantation, his writings make it seem as if he had never heard a corn-shucking song, or any other slave song, for that matter. Jefferson kept noise outside. When he built Monticello, he built it on a hill with the slave quarters known as Mulberry Row below. Craig Barton has argued that the views from the Monticello east portico “actively deny the presence of the black body. Through the manipulation of the landscape section and placement of the volume of the winged dependencies, Jefferson skillfully rendered invisible the slaves and their place of work from the important symbolic view of the property.”22 Jefferson also tried to cancel African American sound. He installed plate glass windows, which, in addition to blocking rain and cold while admitting sunlight, cancelled unwelcome sounds. The glass windows seem especially significant here. Murray Schafer writes, that “With indoor living, two things developed antonymously: the high art of music, and noise pollution – for the noises were the sounds that were kept outside. After art music had moved indoors, street music

20 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 6. 21 See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 22 Craig Evan Barton, “Duality and Invisibility: Race and Memory in the Urbanism of the American South,” in Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 4. 116 bonnie gordon

became an object of particular scorn.”23 The glass windows orchestrated Jefferson’s soundscape, blocking out sounds. In addition to keeping the sounds of the enslaved out of the house, Jefferson practiced what Franz Boas described in 1889 as “sound blindness”: “The characteristic feature of sound-blindness is inability to perceive the essential peculiarities of certain sounds.”24 Boas was responding to linguists who claimed that native languages had alternating sounds or sonic inconsistencies that reflected Native American linguistic inferiority, and thus social inferiority to white English speakers. Boas argued that linguists misheard Native American languages: that they literally could not hear the sounds of the other. In the American slave-holding south, things that were misheard or not heard at all fell into the category of noise – one that came with racialized connotations that were deeply tied to the chattel slave system. Jon Cruz explains,

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century black music appears to have been heard by captors and overseers primarily as noise – that is, as strange, unfathomable, and incomprehensible. However, with the rise of the abolitionist movement, black song making became considered increasingly as a font of black meanings.25

Before Frederick Douglass and the essentially ethnographic “discovery” of slave songs, learned white discourse did not register African American music as a creative or skilled activity. Dominant white auralities obscured spirituals altogether, and instrumental skills like fiddling mattered mostly because they increased the value of a slave and provided an identifying feature to catch them if they ran away. Cruz reads Frederick Douglass’s now-famous descriptions as prompting a crucial turn in how whites heard and interpreted slaves’ singing. Dou- glass’s descriptions of masters making slaves sing also points up that musicianship of the enslaved was both an instrument of white sovereignty and a source of black resistance: an instrumental practice that made the work go faster and that allowed for some independence of expression. Douglass wrote that the songs of slaves “told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over

23 R. Murray Schafer, “Music, Non-Music and the Soundscape,” in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, ed. John Paynter et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 35. 24 Franz Boas, “On Alternating Sounds,” American Anthropologist 2:1 (1889): 47. 25 Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 43. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 117 with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was testimony against slavery and a prayer to god for deliverance from chains.”26 Here Douglass calls out the misreading of the meaning of slave music (both sonically and lyrically); he also highlights song as an instrument of control by masters. “Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave is not liked by masters or overseers. ‘Make a noise,’‘make a noise,’ and ‘bear a hand’ are the words usually addressed to the slaves when there is silence amongst them.”27 Douglass’s remark highlights the conflation of slave music and noise, and the demand that slaves perform their contentedness through making music. The categories of silence, quietude, music, and noise are radically contingent, and in the context of southern chattel slavery they were highly racialized. Overseers encouraged slaves to sing while they worked: for example, an article entitled “Management of the Negro” stated, “When at work, I have no objection to their whistling or singing some lively tune, but no drawling tunes are allowed in the field, for their motions are almost certain to keep time with the music.”28 And we know that at slave markets – particularly at the largest one, in New Orleans – slave traders made slaves dance in order to show off their bodies. Solomon Northup, a free black from Saratoga, New York, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, remembered this practice at the New Orleans market:

After being fed, in the afternoon, we were again paraded and made to dance. Bob, a colored boy, who had some time belonged to Freeman, played on the violin. Standing near him, I made bold to inquire if he could play the “Virginia Reel.” He answered he could not, and asked me if I could play. Replying in the affirmative, he handed me the violin. I struck up a tune, and finished it. Freeman ordered me to continue playing, and seemed well pleased, telling Bob that I far excelled him – a remark that seemed to grieve my musical companion very much.29

26 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 6th edn. (London: H. G. Collins, 1851), 19. 27 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 19. 28 “Management of Negroes,” in James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, The Industrial Resources, etc. of the Southern and Western States (New York: Office of De Bow’s Review, 1852), 335. 29 The literary genre of the slave narrative grew out of enslaved people giving accounts of their experiences. When enslaved persons themselves were not literate, they communicated their experiences to (often white) literate interlocutors who then published the books. Northup published his memoire in 1853 with the help of David Wilson, a local white writer. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855), 79. 118 bonnie gordon

There is no reason to believe that Jefferson would have stood outside the link between song and labor that permeated plantation culture. His daughters sang corn-shucking songs and rowing songs taught to them by the enslaved women who raised them. Shucking songs passed the time during the arduous corn shelling that followed a harvest, and rowing songs regulated rowing. In 1863, the former slave Francis Frederick described corn-shucking songs: “Some of the masters make their slaves shuck the corn. All the slaves stand on one side of the heap, and throw the ears over, which are then cribbed. This is the time when the whole country far and wide resounds with the corn-songs.”30 As Frederick tells it, masters saw slaves shucking and asked them if they were going to sing, and the slaves began to sing. George Tucker, whom Jefferson appointed as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia and who was an avid anti-abolitionist, presented a vivid description of corn songs in his 1824 novel The Valley of the Shenandoah, which was set on a Virginia plantation in 1796:

The corn songs of these humble creatures would please you ... for some of them have a small smack of poetry, and are natural at expressions of kind and amiable feelings—such as, praise of their master... The air of these songs has not much variety or melody, and requires not more flexibility of voice than they all possess, as they all join in the chorus... [T]here are thousands among us, who never attended a corn-shocking, or even heard a corn song—so entirely separated are the two classes of black and white, and so little curiosity does that excite.31

Here Tucker is not willing to call the tunes music, but he does seem to admonish the tendency of white slaveholders to remain deaf to their sounds. If blacks and whites heard music differently, they also heard bells differently. Time at Monticello was marked by bells. Jefferson had a varied collection of bells that kept Monticello running, and slaves rang most of those bells. The bells served as sonic instruments of domination that compelled slaves into action. Bells regulated every aspect of time for whites and blacks, but the resonance of that regulation had deeply racialized overtones. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson was well aware of the power of bells. When ordering gongs for the house, he specified that they make sounds

30 Francis Frederick, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky: A Narrative by Francis Fedric, Escaped Slave/Edited with an introduction and notes by C. L Innes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 43. 31 As cited in Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 172–73. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 119

“which might be heard all over my farm.”32 Bells were the metronome that marked plantation time. Alain Corbin has read bells in nineteenth-century French parishes as representing victory over chaos and creating a community through the territorializing potential of sound.33 Likewise, Jefferson understood that loud bells created and marked communities. In 1825, while looking for a perfect bell for the University of Virginia’s Rotunda, Jefferson wrote, “We want a bell which can generally be heard at the distance of 2 miles, because this will ensure its being always heard in Charlottesville.”34 In 1949, Charles Bullock recalled, “Peter Fossett, as footman, had to run to open the gate upon the arrival or departure of vehicles. There was a large bell which was rung upon the arrival or departure of ones to Monticello, whether by foot or riding.”35 In February of 1815, George Ticknor, who was visiting from Massachusetts, wrote,

The afternoon and evening passed as on the two days previous; for everything is done with such regularity, that when you know how one day is filled, I suppose you know how it is with the others. At eight o’clock the first bell is rung in the great hall, and at nine the second summons you to the breakfast-room, where you find everything ready. After breakfast every one goes, as inclination leads him, to his chamber, the drawing-room, or the library. The children retire to their school- room with their mother, Mr. Jefferson rides to his mills on the Rivanna, and returns at about twelve. At half past three the great bell rings, and those who are disposed resort to the drawing-room, and the rest go to the dining-room at the second call of the bell, which is at four o’clock.36

The bell activated human labor, so that both people and bells served as instruments of Jefferson’s designs. And we know that even the drum, which was heavily regulated because of its associations with slave insurrections, was played at Monticello, as Isaac Jefferson recalled in a memoir recounting his life on the plantation.

32 Thomas Jefferson, to Henry Remsen, November 13, 1792, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. 33 See Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 34 Thomas Jefferson, to Joseph Coolidge, April 12, 1825, Jefferson, Thomas, and others. Letters to and from Jefferson, 1825, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.lib. virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Jef10Gr.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/ english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=56&division=div1 (accessed July 29, 2014). 35 Charles H. Bullock, to Pearl Graham, Howard University Archives, Washington, DC. Bullock had heard this when he drove Rev. Peter Fossett (1815–1901) up to Monticello in 1900, when the former slave came from Ohio to visit his boyhood home. 36 George Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876), 1:36. 120 bonnie gordon

Isaac, an enslaved blacksmith, was by 1847 a free black man working in Petersburg, where the Reverend Charles Campbell interviewed him and later published the interviews as a “memoir.” In the memoir, Isaac (speaking of himself) states,

Isaac larnt to beat drum about this time. Bob Anderson a white man was a blacksmith. Mat Anderson was a black man & worked with Bob. Bob was a fifer Mat was a drummer. Mat bout that time was sort a-makin love to Mary Hemings. The soldiers at Richmond, in the camp at Bacon Quarter Branch would come every two or three days to salute the Governor at the Palace, marching about there drumming & fifing. Bob Anderson would go into the house to drink; Mat went into the kitchen to see Mary Hemings. He would take his drum with him into the kitchen & set it down there. Isaac would beat on it & Mat larnt him how to beat.37

Jefferson supposedly gave the enslaved Scott family special treatment, perhaps because of their musical ability. In 1880, Orra Langhorne, a Virginia suffragette and oral historian, visited the last living Scott. As Robert Scott reported, “the taste for music shown by his family had early attracted Mr. Jefferson’s notice, as he dearly loved music himself, and he had taken much kindly interest in the family.”38 Jefferson, in other words, gave preferential treatment to certain slaves, based in part on their musical aptitude.

Noise and Jefferson’s scientific racism

The politics of noise at Monticello and in Jefferson’s writings cannot be disconnected from his scientific racism. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was fundamental to the codification of scientific racism in the new Republic, and was in turn instrumental in upholding and justifying the slavery system. While Jefferson’s views were not unique, he was one of the first in the new nation to write about them.39 Robert P. Forbes has persuasively argued that Jefferson wrote the book in part to combat growing critiques of slavery by the Europeans and that he worked to

37 Isaac Jefferson, “Life of Isaac Jefferson of Petersburg, Virginia, Blacksmith” (1847), http:// encyclopediavirginia.org/_Life_of_Isaac_Jefferson_of_Petersburg_Virginia_Blacksmith_by_ Isaac_Jefferson_1847 (accessed June 13, 2014). 38 Orra Langhorne, Southern Sketches from Virginia, 1881–1901, ed. Charles E. Wynes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964), 82. 39 For the classic treatment of Jefferson’s position in discussions of race, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970). What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 121 map the slaveholder’s understanding of slaves as chattel onto an Enlightenment world view.40 Notes on the State of Virginia sits squarely in the tradition of natural history, whose purpose was in essence to observe, compare, measure, and order humans animals.41 The genealogy of modern racism is inextricably intertwined with the classification of race in natural histories. Indeed, when Jefferson made Africans the subject of natural history, they became objects for study, not subjects: or, to put it differently, species of animals, not humans. The book directly engages Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who in his Histoire Naturelle argued that all species of the New World were degenerate.42 And, more broadly, it attempts to present Jefferson’s interpretations of Virginia – as a stand-in for the United States in general – to a wide philosophical audience. In making his case for the supposed inferiority of blacks, Jefferson wrote, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”43 Jefferson’suse of the word “suspicion” ought not to soften his statements: the book as a whole makes a sustained argument for racial hierarchy. He concludes, for example, that “it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigation of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”44 Note here that by 1829, the black abolitionist David Walker was already refuting these claims:

Will not a lover of natural history, then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of MAN as distinct as nature has formed them? – I hope you will

40 Robert P. Forbes, “Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson and the Imperative of Race,” Torrington Articles (2012). Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robert_forbes/3 (accessed June 20, 2014). 41 There is a vast literature on Jefferson and race in Notes on the State of Virginia. See, for example, Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 65–70, 147–69; and David Tucker, Enlightened Republicanism: A Study of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2008). 42 George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, 3rd edn. trans. William Smellie (London: A. Strahan, 1791). 43 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: printed for John Stockdale, 1787), 239. 44 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 232. 122 bonnie gordon

try to find out the meaning of this verse – its widest sense and all its bearings: whether you do or not, remember the whites do. This very verse, brethren, having emanated from Mr. Jefferson, a much greater philosopher the world never afforded, has in truth injured us more, and has been as great a barrier to our emancipation as any thing that has ever been advanced against us. I hope you will not let it pass unnoticed.45

Walker argued that, in fact, Jefferson’s Notes was a provocative document that should incite slaves to protest and flee. Jefferson supported his conclusion about the supposed inferiority of black persons in his few discussions of their musicality. As noted, he mentioned African American music-making exactly twice, in Query XIV (“Laws”) of the Notes on the State of Virginia: “In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.”46 With the word “catch,” Jefferson was referring to the English tradition of three-voice rounds, usually for unaccompanied male singers. These songs, which typically had light and bawdy texts, circulated aurally rather than in print; as such, they hardly met Enlightenment aesthetic ideals of cultivated music. And he argued that they could not even achieve creativity, aesthetics, or rational thought.47 “Their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” he wrote. In other words, he regarded blacks as equal in memory, but inferior in reason, more ardent, but less sophisticated. Arguing against any potential for a black aesthetic, Jefferson wrote, “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”48 His second mention appears in a famous footnote documenting the slaves’ performance on the banjar (the northwest African ancestor of the modern banjo): “The instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they

45 David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 31. 46 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 233–34. 47 Jefferson’s ideas were in keeping with others of his time. The French had also long used scientific racism to justify slavery and persecution. For instance, Jefferson’s ideas corresponded in some ways to those of Buffon, who was in fact an implied interlocutor of his text. 48 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 234. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 123 brought hither from Africa, and which is the original of the guitar, its chords being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar.”49 Jefferson acknowledges some degree of musicality, but no aesthetic originality. To take this one step further, blacks were denied a musical voice; this is why, despite his obsessive touring of his plantation, Jefferson appears never to have heard a work song. Jefferson’s refusal to assimilate African Americans into his nation-building project is by now well known. Catharine Holland explains:

In a very important sense, slaves cannot be fully or comfortably integrated as American citizens within the terms of Jeffersonian nationalism because they are, paradoxically enough, not products of American nature but creations of the law itself, or more precisely, of what is most injudicious in American law.50

This is not just a passive erasure. Holland writes that within Jefferson’s conception of what we might call a body politic, “the black body figures as a principle of dissonance and disharmony in the national present.”51 To push her musical metaphor further, the sounds Jefferson heard from black musicians simply did not fit into his scheme of musical nation building, even as he heard them. Their music, like their bodies, troubled his notion of what constituted American music. This seems especially ironic today, given that the vast majority of what is understood as American music emerged from African American culture.

A different tune

When Jefferson talked at all about emancipation, he embraced a forced deportation of freed slaves to Africa. His proposal reflected deep anxieties on the part of American slaveholders; and, indeed, the Haitian Revolution likely affirmed his anxieties. Thousands of white planters and free people of color came to the United States in the early 1800s, many of them with slaves. The same period also saw a series of attempted slave rebellions in the United States, which some attributed to the influx of Haitians. The Haitian Revolution implicitly threatened Jefferson’s understanding

49 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 233–34. See also Jay Scott Odell and Robert B. Winans, “Banjo,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/01958 (accessed March 26, 2013). 50 Catherine A. Holland, The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2001), 35. 51 Holland, The Body Politic, 42. 124 bonnie gordon

of black slaves as inherently incapable of self-governance and resistance. Slavery as an American institution depended on the assumption that enslaved Africans and their descendants could not imagine or demand freedom because they were subhuman, incapable of imagination, creativity, and reason, as Jefferson’s multiple writings on slavery assert. When slaves rose up against 60,000 of Napoleon’s troops, the effects of the revolution rippled through the United States – a slave society that, although founded on liberal principles of freedom and equality, restricted these rights to white men of means. In the Anglo-American imagination of the francophone Caribbean, Haiti came to embody a reign of terror. Official US discourse cast Haitian revolutionaries as criminals bent on devastation, while casting their own revolutionaries as self-sacrificing patriots. Jefferson, like other slaveholders, understood the events of the Haitian Revolution as potentially dangerous. In 1793, in the wake of the bloody start to the Revolution, he wrote, “The situation of the St. Domingo fugitives (aristocrats as they are) calls aloud for pity and charity. Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man... I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India Island will remain in the hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Potomac), have to wade through and try to avert them.”52 Finally, in 1799, he wrote, “If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have to fear it.”53 For enslaved blacks, the Haitian Revolution meant something completely different: it signified hope. Moreover, Caribbean slaves who were shipped to Louisiana and sold throughout the South brought with them an understanding of a republic with racial equality. In 1797, Prince Hall, an African American who fought in the American Revolution, said the following words to the Boston African Masonic Lodge: “My brethren, let us not be cast down under these and many other abuses we at present labour under: for the darkest is before the break of day...Let us remember what a dark day it was with our African brethren, six years ago, in the French West Indies. Nothing but the snap of the whip was heard, from

52 Thomas Jefferson, to James Monroe, July 14, 1793, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. 53 Thomas Jefferson, to James Madison, February 12, 1799, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 125 morning to evening.”54 David Walker, in the address discussed above, had called on his readers to “go to our brethren, the Haytians [sic], who, according to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us.”55 He clearly meant for his readers to follow the Haitians in instigating insurrections. Since it occurred, the Haitian Revolution has been associated with an event that may or may not have occurred at Bois Caïman. One of the first written accounts of this ceremony was produced in 1793–95 by Antoine Dalmas, a French surgeon who fled to the United States following the revolution:

They celebrated a sort of feast or sacrifice in the middle of a wooded untilled plot on the Choiseul plantation, called le Caïman, where a very large number of Negroes assembled. An entirely black pig, surrounded by fetishes [fétiches], loaded with offerings each more bizarre than the other was the holocaust offered to the all-powerful spirit [génie] of the black race. The rituals that the negroes conducted while cutting its throat, the avidity with which they drank of his blood, the value they set in possessing a few of his bristles, a sort of talisman which, according to them, was to render them invulnerable, all serve to characterize Africans. That such an ignorant and besotted caste would make the superstitious rituals of an absurd and sanguinary religion serve as a prelude to the most frightful crimes was to be expected.56

Dalmas’s narrative reflects his position as an exiled colonist, especially in its mixture of an obvious racism with an essentialized exoticism about African religious practices. Another description is from the Lettre annuelle de l’Ordre de Notre Dame, first published in 1887:

The king of the cult of Voodoo had just declared war on the colonists. His brow girded with a diadem and accompanied by the queen of the cult, wearing a red sash and shaking a box [rattle] garnished with bells and containing a snake, they marched to the assault on the cities of the colony... They came to lay siege to Cap Français. By the glimmer of the great smoldering fires, punctuated by the silhouette of the spectacular rounds, the sisters perceived from the windows of their Monastery, overlooking the countryside and the city, barebreasted Negresses belonging to the sect, dancing to the mournful sound of the long, narrow

54 Prince Hall, “A Charge of 1797,” in Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1960 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 47. 55 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 58. 56 Antoine Dalmas, Histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue: depuis le commencement des troubles, jusqu’à la prise de Jérémie et du Môle S. Nicolas par les Anglais; suivie d’un Mémoire sur le rétablissement de cette colonie (Paris: Mame frères, 1814), cited and translated in Leon- Francois Hoffman, Haitian Fiction Revisited (Pueblo, CO: Passeggiata Press, 1999), 161. 126 bonnie gordon

tambourines and conch shells, and alternating with the moaning of the sacrificed creatures. In the midst of the rebels was Zamba Boukman, urging them on to the assault on the barracks and the convent, which held a good number of young girls and other colonists. He reminded them in his poetic improvisations that the whites were damned by God because they were the oppressors of the blacks, whom they crushed without pity, and he ended each refrain with these words: ‘Couté la liberté li palé coeur nous tous.’57

This romanticized and exoticized description positions the ceremony as a moment of sonic uprising: a moment made sacred and holy by song, instruments, and dancing.58 We know very little about the actual soundscape of the Haitian Revolu- tion, but drumming and charismatic incantation played a vital part in the white imaginary of the event. The role of subaltern spiritual leadership in the Haitian uprising is a matter of vituperative debate. But the idea that this subaltern musical spiritual practice instigated the rebellion remains strong, and in some ways it is the legend itself and the fears it inspired that interest me most. The Haitian Revolution, like slave revolts in the United States, was associated with martial and religious drumming. US slave owners heard slave drumming as chaotic and threatening. As Dena Epstein and Richard Rath have shown, by the time the Atlantic slave trade was consolidated, white Europeans and Americans tended to hear drums as powerful instruments of black African power and, potentially, revolt.59 The French Code Noir, first established by Louis XIV in 1685, defined slavery in the French colonies, prohibited religious practices outside of Catholicism, and

57 As cited in Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 265–66. 58 Interestingly, the French colonists’ exoticizing narratives have since been appropriated by modern Protestant Haitians and other evangelicals as a basis for casting the Haitian Revolution as diabolical. See Elizabeth McAlister, “From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History,” Studies in Religion 41:2 (2012): 187–215. Speaking about the Haitian earthquake of 2010, Pat Robertson also referred to the ceremony at Bois Caïman as a pact with the Devil. “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever...and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you get us free from the prince...true story...so the devil said okay, it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.” The Huffington Post, March 3, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/pat-robertson- tornadoes-prayer_n_1321686.html (accessed June 20, 2014). 59 See Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); and Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 127 regulated the actions and activities of all blacks. It legislated against ritual assembly, drumming, and dancing. It also banned all drumming and incantations of non-Christian African religions. In 1704, the government issued an ordinance that forbade dance and assemblies, especially on Sundays and holidays. By the 1780s, white slaveholders were very anxious about what they understood to be nighttime magical gatherings.60 American slaveholders were just as anxious about drumming. In 1740, South Carolina prohibited slaves “using and keeping drums, horns or other loud instruments.” This was in response to the Stono Rebellion of 1739, in which descriptions of drums were very prevalent. “They were less than exhausted and more than a ragged band of enslaved men some exhausted but exhilarated from their nights labors, two drummers announcing their progression and a flag bearer at their head.”61 Other states quickly followed South Carolina’s example. The French army marched to battle with bands known as corps de musique. Like the bands that accompanied colonial American militias, these groups featured snare drums and trumpets, which were meant to impose sonic order on the battlefield. Eyewitness accounts of slave revolts also suggest that armies of free blacks, slaves, and Maroons moved to the sounds of drums, conch shells and trumpets.62 By the time the revolution was in full swing, soldiers reported that rebels marched toward them singing what they described as African songs, punctuated by religious incantations from leaders.63 Incantations or no, Jefferson was correct to fear the Haitian Revolution and to view slaves and Haitian revolutionaries as forces that in the end could not be contained, despite the best efforts of the slave system. When hundreds of Haitian refugees arrived in Virginia, beginning in 1793, they brought with them slaves who had experienced successful revolts. The revolution thus reverberated through the American South, and slave owners were correct to read insurrections as related to the revolts in Saint Domingue. For instance, Virginia Governor James

60 For a detailed discussion of the spiritual practices of revolutionary Saint Domingue, see Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 24–52. 61 Peter Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103. 62 For a discussion of these accounts, see Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2010), 24–78. 63 For a study of particular slave and Maroon armies, see Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death, trans. A. Faulkner Watts (New York: Blyden Press, 1981). 128 bonnie gordon

Monroe speculated that Gabriel’s rebellion, led by the enslaved blacksmith Gabriel Prosser in 1800, was probably inspired by the recent events in Haiti: “occurrences in St. Domingo for some years past...doubtless did excite some sensation among our Slaves.”64 Southern Louisiana was especially ripe for this kind of rebellion during pre-Lentian festivities, when slaves, free men and women, and Creoles of high society mingled at balls and at the theater. Slaveholders in this region rightly feared unruly mixed-race and black slaves from the erupting Caribbean. Indeed, the largest slave revolt of the period occurred in southern Louisiana in 1811 and was led by Charles Deslondes, reputed to be a free person of color from Saint Domingue. Slaveholders were frightened by the prospect of a military operation organized by a black man who had come from Saint Domingue. In this well-orchestrated revolt, between 150 and 500 rebels stormed New Orleans in military formation, waving flags, beating drums, and following Haitian migrants. By all accounts, the sight of slaves in military formation with drums stunned witnesses.65 The sounds of the Haitian Revolution and of the North American rebellions it helped to incite loomed large in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, a novella that implicitly addresses the Haitian Revolution, was first published serially in Putman’sMonthlyin 1855.66 In Melville’s story about a slave ship, the main character’s imperial vision gives way to terrified white aurality as the black slaves on the boat begin to revolt. Delano’simperialgaze comes through most clearly as he watches the “negresses” caring for their children:

There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love, thought Captain Delano, well pleased. This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more particularly than before. He was gratified with their manners: like most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution; equally ready to die for their infants or fight for them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves. Ah! thought Captain Delano, these, perhaps, are some of the very

64 As cited in Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 169. 65 For a summary of sources and debates around the details of this insurrection, see Robert L. Paquette, “‘A Horde of Brigands?’ The Great Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811 Reconsidered,” Historical Reflections 35:1 (2005): 73–96. 66 Sidney Kaplan, American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays 1949–1989 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 159. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 129 women whom Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of. These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and ease.67

The character Delano refers to here is John Ledyard, an eighteenth-century mariner who explored Africa and the South Seas and ultimately sailed with Captain Cook. When Delano realizes that the slaves are rebelling, he is terrified by their shrieks, calls, and singing:

Soon the ship was beyond the gun’s range, steering broad out of the bay; the blacks thickly clustering round the bowsprit, one moment with taunting cries towards the whites, the next with upthrown gestures hailing the now dusky moors of ocean – cawing crows escaped from the hand of the fowler...Huddled upon the long-boat amidships, the negresses raised a wailing chant, whose chorus was the clash of the steel... For a few breaths’ space, there was a vague, muffled, inner sound, as of submerged sword-fish rushing hither and thither through shoals of black-fish. Soon, in a reunited band, and joined by the Spanish seamen, the whites came to the surface, irresistibly driving the negroes toward the stern.68

The terror of slave revolution, for Melville’s fictive colonial subject, is in part a narration of the terror of the imperial gaze transforming suddenly into the largely aural experience of white listeners hearing black slave resistance. A few years later, the black abolitionist novelist Martin R. Delany referred explicitly to the connection between black musical performance and American Revolution in the “New Orleans” chapter of Blake, or, The Huts of America. He portrayed the city’s exhibitions, festivals, balls, and gatherings as a breeding ground for revolt:

This was the evening of the day of Mardi Gras, and from long-established and time-honored custom, the celebration which commenced in the morning was now being consummated by games, shows, exhibitions, theatrical performances, festivals, masquerade balls, and numerous entertainments and gatherings in the evening. It was on this account that the Negroes had been allowed such unlimited privileges this evening.69

Delany’s description begins neutrally enough, almost like an exotic travel account meant to amuse middle-class white Northeastern readers. Indeed, a minstrel-like performer, speaking in dialect and “shuffling about over the floor” soon appears on the scene and, “stamping and singing at the top

67 Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2008), 40. 68 Melville, Benito Cereno, 77. 69 Martin R. Delany, Blake, or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), 98. 130 bonnie gordon

of his voice,” belts out a minstrel song, complete with references to “Old master.” But this particular minstrel performance is not designed to reassure white audiences, for the singer is in fact the leader of an imminent slave revolution, and he calls the slaves to arms with his song – which turns out to celebrate, rather than mourn the death of “Old master”: Come all my brethren, let us take a rest, While the moon shines bright and clear; Old master died and left us all at last, And has gone at the bar to appear! Old master’s dead and lying in his grave; And our blood will now cease to flow; He will no more tramp on the neck of the slave, For he’s gone where slaveholders go! Hang up the shovel and the hoe – o – o – o! I don’t care whether I work or no!70

In Delany’s rendering, this Louisiana minstrel scene yields not the canned music of white complacency, but what he calls the “terrible accents” of black revolution: “Insurrection! Insurrection! Death to every white!” Minstrel song becomes revolutionary “noise,” but the reader doesn’t hear it immediately and instead must learn to “hear” the difference between white complacency and black revolution.

Conclusion

As others have noted, the Haitian Revolution, which ultimately led Napoleon to sell Louisiana to Jefferson for barely four cents an acre, racialized the age of revolutions and called into question the very notion of a slaveholding republic. The Louisiana Purchase depended on the actions of a revolutionary movement in Haiti and on violent events that cost 50,000 French troops their lives, and probably twice as many Saint Dominguans.71 As Jefferson’s multiple justifications for slavery demonstrate, slavery as an institution in the United States depended on the

70 Delany, Blake, or, The Huts of America, 99. See also Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 236. 71 See James, The Black Jacobins; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution; and Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution. What Mr. Jefferson didn’t hear 131 assumption that enslaved Africans and their descendants could not imagine or demand freedom. In effect, they were seen as subhuman. The Haitian Revolution loomed large for contemporary African slaves, as it would later in the emergence of a particularly African American culture. W. E. B. Du Bois explained in 1896:

The role which the great Negro Toussaint, called L’Ouverture, played in the history of the United States has seldom been fully appreciated. Representing the age of revolution in America, he rose to leadership through a bloody terror, which contrived a Negro “problem” for the Western Hemisphere, intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one of the causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally, through the inter- working of all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition of the slave-trade by the United States in 1807.72

The refugees from Haiti also brought with them West African cultural elements, including music, and the attempts to silence that culture – literally and figuratively, diachronically and synchronically – remind us that sound was and is heavily racialized. The drums and incantations that the migrants were imagined to bring were immediately associated at the time with black noise and resistance. These sounds were thus assimilated into a larger process of racializing sound as white or black. The most important point in this essay, then, is the reminder that sound is not all about the visual, and that silence and quiet are not the same thing. Jefferson’s silence on the issue of African American musicking does not mean that it did not resound in his world. In Jefferson’s Virginia, this meant that blacks were almost always denied the potential to be musical and that their sounds were often associated with noise and disruption. Drums, dancing, and chanting all had associations with rebellion and with non-Christian practices, which slaveholders worked to stamp out. This essay, on the one hand, attempts to listen to the past; to hear Jefferson’s soundscape and the ways in which it was constructed by race. But it also stresses that acts of understanding and remembering themselves always involve sound and aurality. It is not as easy as the familiar formula, silence equals oppression and voice equals power; but the interplay between noise and music, as well as of sound and silence, depends on trying to think through real sound from the past. In other words, it is

72 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 70. 132 bonnie gordon

worth listening to the noise in the silences that supposedly embody oppression and tuning into sounds, not just ideas about sounds. History is always an act of silencing as well as envoicing, and part of our job is to bring on the sounds of the clamorous past. This listening might be a way to answer Ruth Solie’s call in Musicology and Difference to question the disciplinary assumptions not so much about what counts as music, but about what counts as music worthy of study, and thus about who has the power to interpret, define, and own music.

5 Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn’s instrumental music melanie lowe

Enlightenment moral discourse is hardly celebrated in critical work on difference, despite its global dissemination and revolutionary appropriation in the eighteenth century and after. After all, the “universal” human, its central category, is a European man. Alongside the widespread popular and scholarly rejection of this unsavory foundational tenet, copious critiques of the entire Enlightenment project have emerged from within the European philosophical tradition itself. To list only a few of the most damning ones: Heidegger denounced reason as an adversary of thought;1 Horkheimer and Adorno judged the Enlightenment as ideologically totalitarian;2 Foucault argued that its social reforms created the “carceral society”;3 and MacIntyre pronounced the Enlightenment morality project dead on arrival.4 Indeed, given such sustained interrogation of the Enlightenment and our consequent readiness to count absolutism, racism, colonialism, and sexism among its sins, it would be entirely reasonable to cringe at the thought of further critical engagement with its ideals, wondering perhaps whether any such effort risks trading in discredited clichés or beating the proverbial dead horse. Unfortunately, these concerns would be justified with regard to scholarship on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European music, for it has tended to do both. Susan McClary’s reading of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as patriarchal violence is perhaps the most notorious example.5

1 This particular distillation of Heidegger’s analysis of assertion comes from Hendrik M. Vroom, “The Critique of the Critique of Enlightenment,” in Lieven Boeve et al., eds., Faith in the Enlightenment? The Critique of the Enlightenment Revisited (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 341. See also Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1962), 195–99. 2 Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 4 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edn. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 5 Susan McClary, “Getting Down off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman’s Voice in Janike Vandervelde’s Genesis II,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 128–30. 133 134 melanie lowe

It is hardly surprising that her critical reading of this most celebrated musical testament to Enlightenment ideals fast became a lightning rod for harsh attacks from all sides.6 But from within the smaller arena of Haydn scholarship, critiques of the Enlightenment project, if engaged at all, are quickly brushed aside in favor of optimistic – emancipatory, even – readings that betray a reductive and uncritical conception of the Enlightenment. In this essay I offer an alternative. Rather than hearing in Haydn’s music unequivocal assertions of such Enlightenment ideals as tolerance and egalitarianism, or, conversely, symbolic representations of oppressive false-universals, I situate Haydn, in a Habermasian vein, within the stratified discourses of the late eighteenth-century public sphere. My critical analysis suggests that Haydn’s music projects both a naturalization and a denaturalization of difference, often simultaneously. In the end, we may hear a more nuanced and politically calculating Haydn: a composer whose music tacitly endorses the hegemony of existing social structures and institutions while nodding subtly toward their dissolution.

Difference at the inception of modernity

Surely there is no need to survey here the rich and multifarious tradition of modern scholarship on the European Enlightenment. Suffice it to say that since the landmark historical and philosophical interpretations of the 1960s, which were more or less in agreement as to the central tenets of enlightened thought in the eighteenth century,7 a constellation of Enlight- enments has displaced the notion of a unified pan-European intellectual and cultural movement. However, pluralism has not been the sole critical

6 Among the overwhelmingly negative responses to McClary’s reading of Beethoven, Pieter van den Toorn’s was particularly harsh and oddly personal. See van den Toorn, “Politics, Feminism, and Music Theory,” Journal of Musicology 9 (1991): 275–99. 7 See, for example, Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment: The 18th-Century Philosophers (New York: New American Library, 1956); Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955); Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: the Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (New York: G. Braziller, 1960); Lester G. Crocker, ed., The Age of Enlightenment (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 1966–69); Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: Knopf, 1964); Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (New York: Penguin, 1976); Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (London: Hollis and Carter, 1954); and Ira Owen Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 135 response. Jonathan Israel’s model of a single, integrated “Radical Enlightenment,” for instance, challenges the various national, cultural, political, and intellectual histories of the period.8 In yet another critical trajectory, recent readings suggest that – in addition to being a wellspring for modern ideas, ideologies, and analytical methodologies – the Enlight- enment was a breeding ground for certain postmodern critical modalities.9 Given the centrality of universalism in enlightened thought, it may seem paradoxical that a key concept of postmodern philosophy and criticism – difference – was already present and critically active at the inception of modernity. In seventeenth-century French salons, for instance, difference was a central topic in discussions of social, political, and cultural matters, as salonniers and salonnières employed Descartes’s discourse of universal reason to denaturalize differences. As Dena Goodman argues, this was “not in order to dismiss [differences], but in order to organize them usefully and fairly for the greater good of society and the happiness of individuals.”10 To be sure, the “civilized discourse” of salon conversation was purposeful gossip as much as high-minded philosophical inquiry, but its genuine open-mindedness allowed for navigation of what was hardly an egalitarian space. Because differences in status were acknowledged but neither dissolved nor even contained, such conversations took place under the banner of civilité, a practice that allowed people who adopted noble behavior but were not themselves of noble birth to interact meaningfully with the aristocratic elite. However, in the civil conversations of the eighteenth century, which took place in public coffeehouses and Tischgesellschaften as well as private salons, politesse succeeded civilité. What may seem mere semantics to us was clearly viewed by the philosophes as progress. “The former [politesse] concerns principally the matter of things, the latter [civilité] how to say and

8 “Radical Enlightenment” is Israel’s term for a set of core values (democracy, equality, liberty, freedom, separation of church and state, etc.) that he argues originate in Benedict Spinoza’s thought and were subsequently disseminated by derivative followers. See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 9 See Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Karlis Racevisks, Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993); and, concerning musical aesthetics specifically, Melanie Lowe, “Enlightening the Listening Subject,” in Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 10 Dena Goodman, “Difference: An Enlightenment Concept,” in Baker and Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment?, 144. 136 melanie lowe

do them,” wrote the Abbé Nicolas Trublet in his 1735 essay, “De la politesse.”11 As differences in class and status expanded to admit a greater diversity of participants in civil conversation, nothing short of a new kind of society was born. As Goodman explains, this was

a society in which differences did not disappear but, rather, became all the more visible and audible in their proximity to others. Because civil conversation allowed those men and women who embraced it to interact with one another despite cultural differences, either real or assumed, it set them apart from those who believed difference to be natural, immutable, and unbridgeable.

In short, civil conversation “became a practice of Enlightenment.”12 Moreover, the most significant differences with which participants in civil conversation had to contend were now not those of culture or status, but of opinion. Without an open and free exchange of ideas, which the new norm of politeness facilitated, progress in enlightened thought itself was not possible. While differences in social and economic status may have affected the architects of the Enlightenment most directly, it was religious difference – especially the enduring conflict between Catholics and Protestants throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – that gave rise to the Enlight- enment’s fundamental liberal ideal of toleration. After two centuries of violence had failed to eradicate religious intolerance, and as the emergence of new Christian sects had only increased division, the fatigue of unending conflict yielded a new strategy both between and within states. Rather than persecuting, expelling, and exterminating those who practiced religions other than the sanctioned one, nations began simply to ignore them. Not only did religious toleration suspend costly warfare, it proved to be both economically pragmatic and politically useful. Voltaire’s famous comment on the Royal Exchange in London speaks to the economic rationale: “There the Jew, the Mohometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. And all are satisfied.”13

11 Abbé Nicolas Trublet, “De la politesse” (1735), in Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h, L’Art de la conversation (Paris: Garnier, 1997), 248. See also Louis de Jaucourt, “Civilité, Politisse, Affabilité,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des artes et des métiers, 35 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1751–65), vol. III, 497; and Peter France, Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 12 Goodman, “Difference,” 133. 13 F. M. A. de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: printed for C. Davis and A. Lyon, 1733), 44. Voltaire’s comment echoes Sir William Temple’s observation that “the way to our future happiness has been perpetually disputed throughout the world, and must Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 137

Joseph’s advice to his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, speaks to the political utility of toleration: “With freedom of religion, one religion will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to the welfare of the state. Without this approach we shall not save any greater number of souls, and we shall lose a great many more useful and essential people.”14 Joseph’s argument became law with his 1781 Patent of Toleration, an edict that granted religious freedom to non-Catholic Christians for the first time in Habsburg lands. Of course, despite such laws, religious toleration did not involve a warm embrace or even acceptance in either eighteenth-century thought or action. Nor was it practiced uniformly throughout Europe.15 But it did lay the foundation for the broader Enlightenment ideal of tolerance, which rested more firmly on the autonomy of the individual. As John Locke argued in his foundational Letters Concerning Tolerance, only through individual freedom of thought and choice could religious faith be genuine.16 Once tolerance was embraced as a societal ideal, the discursive space of the public sphere could emerge, or so argues Jürgen Habermas in his seminal philosophical delineation. The public sphere was the primary site for the critical political discourse of the Enlightenment. As the arena in which private individuals came together as a public to talk about their common concerns, it was the realm in which participants would advance claims for human emancipation and the democratization of society through the judicious use of reason. In Habermas’s conception, this deliberation took place among free and equal interlocutors. The Tischge- sellschaften, salons, and coffeehouses, he argues, “preserved a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded

be left at last to the impressions made upon every man’s belief and conscience.” See Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, 5th edn. (Amsterdam: printed for the widow of Steven Swaert, 1696), 191–92. 14 Alfred Ritter von Arneth, ed., Maria Theresa und Joseph II: Ihre Correspondenz, 3 vols. (Vienna: C. Gerold’s Sohn, 1867–68), vol. II, 141–42, cited in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14. 15 The literature on religious tolerance in the Age of Enlightenment is vast. Two recent books make advantageous starting points: John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 16 That said, Locke does not always come across as especially tolerant. For example, his theory of toleration extends to neither Catholics nor atheists. He argues that, from the perspective of the state, both are untrustworthy: Catholics must answer to the foreign power of the Pope, while the denial of the existence of God precludes the genuineness of promises and oaths. See John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), 52. 138 melanie lowe

status altogether. The tendency replaced the celebration of rank with a tact befitting equals.” The better argument, rather than the identity or status of the individual making it, was what mattered and would prevail in the end. In Habermas’s optimistic social theory, the emancipatory potential of the public sphere resided within bourgeois institutions and structures that already existed in the eighteenth century. Rather than dismantling the power hierarchies of economic dependencies and the laws of the state, it was sufficient to suspend them temporarily for the purpose of free conversation among equals. To be sure, Habermas does not claim that “this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses, the salons, and the societies”; but rather that “as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realized, it was at least consequential.”17 Needless to say, in the ongoing project of critically reconceptualizing the public sphere, the emancipatory potential Habermas sees in its eighteenth-century manifestation is a hot point of contention. Nancy Fraser, for one, questions from a feminist socialist perspective whether the mere bracketing of social, economic, and political inequalities would truly permit equality among participants in civil conversation. Citing several historical studies that show how “discursive interaction within official bourgeois public spheres has consistently been governed by protocols of style and decorum that were also markers of status inequality,” she contends that marginalized groups, even those formally incorporated, were prevented from participating as peers.18 And Geoff Eley argues that Habermas ignores “the extent to which [the public sphere’s] institutions were founded on sectionalism, exclusiveness, and repression,”19 a criticism that likewise finds Habermas’s rationalist discourse overly idealistic. However, the antidote to Habermas’s idealization in both Fraser’s and Eley’s critiques is not to deny outright the emancipatory potential of the public sphere or even to diminish the value of the concept itself. By viewing competition among multiple publics within stratified societies as essential

17 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 36. 18 Nancy Fraser, “Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Toward a Postmodern Conception,” in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman, eds., Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 289. See also her book, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), esp. 113–43. 19 Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 321. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 139 to the liberal democratic process, Fraser and Eley simply offer more nuanced models. For Eley, the “civil society” of the Tischgesellschaften, salons, and coffeehouses was in confrontation not only with sovereign and aristocratic power and entitlement, whose authority participants hoped to displace, but also with the plebian class they hoped to dominate. The result is decidedly more troubled: the public sphere was the “institutional vehicle for...the shift from a repressive mode of domination to a hegemonic one, from rule based primarily on acquiescence to superior force to rule based primarily on consent supplemented with some measure of repression.”20 For Fraser, the public sphere is neither the instrument of domination Eley elaborates, nor the utopian ideal of Habermas’s modern liberal conception. Rather, she theorizes a postmodern public sphere in which multiple publics are each empowered or segmented differentially, and the categories of “privacy and publicity with their gendered and racialized subtexts” are contested and variously delimited.21 To be sure, Fraser’s model responds to the mass-mediated and highly stratified late-capitalist societies of the very recent past. But just as we can recognize tenets of postmodern critical theory in the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, facets of her conception of the postmodern public sphere were likewise present in the civil conversations that marked the inception of modern publicity.

Difference and tolerance in late eighteenth-century music

Music, as both a sociocultural activity and a topic of civil conversation, entered the public sphere in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, once professional musical performances became commodities produced for the public marketplace as well as for princely glorification.22

20 I quote Fraser’s elegant and efficient encapsulation of Eley’s argument. I simply could not capture his subtleties or sophistication any better than she does. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 117; and Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures.” 21 Fraser, “Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere,” 308. 22 In France, music participated in the emergence of a literary public sphere somewhat earlier. Musical life was a favored topic for discussion in seventeenth-century French salons; and the imitation of chatty salon repartee alongside the aesthetic debates on literature and the arts in the Mercure galant and Mercure de France made this discussion available to elegant society. This literary public sphere, however, is not an analogue to Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, esp. 14–26; and Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (University of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. 31–77. 140 melanie lowe

The analogue in the musicological literature to Habermas’s optimistic social theory is the argument (of which there are many varieties) that music, by embracing the ideals of the Enlightenment, advanced the emancipation of the middle classes from their subordination to the court and the church, thereby contributing tangibly to democratization and the freedom of the individual. Central in such interpretations are musical expressions – models, even – of toleration. For instance, in Haydn’s “Turkish” abduction opera L’incontro improvviso, the tyrannical Sultan of Egypt in the end transforms into an enlightened and tolerant ruler, embodying the new bourgeois political virtue. Of course, the production of this opera in the Eszterháza Theater was hardly a public event. Indeed, it comprised part of the courtly festivities for the August 1775 royal visit of Archduke Ferdinand, the Habsburg governor of Milan. But the performance of L’incontro improvviso in princely chambers promptly entered the civil conversations of the public sphere by means of the Pressburger Zeitung’s extensive and detailed description of the state visit’s festivities. Moreover, the opera’s exotic story and enlightened themes were undoubtedly familiar to the literate public. Its libretto was fashioned from Gluck’s highly successful La Rencontre imprévue, his last opéra comique composed for Vienna (Burgtheater, 1764), and the opera itself was based on the vaudeville classic Les Pèlerins de la Mecque. The “Turkish” subject of L’incontro improvviso was in vogue at the time of its first performance and undoubtedly would have pleased the Austrian sensibility of the visiting Habsburg dignitaries. But the opera’s politics were likely as appealing as its exotic subject, for neither the Archduke nor Haydn’s employer, the Esterházy Prince Nikolaus, would have missed the political significance of the dramatic presentation of an enlightened, forgiving, and tolerant ruler. As Matthew Head notes, the Sultan’s “transformation was implicitly a lesson to European (not Ottoman) mon- archs on the need for reforms to despotic rule.” Because all of the opera’s characters are non-European, thereby carefully avoiding the East–West dichotomy found in, say, Mozart’s Die Entführing aus dem Serail, “the exotic setting focuses attention on the European ideal of liberty,”23 itself simultaneously a localized prerequisite and universal goal of enlightened civil conversation.

23 Matthew Head, “Haydn’s Exoticisms: ‘Difference’ and the Enlightenment,” in Caryl Clark, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Haydn (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 80–81. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 141

But the filtering of this European ideal through the lens of an Orientalist subject complicates any expression of tolerance that an “exotic” opera may have advanced, for its enlightened agenda is also undeniably a colonialist one (notwithstanding the Turkish Ottomans’ own recent attempts to conquer central Europe). Mary Hunter arrives at a similar conclusion in her exploration of race and gender in the alla turca style. Her argument hinges on the identification of two negative principles – irrationality and deficiency – that govern eighteenth-century musical representation of exoticized Others, as Turks were for Europeans. She identifies examples of both principles in the final dance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride: the irregular phrase structures in an otherwise “aggressively regular movement...give the impression of awkwardness or phraseological incoherence,” while the sheer abundance of unison textures, root position harmonies, and profuse repetition of every motivic idea suggest “a deficiency of musical invention.”24 In the instrumental repertory, Hunter finds similar expressions of difference and barbarity in the countless moments that use an “exoticising musical device that discards or diminishes a ‘normal’ feature of the style.” As examples she offers the last phrase of the exposition of the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 (Example 5.1a) and measures 27–34 of the finale of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F, Op. 18, No. 1 (Example 5.1b). Once difference is “contained by means of a caricature,” Hunter concludes, “that caricature becomes a normalized or domesticated part of ‘civilized’ discourse”: a musical and political strategy in striking contrast with the use of reason to denaturalize difference in the salon conversations of the previous century.25

Example 5.1a Haydn, Symphony No. 104, IV, mm. 108–116

24 Mary Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio,” in Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music. (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 51. 25 Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style,” 54. 142 melanie lowe

Example 5.1b Beethoven, String Quartet in F, Op. 18, No. 1, IV, mm. 27–35

Unfortunately, such critical assessments of music’s negotiation of difference and tolerance in late eighteenth-century music are quite unusual in the musicological literature, particularly in interpretations of Haydn’s music. David Schroeder’s landmark study of Haydn and the Enlighten- ment, for example, abounds in uncritical optimism about the late symphonies’ participation in and furthering of enlightened thought. To support his contention that Haydn subscribed to the view that music, like literature, should serve a didactic purpose and instruct in moral values, Schroeder’s analyses of Haydn’s instrumental music – from the Op. 33 string quartets to the London symphonies – advance one, and only one, reading: the coexistence of conflicting musical forces, as opposed to some contrived sense of unity, advocates social tolerance. In the “accompaniments that can be transformed to melodies and vice versa” in the Op. 33 quartets, for example, Schroeder hears “a higher social truth which is that differences do not preclude equality”;26 in the coexistence of instability and stability in Symphonies Nos. 92 and 94, he hears “a message concerning

26 David P. Schroeder, Haydn and the Enlightenment: The Late Symphonies and their Audience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 62. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 143 tolerance”;27 and in the fusion of opposites – dark and cheerful forces – in Symphony No. 103, he hears Haydn “jolt[ing] the listener into awareness of his moral intention.”28 Similarly, though perhaps not quite so uncritically, Head interprets Haydn’s musical exoticisms as “dissolving boundaries between social- musical categories as part of a current discourse on universal brotherhood.” For example, he contends that, in the Minuet of the Op. 20, No. 4, string quartet (Example 5.2), in which Haydn uses the gypsy style to critique the rules of learned counterpoint, “Haydn does not single out any one social- musical type for parody; rather, each topic in the movement defines itself through the other and is, through such definition, exposed as particular.” This idealistic hearing leads Head to suggest that Haydn is making a philosophical and political point in this piece: “that Gypsy music is not so different after all and that its principles are universal and can be coupled with Western art music.” Head then ties this musical point directly to “the Enlightenment’s idea of universal human nature, according to which differences of dress, language, social organization, and manners were superficial and masked a common humanity.” To be sure, he acknowledges the homogenizing and uncomfortable aspects of such Enlightenment ideals and explicitly distances himself from them. In addition to noting that the quartet invites “accusations of excessive domestication and rationalization of cultural difference,” Head also rightly identifies the “gypsy” topic as disruptive, suggesting “both danger and the need for external control.” Even so, his rationalization of these ideals under the period’s universalist notion of progress comes a little too easily. Indeed, only a convenient alignment of progressive thought with an unconditional overcoming of ignorance and prejudice could lead to Head’srosy notion that “a dream of global conviviality can be sensed in Haydn’smusic.”29

Example 5.2 Haydn, String Quartet in D Major, Op. 20, No. 4, III, mm. 1–8

27 Ibid., 163. 28 Ibid., 190. 29 Head, “Haydn’s Exoticisms,” 84–85. 144 melanie lowe

Such one-dimensional and idealistic readings of Haydn’smusicand of its intellectual and philosophical contexts reflect a reductive and non- critical conception of the Enlightenment. They also inadvertently align with Habermas’s decidedly optimistic view of the emancipatory potential of civil conversation in the public sphere and its contribution to advancing the ongoing Enlightenment project. What follows here are my alternative interpretations of two instrumental works by Haydn – the “Oxford” Symphony and the “Gypsy” Piano Trio – that were enormously popular in Haydn’s lifetime, remain so even today, and are much discussed in the musicological literature. I also address the activation of both pieces within the eighteenth-century public sphere. My analysis departs from the tendency to perceive straightforward expressions of tolerance, egalitarianism, and dissolution of social boundaries in Haydn’s music and to cite them as evidence of the composer’s commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of universal brotherhood. Instead, I find musical homologies of political difference, hearing symbolic expressions of consent to hegemonic forces alongside challenges to existing social structures. On the one hand, this interpretive strategy does locate Haydn’s music within Habermas’smodern(and utopian) liberal conception of the eighteenth-century public sphere by embracing his critical theories of deliberative democracy as a means to understand social and political signification in Haydn’smusic.But at the same time, this civil-conversational model of instrumental musical process acknowledges the activation of Haydn’s music within the stratified societies and multiple publics posited in recent critiques of Habermas’stheory.

Hearing hegemony in Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony

On July 14, 1789, a crowd of over 8,000 rioters stormed the Bastille, liberated its prisoners, and, as we usually tell the story, kicked off the French Revolution. On the very same day, as chance would have it, Joseph Haydn, in Eszterháza, received the score and vocal parts for Mozart’s opera Le nozze di Figaro, which he intended to direct that summer in the court theater.30 As France transformed into a fledgling Republic, Haydn surely

30 Le nozze di Figaro was not performed at Eszterháza, however, because the opera troupe was disbanded after the death of Prince Nikolaus. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 145 scrutinized Mozart’s politically incendiary opera. Coincidentally, that same summer he also composed Symphony No. 92 in G Major for a French aristocrat, the comte d’Ogny. This symphony was likely performed on the Concert spirituel in Paris, but Haydn also used the work to fulfill a subsequent commission by the German prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein. Haydn later conducted this symphony at Oxford University when he received an honorary doctorate on July 7, 1791, the event that earned the piece its nickname “Oxford.” The “Oxford” Symphony, especially its first movement, is among the most celebrated and widely discussed works in Haydn’s entire output. In one notable instance, after gushing over the work for four pages, Donald Francis Tovey simply concludes that it is “great music; and nothing other than great music, whether tragic, majestic, or comic, can stand beside it.”31 James Webster finds it a model of progressive form, “a stunning example of Haydn’s through-composition in a single movement.”32 A. Peter Brown considers it one of “Haydn’s most satisfying symphonies,” a high point of the genre during the eighteenth century, comparable to Mozart’s “Prague” and “Jupiter” Symphonies;33 and Charles Rosen proclaims that Haydn “equaled but never surpassed the ‘Oxford’ Symphony,” contending that with this work “the classical symphony finally attained the same seriousness and grandeur as the great public genres of the Baroque, oratorio and opera.”34 Satisfying as these aesthetic appreciations are, most relevant to my present purpose are two conflicting political interpretations that emerge in commentaries on the work: Schroeder hears in its stylistic polarities a moral lesson on social tolerance, while H. C. Robbins Landon hears, in contrast, “a tribute to all that was gracious and beautiful in pre- revolutionary Europe.”35 To put a finer point on it, Landon’s conservative “Oxford” celebrates the grace and orderliness of the ancien régime, while

31 Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), vol. I, 147. 32 James Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 167. 33 A. Peter Brown, The Symphonic Repertoire, Vol. II: The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 239. 34 Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, expanded edn. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 162. 35 H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, Vol. II: Haydn at Eszterháza, 1766–1790 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 633. 146 melanie lowe

Schroeder’s progressive “Oxford” refuses graceful and orderly resolution in order to instruct on a progressive ideal. Before embarking on an alternative sociopolitical interpretation of this work, we should note a few of its unusual structural features and briefly review Tovey’s, Brown’s, and Webster’s various formal interpretations of them. In essence, the movement is a sonata design with unusual formal proportions: its development is surprisingly short and its recapitulation is the longest, proportionally speaking, in Haydn’s entire oeuvre. As I hear it, the slow introduction lacks a structural dominant (Example 5.3).36 It ends on an augmented sixth chord, which nicely sets up the off-tonic beginning of the exposition. This destabilizing opening theme on the dominant, which is also the primary thematic material of the second group, presents tonal problems that require some high structural adventuring to resolve adequately in the recapitulation. In real time, one struggles to hear any easily recognizable and clearly articulated conventional formal sections. Rather, the recapitulation sounds like successive rehearsals of the main theme on the dominant, between which are sandwiched various diversions and excur- sions. Indeed, commentators have struggled to categorize – or even simply label – the unusual structural elements in this movement. Schroeder and Tovey both hear a recapitulation and coda structure, but where Schroeder finds the two sections clearly demarcated, Tovey hears a “Beethovenian synthesis of recapitulation and coda.”37 Brown, on the other hand, does not hear a coda at all, but rather three distinct thematic reprises, each “presenting the thematic gestalt of the exposition, and each tighter and more energized with its shorter lengths.”38 Webster, in further contrast, hears not just a series of reprises, but one “extraordinary recapitulation” with a “wholesale recomposition of the second group.”39 Clearly, this movement challenges us to hear it through any conventional formal filters.

36 Webster also hears the “Oxford” introduction as lacking a structural dominant. See Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, 169. 37 I quote Webster’s encapsulation of Tovey’s point here; see Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, 171. Tovey’s more wordy description is as follows: “But the so-called recapitulation is designed exactly like one of Beethoven’s biggest codas, while the so-called second subject (which in the exposition differed in material from the first only by introducing a single square little dance-tune) gives rise to all manner of new features in this coda.” Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. I, 145. 38 Brown, The Symphonic Repertoire, Vol. II, 241. 39 Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, 171. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 147

Example 5.3 Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 1–25

It also presents a remarkable thematic variability, particularly in its many iterations of the four-bar off-tonic primary thematic idea. To convey a sense of their number and variety, Examples 5.4a–5.4i show each thematic iteration in order of presentation in the movement. As is 148 melanie lowe

immediately apparent, each statement is different in its scoring and timbre, its texture, its preparation, and ultimately its effect. But it is the four reprises of this theme in the second group of the recapitulation that interest me most (Examples 5.4f–5.4i). In them I hear both a naturalization and a destabilization of thematic difference, which I will interpret politically as an expression of hegemony rather than either a repressive mode of political domination or a call for its dismantling.

Example 5.4a Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 21–24

Example 5.4b Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 41–44 Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 149

Example 5.4c Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 56–59

Example 5.4d Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 125–128 150 melanie lowe

Example 5.4e Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 145–148

Example 5.4f Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 166–169 Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 151

Example 5.4g Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 176–180

It is a widely promoted idea, if not quite a truism, that the tonal and structural logic underlying the narrative paradigm of sonata design is “natural.”40 Because important thematic material is presented in a key

40 Problematic and widely critiqued, the concept of nature in music-theoretical discourse is most dangerous when it promotes totalizing tenets. The heart of the problem, as Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding encapsulate it, is that the very idea of nature relies “on the assumption of an essence independent from historical or cultural context...[but] the images invoked in support of this idea will necessarily reflect the culture and historical age in which they arose.” See Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, eds., Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–13. 152 melanie lowe

Example 5.4h Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 205–208

other than the tonic, satisfactory resolution of this “large-scale dissonance”41 requires the reappearance of such material in the tonic key in the recapitulation. Or, as Webster puts it in the New Grove entry on sonata form, when “the most important ideas and the strongest cadential passages from the second group reappear in the recapitulation, transposed to the tonic...the subtle tension of stating important material in another key is thus grounded, and the movement can end.”42 This is, of course, the “sonata principle,” as Edward T. Cone defined it in 1968.43 More recently, Scott Burnham proclaims unequivocally that “sonata form...boasts a distinct link to nature itself: from the overtone series and the ‘chord of nature’ to the dominant-tonic resolution. Encompassing conflict and

41 The term is Rosen’s, in The Classical Style, 440. 42 James Webster, “Sonata form,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/subscriber/article/grove/ music/26197 (accessed September 3, 2010). 43 Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968), 76–77. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 153

Example 5.4i Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 218–223 enfranchised by nature, sonata form offers a sense of protagonist and world, subject and object, journey and home.” Even more poetically (and expansively), Burnham concludes that “the nature of sonata form may in fact be broader than this exclusive renewal of a central tonic, broader than that fraught journey home: the nature of sonata form may teach us that renewal is a basic rhythm of life, as momentous as the new millennium, as available as the next sunrise, or as easy and unpredictable as one’s next step.”44

44 Scott G. Burnham, “The Second Nature of Sonata Form,” in Clark and Rehding, eds., Music Theory and Natural Order, 112, 141. 154 melanie lowe

In the first movement of the “Oxford” Symphony, because the thematic material of the first group and the second group is the same, the second group of the recapitulation is, of course, identical to the first group in pitch and key. Yet because this theme begins off-tonic and on the dominant, the presentation of the primary theme in the home key – whether in the first group or the second group – fails to provide either the double return or the structural tonic required for formal resolution. The upshot is that the movement’s structural logic yields an unusual narrative dilemma, one centered on the nature of thematic difference and the relation of this difference to formal progress and to the resolution of large-scale tension. Haydn’s solution to the “problem” (a problem he created, of course) generates the long second group with its four reprises of the primary thematic material, separated by – as Webster puts it – a “bewildering succession of contrasting passages.”45 Because the presentation of this material in the home key can neither provide nor sustain a return to the tonic, no matter how many appearances it makes or how varied its texture, timbre, preparation, or effect might be, the only way Haydn can resolve the movement’s large-scale dissonance in the recapitulation is, ironically, by maintaining the tonal structure of the exposition: that is, by restating the thematic material of the second group in the dominant. Only then can at least the tonic pitch effectively supply resolution of a 6 conventional and conclusive I4-V7-I cadence. In other words, formal progress in this movement ironically requires the preservation of the structural and tonal status quo of the exposition, at least as far as the presentation of the primary thematic material is concerned. And yet, when the theme, commencing with the tonic pitch, finally does enter as the resolution of an authentic cadence in the tonic key (Example 5.4i, mm. 218–220), Haydn harmonizes the tonic pitch as the seventh of a 4 V3/V chord, the very harmony that has, until this point, always prepared the second-group appearances of this primary theme.46 No longer preparation, this dominant harmony has become the resolution of the movement’s large-scale dissonance – or, at least, that is the implication of the formal logic at this point. But of course, while the final off-tonic presentation of this theme – that is, off both the tonic’s dominant and the dominant’s tonic – may somewhat satisfy the melodic needs of the narrative paradigm of this movement’s sonata design, Haydn’s structural-tonal “problem”

45 Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, 172. 46 Webster also notes the preparatory function of this harmony in the second group, in Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, 172. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 155 precludes any “natural” formal or harmonic solution. That this conflict is ultimately irresolvable, at least from a structural perspective, may explain the expedience of the movement’s close: four bars of the closing theme and four bars of stock cadential material, in the tonic of course, and the movement summarily ends (Example 5.5). To be sure, as Webster demonstrates in his painstaking analysis, the first movement of the “Oxford” is a “stunning example” of Haydn’s single-movement through-compositional process. “The unusual join at the end of the introduction,” the recall of “the prominent g-c# tritone,”

Example 5.5 Haydn, Symphony No. 92, I, mm. 224–232 156 melanie lowe

Example 5.5 (cont.)

the E-flat-major outburst’s re-establishment of the structural role of flat-VI, along with myriad other musical details, ensure that “the entire structure resolves only at the end.”47 Following that line of reason, we may

47 Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, 172–73. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 157 read the structural eccentricities of this movement – in particular, the reprise of the main theme, presented in the dominant at the end of the recapitulation – as a bracketing of difference. Along with its dominant-key-area status, any conception of this final reprise as an aber- ration of sonata design is suspended. Its difference is denaturalized for the sake of the structural-tonal argument, the resolution of large-scale dissonance, and the securing of formal progress. The parallels to Habermas’s optimistic conception of the civil conversations of the public sphere are striking: through the judicious use of reason within structures and institutions that already exist, difference is not merely tolerated but disregarded, so that the better “argument” may prevail regardless of the status of the “individual” making it. It is an easy step from this sociopolitical homology to the musicological discernment of unequivocal expressions of enlightened thought in this symphony. At the same time, we may also hear this particular divergence from the narrative of sonata design as formally essential. Because this movement’s structural-tonal progress and the eventual resolution of its large-scale dissonance depend on the retention, however fleeting, of the second group’s dominant key-area, tonal and harmonic difference is also rendered inevitable and, thus, natural to the form. Within the context of this reading, might the expedient ending suggest that such thematic difference is ultimately unbridgeable? To be sure, the instantiations of difference heard in the theme’s final iteration, as well as in its varied presentations, may suggest “a form of resistance against subsumption into an undifferen- tiated universal subject.”48 But even in the most emancipatory readings of the “Oxford” Symphony’s second group, the conceptual authority of neither structure nor institution is effectively challenged. The naturalization–denaturalization dialectic in operation here may indeed symbolically thwart a repressive mode of structural domination. But when consent displaces mere acquiescence, hegemony replaces repression.

Multiple publics and “postmodern” publicity in Haydn’s “Gypsy” Rondo

While my political reading of the first movement of Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony depends on structural and tonal details that may – or may

48 Ruth Solie, “Introduction,” in Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6. 158 melanie lowe

not – be immediately audible or apparent, particularly to a lay listener, in the finale of Haydn’s famous “Gypsy” Piano Trio (Piano Trio in G Major, Hob. XV:25), composed no later than 1795, the politics of difference reside saliently at the musical surface. The defining topic of this movement, which Haydn titled “Rondo all’ongorese” (“Rondo in the Gypsies’ style”), is a Westernized Hungarian-Gypsy style – meaning Haydn’s Viennese translation of his perception of Verbunkos dances – combined with traditional elements of the alla turca style. In addition to being an obvious instance of stylistic exoticism and Orientalism in the Saidian sense, this piece does more than just flirt with the symbolic domestication and rationalization of ethnic and cultural difference. As Head rightly warns, “if we read Haydn’s exoticism literally as representations of the musical others named in their titles we risk missing much of their cultural meaning.”49 But his biographical reading of the “Gypsy” finale, as an instance of Haydn’s self-definition as exotic Other in London, seems to me both anachronistic and far-fetched.50 More fanciful still is Head’s overly general, rather idealistic claim that Haydn’s mixing of ethnic and national references can “be heard as an imaginative effort to cross boundaries and confound categories.” According to this reading, the combination of pseudo-Gypsy and -Turkish elements in the finale projects the Enlighten- ment’s universalist program by “effortlessly suggest[ing] that national boundaries are unnatural.”51 In a tantalizing proposition, Catherine Mayes effectively turns such interpretations on their head, suggesting that Haydn’s rondo may itself have been the source for some later Hungarian national dances. She acknowledges the striking similarities, first pointed out in 1928 by Ervin Major, between Haydn’s “Gypsy” finale and several dances from two collections of Hungarian music: the first, 22 originelle ungarische Nationaltänze, published in 1806, and the second, Hungarian Melodies from Veszprém County [Magyar nóták Veszprém Vármegyéböl], published in 1825.52 Haydn’s “Gypsy” Piano Trio was published in 1795. While there

49 Head, “Haydn’s Exoticisms,” 89. 50 His connection of this work to Hungarian nationalism is similarly problematic – there is no evidence to suggest either Haydn or contemporary audiences would have associated this Westernized and essentially Viennese “Gypsy” style with Hungarian nationalism. See Catherine Mayes, “Domesticating the Foreign: Hungarian-Gypsy Music in Vienna at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2008, 127–28. 51 Head, “Haydn’s Exoticisms,” 86. 52 Ervin Major, “Miszellen: Ungarische Tanzmelodien in Haydns Beabeitung,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 11 (1928–29): 601–4. The two collections of Hungarian music are: Géza Papp, ed., Hungarian Dances 1784–1810 (Budapest: Curis, 1986); and Ignác Ruzitska and Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 159 is no way to establish definitively the direction of influence in this case, the question Mayes asks has the potential to undercut the usual Orientalist, exoticist, self-Othering, or universalist interpretations of the piece, readings that depend on the assumption that Haydn came into contact with these dances at Eszterháza or Vienna sometime in the late eighteenth century and “normalized” the harmonic differences of Verbunkos dances in the “Gypsy” Piano Trio finale.53 As Mayes asks, “Could Haydn’s rondo actually be the source for these later publications, the latter of which was published with the goal of preserving Hungarian national music?”54 The potential for irony abounds. Such “exotic” texts and subtexts in and around this finale are intriguing to me because in them I hear not just a struggle over categories of ethnic difference, but also a political friction within the categories of privacy and publicity as Habermas has delineated them. By exploring this multivalent activation of difference in Haydn’s “Rondo in the Gypsies’ Style,” what follows here is not intended simply to challenge optimistic or utopian readings of this piece by pointing out the undeniable colonialist and even racist politics of its various representations. After all, Haydn’s “Gypsy” Rondo is very much a product of its time – along with “Enlightenment,” this is an age of Habsburg colonization of Hungary and of the confinement and assimilation of Hungary’s Roma inhabitants.55 Rather, I will consider how the finale interacts with multiple “publics” within a postmodern conception of the public sphere and locate one possible musical manifestation of this interaction at the inception of modern publicity – a social moment grounded nonetheless in the Enlightenment’s liberal political ideology of public and private spheres. The conventional musicological delineation of two stylistic poles in late eighteenth-century music – public and private music – rests on both musical and social-historical factors: eighteenth-century theoretical expli- cations of style, our own contemporary analytical observations, the historical circumstances of eighteenth-century concert life, and the social

Miklós Rakos, Magyar nóták Veszprém Vármegyéből: 136 verbunkos tánc 15 füzetben, a Vesprémvármegyei Zenetársaság kiadásában 1823–1832 között (Nemzeti Kulturális Alap: Faklya Club Egyesület tamogatasaval, 1994). 53 As Mayes notes, “Haydn’s rondo is somewhat different from the two verbunkos dances. While the initial four-measure phrases of these dances exhibit a sparse, dyadic harmonic texture and tonicize the supertonic, Haydn’s rondo is more harmonically normative, with strong emphasis on both the tonic and its dominant in addition to a reference to the supertonic, which is not tonicized.” See Mayes, “Domesticating the Foreign,” 124. 54 Ibid., 124–25. 55 See David M. Crowe, “From Persecution to Pragmatism: The Habsburg Roma in the Eighteenth Century,” Austrian History Yearbook 37 (2006): 99–120. 160 melanie lowe

contexts for both performing and listening to music. While few would uphold these categories as stylistically absolute, either in the eighteenth century or today, there is a certain musical, historical, and cultural legitimacy to them.56 Of course, in terms of late eighteenth-century performance contexts, the categories are already contested, as “public” concerts were often exclusive affairs, while “private” events, such as birthday celeb- rations and court occasions, were frequently reviewed in newspapers and widely discussed in civil conversation. But when we bring the Habermasian political concepts of publicity and privacy into the mix, the interpretive possibilities of Haydn’s “Gypsy” Rondo multiply, for, as Habermas establishes, the public and private spheres were not just in constant dialogue: their intersection points to total interdependence even for the purposes of individual definition.57 The social world of accompanied sonatas in late eighteenth-century London was decidedly the private musical sphere. Such pieces were composed for amateur players, performed in domestic settings, and strongly associated with female music-making. Indeed, all of Haydn’s London piano trios are dedicated to women – the “Gypsy” Piano Trio is one of three trios dedicated to Rebecca Schroeter, an English widow with whom Haydn was romantically involved. And yet despite the piece’s ostensibly “private” domain, the “Gypsy” Rondo engages nonetheless in a matter of vital importance to civil conversation in the late eighteenth-century liberal public sphere: nothing short of the question of democracy and the limits of shared human reality. The Rondo’s refrain (the A section, Example 5.6a) is an expressive trope.58 Its “normalized” Verbunkos dance is primarily a melodic manifestation, as evidenced by its long-noted resemblance to two specific dances

56 Writers from Sulzer, Koch, and Kollmann in the eighteenth century, to Charles Rosen, Leonard Ratner, Michael Broyles, and Evan Bonds more recently, distinguish between private and public music, even if the categories are not always explicitly labeled as such in their writings. See Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, rev. edn., 4 vols. (Leipzig: 1792–97), s.v. “Sonate” and “Symphonie”; Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, Vol. III (Leipzig: A. F. Böhme, 1793); August Kollmann, An Essay on Practical Musical Composition (London: 1799); Rosen, The Classical Style; Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980); Michael Broyles, “The Two Instrumental Styles of Classicism,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 (1983): 210–42; and Mark Evan Bonds, “The Symphony as Pindaric Ode,” in Elaine Sisman, ed., Haydn and His World (Princeton, NH: Princeton University Press, 1997), 131–53. 57 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, esp. 27–56. 58 On topical tropes, see Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and Robert Hatten, “The Troping of Topics in Mozart’s Instrumental Works,” in Danuta Mirka, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 161

Example 5.6a Haydn, Piano Trio in G Major, Hob. XV:25, III, mm. 1–16

in the Hungarian collection Magyar nóták Veszprém Vármegyéből (Examples 5.6b and 5.6c), whatever the actual (and likely unknowable) direction of influence. Nearly every other musical parameter of the refrain, however, projects a contredanse – the “danceless dance” of democratic spirit in which aristocratic and bourgeois dancers mingled in a “happy 162 melanie lowe

Example 5.6b Anonymous, “Friss Magyar,” Magyar nóták Veszprém Vármegyéből, Vol. 5, No. 2, mm. 1–8

Example 5.6c Anonymous, “Friss Magyar,” Magyar nóták Veszprém Vármegyéből, Vol. 9, No. 6, mm. 1–8

social exercise.”59 Indeed, with its 2/4 meter, rhythmic scansion in two light beats, predictable and periodic phrase structure, and rounded binary form with internal repeats, the parametric density of the contredanse in the refrain is considerably higher than that of the “gypsy” dance. In the episodes (the B and C sections), however, the parametric density of Verbunkos, alla turca, and contredanse elements is more evenly balanced (Example 5.7a). Although only the “Minore” passages (Example 5.7b) resemble a known Hungarian dance (the sixth dance of the anonymous 22 originelle ungarische Nationaltänze; Example 5.7c), drones, heavy chords, and stomping rhythms articulate a more “primitive” affect while athletic melodic lines achieve a wild and frenzied physicality. But even with the heightened Verbunkos elements, the structural, metric, and

59 Wye J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 60–61. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 163

Example 5.7a Haydn, Piano Trio in G Major, Hob. XV:25, III, mm. 35–66 phrase-rhythmic features of the contredanse remain unaltered. The “gypsy” dance of Haydn’s famous “Rondo all’ongorese” is ultimately framed – and contained – by the “democratic” contredanse. Like Head’s utopian reading of boundary crossing, it is just as easy and direct an interpretive move, albeit a more pessimistic one, to hear in Haydn’s Rondo finale a musical reflection of the Habsburg confinement 164 melanie lowe

Example 5.7a (cont.)

and assimilation of Roma under the Enlightenment banner of universal humanity. Yet when we consider the finale’s musical-textural projection alongside the obvious political tensions of its topical trope, the interpretive possibilities multiply: the Rondo’s democratic spirit effectively challenges courtly authority while simultaneously questioning the politesse of civil Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 165

Example 5.7b Haydn, Piano Trio in G Major, Hob. XV:25, III, mm. 67–94

conversation itself, the supposed agency of the liberal public sphere’s peaceful political challenge. On the one hand, the irrationality, musical deficiency, and frenzied, “primitive” affect of the Verbunkos and alla turca topics, coupled with the boisterous energy of the contredanse, stand in expressive opposition to the rationality, stateliness, and grace of courtly decorum, the affect of which was projected musically in the last decade of 166 melanie lowe

Example 5.7b (cont.)

the eighteenth century most effectively by a moderate-tempo minuet.60 But on the other hand, Haydn’s piano trios contain few moments that are

60 In Haydn’s works from the 1790s, such a courtly affect can be heard in the third-movement minuets in Symphonies Nos. 95, 100, and 103, and in the Tempo di Menuetto finale of the Piano Trio in F-sharp Minor, Hob. XV:26. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 167

Example 5.7c Sixth Dance in 22 originelle ungarische Nationaltänze, mm. 1–10 truly “conversational,” those “free yet connected exchange[s] that might reasonably be construed as conversation,”61 and the “Gypsy” Piano Trio is no exception. Indeed, there is very little of the conversational sorts of texture so widely commented upon in the string quartets. As W. Dean Sutcliffe observes, the instruments in Haydn’s piano trios “seem to have reached a prior agreement as to the significance of the material they are to perform.”62 The most direct social referent for this “single will projected in several voices” is, of course, the will of the court or the sovereign. As Norbert Elias puts it so elegantly in his classic The Court Society, “the king brings his subjects to a point where, as Montesquieu once put it, they think comme il veut.”63 The salient cultural allusions of Haydn’s finale – the Verbunkos and alla turca surface topics, the expressive assimilation and structural containment of such “exotic” elements, the democratic spirit of the finale’s governing contredanse topic, and the political projection of a single will in the textural relations among the three instruments – interact with and contradict one another in such a way as to project a multiplicity of publics of various delineations. In a Habermasian interpretation of this piece – a reading dependent on the decidedly modern, utopian, and singular construction of public and private spheres – one difference would be bracketed for the sake of another. The implication is of an at least partial but

61 Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style,” 126. 62 W. Dean Sutcliffe, “Haydn’s Piano Trio Textures,” Music Analysis 6 (1987): 320. 63 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 71, cited in Mary Hunter, “Haydn’s London Piano Trios and His Salomon String Quartets: Private vs. Public?” in Elaine Sisman, ed., Haydn and His World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 127. 168 melanie lowe

nonetheless willing consent to political exclusion: as Joan Landes puts it, “only those who embody the principle of a disinterested, rational discussion, free from external coercion, within which the claims of particular interests can be subsumed, are so entitled to act (for themselves and for others).”64 In contrast, a postmodern model of multiple publics, all continually contested and variously delimited – the bourgeois conversational- ists of the coffeehouses and Tischgesellschaften; the mixed public of the dance hall, where nobles enjoyed a rowdy contredanse alongside common dancers; the “men of letters” of the literary public sphere, to delineate but three such publics – accommodates the social meanings, political implications, and musical contexts of Haydn’s Rondo in the Gypsies’ style with more flexibility and nuance. Such a pluralist model of publicity, one in which difference may be accommodated within certain publics, but not necessarily within others, ultimately provides for more engaging – and, I think, historically plausible – interpretive possibilities, even as (or precisely because) it challenges some central tenets of the Enlightenment. It also fits much more comfortably with Haydn’s careful and calculated political navigation of his own multiple publics – most importantly, the multiple audience Elaine Sisman has recently explored, an audience that included such diverse and different constituents as the adoring English public whose approbation Haydn so actively sought, the princely courts throughout Europe upon whose commissions and favors he relied for most of his career, publishers with whom he had to drive hard bargains, critics whose criticism he actively tried to deflect, and amateurs and connoisseurs, virtuosos and dilettantes, and simply working musicians upon whose performance and pleasure his reputation and success ultimately depended. Even as he rankled from being slighted by the high society of the Viennese establishment and resented his servant status at the Eszterháza court, Haydn had little sympathy for the revolutionaries in France. His status as an “outsider” for most of his life, the bitterness he felt at his station, and the sense of entitlement that sometimes seeps through the obligatory obsequious surface of his letters suggests, at the very least, a composer of some ambivalence in political and philosophical matters. Readings of Haydn’s music that fail not just to acknowledge but to actively embrace this ambivalence – especially when exploring his music’s connections to enlightened thought – will always fall short. In their unclouded and decidedly modernist optimism, their clichéd conceptions of the

64 Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 205. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn 169

Enlightenment, and unwaveringly liberal sense of progress, such interpretations are frankly inadequate. In our interpretations of the “Oxford” Symphony, the “Gypsy” Rondo, and indeed much if not most of Haydn’s instrumental music, we must acknowledge in this music projections of stratified social structures and repressive political institutions. That said, Haydn’s tacit endorsement of the political hegemony of his time need not necessarily preclude simultaneous emancipatory projections of a more liberal, tolerant, and democratic society. As we explore Haydn’s commitment to the ideals and values of the Enlightenment and the moral and didactic intent he himself professed for his music, we would do well to resist both utopian, idealistic readings of the Enlightenment’s emancipatory potential and wholeheartedly pessimistic ones. Without a doubt, progress – that ultimate Enlightenment concept – was advanced largely within exclusive and repressive institutions. But it was within those very institutions that participants in civil conversation sought to denaturalize difference, advocate toleration, and ultimately demand political representation. Only nuanced, pluralist models of publicity can accommodate this underlying contradiction and are therefore useful for interpreting the multiple layers of political contradictions to be heard in Haydn’s music.

6 Different masculinities: androgyny, effeminacy, and sentiment in Rossini’s La donna del lago heather hadlock

Femininity, as manifest by operatic heroines and the divas who play them, has been the central focus of feminist opera scholarship since the late 1980s. Catherine Clément’s Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings, and Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, three foundational texts for the study of opera and gender, all approached opera as a ritualized sacrifice-drama in which women are “undone” by their otherness, variously figured as madness, illicit sexuality, ethnic/racial/national difference, and marginal or subordinate place within the family and social structure.1 Contrast between feminine types emerged as an important strategy for establishing such otherness, through such familiar pairings as ingenue and vixen, respectable lady and fallen woman, or domestic sweetheart and exotic temptress.2 Carolyn Abbate’s “Opera, or, The Envoicing of Women” reframed the problem by de-essentializing operatic femininity, resisting readings of it as naturally or authentically grounded in the female body of a performer and instead calling attention to how any stage performer, whether diva or drag queen, creates and manipulates codes of gender. Nevertheless, with a few important exceptions, male characters and singers have remained relatively invisible in opera scholarship compared to the abundant and ever-developing research on women and femininity in opera.3

1 Catherine Clément, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, trans. B. Wing with an introduction by Susan McClary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). McClary analyzed Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Strauss’s Salome, and Bizet’s Carmen from this perspective; see Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 80–111; and Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 29–43. For a critique of McClary’s analysis of Lucia, see Mary Ann Smart, “The silencing of Lucia,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4:2 (July 1992): 119–41. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: DaCapo Press, 1993). 2 See, for example, Susan McClary, “Structures of Identity and Difference in Carmen,” in Richard Dellamora and D. Fischlin, eds., The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 115–29; and Patricia Juliane Smith, “‘O Patria Mia’: Female Homosociality and the Gendered Nation in Bellini’s Norma and Verdi’s Aida,” in ibid.,93–114. 3 Notable exceptions are Clément’s Chapter 6 on deformed and ethnically “othered” male characters 170 in Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, 118–36; Karen Henson, “Victor Capoul, Marguerite Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 171

While second-wave feminist criticism tended to theorize “the male gaze” or “patriarchal society” in rather monolithic terms, theorists of gender and sexuality since the late 1990s have increasingly attended to “masculinities” as culturally constructed, as effect rather than essence. The fields of gay/ lesbian/queer and transgender studies in particular continue to examine how masculinity, like femininity, intersects with other categories of identity and difference. In addition to the familiar categories of race, class, sexuality, and age, masculinity presents itself along other axes of the social hierarchy, including central and marginal, urban and rural, in-power and out-of- power. Judith Halberstam has used the apparent paradox of female masculinity, as manifest in butch women, transmen, and theatrical “drag kings” or male impersonators, to argue against the commonplace understanding of masculinity as the social, cultural, and political expression of biological or anatomical maleness, and to define it instead as a naturalized performance of power, legitimacy, and privilege.4 Halberstam notes the elusiveness of “normal” or “unmarked” masculinity, its tendencies either to fall short and register as weak or effeminate, or to overshoot its mark and be stigmatized as excessive, bestial, or subhuman. Contemporary popular culture offers a ready array of masculinities inflected by race, class, and sexuality as clichéd images of deficiency or excess, as in Halberstam’s analyses of rappers, lounge lizards, dandies, rednecks, and so on.5 Rossini’s 1819 La donna del lago, an Italian opera seria based on Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem about the fictional adventures of early modern Scottish nobles and chieftains, is obviously distant in time, place, and cultural reference points from the mackdaddies and Elvis impersonators Halberstam has used to theorize masculinity. But the notion of a spectrum of “masculinities” with varying social status, moral legitimacy, and proximity to different sources of authority provides a framework for understanding operatic masculinities of the past, as well as modern American ones. The three male characters of The Lady of the Lake (1810) belong to the same aristocratic class, and all desire the heroine Ellen (the Lady of the

Olagnier’s ‘Le Saïs,’ and the Arousing of Female Desire,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52:3 (Autumn 1999): 419–63; Karen Henson, ed., “The Divo and the Danseur,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19:1 (March 2007), special issue; Joke Dame, “Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato,” in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994): 139–53. 4 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1–3, 231–66. For other historical and disciplinary perspectives on masculinity, see R. Abrams and D. Savran, eds., The Masculinity Studies Reader (Oxford: Blackwells Publishers, 2002). 5 Judith Halberstam, “Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene,” Social Text 52/53, 15:3–4 (Fall/Winter 1997): 104–31. 172 heather hadlock

poem’s title), but they are differentiated by their abilities to act effectively on their own behalf; their orientation toward love or war; and their affiliation with the court or the wilderness. On the “weak” or insufficient end of the spectrum, we may place the lady’s sweetheart Malcolm Graeme, whom the poet describes in androgynous, even feminine terms: Of statue fair, and slender frame, But firmly knit, was Malcolm Graeme. The belted plaid and tartan hose Did ne’er more graceful limbs disclose; His flaxen hair, of sunny hue, curled closely round his bonnet blue.6

Scott’s poem portrays Malcolm, the disenfranchised scion of a fading clan, as an isolated and relatively powerless character. The outlaw chieftain Roderick Dhu, by contrast, represents the excessive masculinity of the wild man or “[ig]noble savage” type. Physically strong and with the charisma and intimidation tactics of a warlord, he rallies the rebellious Highland clans against centralized royal authority. Scott’s Romantic language calls him Ellen’s suitor, but modern readers may place a less chivalrous construction on the forced marriage he demands as the price of his continued protection. Closer to the masculine ideal of power tempered by wisdom and self-restraint is the King of Scotland, James V, who spends most of the poem incognito among his Highland enemies. Despite its titular focus on the Lady, Scott’s poem is essentially a Bildungsroman of the king, whose encounters with Ellen inspire him to rise above the wild man’s impulse to dominate through violence, and instead to resolve his political conflicts with magnanimity and clemency. Although the operatic adaptation of the work interpreted Scott’s range of masculine types through a surprisingly narrow range of voice types and registers, two tenors and a female contralto, it is largely voice that nevertheless conveys the strongly differentiated personae of the opera’s male characters.

Contested borders

The action of Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake takes place on a number of contested borders: the geographic border between the untamed

6 Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake, Canto 2, stanza xxv (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne and Co., 1810), 76–77. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 173

Highlands and the capital city with its royal castle, and the political threshold between a traditional society of independent clans and a newly centralized monarchy. Ellen, the lady of the title, has followed her father Lord Douglas into exile from the court of King James V. They have found refuge in the Highlands on the shores of Lake Katrine with an outlaw chieftain, Roderick Dhu, and now live outside the bounds of the king’s authority. The king encounters Ellen by chance while he is hunting incognito, falls in love with her, and ultimately uses his royal prerogative to facilitate her happiness: he defeats Roderick in battle, makes peace with Lord Douglas, and permits Ellen to marry her beloved Malcolm Graeme. Scott found inspiration for this plot from old legends and ballads about King James V’s habit of traveling in disguise among the common people, crossing borders of social class and identity. As the king travels from personal erotic desire to disinterested benevolence, the ethical focus of the story shifts from romantic intrigue to love as a social force of compas- sion, reconciliation, and harmony. As a literary production, Scott’s poem also sits uneasily on other, more metaphorical borders between gendered readerships, genres, and degrees of literary value. Michael C. Gamer has shown how, even as Scott worked to position his narrative poems in the legitimate masculine domains of history and antiquarianism, literary critics looked down on his gothic settings, character types and narrative formulas. Coleridge, for example, criticized The Lady of the Lake for catering to “the unschooled taste of a reading public whom he [Coleridge] characterizes as childish and feminine.”7 As Gamer summarizes, “Scott’s reviewers are aware – as is Scott – that using the conventions of gothic romance destabilizes his position as a serious author by placing him on the borders of gender, as well as between literary and popular standards of taste.”8 Within a few years of its publication in 1810, the poem began to travel across national and linguistic borders. The first prose translation, published by Elisabeth de Bon under the title La dame du lac in Paris in 1813, strengthened the work’s feminine affinity by rendering Scott’s rhyming epic as a sentimental novel, dedicated to the translator’s sister and addressed to a Parisian circle of upper-class female literary dilettantes.9 De Bon’s French prose version

7 Michael C. Gamer, “Marketing a Masculine Romance: Scott, Antiquarianism, and the Gothic,” Studies in Romanticism 32:4 (Winter 1993): 538. 8 Ibid.: 538. 9 La dame du Lac, roman tiré du poème de Walter Scott, trans. Elisabeth de [Bon] (Paris: A la Librairie Française et Etrangère de Galignani, 1813). 174 heather hadlock

became in turn the source of Andrea Leone Tottola’s Italian libretto, set by Gioacchino Rossini for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples in 1819.10 La donna del lago thus represents a leading edge of Italian fascination with the history of the British Isles and with the literary works of Sir Walter Scott, which would both intensify through the 1830s.11 Like the source poem, the operatic adaptation also straddled stylistic and generic borders. As Philip Gossett, Alberto Zedda, and other scholars have argued, Tottola and Rossini’s La donna del lago occupies a liminal position between the values of classical opera seria and nascent Romanticism.12 The libretto and score juxtapose static reflective arias, in what Alberto Zedda usefully calls Rossini’s “Apollonian” mode, with “Dionysian” passages marked by local color, evocation of outdoor spaces and land- scapes, and rapidly shifting rhythms that respond to psychological shifts and intrigues.13 The propulsive, antiphonal choral Introduzione and the heroine’s barcarolle “O mattutini albori” (Act I, scene 1) epitomize Rossini’s Dionysian energy, as does the long and complex Act I duet for Elena and the disguised king “Uberto.” The duet anticipates Romantic musical dramaturgy in the way it employs Elena’s barcarolle melody as a recurring theme to link disparate scenes together and to chart the development of Elena’s relationship with the king. In contrast, the two arias for Malcolm epitomize the “Apollonian” aspect of Rossini’s style,

10 Facsimiles of De Bon’s French prose adaptation, and of Tottola’s 1819 Naples libretto and 1924 Paris libretto are included in La donna del lago, ed. Arrigo Quattrocchi (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 2007). Tottola’s 1819 libretto predates the first two Italian translations of the poem, which would be published in Turin and Palermo in 1821. See Mary E. Ambrose, “La donna del lago: The First Italian Translations of Scott,” The Modern Language Review 67:1 (January 1972): 74–82. 11 See Jerome Mitchell, The Walter Scott Operas: An Analysis of Operas Based on the Works of Sir Walter Scott (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1977); and Jerome Mitchell, More Scott Operas: Further Analyses of Operas Based on the Works of Walter Scott (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996). 12 On the libretto, musical construction, and proto-Romantic features of La donna del lago in the context of Rossini’s other operas for Naples, see Philip Gossett, “History and Works that Have No History: Reviving Rossini’s Neapolitan Operas,” in Katherine Bergeron and Phillip Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103–7. On the place of La donna del lago in the development of Rossini’s approach to opera seria, see Fedele d’Amico, Il Teatro di Rossini (Bologna: Universale Paperbacks il Mulino, 1992), 152–61. Charles Osborne provides a brief synopsis with musical commentary in Rossini: His Life and Works, 2nd edn. (Oxford University Press, 2007), 279–85. 13 Alberto Zedda, “Rossini a Napoli,” in Il Teatro di San Carlo (Naples: Guida, 1987): 121–40. In Il Teatro di Rossini,d’Amico also notes the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century Romantic elements (particularly in the opening scenes) with eighteenth-century vocalism and aria structures. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 175 with their static dramaturgy and long-sustained introspective stance, brilliant figuration, and schematic two-movement form. The assignment of Malcolm’s role to a female singer in male costume (referred to in this period as a musico), and the contrast between that musico role and his two tenor rivals, places La donna del lago on yet another temporal and stylistic border. Habits and expectations about how to represent masculinity and femininity in opera were changing rapidly between 1810 and 1840. This period saw the emergence of modern female divas and a focus on women’s undoing as the core of Romantic opera plots, together with a generation of modern tenors whose new vocal potency would be mythologized in Gilbert-Louis Duprez’s high C from the chest in 1837.14 These modern operatic voice types, along with the character traits associated with them, quickly came to seem natural and inevitable: soprano heroines and tenor heroes give voice to youthful idealism and thwarted love, while lower-voiced rivals and fathers block their desires.15 But older taxonomies of voices, genders, and characters persisted well into the 1830s.16 Through the early decades of the nineteenth century, the high heroic voice still belonged to a musico (either a castrato or a cross-dressed woman in a male role), whose youth, ardor, impulsiveness, and moral clarity were conveyed by his or her higher

14 See Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss, eds., The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. Cowgill and Poriss, “Introduction,” xxvii–xlvi, and James Q. Davies, “Gautier’s ‘Diva’: The First French Use of the Word,” 123–46; Mary Ann Smart, “Roles, Reputations, Shadows: Singers at the Opéra, 1828–1849,” in David Charlton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108–28. Gregory Bloch cautions that this do del petto “has retrospectively been mythologised as the origin-point of modern tenor technique, though recent research has thrown the exact nature and significance of Duprez’s achievement into doubt,” in Gregory Bloch, “The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-Louis Duprez,” in Cambridge Opera Journal 19:1 (2007): 11. On the pre-Duprez history of the do del petto, see Bloch, “The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-Louis Duprez”:12–14; and John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 175–77. For a comparison of the Opéra’s leading tenors, Adolphe Nourrit and Gilbert-Louis Duprez, in the 1830s, see Smart, “Roles, Reputations, Shadows,” 117–22. 15 See Heather Hadlock, “Women Playing Men in Italian Opera, 1815–1830,” in Jane Bernstein, ed., Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 285–307; Catherine Clément, “Through Voices, History,” in Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren Songs: Representing Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 17–28. 16 See Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Wendy Heller, “Reforming Achilles: Gender, ‘Opera Seria,’ and the Rhetoric of the Enlightened Hero,” Early Music 26:4 (November 1998): 562–81; Dame, “Unveiled Voices,”; Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera,32–74, 176–78. 176 heather hadlock

voice range.17 As James Q. Davies’s evocative phrase “the twilight of the castrato” conveys, castrato musico performers faded rather gradually from opera companies and stages during the first three decades of the nineteenth century.18 A generation of female musico singers performed both extant and newly composed roles between 1810 and 1835, but this solution to the problem of how to represent heroic masculinity proved short-lived, and by the early 1830s, La donna del lago would prove to be one of the last internationally successful and durable operas to feature a female musico hero. Not until the mid-1830s did the tenor become the seemingly natural and exclusive owner of heroic male parts.19 Because it juxtaposes a musico contralto, a type of heroic voice and role that was beginning to decline in 1819, with two tenors, a type which proved to be rising, La donna del lago provides a unique opportunity to examine this transitional moment in operatic representations of masculinity. The role of Malcolm, the favored suitor and successful lover, was written for a female musico, the contralto Rosmunda Pisaroni. Although Pisaroni had debuted in 1811 as a soprano, she had moved to contralto roles after an illness in 1813, and Malcolm would prove to be a definitive step toward her international success in masculine parts. Her unusually potent and resonant low register lacked the ingratiating charm associated with femininity, as did her smallpox-scarred face and her assertive stage manner. The senior primo tenore of the San Carlo company, Andrea Nozzari, was cast as Malcolm’s antagonist, the warlord and unwelcome suitor Rodrigo di Dhu.20 (Nozzari was sometimes described with the hybrid term “baritenor,” signaling the range and tessitura of a tenor with the dark timbre and heavier sound of a baritone.) The amorous and mischievous King James V of Scotland, who spends most of the opera

17 See Roger Covell, “Voice Register as an Index of Age and Status in Opera Seria,” in Michael Collins and Elise K. Kirk, eds., Opera and Vivaldi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 193–210. 18 See James Q. Davies, “‘Veluti in Speculum’: The Twilight of the Castrato,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17:3 (2005): 271–301. 19 Bertram in Bellini’s Il pirata (1827), Arnold in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829), and Enrico VIII in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena (1830) are early examples of the modern tenor voice type: see Bloch, “The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-Louis Duprez”:11–31; and Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera, 176–78. See also Marco Beghelli, “Il ruolo del musico,” in F. C. Greco and R. di Benedetto, eds., Donizetti, Napoli, L’Europa (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2000), 323–36. See also Heather Hadlock, “Tancredi and Semiramide,” in E. Senici, ed., Cambridge Companion to Rossini (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139–58. 20 Andrea Nozzari and Isabella Colbran were the first and most consistent members of the company Barbaja assembled at the Teatro di San Carlo. Nozzari had sung heroic roles in serious operas at the Teatro di San Carlo since 1810. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 177 incognito as a hunter or shepherd, was a non-standard element in a heroic opera: although he initially appears (like Rodrigo) as a rival to Malcolm and an obstacle to the central romance, he ultimately functions as a benevolent helping figure. Rossini and Barbaja gave this role to Giovanni David, a younger and lighter-voiced leading tenor who had recently joined the company of the San Carlo, after early successes in comic and semi-seria roles.21 My analysis of masculinity in La donna del lago will read the opera’s libretto and score as texts, taking into account the constraints that early nineteenth-century conditions of opera production place upon the hermeneutic activity of any close reading. Like practically every successful Italian opera from this period, La donna del lago began metamorphosing immediately after its premiere. At its Milan premiere in 1821, for example, one journalist reported:

Here [in Milan] it was necessary to alter the musical score notably, because the contralto role was entrusted to a soprano sfogato [Adelaide Tosi as Malcolm], and one tenor role to another soprano [Adelaide Cassago as Rodrigo]...to say nothing of the minor changes made in several other roles, the pieces interpolated from other operas, and the necessity of tampering with the whole first act finale, which is a ghost of the original composition. This alteration did not prevent La donna del lago from being enjoyed on many accounts at La Scala, mainly for the singular mastery of several of the performers; but it shows how among us it has had to lose its first splendor, and that original beauty which gives this score one of the most distinguished places among the illustrious maestro’s most beautiful works.22

Tailoring a score and libretto to the available resources and local expectations of each new venue outweighed considerations of textual integrity, and, as a result, a successful Italian opera of this time was an unstable

21 Giovanni David had played both comic-sentimental and serious-heroic roles, including Narciso in Rossini’s comedy Il turco in Italia and the title role of Paer’s melodramma eroico-comico Sargino. 22 “Fra noi bisogno alterare notabilmente l’orditura musical, perché la parte del contralto fu affidata ad un soprano sfogato, e quella d’un tenore ad altro soprano, che rinunzierebbe all’impero del mondo piuttosto che alle stonature; senza contare i minori cambiamenti fattisi in qualche altro personaggio, i pezzi d’altre opere intrusi, e la necessità in cui si fu di manomettere tutto il finale dell’atto primo, ch’è una larva dell’originale composizione. Questo mutamento non impedì che la Donna del Lago non sia piaciuta per molti conti anche sul teatro della Scala e principalmente per la singolare maestrìa d’alcuni fra gli esecutori; ma esso dimostra quanto fra noi abbia naturalmente dovuto perdere de suo primo splendore, e di quella natia bellezza che assegnano a questo spartito uno dei posti più distinti fra i più belli dell’illustre maestro.”“Teatro alla Scala—La Donna del Lago,” Gazzetta di Milano 41 (February 11, 1821): 199–201. 178 heather hadlock

compound of musical numbers and dramatic situations, subject to alteration and revision as needed. Which elements in a given opera were relatively stable, and which were changeable, emerged over time through the unique history of its production and reception. In La donna del lago, the heroine’s role proved to be the stable core, defined by her iconic entrance in a boat at dawn (“O mattutini albori” [“Oh early dawn”]), her scenes with her suitors Malcolm and the king, and her virtuosic final aria (“Tanti affetti” [“So many emotions”]). The three leading male roles, by contrast, proved highly unstable and subject to change as the opera was taken up in other Italian cities, Paris, London, and elsewhere. For this reason, the textual traces of the opera must be understood as contingent upon specific productions and performers. It is by now well established in opera scholarship that roles – especially leading roles – were composed, revised, and even conceived for the singers who would play them.23 The presence or availability of a particular singer informed the compositional choices of range, tessitura, and vocal style, and the voices and personae of particular performers could shape a role at every stage of creation. Revivals therefore required cuts and additions for a new cast, and leading singers tailored their roles both to their own strengths and to local taste, by interpolating or substituting “trunk arias” into a score.24 But a singer was not simply a voice: he or she was a complex persona comprised of appearance, stature, movement, gesture, previous roles, and off-stage reputation. This persona informed decisions about the prominence of the role in the score, the length and dramatic scope of a role (and therefore of the character in the plot), the librettist’s framing of a character, and even the choice of dramatic subject. A performer on stage was at once an immediately present voice, face, and body, and a cumulative persona that persisted across time through multiple performances and roles. Through La donna del lago’s three heroes and their first performers, particularly Rosmunda Pisaroni as Malcolm and Giovanni David as the disguised King James, we may trace the changing meanings attached to

23 See Mary Ann Smart, “The Lost Voice of Rosine Stoltz,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6:1 (March 1994): 31–50; Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera; Hilary Poriss, Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford University Press, 2009). 24 For an overview of how musicologists have framed the concept of the aria di baule (“suitcase aria”) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoires, and an analysis of aria interpolations in the early nineteenth-century, see Hilary Poriss, “Making Their Way through the World: Italian One-Hit Wonders,” Nineteenth-Century Music 24:3 (Spring 2001): 197–224. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 179 masculine-heroic personae between 1819 and the mid-1830s.25 David’s gallant persona and flexible, silvery voice served the king’s persuasive and amorous character, just as Andrea Nozzari’s baritenor voice, reinforced by his age, gravitas, and seniority in the San Carlo company, expressed the domineering character of Rodrigo di Dhu.26 The act finales of La donna del lago showcase each tenor’s persona and vocal authority as a military-political leader in his characteristic milieu: at the climax of Act I, Nozzari as chieftain Rodrigo dominates the outdoor gathering of rebel clans, while in the second act finale, David as King James presides over a courtly tableau of royal clemency restoring hierarchy, order, and peace. The addition of the musico contralto Rosmunda Pisaroni as the sentimental hero Malcolm complicates this binary opposition between tenor masculinities.27 In solo scenes, in confrontations between two or more rivals, and in relation to the heroine Elena, La donna del lago’s “wild man,”“cultured man,” and sentimental “man of feeling” reveal ways that masculinity, vocality, and operatic genre mutually constructed each other at this transitional moment between musico and tenor heroes, between classic and Romantic structures, and between competing conceptions of romantic love and desire.

25 La donna del lago was one of Rossini’s most successful operas through the 1820s, popular in Italian cities, Dresden, Vienna, London, Paris, Lisbon, and St. Petersburg. It largely fell out of circulation by the mid-1830s, and completely by 1860. See H. Colin Slim, “Prefazione,” in La donna del lago, ed. H. Colin Slim, Edizione critica delle opera di Gioachino Rossini (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1990), xxx–xxxi. Revivals with different casts, resources, and audiences motivated substantial revisions and substitutions, particularly in the first five years of the opera’s circulation. Slim’s edition documents revisions for Naples in 1820, Rome in 1821 (planned, but not completed), and Paris in 1824–25. The 1821 Milan premiere also made substantial changes; see n. 22 above. Poriss documents the popularity of Malcolm’s aria “Mura felici...O quanti lagrime” as a substitution piece in other operas, including Rossini’s Otello, and the fashion, initiated by tenor Rubini in 1830, for replacing the king’s Act II aria “O fiamma soave” with the aria “O soave bel contento” from Pacini’s Niobe. See Poriss, Changing the Score,80–99. 26 La donna del lago was the fourth opera in which Rossini explored contrasting psychological, affective, ethical, and social dimensions of heroic masculinity through the tenor voices and personae of David and Nozzari. Rossini had first paired these singers in the cantata Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (April 1816), and in July 1816, the impresario Barbaja cast them as the jealous husband and doomed lover of Michele Carafa’s Gabriella di Vergy. Prior to La donna del lago, Rossini had paired them in Otello (1816), Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818), and Ermione (1819). 27 Rosmunda Pisaroni joined Barbaja’s company in 1818, following her performances as primo musico in Rossini’s Ciro in Babilonia and Aureliano in Palmira, and her creation of the female role of Romilda in Meyerbeer’s Romilda e Costanza (1817). Prior to La donna del lago at the Teatro di San Carlo, she created female contralto roles in Rossini’s Ricciardo e Zoraide and Ermione, and took the primo musico role in Manfroce’s Alzira in December 1818. On Pisaroni’s persona and masculine roles in Italy, Paris, and London in the 1820s and 1830s, see Hadlock, “Women Playing Men in Italian Opera, 1815–1830,” 292–97. 180 heather hadlock

Sentimental heroism

As Mary Hunter, Stefano Castelvecchi, and Jessica Waldoff have shown in studies of late eighteenth-century opera buffa and opera semi-seria, the gender roles staged in Italian opera at the turn of the nineteenth century perpetuate and extend those presented in eighteenth-century sentimental literature and drama.28 Sentimental novels in England, like the bourgeois dramas advocated by Diderot in France and imitated in Germany, offered a new, proto-feminist account of women’s experience through critical depictions of the feminine role in the family, in society, and in intimate relationships. The archetypal “sentimental heroine” is virtuous, yet persecuted: oppressed, neglected, or falsely accused. She is physically confined (usually to a house, a chamber, a garden, a prison, or a harem), and has a limited ability to act on her own behalf. Her dominant affect is pathos, and her main dramatic action is the exploration and detailed expression of emotion. But as Hunter emphasizes, the sentimental heroine paradoxically combines powerlessness and power, for although she may be helpless within the plot, the affective power of her performance makes her the center of attention and the focus of sympathy and audience identification.29 Her power lies in moving the reader or listener to pity through her rhetoric, her vulnerability, and her beauty. While this feminine passivity would normally present itself as the antithesis of political engagement, the example of Ellen in Scott’s The Lady of the Lake shows that such passivity can actually carry political import. As Lincoln observes,

Feminine values...become a means of humanizing civil order and the idea of nation. The exiled Ellen represents femininity as a mythical power which can exert its influence over masculine passion, a “maiden confidence” which chastens Fitz-James [the king], softens the lustful Brent, and subdues Lewis of Tullibardine. This idealized femininity allows the heroine to express a humane response to violence, and to act without acting, to influence the masculine world innocently.30

28 See Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999): 84–94, 146–55; Stefano Castelvecchi, “Sentimental and Anti-Sentimental in Le nozze di Figaro,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53:1 (2000): 1–24; and Jessica Waldoff, Recognition in Mozart’s Operas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. 104–38, 185–210. 29 Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna, 146–55. 30 Andrew Lincoln, “Walter Scott and the Birth of the Nation,” Romanticism 8:1 (2002): 13. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 181

Lincoln argues persuasively that although the historical tradition of border minstrelsy emulated by Scott “represents a belligerent feudal world which apparently has little room for conventionally feminine values,” The Lady of the Lake depicts a “feminine realm of sensibility and domesticity” in which Ellen’s virtues of sincerity, frankness, and empathy inspire the king to reconcile with his defeated rebel vassals.31 In the opera, as in the poem, the apparently passive and helpless feminine thus operates on the highest political level as it helps facilitate the transition from a feudal society to a centralized royal government. Masculinity proves a trickier category in sentimental culture, for sympathetic masculine qualities are virtually identical to “feminine” ones: like the sentimental heroine, the man of feeling also engages the audience through beautiful expressions of longing for something or someone inaccessible to him. This type has received little critical attention, although Mary Hunter notes that he is a problematic figure in comic opera, appearing less frequently than the sentimental heroine and treated in a more ambivalent manner by librettists and composers.32 His high, light voice, introspective nature, and dependence on women for happiness (expressed in arias like Don Ottavio’s “Dalla sua pace” and Ferrando’s “Un’ aura amorosa,” for example), place him on the margins of the energetic and often misogynistic baritone masculinity that dominates the buffa landscape. His languishing utterances may also have a parodic edge, as if the authors were mocking his passive and self-involved state. In serious opera, by contrast, those jovial baritones are absent and the hero’s sentimental emoting, like the heroine’s, is presented without irony or parody. Moreover, the casting of a castrato and/or a female musico serves to emphasize the hero’s rhetorical and structural resemblance to the heroine. Musical idioms were only weakly marked by gender, as florid coloratura singing belonged equally to male and female voices, and both men and women cultivated the “pathetic” idiom of legato singing intended to melt listeners’ hearts rather than dazzle their ears.33 Like the sentimental

31 Ibid.,7–8. 32 Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna, 146–55. 33 The role of Romeo in Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo (1796), created by the castrato Crescentini and perpetuated in subsequent decades by sopranos Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran, provided one archetype of sentimental heroism in the early nineteenth century. With its simple syllabic declamation designed to foreground vocal beauty and heartfelt emotion, Romeo’s lament in the famous tomb scene, “Ombra adorata,” epitomized the pathetic mode of virtuosity. On Zingarelli’s Romeo as a sentimental archetype, and on the interpretations of Crescentini and Pasta, see Heather Hadlock, “On the Cusp Between Present and Future: the Mezzo- 182 heather hadlock

heroine, the sentimental hero is constrained by social, physical, and psychological forces (usually some combination of all three). Thus in La donna del lago, Elena and Malcolm each enter with a soliloquy addressed to a landscape that inspires thoughts of the beloved: Elena greets the morning with the lines, “O mattutini albori, vi ha preceduto amor” (“Oh early dawn, love has preceded you”), and Malcolm greets the exterior of Elena’s house with, “Mura felici, ove il mio ben si aggira!” (“Oh happy walls in which my love resides!”). Admittedly, their entrances have different forms and generic associations: Elena’s position in a boat, combined with the barcarolle rhythm of “O mattutini albori,” suggests that we are to hear her song as diegetic, while Malcolm’s accompanied recitative represents an interior monologue. Yet these two entrance numbers establish the solitary, disempowered condition and wistful affect that Elena and Malcolm share, each confiding in the surroundings – clouds and walls, respectively – that exclude them from happiness. High-voiced protagonists, whether female or male, display similar helplessness and affective power in their soliloquies, prayers and laments. Malcolm sings almost exclusively of grief and fatalism: his willingness to die for Elena, the tears already shed over her, and his railing at the fate which keeps her from him. The constraint of heroines within a social or familial structure and the exile of heroes to a place outside it are thus two sides of the sentimental coin, with hero and heroine equally unhappily subject to hostile authority. Fathers, brothers, and suitors may all embody that authority, but so may female characters and groups. In other words, the “masculine” in this genre is not confined to particular bodies or personae, but is rather defined by the system of laws, customs, and social relationships in which sentimental protagonists must operate. Heroines and heroes become sentimentally interesting when they come into conflict with that system – that is, when they become “structurally feminine.”34 The first act of La donna del lago follows sentimental and seria convention insofar as Elena prefers a young, disenfranchised suitor (Malcolm, the musico contralto), while her family and community support the claims of an older, more powerful rival (Rodrigo, the baritenor). She describes her situation as a “fatal conflitto/di amore e di dover” (“fatal conflict between love

Soprano Romeo of Bellini’s I Capuleti,” The Opera Quarterly 17:2 (Summer 2001): 399–422; see also Jean Starobinski, “Ombra adorata,” The Opera Quarterly 21:4 (2005): 612–30. 34 Philip Gossett notes that Tottola revised the story so that Elena’s father in the opera supports Rodrigo’s demands for marriage, whereas in Scott’s poem he had protected Ellen from Roderick. Gossett, “History and Works that Have No History,” 103–7. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 183 and duty”).35 But this conventional Metastasian framing of “love versus duty” turns out to be misleading, because Elena never has to choose between her love for Malcolm and her duty to obey her father and marry Rodrigo. In the end, she never makes any choice, for she is passed from the authority of a biological father who opposed her desire, to the authority of a symbolic father, the king, who indulges it. The initial conflict between romantic love and filial duty evaporates when Rodrigo is killed, and neither love nor duty is at stake in the relationship that ultimately determines her fate, her friendship with the disguised king. It therefore proves more productive to organize a reading of this opera around another conflict, between two models of love that attempt to explain, authorize, and naturalize the bond between man and woman as based either on difference or on similarity.

Rules of attraction: difference and likeness

The sentimental model of heroism – a “structurally feminine” heroism based on sensibility and self-expression rather than action and self-determination, and displayed by both male and female protagonists – produces in many operas of this period a conflict between two competing codes of heterosexual attraction. The first code might be called the “romance of difference”: the traditional pairing of masculine strength and feminine beauty, the man of action and the woman of feeling. The “difference” model is articulated most plainly in La donna del lago in the women’s chorus about the legendary “Damsel of Inibaca,” whose beauty enthralled the hero Tremmor, “the terror of the North.” Now Elena, still more beautiful, has kindled a similar flame in “Rodrigo the strong”:

D’inibaca, Donzella, Che fe’ D’immenso amor Struggere un dì Tremor, Terror Del Norte: Sei Elena Più bella: Per te

35 La donna del lago, ed. Slim, Act I, scene 8. 184 heather hadlock

Di pari ardor Avvampa così Ognor Rodrigo, il forte.36 [The Damsel of Inibaca inspired a great love in Tremmor, the terror of the North: You, Elena, are even more beautiful. For you, Rodrigo the strong burns with a similar passion.]

As beauty is to strength, as the damsel was to Tremmor, so Elena should be to Rodrigo: the natural companion and appropriate reward. The librettist Tottola used faux-Ossianic reference and broken poetic lines to create an archaic effect for this text, and Rossini responded with a primitive melody whose short, repeated phrases derive almost entirely from an arpeggiated tonic triad, supported by rudimentary harmonies and a projected drone bass (Example 6.1).37 The A-major key evokes the pastoral, as do the woodwind colors in the second verse, and the persistent appoggiatura figure in the accompaniment suggests a “Scotch snap” for a note of Highland color. The repeated “cuckoo” motif between C#-A in the first phrase intensifies the rustic effect. While the poetry of this chorus celebrates the masculine and feminine as timeless complementary forces, the musical setting supports the opera’s representation of the Highland clans as a “natural” society, untainted by aristocratic artifice. In the Act I finale, Rodrigo exults in the energizing force of the code of difference, vowing that Elena’s love will spur him on like a “nuovo Alcide” (“new Hercules”) (Act I, scene 9). Yet despite these moments of endorsement for the “romance of difference,” the soprano maiden and baritenor warrior remain quite musically separate in La donna del lago, because Elena and Rodrigo never sing a duet. (In Rossini’s Otello, by contrast, the soprano Colbran and baritenor Nozzari had enacted the tragic potential of the romance of difference as Desdemona and Otello.) Furthermore, although Rodrigo’s role in the 1819 Naples version of the opera was as prominent as the other two male leads, it diminished in importance as the opera was revised for performance in other cities. Rodrigo’s part was usually reduced in scale and virtuosity because few tenors other than Nozzari could sing it. The Milan premiere of 1821, for example, abridged Rodrigo’s part and assigned it to a second- rank soprano en travesti, Adelaide Cassago. In Paris (1824), Rodrigo’s most

36 Ibid., Act I, scene 6. 37 Stefano Castelvecchi, “Walter Scott, Rossini e la couleur ossianique: il contesto culturale della Donna del lago,” Bollettino del centro rossiniano di studi 33 (1993), 57–71. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 185

Example 6.1 Act I, No. 2, Chorus: “D’Inibaca, donzella,” mm. 30–47 impressive number, the Act II trio, was replaced with a quartet adapted from Bianca e Falliero.38 But unchanged in every version is Rodrigo’s off- stage death midway through Act II, the event that clears the way for the plot to focus on the heroine’s relationships with her other two suitors, Malcolm and James. The plot and music of La donna del lago therefore

38 On the planned Rome revisions for 1821–22 and the Paris version for 1824, see Slim, “Prefazione,” xxvi–xxix. 186 heather hadlock

Example 6.1 (cont.)

focus less on the contrast between feminine soprano beauty and masculine baritenor strength than on what I will call a “romance of likeness,” according to which the heroine will prefer the lover who most resembles her in personality, sentimental situation, and voice. In bel canto opera, sentimental affinity manifests itself through similar voice registers, vocal styles, poetic inclination, and outsider status. Accord- ingly, the heroine of La donna del lago is repelled by the baritenor Rodrigo and loves the musico Malcolm. (Her sympathy for the light tenor “Uberto,” the disguised king, enriches this scheme in ways that will be discussed in Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 187 the next section.) We have seen already how Elena’s and Malcolm’s entrance arias establish their parallel situations of isolation and romantic yearning. The slow concertato movement of the Act I finale (“Crudele sospetto” [Cruel suspicion]) foregrounds this affinity as their paired female voices express their shared distress at Rodrigo’s antagonism.39 Prima donna and primo musico belong together not because opposites attract, but because they are alike. Indeed, the role of Malcolm tended to be appreciated through a feminine framework, when played by musico singers other than Rosmunda Pisaroni. Pisaroni’s powerful voice, marred face, ungraceful posture, and assertive stage presence made her an exception to the general tendency of critics to praise female musicosas“charming” or “delightful.” Assessments of travesty performances in the 1810s and 1820s suggest that a charming appearance, graceful gestures, and light or sweet vocal timbre could enhance a musico singer’s masculine role, rather than undermine it. A critic at the Milan premiere of La donna del lago (1821), for example, praised Adelaide Tosi’s appearance as Malcolm in feminine terms: “The young Adelaide Tosi, casting off her Greek attire, now appears clothed in Scottish military garb. The plumes that cast their shadows on her cheek also heighten the sweet majesty of her youthful carriage.”40 Tosi had worn “Greek attire” earlier in the season as the young hero Ippolito in Mayr’s Fedra, and the reviewer turns her trouser roles into an exotic fashion parade: first the Grecian ensemble, now the Scottish.41 (Malcolm’s music in the Milan version was lighter in vocal color and weight than it had been in Naples, the result of transposition up to accommodate Tosi’s soprano voice.42) The focus on “plumes that cast their shadows on her cheek” situates Tosi’s masculine impersonation

39 Bellini would adopt this device in the Act I finale of I Capuleti ed i Montecchi, where the female voices of Giulietta and the musico Romeo soar plaintively above a hostile chorus. Philip Gossett notes that the female musico’s range and timbre is crucial to the dramatic effect of the Capuleti finale in Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 116–19. 40 “La giovane Adelaide Tosi, deposte le spoglie greche, comparisce vestita dell’armatura scozzese. Le piume che le ombreggiono il cimiero accrescono la dolce maestà del giovanile suo portamento, e nelle animate fattezze del volto si dipingono tutti gli affetti ch’ella inspira in altrui.”“Teatro alla Scala. La donna del lago,” Gazzetta di Milano 41 (February 11, 1821): 199–201. 41 Giovanni Simone Mayr, Fedra, Teatro alla Scala, December 26, 1820. 42 “Fra noi bisogno alterare notabilmente l’orditura musical, perché la parte del contralto fu affidata ad un soprano sfogato...[Tosi] è dotata d’un soprano che nella sua acutezza conserva tutta l’omogeneità del contralto.”“Teatro alla Scala. La donna del lago,” Gazzetta di Milano 41 (February 11, 1821): 199–201. 188 heather hadlock

within a heterosexual discourse of flirtation, as the male spectator enjoys discerning the pretty face behind those shadowing plumes. The plumed hat adds height and “majesty,” but even that maestà is rendered attractively feminine with the adjective dolce. The female performer in male costume remains an object of male delectation. Nor does the fact that Malcolm’s arias and duets are addressed to a female love object (Elena) preclude the singer Tosi from being a female love object herself; in fact, the critic remarks that, “in the vivacious movements of her face are depicted all the emotions that she inspires in others.”43 Tosi’s “depictions” of longing for Elena inspired in the spectator an analogous longing for the singer Tosi herself; similarly, Tosi’s depictions of Malcolm’s devotion to Elena offered to the spectator an image of his own devotion to this charming performer. Such praise defuses the gender- transgressive potential of Tosi’s cross-dressed performance, reinterpreting the love and desire that the musico (in her masculine role) addresses toward another woman (in the role of the heroine) as a reflection of the emotions that the spectator feels toward the musico singer herself. This appreciation of the female musico’s charms resonates with the positive sentimental-erotic image of androgyny in Romantic literature, in which the androgyne is discovered as a woman – always young, slim, and pretty – whose masculine dress indexes her admirable courage, adventurous spirit, and nonconformist attitude.44 For the Milan reviewer, in 1821 at least, the musico singer’s femininity registered through her male costume as a source of pleasure, and her male character inspires the same pathos and desire that a sentimental heroine would elicit. The fictional plot presented a hero and heroine mutually attracted by their similar virtues of tenderness, sensitivity, and constancy, and the performance convention of the musico hero made both singers available for enjoyment as feminine or feminized love objects. At the same time, La donna del lago

43 “La giovane Adelaide Tosi, deposte le spoglie greche, comparisce vestita dell’armatura scozzese. Le piume che le ombreggiono il cimiero accrescono la dolce maestà del giovanile suo portamento, e nelle animate fattezze del volto si dipingono tutti gli affetti ch’ella inspira in altrui.” Ibid.: 199–201. 44 See Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998); and Elisabeth Krimmer, In the Company of Men: Cross-dressed Women around 1800 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Both MacLeod and Krimmer have shown that this type of androgyne appears in Romantic narratives as an object of apparently homoerotic (yet safely heterosexual “underneath”) masculine desire; she is rarely, if ever, presented as a female-desiring female subject. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 189 presents the romance of similarity in a surprisingly pessimistic and limited tone. The hero’s and heroine’s vocal, affective, and dramatic similarities are emphasized most strongly in their Act I duettino, “Vivere io non potrò” (“I will not be able to live without you”), which, however, imbues the sentimental romance of similarity with an unexpectedly melancholy spirit:

Vivere io non potrò, Mio ben, senza di te. Fra l’ombre scenderò Pria che mancar di fè. [I will not be able to live, Without you, my beloved. I will descend among the shadows Before I break faith.]

Although the poem is a vow of constancy, the musical setting emphasizes its images of defeat, resignation, and anticipation of death. Deceptive cadences begin and end the piece: both the first chord of the orchestral introduction and the final chord of the vocal duet are poignant F# minor triads, in place of the expected A major (Example 6.2). Even as Elena and Malcolm vow eternal devotion, the chromatic harmonies on their promise, “Fra l’ombre scenderò” (“I will descend among the shadows”), seem to mourn an inevitable parting, made more sorrowful by repetition. Despite the affirmative declaration of the second sentence (“I will descend among the shadows / Before I break faith”), the closing musical phrases emphasize the fragment “mancar di fè” by ornamentation, descending contour, and repetition. Lacking a cabaletta (the fast closing movement that conventionally serves to gather up and discharge the dramatic and emotional energy of a scene), their duet sounds permanently unconsummated. While the close harmony of soprano and contralto is heartbreaking in its beauty, and the similarity between two female voices conveys a utopian sense of refuge from oppressive reality, this duettino also presents sentimental masculinity as powerless and passive.45 It suggests that the romance of similarity between heroine and musico hero was becoming problematic, as the sentimental hero – defined by yearning and lack, and by a high voice audibly literalizing his “structurally feminine”

45 Elisabeth Krimmer and Martha Feldman have recently traced the increasingly negative descriptions of castrati as monstrous and unnatural in Enlightenment writings of the later eighteenth century. See Martha Feldman, “Denaturing the Castrato,” The Opera Quarterly 24 (2008): 178–99; and Elisabeth Krimmer, “‘Evviva il coltello?’: The Castrato Singer in Eighteenth-Century German Literature and Culture,” PMLA 120:5 (2005): 1543–59. 190 heather hadlock

Example 6.2 Act I, No. 5, Duettino: “Vivere io non potrò,” mm 1–29

position and his affinity with the heroine – was becoming shadowed by the threat of effeminacy.

Effeminacy in bel canto opera

While Malcolm’s appearance and poignant situation had inspired sentimental interest in Scott’s readers, especially female readers, he fell short of “high heroic pride.” In the poem’s second canto, Ellen asks her minstrel to Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 191

Example 6.2 (cont.)

“Pour forth the glory of the Graeme!” in a song about her absent beloved, but the minstrel and his instrument are unable to do it: The minstrel waked his harp, – three times Arose the well-known martial chimes, And thrice their high heroic pride In melancholy murmurs died. “Vainly thou bidst, O noble maid,” clasping his withered hands, he said.46

46 Scott, The Lady of the Lake, Canto 2, stanzas vi–vii, 53–54. 192 heather hadlock

Example 6.2 (cont.)

Scott himself noted ruefully in letters to his patron Lady Abercorn that Malcolm remained “a perfect automaton,” overshadowed on one side by the gallant king and on the other by the exciting brutality of the outlaw Roderick.47 The character’s melancholia, his absence from decisive action,

47 While writing the poem, Scott exclaimed in a letter to his patroness, “The deuce take my lover [Malcolm Graeme] – I can make nothing of him; he is a perfect automaton.” Scott to Lady Abercorn, March 14, 1810, in David Douglas, ed., Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), vol. II, 169. A few months later he reflected, “[H]owever Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 193

Example 6.2 (cont.)

and his passivity in the final scene all originate with Scott, who admitted that Malcolm, “in spite of my best exertions, is like to turn out what the players call a walking gentleman.”48 As explained by the nineteenth- century American actor James Murdoch in 1880, the term “a ‘walking

interesting lovers are to each other, it is no easy matter to render them generally interesting. There was however another reason for keeping Malcolm Graeme’s character a little under as the painters say, for it must otherwise have interfered with that of the king, which I was more anxious to bring forward in splendor, or something like it.” Scott to Lady Abercorn, June 29, 1810, in ibid., 183. 48 Scott to Lady Abercorn, January 21, 1810, in ibid., 167. An early review similarly noted, “Malcolm Graeme has too insignificant a part assigned to him, considering the favour in which he is held both by Ellen and the author.” See F. Jeffrey, “Review of The Lady of the Lake: 194 heather hadlock

gentleman’...is used to designate a character in the drama essential to the progress and development of the plot, but performing what may be termed a merely mechanical part in the dialogue; that is, one not partaking of the emotional characteristics of the language of the play.”49 It would be false to describe Malcolm’s role in the opera as “merely mechanical,” given the length and virtuosity of his music and his dramatic importance as Elena’s favored suitor. But if we replace “the emotional characteristics of the language of the play” in Murdoch’s definition with something like “the predominant musical tone and dramatic design of an opera,” the label “walking gentleman” proves unexpectedly applicable to Rossini’s Malcolm as well as to Scott’s. Although Malcolm’s role gratifies the singer with opportunities for virtuosic singing, his two arias do not participate in the formal innova- tions and dynamic dramaturgy of the scenes around them. Less than ten years after the opera’s premiere, the Gazzetta di Milano described Malcolm’s character as “Isolated, so to speak, in only two arias, which, although beautiful, are not in favorable situations, and altogether very trite.”50 Malcolm’s first entrance in Act I, scene 3 marks him immediately as a conservative element in the score. The opera had begun with choral and orchestral evocations of echoing hills and mountains, followed by a duet for Elena and the disguised king that spanned a scene change and two choral interruptions.51 In contrast to these dramaturgically innovative numbers, Malcolm’s entrance aria, “Mura felici... O quante lagrime,” follows a conventional progression of tempo and affect from slow and plaintive to fast and impassioned. In Act II, Malcolm’s rondo “Ah! Si pera... Fato crudele” again showcases the singer’s virtuosity in a solo aria that follows on the heels of an innovative action-ensemble scene, the duet-turned-trio for the soprano Elena and the two tenors. While off-stage his two rivals duel to the death and his comrades lose a battle, Malcolm remains a static character who exercises no agency over the events that shape his fate.

A Poem,” in Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, [August 1810] 1846), vol. II, 258. 49 James E. Murdoch, The Stage: Or Recollections of Actors and Acting (Bronx, NY: Benjamin Blom, Inc., [1880] 1969), 204–5. 50 Gazzetta di Milano 184 (1827). 51 Elena and “Uberto’s” duet develops out of her “O mattutini albori,” whose recurring melody links the movements of the duet across a scene change from the lake to Elena’s cottage. On large-scale musical planning as a feature of Rossini’s Neapolitan operas, see Gossett, “History and Works that Have No History,” 107–13. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 195

In short, although Malcolm is the successful suitor from whom Elena’s emotional focus never swerves, he may also be deemed the hero in name only. The original 1819 Neapolitan version of the opera carves out only the smallest private space for Elena and Malcolm, for apart from their brief duettino, all their interactions take place before a crowd: the gathered clans in the Act I finale and the royal court at the end of Act II. The lovers have no long duets like the ones Elena sings with the disguised king (Act I, scenes 1 and 2; Act II, scene 11). Even when revivals outside of Naples expanded Malcolm’s role with new musical numbers that made the romance plot and the sonority of paired female voices more prominent, these additions did not transform Malcolm into a more active character.52 In every version, his scenes emphasize romantic frustration and inability to act, and even the happy outcome of his love is merely a gift from his benevolent rival the king. Malcolm is allowed only three syllables of reaction to this unexpected clemency –“O cielo!” (“Oh heavens!”) – before he, with the rest of the cast, steps aside to watch Elena finish the opera alone. The dramatic weakness of Malcolm’s character is significant because La donna del lago and Rossini’s other Neapolitan operas register early signs of what would become a widespread dissatisfaction with female musico roles and the traditional pairing of prima donna soprano and primo musico. In the influential operatic environment of the Teatro di San Carlo, the “romance of similarity” between musico hero and heroine was undermined both by the prima donna’s desire to shine uncontested and by local taste. The operas Rossini composed for the company’s leading soprano, Isabella Colbran, suggest that this prima donna preferred other women to play secunda donna roles as confidantes or as scorned and suffering rivals, rather than to match her importance as primo musico.53 Above and beyond the impact of a diva’s ego within the hierarchical environment of an opera company, Naples under French rule in the Napoleonic years had turned against the tradition of high-voiced heroes, whether castrated men or cross- dressed women. By 1832, a Milanese music critic, attempting to explain the

52 Milan 1821 interpolated a duet from Zoraide; Paris 1824 interpolated a duet and quartet from Bianca e Falliero, which became standard. See Slim, “Prefazione,” xxvii–xxix. 53 La donna del lago (1819) and Maometto II (1820) are Rossini’s only Neapolitan operas that feature a primo musico as the lover of a heroine played by Isabella Colbran. Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra (1815) featured a contralto in the minor male role of Enrico. Otherwise, women singing opposite Colbran in Rossini’s Neapolitan operas played her confidantes in Otello (1816) and Zelmira (1822), persecuted rivals in Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra (1815) and Ermione (1819), and antagonists in Zoraide (1818) and Mosé in Egitto (1818). Armida (1817), the most extreme case, has no “second woman” character. 196 heather hadlock

diminished population and prestige of the contralto voice, would assert that “The neglect of the contraltos began at the San Carlo in Naples: as the musici [castrati] were not wanted at that theater, the practice of employing contraltos in their place was rendered superfluous on those stages.”54 He recalled that the most celebrated contralti of the 1810s had found Naples less receptive to their talents than other cities: “[Adelaide] Malanotte was there, and there was no interest; [Elisabetta] Gafforini was there, and spent the year without performing an opera written for her by Generali, and even [Rosmunda] Pisaroni, in order to sing in one of her two operas, had to renounce her male attire.”55 This critic claimed (albeit incorrectly) that Rossini either reduced the importance of the contralto roles or omitted them altogether from his operas for Barbaja’s company: “La donna del lago and Ricciardo e Zoraide are the only two Neapolitan operas which this maestro composed for the contralto voice – both for la Pisaroni – but her role was not the most important, and was only made so by her talent.”56 The inaccuracies in this account of contralto singers in Naples, made less than twenty years after the repertory they describe, show how female musico roles and singers were already fading from narratives of opera’s recent history and current state. In 1835, the tenor and vocal pedagogue Nicola Tacchinardi would categorically disparage female musico singers as a weakness in contemporary Italian opera: “Never does [the female musico] take on the character and the resemblance of a man. Her way of walking is always a woman’s. The arrangements of her garments are always those of a woman: a woman’s, too, are the ringlets that drip down her cheeks.”57 Ironically, this description of ringlets and womanly carriage echoes the praise accorded to Adelaide Tosi as Malcolm in 1821. Over fifteen years, the judgment of those features had changed from admiration to blame.

54 “La trascuranza dei contralti ebbe la sua origine a San Carlo di Napoli; e siccome su quel teatro non si vollero i musici, l’uso di adoprare i contralti per essi, li rese per quelle scene superflui.” Il censore universale (November 24, 1832): 374. 55 “Vi fu la Malanotti [sic], e non vi resse; vi fu la Gafforini, e compì l’anno senza eseguire nemmeno un’opera per lei scritta da Generali; e la Pisaroni medesima, per cantare in una delle sue due opere, rinunziare dovette alle spoglie virili.” Ibid. Adelaide Malanotte [Montresor] created the title role of Rossini’s Tancredi in 1813. Elisabetta Gafforini, primarily an opera buffa performer, played male roles in serious operas. Rosmunda Pisaroni actually “renounced her male attire” in two of her three female contralto roles: Andromaca in Rossini’s Ermione (1817) and Zomira in Rossini’s Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818). 56 “La Donna del lago e Ricciardo e Zoraide, ecco le sole due opere napolitane da questo maestro composte per la voce di contralto, ed anzi per la Pisaroni, dove però la sua non era delle parti la più importante, e tale solo fu fatta dal di lei talento.” Il censore universale (November 24, 1832): 374. Maometto II (1820), with Adelaide Comelli in the primo musico role of Calbo, was evidently already forgotten. 57 Nicola Tacchinardi, Dell’ opera in musica sul teatro italiano e de’ suoi difetti (Florence: 1833), 41. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 197

Developments after the 1819 premiere support the critic’s remark that the role of Malcolm owed its prominence to Pisaroni’s talent, for she repeated the role in numerous cities, and other singers who sang it in the 1820s were measured against her memory or reputation. Pisaroni sang Malcolm in the Florence premiere in 1824, and when Teresa Cecconi sang it there a year later, the journal Teatro Arte e Litteratura reported, “La Cecconi, in the part of Malcolm, always confronts Pisaroni, that fearsome rival: fearsome for her intelligence, fearsome the soul with which she gave to her song a vitality that is not yet extinguished in our memories... Let us rejoice with Signor Cecconi that she succeeded before an audience that remembers Pisaroni all too well.”58 A “Mlle Dotti” was less successful at Paris’s Théâtre Italien in February 1829: “The enterprise was perilous, because she had to follow Mme. Pisaroni in one of her best roles, before an audience that is strongly attached to her [Pisaroni’s] habits, and that loves to make comparisons. It must be said: Mlle Dotti’s shipwreck was total.”59 London’s New Monthly in 1830 pitied Costanza Petralia for essaying the role while “the Malcolm of Madame Pisaroni was yet fresh in every one’s recollection,” and further noted that Pisaroni had “triumphed” as Malcolm after “her predecessors, Madame Schütz and Madame Vestris, had made but little impression.”60 A critic writing in the Gazzetta di Milano in 1827, when La donna del lago was revived in Milan, ruefully notes that, “After Tosi [who sang Malcolm in the 1821 Milan premiere] and Pesaroni [sic], the part of Malcolm always seems faded.”61 For many reasons, then, the romance of similarity could not be played out fully in the musico role in La donna del lago: the weakness of Malcolm’s character in the source poem, the dramatic isolation and conservative musical cut of his scenes in the opera, the subordinate place of female musicos in Naples, and the limited ability of other singers in the role to live

58 “La signora Cecconi della parte di Malcolm ha tuttavia a fronte in certo modo la signora Pisaroni, rivale terribile: terribile per l’intelligenza, terribile l’anima con che diede al suo canto una vita non spenta ancor nella nostra memoria... Ci l’allegriamo colla signora Cecconi che dinanzi a uditori troppo ben ricordevoli della signora Pisaroni, si sostenne.”“La donna del lago. Teatro della Pergola – Firenze,” Teatri arte e letteratura 60 (June 16, 1825): 90–91. 59 “Théâtre Italien,” Revue musicale 3, no. 5 (1829): 68. 60 “Music. The King’s Theatre,” The New Monthly 30:113 (May 1, 1830): 199. 61 “Dopo la Tosi e la Pesaroni [sic], la parte di Malcom si è sempre scolorata. Isolata, per così dire, in due sole arie, le quali, tuttoché bellissime, non sono in favorevole situazione, ed altronde assai trite, questa parte non può ormai invogliare alcun cantante. La Pesaroni medesima, che forma ora le delizie del pubblico parigino, potè poc’anzi farsi osservare appena nella stretta del rondò.” Gazzetta di Milano 184 (1827). 198 heather hadlock

up to Rosmunda Pisaroni’s triumphant interpretation of it. It remained for the disguised king, incarnated and envoiced by the light tenor Giovanni David, to perpetuate the sentimental hero’s qualities of a high voice, poetic spirit, languishing affect, and affinity to his female partner. Love scenes that would more normally have been assigned to the primo musico and prima donna were “displaced” onto David and Colbran. In short, the fact that he was not a woman meant that pleasurable similarity could not collapse into uncomfortable sameness.

Aristocratic masculinity: the king

The off-stage death of Rodrigo and the capture of his allies (Lord Douglas and Malcolm), which occurs halfway through the second act, initiates a second round of rivalry, this time between the musico contralto Malcolm and the tenor king. In contrast with the Malcolm/Elena/Rodrigo triangle, which I have analyzed as a conflict between the sentimental romances of likeness and difference, both Malcolm and the king can claim bonds of likeness with the heroine. But in the relationship between Elena and the disguised king, a degree of difference disrupts their similarity, fulfilling the sentimental ideal without the troubling specter of effeminacy. Differences between them are established in their first scene by the registral and timbral contrast between Elena’s relatively dark soprano and the king’s high, light tenor.62 In terms of declamation, Elena’s smooth melodic lines and straightforward speech express the guileless beauty and virtue of the landscape, while the king, even travelling incognito as the hunter “Uberto,” speaks in the more florid idiom of aristocratic culture. When he takes up her barcarolle melody at the start of their duet (“Scendi nel piccol legno” [“Step into the little boat”]), for example, he cannot resist ornamenting it with more sophisticated figuration (Example 6.3). The most profound difference between them, however, is produced by the king’s masquerade, for while he recognizes Elena as the daughter of a nobleman he has banished, she accepts his disguise at face value. The opera’s spectators (having skimmed the dramatis personae) immediately recognize the errant hunter as the king. All the interactions between Elena and the disguised king are therefore marked by the ironic gap between her ignorance and his knowledge.

62 Although many high-profile modern revivals of La donna del lago have featured coloratura high sopranos in the role of Elena, Isabella Colbran’s voice was more similar to modern coloratura mezzo-sopranos. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 199

Example 6.3 Act I, No. 1, Introduzione: “Scendi nel piccol legno,” mm. 479–488 Elena: Step into the little boat, sit here at my side. Uberto: Oh, most worthy of your heart is this exceeding graciousness! 200 heather hadlock

Scott took inspiration for his poem from legends and anecdotes about King James V traveling incognito, playing tricks, seducing girls, bestowing gifts on commoners, and observing how his sheriffs and magistrates treated the common people.63 Whether in pursuit of girls or justice for the poor, these tales define aristocratic masculinity by its discretionary relationship to identity, for unlike his subjects, the king may conceal or reveal his identity at will. While the outlaw’s identity is literally bound to death if discovered by the law, and a woman is constrained in her functions as an object of desire and exchange, the king has the freedom both to shed and to resume his name and social role – to “gang a-rovin’,” in the phrase attributed to James V himself. Crossing class lines as a beggar or shepherd, or traveling incognito as a hunter, the king plays with his subjects not just for his own amusement, but for their own good. The Lady of the Lake developed the bawdy-comic folkloric episodes of King James V in disguise into a more novelistic Bildungsroman plot that resolves the tensions between a king’s incognito and his royal identity, between his individualistic impulses and the reasoned, altruistic concern for the collective good demanded of a monarch. Because the playful trick allows the good king to access his subjects’ authentic merits and secret desires, and then to use that knowledge to make the good subjects happy, the incognito acquires in this plot a larger significance than it held in the old tales and ballads. In a Rousseauvian vision of benevolent despotism, the King’s omniscience gives him power, while his altruism guides him to exercise that power without selfishness. Although no contemporary commentary links the opera with the political context in which it was created, it is tempting to see it as a fable of restoration. To the reader/spectator, guided to identify with the virtuous subject Ellen and against the rebel Roderick, the poem and opera offer a comforting conservative fantasy of being fully known by an absolute monarch who can be trusted to have her best interests at heart. In La donna del lago,theking’s incognito facilitates the romance of similarity as it allows him to forge a bond with Elena that proves more potent in its impact on the plot than her love for Malcolm, and receives a fuller musical expression and dramatic presentation. With the king,

63 Scott’s appendix cites several such anecdotes, including the ballads “We’ll gang nae mair a rovin” and “The Gaberlunzie Man,” published in the late eighteenth century and attributed to King James V. See Scott, The Lady of the Lake, 427–31. On the “king in disguise” motif in King James V historiography, see D. Stevenson, “The Gudeman of Ballengeich: Rambles in the Afterlife of James V,” Folklore 115 (2004): 187–200. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 201

Elena sings two long and formally innovative duets, in contrast with the brief one-movement duettino she sings with Malcolm. In the cabaletta of their first duet, “Cielo, in qual estasi” (“Oh heaven, what ecstasy”), they sing identical words to express their parallel emotions: Elena’s longing for the absent Malcolm, and the king’s longing for the oblivious Elena. The slow movement of their Act II duet, “Nume, se a miei sospiri” (“Gods, hear my prayer”), endows their relationship with the same pathos heard previously in Elena and Malcolm’s Act I duettino “Vivere io non potrò” (see Example 6.2): it uses the same andantino tempo and arpeggiated triplet accompaniment, and begins with the same descending fourth that lies relatively low in Elena’s soprano range, to produce a warm, husky timbre. The most important musical link between them is the “O mattutini albori” melody, which the king had overheard Elena singing alone in her boat in the opening scene, and which recurred to tie together the disparate movements of their Act I duet. This same melody recurs again at the end of Act II, when Elena finds the king still singing it in the royal palace. Through repetition, her melody accumulates significance as a sign of their mutual friendship and memory, the musical complement of the ring he gives to her. Although the king’s ring and Elena’s song are not pledges of romantic love, they are tokens of the bond of similarity. When the king finally reveals himself and reclaims his authority, it is his subordination of his own desire to Ellen’s that allows him to remain uncontaminated by rivalry and violence. Unlike Rodrigo, who responds with wrath to the discovery that Elena’s desire is already directed at another, the king converts this difference between himself and the woman into a new bond of similarity. Like him, Elena loves hopelessly; like him, she is barred from fulfilling her desire. The difference becomes a new affinity, symbolized in the ring, a pledge of his faith to her as a fellow sufferer of unrequited love. Although their two loves make a chain of unsatisfied desire rather than a completed circuit, the shared experience of longing for an unattainable object unites them in the relationship that ultimately heals their community. The king’s bond of sympathy with the heroine is the key not only to his character, but to La donna del lago’s portrait of an ideal aristocratic masculinity. In the penultimate scene of the opera, the king’s identification with Elena has brought him to a condition identical to hers: Elena, searching the castle, overhears the friend she knows as “Uberto” in a room alone (as she was on the lake), singing the melody he learned from her, addressing the dawn, and lamenting elusive love just as she did. 202 heather hadlock

But where Elena’s suffering was imposed on her by outside powers, the king claims unrequited love as his free ethical choice. With the power to dispense any fate to the defeated rebels, he might step into Rodrigo’s place as an older, more powerful, lower-voiced opponent to Malcolm, demanding an alliance between Elena and himself to cement Douglas’s fealty. Instead, the king chooses to befriend Elena and facilitate her happiness. Andrew Lincoln’s observation about Scott’s poem also holds true in the operatic adaptation: “Roderick and Fitz-James [the king] are doubled as would-be protector/suitors of Ellen, Roderick embodying the lawless passion that Fitz-James must subdue before he can become a worthy prince.”64 The opera makes this doubling audible in the celebrated Act II trio, where the jealous Rodrigo ambushes “Uberto” and Elena and the two tenors confront each other for the first and only time, each belting out grupetti and high Cs. In Rodrigo, the king had confronted not only a romantic rival and political rebel, but an alter ego, an externalization of the aggressive self-interest which he ultimately over- comes in himself.65 The light voice and gallant persona of Giovanni David served the opera’s idealized image of the aristocratic male as purified of self-serving impulses, and empowered by that purification to claim benevolent authority, bestow personal happiness, and restore political order. In the character of the king, the opera and its source poem depict the aristocratic “man of feeling” as an essentially comic and feminine force, aligned with the sentimental heroine and her happiness. The restoration of social order and harmony is signaled by a series of gendered events: Rodrigo’s death purges the society of the “wild man,” and James masters himself to grant the woman (representative of all his good subjects) happiness on her own terms. This “women on top” ethos is more momentous than the merely “topsy-turvy” vision of carnival (which temporarily inverts hierarchies without changing them), because the proto-feminism of sentimental literature attributes to women clear vision and appropriate desire, in contrast to the conflict-generating delusions, misapprehensions, and misguided desires of men. This in turn lends unexpected significance to the opera’s final tableau, which showcases the heroine’s joy in her

64 Andrew Lincoln, “Walter Scott and the Birth of a Nation,” Romanticism 8:1 (2002): 14. 65 This terzetto proved impossible to revive without two tenors of David and Nozzari’s caliber. It was abridged for Milan 1821 to accommodate the reduced scope of Rodrigo’s role, and by 1824 it became standard to replace it with a duet and quartet from Bianca e Falliero. On the planned Rome revisions for 1821–22 and the Paris version for 1824, see Slim, “Prefazione,” xxvi–xxix. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 203 rondo “Tanti affetti” (“So many emotions”) and pushes all the other characters – the requited lover Malcolm, the pardoned father, and the king in his new attained mature authority – into the role of silent admirers. Ending the opera with the spotlight on Elena gave Isabella Colbran (and every subsequent prima donna) the last musical word, but beyond that “diva-centric” imperative, it also makes explicit and affirms the feminine ethos of the work. Unlike the “tragic” or serious masculine ethos that would subjugate women’s desire to duty and law, the masculine authority restored and celebrated at the end of this plot is a comic one aligned with the heroine and her desire. The king’s revelation of himself and his magnanimous intentions in the final throne room scene thus effects a retroactive shift from the first act’s serious and potentially tragic mode to a comic ethos of social regeneration – an ethos that expels irreconcilable antagonists and misfits, unites virtuously loving couples, heals social rifts, and affirms the benevolence of legitimate authority. Giovanni David’s early successes in the light- voiced, fleet-footed genre of comic opera prefigure his incarnation in La donna del lago as a light-hearted restorer of love, order, and harmony. The tenor as aristocratic “libertine trickster” represents a masculinity aligned with the feminine and the comic, an ideal between a brute masculinity too different from femininity and a female-voiced masculinity too similar to it. The positive moral and ethical forces of sentiment, reconciliation, and self-renunciation embodied in the fictional king and the performer David were, for the moment, untainted by the threat of effeminacy.

Effeminacy and sentiment redux

The sentimental masculinity embodied and envoiced in La donna del lago by the light tenor David appears as a step along the path to the “straightening” out – or heterosexualizing – of gender representation in opera between 1800 and 1830. But it proved to be an interim solution that neither traveled well nor transferred durably to other singers. Just as younger contraltos in the role of Malcolm often fell short of Pisaroni’s example and reputation, few tenors after David were able to make an impression in the king’s part as written. Stendahl remarked of a Paris performance in 1824:

Avec des ténors tels que MM. Bordogni e Mari, l’on ne peut donner aucun des opéras que Rossini a écrits à Naples pour Davide et Nozzari. Par exemple, l’air que 204 heather hadlock

Bordogni chante au second acte, e qui, chargé de ses petits ornements mesquins, nous semble la chose du monde la plus ennuyeuse, était interrompu trois ou quatre fois par les frémissements de plaisir du public quand Davide le chantait.

[With tenors like Bordogni [the king] and Mari [Rodrigo], one cannot perform any of the operas that Rossini wrote in Naples for David and Nozzari. For example, the aria which Bordogni sings in the second act, and which seems to us the most tedious thing in the world, being overloaded with vulgar little ornaments, used to be interrupted three or four times with shudders of pleasure from the audience when David sang it.]66

Stendahl refers to the king’s Act II cavatina “O fiamma soave” (“O sweet flame”), a piece notable for its combination of slow, almost static harmonic rhythm and elaborate ornamentation (see Example 6.4). This aria was tailor-made for David, its sparse accompaniment and slow tempo focusing attention on his ability to decorate a vocal line with intricate embroidery, yet it did not suit other tenors as well.67 Even reactions to David himself in La donna del lago and similar roles mark the limitations of the delicate, aristocratic tenor as a solution to the problem of operatic masculinity. In the summer of 1823, when David performed the role of King James at Vienna’s Hof-Theater, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published a poem that suggests that the tenor had struggled to command his voice and the stage in the first three performances: Horcht! Ist dieses das Lied des Sängers, der Alles begeistert! Nun ich kenne fürwahr, heute nicht Seinen Gesang! Hat des Boreas Hauch vielleicht die schmelzenden Töne So in Nebel gehüllt? – Trüget mich Seine Gestalt? Ha! Nun zürnet Er selbst ein Gott der menschlichen Schwachheit! “Siegreich war ich doch stets! Heute verlässt mich mein Glück?” Still! Jetzt rauschet empor des Adlers Fittig zum Äther! Ach der Held des Gesangs! Habt Ihr Ihn wieder gehört?

66 Stendahl, “Notes d’un dilettante,” Journal de Paris (September 13, 1824), cited in Slim, “Prefazione,” xxvii. 67 When Giovanni Battista Rubini, another tenor for whom King James V became a signature role, first sang the role in the Naples revival in 1820, he added a new aria in Act II. See Slim, “Prefazione,” xxvi. In 1830, Rubini replaced “O fiamma soave” with the more rhythmically dynamic two-movement aria “O soave bel contento” from Pacini’s Niobe. On Rubini’s insertion of “O soave bel contento” into La donna del lago and other operas in the 1830s, see Poriss, Changing the Score,82–95. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 205

Example 6.4 Act II, No. 8, Cavatina: “O fiamma soave,” mm. 43–58 Uberto: O sweet flame, which burns in my breast! Show mercy to a faithful lover. 206 heather hadlock

Example 6.4 (cont.) Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 207

Mächtig stürmt’ Er hinan, dann lispelt es Oben wie Ostwind Durch den blühenden Hain! – Ja, nun erkenn’ ich ihn ganz! – Ganz so schreitet einher ein Fürst, gehüllt in den Mantel; Doch du erblickest den Stern, wirft er die Hülle von sich.68 [Hark! This is the song of the singer who enthralls everyone! Now I truly do not recognize his singing today! Has the breath of the North Wind perhaps wrapped the melting tones In mist? – Does his appearance deceive me? Ha! Now he is angry at himself, a god with human frailty! “I was always victorious! Does my luck leave me today?” Hush! Now the Eagle’s pinion rushes up toward the ether! Oh, the hero of song! Did you hear him again? He storms powerfully upward, then at the top there’s murmuring like the East wind Through the flowering grove! – Yes, now I recognize him! Just so does a prince walk along, wrapped in a cloak; Yet when he casts his mantle aside, you behold a shining star.] The opening quatrain of the poem hints that David’s first two performances in Vienna had not lived up to his enthralling reputation, suggesting that the Northern climate had interfered with his expected “melting tones.” The poet picks up the plot’s central motif of the “king in disguise” to describe the voice and the performer as initially unrecognizable, burdened by “human frailty” and self-doubt. In the third performance, he seemed to have regained command of his voice and soared from faltering sounds to high and steady ones. Having achieved an affect of heroic command evoked by the eagle’s wings and the storm, David’s high register and delicate vocal stylings could register as potent rather than frail. Having secured his status as a “hero of song” with potent upward flights, David’s hero-prince-god persona can encompass the soft and amorous aspects suggested by the whispering East Wind and the flowering grove. The poem’s closing image suggests that, just as the king reveals his royal identity at the end of the opera, David’s voice has finally revealed its princely and even supernatural potency. The poem celebrates this fusion

68 F. A. Kanne, “David. In der dritten Vorstellung der Donna del Lago.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat, vol. 7, no. 63 (6 August 1823): 504. I am grateful to Stephen Hinton and Thomas Grey for their assistance with this translation. 208 heather hadlock

of masculine authority and tenderness, while presenting it as both hard- won and unstable. Within a few years, David’s light voice and refined persona, like that of castrati before him and female musicos around him, were also bearing the stigma of effeminacy. In 1826, he appeared in Milan as Alexander the Great in Pacini’s Alessandro nell’ Indie, an opera that, like La donna del lago, depicts a historical king renouncing his own desire in order to effect social reconciliation.69 The critic asserts that while David’s past roles had successfully employed his ornamental and pathetic tones in service of his characters, this role and David’s performance exceeded the limit of how far the serious and the comic, the historical and the sentimental, the stern and the tender, should be fused:

After an absence of three months, David has reappeared [in Milan], this time in the guise of Alexander. But the conqueror of all empires is only recognizable by his helmet and hauberk. We concede that the proud Macedonian, conquered by the charms of a fair enemy, spoke the language of love with the accent of passion; but these swoons, lazy gestures, and mannered movements are not for the temper of that fierce spirit.70

For this critic, the historical status and significance of Alexander the Great demand a higher standard of masculine dignity than might be tolerated in operas on less venerable subjects. He continues, “Legend may describe Hercules spinning next to Iole; but history does not transform the heir of Philip [i.e., Alexander] into a damerino [young fop] near Cleofide.”71 The critic alludes to Ovid’s tale of how Hercules, in thrall to his spiteful concubine Iole, submitted to wear women’s clothes and do women’s work with her. Hercules in this tale epitomizes the hero unmanned by erotic love as an object of shame and derision, a reverse- face of the monarch moved to clemency by love. Magnanimity seems

69 The love triangle of Alexander, Cleofide, and Poro was one of the most durable opera seria subjects; Vinci, Hasse, Handel, J. C. Bach, and Pacini set various versions of Metastasio’s libretto between 1730 and 1824. 70 “David partì per la Toscana, e dopo un’assenza di tre mesi è ricomparso poc’anzi fra noi [i.e., to Milan], e questa volta sotto i sembianti d’Alessandro. Ma il conquistatore di tanti imperii non si riconosce che all’elmo e all’usberge. Concediamo che vinto dai vezzi della bella nemica, il superbo Macedone parlasse il linguaggio d’amore coll’accento della passione; ma le svenevolezze, e i leziosi atti, e le studiate mosse non sono per la tempra di quell’animo altero.”“Alessandro nell’Indie. Melodramma posta in musica dal M. Pacini. Teatro alla Scala,” Gazzetta di Milano 363 (December 29, 1826): 1431–32. 71 “La favola può descriverci Ercole filando presso a Jole; ma la storia non trasforma in damerino il figliuol di Filippo presso Cleofide.” Ibid. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 209 always in danger of collapsing into unmanly weakness, and noble self-sacrifice into weak lack of self-assertion. As in late-eighteenth-century criticisms of the castrati, images of effeminate languor and emasculation support claims of generic confusion and violation of a naturalized order.72 David’s foppish interpretation of Alexander the Great gives the critic an opportunity to argue more generally for a restoration of generic and stylistic boundaries in opera:

When the genres were not confused; when the opera seria and the opera buffa had each their particular culture, Bacini did not transform himself into Lindoro, nor Viganoni into Caesar [note 1: Bacini was a great singing actor in serio, Viganoni in mezzo-carattere roles]. Then one knew what heroic song was, and what lyric song was; the invocation to the Roman gods in Orazi was not modulated with the charm of “pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora” from the Matrimonio Segreto. Nature, in giving to the younger [Giovanni] David a voice all agility, all brilliance, assigned to him the place of Viganoni, and foreclosed that of Bacini.73

Retroactively consigning David’s voice and persona to the lighter realm of comedy and semi-seria, the critic implies that the time has come to re-segregate the genres of seria and buffa, reserving to each genre its proper heroic or lyric musical idiom, its proper voices, and its proper performers. This erosion of generic boundaries and drift in turn triggers epistemological anxiety about the “confusion” of genres, suggesting that the features and techniques proper to seria and buffa have cross-pollinated so thoroughly that the comic and the heroic have lost their distinct identities and the listener can no longer tell what he is hearing. In an attempt to shore up these boundaries and reaffirm the differences between operatic genres, subjects, musical idioms, and types of masculinity, the critic consigns the

72 On cross-dressed classical heroes as figures of gender and genre confusion in music of other eras, see Heller, “Reforming Achilles”: 562–68, 571–72, 574–75, 577–78, 580–81; and Jann Pasler, “Cross-Dressing in Saint-Saëns’ Le Rouet d’Omphale: Ambiguities of Gender and Politics,” in Lloyd Whitesell and Sophie Fuller, eds., Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 191–215. 73 “Quando i generi non eran confusi; quando l’opera seria e la buffa avean ciascuna un culto speciale, Bacini non trasformatasi in Lindoro, né Viganoni in Cesare (n. 1: L’uno grande attore- cantante nel serio; l’altro del pari nel mezzo-carattere.) Sapessi allora qual era il canto eroico, quale il lirico; né l’invocazione ai dei di Roma negli Orazi modulatasi col vezzo del “pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora” del Matrimonio Segreto. La natura dotando David figlio d’una voce tutta agilità, tutta brio, avea gli assegnato il posto di Viganoni, e percluso quel di Bacini.” The author alludes to two operas by Domenico Cimarosa, the serious Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (1796), based on ancient Roman history, and the comedy Il matrimonio segreto (“The Secret Marriage”) (1792). “Alessandro nell’Indie. Melodramma posta in musica dal M. Pacini. Teatro alla Scala,” Gazzetta di Milano 363 (29 December 1826): 1431–32. 210 heather hadlock

high, florid tenor voice to the domain of comic and semi-serious opera. Most importantly, the last sentence of the quoted passage attributes these boundaries to nature rather than to culture or taste. David’s agile and brilliant voice assigns him to “the place of Viganoni,” singing serenades in sentimental comedies, while his current attempt to sing and act heroically in a historical drama appears as a violation of natural order. Both David’s gallantry and his character’s woman-centered ethos are deemed unmanly and unnatural in a serious context. This criticism of David demonstrates how sounds produced by male singers were being sorted according to naturalized ideas of masculinity in the early nineteenth century. In a process of reception and taste transformation that resembles that “de-naturing” process which Martha Feldman has traced in Enlightenment discourse about the castrati, the high-light-florid-playful tenor was “de-natured” by the end of the 1820s as a masculine heroic voice. While the tenor body was not, like those of the castrati, stigmatized as monstrous or inhuman, audiences and critics grew impatient with a super-refined style they heard as artificial and unnatural. The 1826 review of Alessandro nell’ Indie casts doubt on the naturalness of the agile and brilliant tenor voice. The critic rejects suggestions that the composer Pacini might be at fault for this unmanly depiction of Alexander, and blames the tenor David:

If anyone by chance should accuse the maestro [Pacini] of having endorsed this style of declamation with the character of his music, it might be responded that David’s technique, having become second nature in him, would not admit of anything different.74

The critic may mean that the composer Pacini had accommodated David’s mannerism because the tenor could not sing any other way, or that David’s “technique” would have produced the same effeminate effect in any music Pacini supplied. Either way, David’s style seems less a product of control and volition than the word “technique” suggests. An older review, from 1818, had framed his style entirely in terms of choice and intention:

David sings well, he sings delicately, he pleases, he was applauded in the whole opera, and he would be even more – or so everyone says – if he would moderate his cries [grida] and leave aside the elaborate ornaments with which he decorates his melody. Doesn’t he realize that if the listeners fall silent when he sings spianato,

74 “Se alcuno per avventura accagionasse il maestro d’avere coll’indole della musica secondato questo genere di declamazione, si potrebbe rispondere che il metodo di David, divenuto in lui una seconda natura, non può ammetterne uno diverso.” Ibid. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 211 that is the most flattering praise, and that an indefinable muttering follows when he babbles [garrisce] or loses his way in zigzagging lines [frastagli]?”75

The 1818 critic assumed that David, as a young tenor, could choose between the spianato (“smooth, unadorned”) line and the florid line characterized here with the unflattering images of shouts, babbling, and zigzagging. Eight years later, David’s highly ornamented style is heard as “having become second nature,” a formulation that positions his voice and technique more ambiguously between the learned and the innate. For the Milan critic in 1826, David’s unnatural, effeminate sounds raise the specter of a “first nature,” a more authentic and manly voice that he might once have possessed, but can no longer access. Just as an opera is best understood as overlapping systems of poetry, gesture, and music that may reinforce, complicate, or undermine each other, so operatic spectatorship has always involved multiple layers of response to a character, dramatic situation, performer, and spectacle. A spectator watches and responds to the interactions between fictional characters on stage, and at the same time projects currents of identification, desire, recognition, and validation across the footlights toward the performers who incarnate those characters.76 Fortunately for David, the Milan audience for Alessandro nell’ Indie in 1826 was not so repelled by his manner as the critic was, for the critic admits that David had charmed the audience just as his character succeeded in amorous intrigues: “David, light and gallant in the part of a young prince, made the public forgive those seductive caprices that all the ladies forgive to the character he was playing.”77 Like seducers, performers take liberties and make advances. Whether their ventures win indulgence and praise, or rejection and stigma, depends less on intrinsic quality than on the tastes and

75 “David cionnondimeno canta bene, canta delicatamente, piace, è applaudito in tutta l’opera, e lo sarebbe assai più, o da tutti, se volesse moderar le sue grida, e lasciar da banda i bizzarri ornamenti di che infiora si spesso il canto. Non s’accorge egli adunque che quando canta spianato, gli uditori se ne stanno in un silenzio, ch’è più lusinghiero del plauso, e che a questo succede un indefinibile bisbiglio, quando garrisce o si perde in frastagli?”“Il Rivale di se stesso. Dramma semi-seria di Romanelli, posta in musica di M. Weigl. Teatro alla Scala,” Gazzetta di Milano 109 (April 20, 1818): 471–72. 76 Recent studies have shown, for example, how audiences’ respect for the noble figure and persona of the diva Giuditta Pasta reinforced their sympathetic response to tragic heroines such as Anna Bolena and Norma. On the images and personae of Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran in the role of Norma, see Rutherford, “‘La cantante delle passioni’”: 107–38, esp. 121–38. 77 “David, in aspetto d’un principe giovane, leggiadro e galante, si fece perdonare dal pubblico que’ seducenti capricci, che tante belle perdonarono al personaggio da esso rappresentato.” “Alessandro nell’Indie. 212 heather hadlock

expectations of a venue, an audience, or a subculture. The Milan public in 1826 forgave even while the critic grumbled. Similarly, in Rome in 1828, a French musician traveling in Italy found David’s voice and manner distasteful:

In Rome, I heard the famous David in Rossini’s Zelmira and – must I say it? – he gave me no pleasure. His voice seems ruined; he can no longer make himself audible in the middle register; he takes refuge in the head voice, and does all his traits, all his ornaments (which he abuses) in the high octave, which makes him sound exactly like one of the castrati in the papal choir, the quality of his voice being extremely resonant.78

While acknowledging that the Romans still enjoyed David’s singing, the traveler consigned him to the obsolete and stigmatized company of the castrati, pushing him even further from the category of natural male voices than had the Milan critic in 1826. Reception of Rosmunda Pisaroni’s musico contralto as a masculine voice in Paris in 1827–28 was similarly ambivalent. Although critics like Fétis appreciated Pisaroni’s vigor in masculine roles, amateur enthusiasts responded to her as a female diva and sorted themselves into rival factions of Pisaronisti and Sontagisti, devotees of the beautiful blonde soprano Henriette Sontag. In September 1828, reports reached Italy that “Pisaroni and Sontag have returned [to the Théâtre Italien], and it is written that the faction of the Pisaronisti has almost entirely silenced that of the Sontagisti.”79 The rivalry was followed eagerly by the Revue et gazette musicale in their reviews of Rossini’s operas. While the musico Pisaroni and Sontag enacted fictions of mutual love as the hero and heroine of La donna del lago, Tancredi, and Semiramide, the audience and the press fomented an off-stage drama about two female professionals competing for applause, fame, and prestige. By the mid-1830s, the singers who created the three heroes of La donna del lago had ended, or nearly ended, their careers. Andrea Nozzari had died in 1832, and only Domenico Donzelli was regarded as able to fill his

78 “Enfin, j’ai entendu hier (11 Octobre) a Rome le fameux David dans la Zelmira de Rossini; et, faut-il le dire? Il ne m’a fait aucun plaisir. Sa voix semble ruinée; il ne peut plus à peine faire entendre les notes du medium; il se réfugie dans la voix de tête, et porte tous ses traits, tous ses ornemens (dont il abus) à l’octave aiguë, ce qui le fait ressembler exactement à un des castrats de la musique du pape: la qualité de sa voix de tête étant extrêmement timbrée.” Anon., “Lettre sur la musique en Italie,” La revue musicale, 4 (1828): 313–19. 79 “Vi sono ricomparse la Pisaroni e la Sontag, e si scrive che la fazione dei Pisaronisti ha quasi per intero ridotta al silenzio quella de’ Sontagisti.”“Parigi. Teatro Italiano,” Teatri Arti e Letteratura 6:229 (September 25, 1828): 31–32. Different masculinities: Rossini’s La donna del lago 213

“baritenor” roles in Rossini’s serious operas. Rosmunda Pisaroni retired in 1836, having failed to re-establish herself in Italy on her return from triumphs abroad in Paris, London, and Cadiz. F. J. Fétis, in his 1863 biographical dictionary, attributed her lack of success to the changed tastes of the mid-1830s rather than to her aging and vocal decline: “the Rossini repertoire was worn out, and people were no longer writing for the contralto voice.”80 The popularity of La donna del lago gradually declined until 1835 (though the opera survived as a vehicle for Italian singers in London and Paris until 1850), and then disappeared until its revival in 1958.81 As for Giovanni David, he retired from singing in 1839 to teach in Naples and eventually direct operas in St. Petersburg. The careers of these performers, and the range of responses to their performances in different times and places, demonstrate what a diversity of operatic masculinities existed in the first third of the nineteenth century, not only within opera plots, but also across performing bodies, genres, venues, and nations.

80 F. J. Fétis, “Pisaroni, Benedetta-Rosamunda,” in Nouvelle biographie universelle depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Didot, 1863), 63. 81 Slim, “Prefazione,” xviii.

7 Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly: tonal language and the power of Cio-Cio-San judy tsou

On April 30, 1902, in the midst of working on Madama Butterfly, Puccini wrote to his librettist Luigi Illica that he had “a lot of material of the yellow race that will do for me,” even though he had worried about the lack of “native” music for “local color” before.1 He sent the letter a few days after he attended performances of Kabuki Theater pieces in Milan by the famous Imperial Japanese Theatrical Company, led by Kawakami Otojirō and Sadayakko. Among the other sources of Puccini’s “local color,” we can count the “native” songs that the Japanese ambassador’s wife, Ōyama Hisako, sang to him in September 1902, as well as the recordings of Japanese popular music. Puccini’s quest for Japanese songs and music for use in his opera is well documented.2 He rejected the kinds of shallow representations of Japan that he would have known from such sources as David Belasco’s play Madame Butterfly, on which Puccini’s opera is based (use of pidgin English) or Pietro Mascagni’s 1898 opera Iris (Japanese kidnappers unimaginatively named Osaka and Kyoto).3 Puccini wanted to compose an opera representing the “true Japan.” And indeed, these Japanese tunes and Japanese- inspired tunes play a big part in giving the opera a Japanese tinte, even though the borrowed materials are often liberally altered.4 Among those who have examined extensively the sources for the borrowed Japanese tunes are Mosco Carner (1958), Michele Girardi (1995), Arthur Groos (1999), and Julian Budden (2002).5 Most recently,

1 Arthur Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko: Japanese Music-theater in Madama Butterfly,” Monumenta Nipponica 54:1 (Spring 1999): 49. The word “native” was Puccini’s. 2 Ibid. 3 Arthur Groos likens this shallowness of representation to naming New York thugs “The Bronx” and “Brooklyn”: see Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 42. 4 Puccini’s aim was not ethnographic, but for “atmosphere” only. Therefore, accuracy of transcription was not the main concern. 5 Mosco Carner, Puccini: A Critical Biography, 2nd edn. (New York: Holmes and Meier, [1958] 1974), esp. 385–96; Michele Girardi, Puccini: His International Art, trans. Laura Basini (University of Chicago Press, [orig. Italian 1995] 2000), esp. 211 ff.; Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 41–73; and Julian Budden, Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford University Press, 214 2002), 223–73. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 215

Anthony Sheppard discovered a Chinese folk tune that Puccini used in Madama Butterfly.6 These studies provide very helpful explanations of Puccini’s ethnic tinte. However, his equally important use of tonality to delineate difference has not been discussed in detail.7 In fact, the use of tonality coupled with borrowed and composed Japanese tunes is of paramount importance in creating the sense of the exotic in Cio-Cio- San, Puccini’s heroine in Madama Butterfly. In this essay, I will discuss Puccini’s use of tonality to demarcate difference in this opera. Italian critics at the turn of the twentieth century debated intensely what counted as really Italian in music. The critics and Italians, in general, identified their music with more traditional tonality. Many Italians viewed the use of Wagner’s leitmotivs, continuous music, as well as Debussy’s techniques of parallel ninth and eleventh chords and the use of whole tones and pentatonicism as foreign or international. Puccini’s music was caught in the crossfire of such polemics because he did not always meet the xenophobic Italians’ expectations. Given the perception of influences by Wagner, Debussy, and other contemporary European composers, his music thus suffered merciless attacks from critics, who said that his music was “too international,” with the subtext that he was unpatriotic. Of the many criticisms, one was particularly vitriolic: Fausto Torrefranca’s monograph Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale.8 Torrefranca’s view represented a culmination of views and arguments about Puccini’s work that had already been circulating in the 1890s and 1900s.9 Italians at the time considered the normative tonal discourse to be traditional tonality; the modern tonal language used by other contemporary Europeans was viewed as exotic.

6 W. Anthony Sheppard, “Music Box as Muse to Puccini’s ‘Butterfly’,” New York Times, June 15, 2012. 7 The tonalities discussions are generally not centered on difference. The most prominent article is Roger Parker’s “The Act I Love Duet: Some Models Interpretive and Otherwise,” in Arthur Groos and Virgilio Bernardoni, eds., Madama Butterfly: L’Orientalismo di Fine Secolo, l’approccio pucciniano, la recezione (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2008), 247–56. There was a debate on tonalities in Madama Butterfly, starting with Allan Atlas’s “Crossed Stars and Crossed Tonal Areas in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly,” 19th Century Music 14:2 (November 1990): 186–96. Roger Parker’s critique of Atlas’s piece appeared as “Counterpoint: A Key for Chi? Tonal Areas in Puccini,” 19th Century Music 15:3 (March 1992): 229–32. And Atlas’s reply appears in 19th Century Music 15:3 (March 1992): 232–34. 8 Fausto Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale (Torino: Fratelli Brocca, 1912). This is discussed in Alexandra Wilson’s “A Frame Without a Canvas: New Perspectives on the Reception of Madama Butterfly,” in Groos and Bernardoni, eds., Madama Butterfly, 362, 369 ff. 9 See Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. 216 judy tsou

Puccini skillfully exploited this dualism of traditional and modern in creating ethnic difference in Madama Butterfly. He used traditional tonal music to represent the normative discourse of the white characters, and he used modern compositional devices, in addition to composed and borrowed Japanese tunes, to represent the Asian characters. The important point for the Italian audience was that the music for the Asian characters was not Italian; it did not matter if it was specifically European or Asian. Indeed, Puccini himself also took liberties when it came to specific national attributions. To him, the appropriate atmosphere or circumstance was more important than authenticity, as illustrated by Anthony Sheppard’s discovery that Puccini used a Chinese, not Japanese, tune for the end of the love duet in Act I.10 The tune, “Shi-Ba Mo,” is a Chinese erotic folk song, and it is placed at a moment when Pinkerton and Butterfly are about to enter their nuptial chamber. Thus, to Puccini, the Chinese origin seemed to be only of secondary importance to the implication of the erotic song. Along this same principle, Puccini crafted the American characters musically as Europeans rather than as Americans. The only American attribute in these songs is the grafting of snippets of American tunes onto the music, which I will discuss below. The music for the only two main white characters in the opera, the American Consul Sharpless and the American Lt. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, is traditional in the style of earlier nineteenth-century Italian opera. Sharpless’s entrance is accompanied by a pastorally orchestrated tonal theme in the woodwinds, a theme that is associated with him throughout the opera (see Act I, rehearsal 1711). The tune is less specifically American than in the style of much nineteenth- century European art music. Pinkerton sings a traditional Italian aria, “Dovunque al mondo” (“Every- where in the world”). In his letter of April 23, 1902, to Giulio Ricordi, Puccini wrote, “I am laying stone upon stone and doing my best to make F. B. Pinkerton sing as much like an American as possible.”12 What Puccini refers to as “American” in this aria is probably “The Star-Spangled Banner” frame that he bestowed on this otherwise very Italian aria. Although “The Star-Spangled Banner” was not yet the national anthem of the United States in 1904, it was nevertheless identified as American.13

10 See n. 6 above. 11 All references are to the 1907 Ricordi edition (full score), published in Milan. 12 Cited in Budden, Puccini, 234. 13 “The Star-Spangled Banner” was officially adopted as the national anthem in 1931, but it had previously been used by the armed forces and in official state functions as a stand-in national anthem. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 217

In addition, phrases in English are added to the aria, such as “America forever” at the end, to ensure that this is “as much like an American as possible.” This English phrase is juxtaposed with a fragment of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the orchestra. Typical American military band instruments, brass and woodwinds, play this fragment to drive home the point that Pinkerton is a paragon of American masculinity. The melody, played marcato and fortissimo by the trombone, emphasizes the forceful- ness of the masculine America (see Example 7.1). Carner calls this “a thin ‘American’ veneer spread over” Pinkerton.14 The lyrics confirm this American characterization through the self-portrait of a man who “casts his anchor at random” in every port, a not-too-subtle reference to the essentialist view of an American sailor’s sexual escapades during tours of duty abroad. This “easy gospel” of hedonism is further characterized by the sudden interruption of the aria with the parlando line, “milk punch or whisky?” in English. Not only does this indicate that libations are an important part of the American playboy lifestyle, it also indicates the casualness with which Pinkerton views his love affairs, and by extension, his “marriage.” Carner also points out that the vocal line has more leaps than usual in a Puccinian tenor aria, lending the aria “a certain breeziness and nonchalance,” adding to the casualness of the attitude.15 This “breeziness” is also helped by the tempo marking of “Allegro sostenuto con spirito.” The mixture of the lyrics, orchestration, attitude, and themes paints Pinkerton as a typical philandering American sailor. Both Pinkerton and Sharpless appear in the beginning of Act I, which allows Puccini to set the tonal yardstick at the beginning of the opera. Appearing amid this nineteenth-century lushness is the music of Goro, the Japanese marriage broker, who sings mostly pentatonic music – some borrowed from original Japanese tunes, some composed by Puccini himself. Goro’s music provides an immediate opportunity for Puccini to set up the tonal contrasts between the two races in the opera. While the musical characterization of the American is a “thin veneer,” the Japanese characters are more nuanced, offering different musical depictions depending on the characterization: variously, an altered borrowed tune, a composed pentatonic tune, or modern harmony. For example, Prince Yamadori, Cio-Cio-San’s suitor, is heralded by a melodious whole-tone Japanese folk song (aptly named “The Noble Prince.”)On the other hand, Cio-Cio-San’s Buddhist monk uncle (Zio Bonzo) is marked

14 Carner, Puccini, 390. 15 Ibid. 218 judy tsou

Example 7.1 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, end of “Dovunque al Mondo”

by harsh dissonance, with a dotted-rhythm motive made of a series of parallel thirds outlining two augmented-second intervals, with the viola in tremolo, destabilizing the tonalities of the previous chorus (“O kami, O kami”).16 Puccini orchestrates this augmented-second motive with the sound of Asia; he uses an Asian-identified instrument, the tam-tam (gong), to punctuate the calling of Cio-Cio-San’s name at Bonzo’s entrance on

16 The intervals in the motive are augmented second-halfstep-augmented second, but there are some variations in the different iterations of the motive throughout the opera. However, an augmented second interval is always present in this dotted-rhythm parallel-third motive. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 219 stage immediately following this distinctive motive, associated with Bonzo cursing Cio-Cio-San (see Example 7.2). Tremolo strings bolster the mysterious nature of Bonzo’s descent into the party. At the heart of this curse scene is the issue of Cio-Cio-San’s abandonment of the Buddhist faith for Christianity. The music thus suggests that this foreign (gong) barbarian poses a danger (tremolo strings) to Christianity, the fundamental faith of Europeans. Not being Christian has always been described as “uncivilized” in literature and popular culture about Asians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bret Harte’s The Heathen Chinee,17 which inspired many popular songs with the same title,18 paired many uncivilized attributes (like cheating and gambling) with the Chinese, who are not believers. Thus, the Chinese are often characterized as uncivilized and as savages simply because they are not Christians.19 This cruel and savage scene may have its roots in colonialist and racist views held by the educated elite in nineteenth-century Europe. In his 1903 book, Plays, Acting, and Music, Arthur Symons comments on the performance of the same Imperial Japanese Theatrical Troupe witnessed by Puccini; it represented the views of the educated elites of the time. He describes them as savages and primitive people, equating their emotion and intellect to that of children: “Men spit and sneeze and shuffle, with no consciousness of dignity or hardly of humanity... It is the emotion of children, naked sensation, not yet clothed by civilization. Only the body speaks in it, the mind is absent: and the body abandons itself completely to the animal force of instincts.”20 There was a similar response by a critic following the Milanese performance by the Japanese troupe, who called their performance “savage art.”21 The critic from Il Lombardia found the show “absolutely lacking in human sincerity,” and Il Secolo’s critic noted “insane and uncontrollable intoxication characteristics of primitive peoples.”22 These remarks inhabit the same racial imagery that permitted Puccini to describe the Japanese as “the yellow race” and to refer to their traditional music as “native” (read “uncivilized”) music.

17 Bret Harte, The Heathen Chinee (Chicago: The Western News Co., 1870). 18 “The Heathen Chinee” song by Francis Boott, in the 1870 issue of Overland Monthly (San Francisco), is an example. Another composition of “The Heathen Chinee” is by Charles Towner (Chicago: Root and Cady, 1870). 19 For a detailed discussion, see Judy Tsou, “Gendering Race: Stereotypes of Chinese Americans in Popular Sheet Music,” repercussions 6:2 (Fall 1997), 25–62. 20 Arthur Symons, Plays, Acting, and Music (New York: Dutton, 1903), 76 ff. Cited in Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 54. 21 Il Tempo, April 26–27, 1902. 22 Cited in Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 54. 220 judy tsou

Example 7.2 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, Zio Bonzo’s curse Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 221

The exoticism represented here lay outside the comfort zone of nineteenth-century Europeans: tonally different, racially different, and representing something dangerous and unpleasant. This is in contrast to Prince Yamadori, who does not threaten the fundamental western faith, Christianity, and therefore is portrayed rather benignly. Perhaps this is the underlying reason for assigning him traditional, melodious Japanese music instead of giving him the “modern” treatment. In contrast to these one-dimensional characters, Cio-Cio-San is more fully developed musically (I will discuss this in detail later). Even though she is musically more complex, the librettist and the composer created an Asian woman who is typical of the contemporary Europe’s imagination: “a dear little woman, fragile and beloved like a Japanese doll,” as Puccini described her.23 “Little” and “fragile” are epithets often applied to Asian women and men at the turn of the twentieth century.24 This trope is reflected in Butterfly’s self-description as being a “people accustomed to little things” (“Noi siamo gente avvezza alle piccole cose”).25 Sharpless, too, describes her voice as “a divine mild little voice” (“divina mite vocina”). Other than Asian women being generally smaller in stature compared to Europeans and Americans, the use of “little” to describe them may imply that they are underdeveloped and infantile, as suggested by the critics and educated elites of the time mentioned earlier. Cio-Cio-San’s fragility is presented as a butterfly metaphor in Pinkerton’s “Amore e Grille,” where he speaks of crushing her delicate wings. The combination of the adjectives “fragile” and “little” conjures up a picture of someone weak. Related to being “little” is the long-standing description of Asians as dolls. Long before Madama Butterfly, several works for the musical stage portrayed the Japanese, especially women, as dolls or paintings. In Camille Saint-Saëns’ La Princesse Jaune (1872), the main character, Kornélus, is infatuated with everything Japanese, especially a portrait of a Japanese girl, even though she is not a real person. And in a chorus from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado (1885), the Japanese declare themselves figurines who come alive “on many a vase and jar / On many a screen and fan.”26

23 Reported in Ildebrando Pizzetti, Musicisti contemporanei: saggi critici (Milan: Trebves, 1914), 51. 24 For a detailed discussion, see Tsou, “Gendering Race,” 25–62. 25 Act I, love duet, “Vogliatemi bene,” four measures after rehearsal 129. 26 From Act I, scene 1. The chorus is actually male, but the idea that Asians are not real people but inanimate objects come alive is established here. The text of the chorus is:

If you want to know who we are, We are gentlemen of Japan: 222 judy tsou

This idea was so pervasive that a journalist reviewing the performances of the Imperial Japanese Theatrical Company described the performers as coming to life from a Japanese art work: “to our surprised eyes appeared living the improbable figures of lacquer vases or Japanese fans.”27 This notion of the Japanese as dolls points to the Western attitude that Asian women are toys and not real humans, and therefore are not accorded equal status with Europeans. Madama Butterfly explicitly enlists this trope when Pinkerton observes about Cio-Cio-San, “alla statura, al portamento / sembra figura – da paravento” (“in her stature, her bearing, she seems a figure from a screen”).28 And by extension, unreal characters from the “Far East” lie outside the bounds of true relationships. Pinkerton tells Sharpless in Act I: “I will marry in a real wedding to a true American wife” (“mi sposerò con vere nozze a una vera sposa americana”).29 “Little,”“fragile,” and “dolls” contrast with the categories of masculinity and strength that Pinkerton displays in his autobiographical “Dovunque al mondo.” Thus, a series of dualities demarcate the white man from the Asian woman: masculine/feminine, strong/weak, and real/toy. Ruth Solie has explained the function of these oppositional dualisms: “Western thought has been dominated by a series of tightly interconnected binary dualisms: good/evil, male/female, culture/nature, reason/emotion, self/ other, and so forth.”30 And “[t]hese linked pairings create long chains of associations...that exercise strong and virtually subliminal influence on the ways we position and interpret groups of people, their behavior, and their works. Furthermore, such habits of equation among categories of Other have also enabled familiar patterns of metaphor – for example, of the woman as (variously) darkness, nature, hysteria, small, infantile, mysterious, and crafty.”31 Further, Solie has said, “The pairs are not just oppositional in quality but also imply a power relationship; the first named generally has influence and dominance over the second.”32 These dualities

On many a vase and jar – On many a screen and fan, We figure in lively paint: Our attitudes queer and quaint – You’re wrong if you think it ain’t. 27 Corriere della Sera, April 26–27, 1902, translation in Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 42. 28 See “Amore o Grille,” in Act I, rehearsal 30. 29 See Act I, rehearsal 36. 30 Ruth Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 11. Solie says that these thoughts are based on historians’ descriptions of oppositional styles of periods, such as Apollonian/ Dionysian, or classic/romantic. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 223 dominate the perception of people of a different race, positioning white people as the first of the pair, as in “White/Other,” and “Strong/Weak.” Butterfly embodies the weaker end of the binary dualisms: Asian, female, fragile, powerless, and therefore, voiceless. And yet, she tries to overcome these attributes even though most are innate qualities: she tries to be more American even though she is Asian, and she strives to communicate and assert her voice in the normative language to become more powerful, but she fails. To mark the difference, Puccini uses lyricism (a musical style with which Italians identified, as discussed earlier) as a sounding yardstick of Cio-Cio- San’s assimilation. She reaches the height of her assimilation and lyricism in her aria “Un bel dì, vedremo.” After that aria, her use of traditional tonality noticeably declines. Despite her efforts to claim American features, she sings mostly modern music, a tonal distinction meant to convey the misunderstood, unheard, and powerless nature of her voice. Puccini establishes Cio-Cio-San as powerless early in the opera, by denying her a voice to represent herself. Long before Cio-Cio-San’s appearance on stage, the marriage broker Goro describes her to Sharpless as “a garland of fresh flowers and a star with rays of gold” in a composed pentatonic melody in Act I.33 The accompaniment adds touches of Orientalist color through the harp in pizzicato and by bells, lending an imitation of the sound of the Japanese koto. Butterfly’s exotic tinte is cast by the pentatonic tune. Similarly, Sharpless in Act I declares Cio-Cio-San’s disembodied voice to be mysterious: “Di sua voce il mistero l’anima mi colpi” (“The mystery of her voice struck my soul”). “Mysterious” has been a typical epithet used to describe the Other, especially Asian women, as discussed earlier. In my study of popular sheet music, I also find that the authors often portray Asian women as mysterious, in addition to the other attributes discussed earlier by Ruth Solie. The mysterious attribute often also has a sexual connotation; they were used to describe prostitutes and geishas.34 Furthermore, mysterious means it is something not explainable, something illogical. These pre-entrance musical and textual descriptions reinforce the sense that Butterfly is exotic, not explainable, and without a voice. Further, Goro excitedly anticipates Butterfly’s entrance in a Kabuki dance melody, “The Dance of the Lion of Echigo.”35 This melody is

33 See Act I, ten measures after rehearsal 26. 34 See Tsou, “Gendering Race,” esp. 41 ff. 35 This tune was originally a comic patter song. Although using a low-brow Kabuki tune is appropriate for Butterfly’s social standing, it is not clear whether Puccini knew about the status of Kabuki in Japanese society. 224 judy tsou

accompanied by pizzicato and staccato octave doublings in the strings and bassoon, while other strings play open-fifth tremolos and the clarinets offer open fifths in repeated eighth-note rhythms. Again, the pizzicatos and staccatos evoke the sound of the Japanese koto, the tremolos give an air of mystery, akin to the tremolos that accompanied Bonzo, and the lack of the mode-defining third in the open fifths and octaves ensures that this Japanese tune is not heard as Western functional harmony, but with an Orientalist tinte. Thus, an exotic tonal picture of Cio-Cio-San has been established for the audience before she even sings a note. In most of his operas, Puccini introduces principal characters through a duet, and then each character of some importance enters singly. Thus in La Bohème, Rodolfo and Marcello appear in the opening scene, then each of the other Bohemians enters singly, as eventually does the heroine, Mimi, after the stage is cleared of all but Rodolfo. Even Liu in Turandot, the one who has to sacrifice herself so that her Prince can love another, receives her own entrance. Both the frail Mimi and the jealous Tosca have entrance arias of their own. Butterfly, however, receives neither an individual entrance nor an entrance aria. Instead, a chorus of women friends shep- herds in Butterfly; we hear their disembodied voices, off-stage, before we see them. Puccini presents Butterfly with her voice separated from her body, decoupled as a person, without agency. The off-stage chorus starts with the wordless “ah” in open fifths for fifteen measures before any meaningful text is introduced. Perhaps the vocable anticipates the short-circuiting of Butterfly’s semantic communication in the opera, which ultimately denatures her and makes her powerless. Butterfly’s voicelessness further manifests itself through the opposition between tonal lyricism and modern tonality, and through non sequitur speech. One example of the latter occurs during the entrance of Butterfly and her entourage. The chorus sings about the sky and the sea (“Quanto cielo, quanto mar”). Butterfly, however, responds with an unexpectedly practical phrase about having to climb yet another step up the hill (“Ancora un passo or via”) rather than returning the sentiment of the chorus.36 Even though she is speaking, she is deprived of the logical sequence of semantics. Nor can this reference to nature be viewed as somehow invoking traditional Japanese musical culture, where sounds of nature are considered music.37

36 Cio-Cio-San later does echo the chorus’s line about the sky and sea with earth and ocean. 37 The link between nature and music is discussed extensively by the composer Toru Takemitsu in his essay, “On Sawari,” reprinted in Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau, eds., Locating East Asia in Western Art Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 199–207. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 225

Puccini’s brief encounter with Japanese culture probably did not afford him enough depth of understanding to deploy such a subtle code to denote Japan. And we have already noted that the librettist Luigi Illica displayed a shallow grasp of the Japanese in his libretto for Mascagni’s Iris. Instead, this entrance situates Butterfly as part of the environment and the Orientalist atmosphere: in other words, it places her in the background. Despite being the title character, her entrance defines her as part of the scene and not as the subject. The music for the chorus during Butterfly’s entrance evokes modern “international” harmony. The melody for the entrance outlines an augmented triad (marked Y in Example 7.3), and the harmonic support is provided by this same chord, highlighting the foreignness of the atmosphere through the use of “modern” harmony. This musical phrase is repeated three times, each sounding a whole tone higher. Meanwhile, the orchestra comes in with a swell of nineteenth-century lyricism, with a euphonious theme (marked X in Example 7.3) that later becomes the love theme. Despite the lyricism in the orchestra, Butterfly begins to sing in tentative, monotonal, repeated notes. She starts a second phrase with repeated notes, but gradually includes more melodic shape in it. Eventu- ally, in the fourth phrase, she finally reaches the lyrical theme already played in the orchestra. It is as if Butterfly is learning how to sing about love in the Western idiom, and on the fourth try, she reaches it. She confirms that the lyrical theme is indeed about her love, as she highlights the word “d’amor” (“love”) with a high G-flat, the highest note of the scene. Perhaps this bit of euphonic lyricism is what Puccini was referring to when he wrote Giulio Ricordi on May 3, 1902 to report that he had made Butterfly’s entrance “a little Italian.”38 One can conjecture that tonal lyricism is what Puccini considers “Italian,” like Italian critics of the time. And conversely, then, the traditional Kabuki tune, “The Dance of the Lion of Echigo,” at Butterfly’s entrance (sung by Goro) establishes her Japanese identity. The way in which the lyrical theme gradually emerges underscores Butterfly’s desire to speak the Western language of emotion to express her inner feelings. Initially, the orchestra has to do most of the bidding for her as she struggles through the passage. Cio-Cio-San is “female” and the “Other,” the weaker halves of the dualities of gender and of race. In order to better herself, she adopts the colonialist view of striving toward being more occidental, as she cannot

38 “l’entrata di Butterfly...un po’ italiana.” In G. Adami, ed., G. Puccini: Epistolario (Milan: Mondadori, 1928), 146 (letter 72). 226 judy tsou

Example 7.3 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, Butterfly’s entrance Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 227 transgress the biologically determined line of gender. In musical terms, she assimilates by learning the Western tonal language. In operatic love stories, when boy meets girl they often trade their life stories, like Mimi and Rodolfo in La Bohème. However, by the time Pinkerton and Butterfly meet on stage, we have already heard Pinkerton’s self-portrayal in “Dovunque al mondo.” Butterfly, however, does not enjoy the same freedom to tell her own story. Instead, we learn about her from Goro and Sharpless before she comes on stage. When she does appear, Sharpless asks her a series of questions regarding her background; she is in the position of responding, rather than shaping her own story as does Pinkerton. The chorus acts as an extension of Butterfly, echoing affirm- ations of her answers, as if she alone does not have the power to do so, and emphasizing her lack as an individual. The colonialist power structure is clear here too: the questioning comes from the Americans, with Butterfly and her entourage dutifully answering all the questions. Butterfly herself does not ask any questions of Pinkerton, even though she hardly knows her husband-to-be. Even the stage directions reinforce the power gap, requiring excessive bowing by Butterfly and her chorus. In the all-important love duet at the end of Act I (“Bimba daglia occhi”), Puccini and his librettists emphasize the ethnic and cultural differences between Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San, rather than conventionally allowing them to express their undying love. Pinkerton begins by complimenting her on her appearance: her eyes are full of magic (“occhi pieni di malia”), he likes her dark hair against the white veils (“Mi piace la treccia tua bruna fra candidi veli”), and she is all his (“ora sei tutta mia”). In other words, Pinkerton talks like a new lover, commenting on her beauty and expressing his possessiveness of her. Rather than agreeing with him that they possess each other and reacting to his compliments on her beauty, Cio-Cio-San compares herself to the “Moon’s little goddess” (“la piccolo dea della luna”), coming down to earth and then taking them to “lofty realms” (“alti reami”). It is as if she is avoiding the topic of love, and instead predicting her own eventual demise. This is not a dialogue of the sort that Mimi and Rodolfo or Lucia and Edgardo would have in their moments of passion. The librettists create a disconnection between Pinkerton and Butterfly in their romantic “conversation,” to underline the gap in their cultural understanding. But even the misunderstandings reveal an imbalance. Pinkerton utters the normative discourse of a love duet, which sets the burden of difference on Cio-Cio-San alone, thus rendering her “speech” meaningless, inarticulate. It is as if she did not deliver a “speech” at all, but exists just as a “pure voice.” 228 judy tsou

This dissimilarity also emerges through the music. Pinkerton starts “Bimba, dagli occhi” with a beautiful melodic passage supported by a 6 – 5 functional tonal harmonic progression of I-IV-I-V4 3-I (see Example 7.4). Winds, horn, and lush strings accompany with fully realized chords. The expectation is that Butterfly will reply in the same vein. However, Butterfly’s answer sounds as if it has gone flat: her vocal line has been stripped of C- sharps in an overall A-major key, depriving it of the major mode-defining third-scale degree. In addition, B-flats make her vocal lines sound modal – in this context, another code for foreignness.39 Rather than providing functional harmony, the strings move downward in parallel octaves with Cio-Cio-San’s melody, while the flute, clarinet, and harp punctuate softly in full chords on the offbeats. The effect is a series of descending parallel open octaves, even though all the notes of the parallel chords are present. Again, the harp here is meant to emulate the sound of the Japanese koto (see Example 7.5). My point is that Pinkerton sounds the normative discourse of traditional nineteenth-century European music, while Cio-Cio-San sings the foreign discourse of Debussyesque non-functional harmonies. By not speaking the same tonal language, they fail to communicate. The imbalance in their relationship emerges further in Pinkerton’stermof endearment for Butterfly: “bimba” (“child”). Although lovers are known to address each other as “baby,” here only Pinkerton uses “bimba.” Even though she is only fifteen, addressing her as child implies a hierarchy, and resonates unsettlingly with contemporary European notions of Asians as “childlike” and “primitive.” Thus, a reviewer at the Corriere della Sera newspaper spoke of Sadayakko, the Japanese actress in the Milanese Kabuki performance that Puccini attended, as “truly endowed with Oriental charms... Her grace is infantile.”40 The placing of Asians, especially Asian women, in the place of a child reasserts the power hierarchy of white privilege.41 Although Puccini’s description of Butterfly as “a dear little woman” could be viewed as charming, it eventually plays out as part of a strategy to place her in a subservient position. In the last section of the love duet, rather than professing love in the antecedent phrase, Butterfly begs, “Love me, a little love, a childlike love, as is suited for me” (“Vogliatemi bene,

39 See Susan McClary, Georges Bizet, Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 53. 40 Cited in Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 54. 41 This kind of representation is rampant in other publications as well. An example is the song “Chong, He come from Hong Kong” by Harold Weeks. The cover art shows a demure Chinese boy, but in fact, Chong is a young man. For more details, see Tsou, “Gendering Race,” esp. 33–35. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 229

Example 7.4 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, “Bimba dagli occhi” (Pinkerton) 230 judy tsou

Example 7.5 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, “Bimba dagli occhi” (Butterfly) Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 231 un bene piccolino, un bene da bambino, quale a me si conviene”).42 As noted earlier, Asians are often described as “little,” implying insignificance and weakness. It is because she is “little” that she only requires “a little love,” not all the love that a lover would demand. And the presence of the word “childlike” likewise reinforces the colonialist view of Asian women. Whereas we might assume from other Italian operatic love duets that Cio- Cio-San could assertively profess her love, here she assumes a subservient role in pleading for childlike love. Again, the music reinforces the idea of Cio-Cio-San’s hierarchical position beneath Pinkerton. The orchestral introduction prompts her with a beautiful melody, but as in her entrance aria, she begins by singing monotonal repeated notes, only at the end of the phrase turning to a shaped melody. The repeated notes reflect the tentativeness of her plea for a little love. Her line is accompanied by the same lyrical melody the orchestra played in the introduction to the section (see Example 7.6). Once more, it seems that the orchestra expresses the emotion that she cannot articulate in the proper language of nineteenth-century Italian lyricism. The harmony, too, is Debussyesque, with a series of parallel chords that do not resolve. This contrasts with the harmony of the first part of “Bimba dagli occhi,” where Pinkerton takes the lead. Pinkerton’s reply in “Voglietemi bene,” not surprisingly, is right on the lyrical melody of the orchestral accompaniment. In addition, Pinkerton brings the passage back to the tonic (see Example 7.7).43 Pinkerton holds his musical ground firmly and does not concede to Butterfly’s melody, showing through the music that he is in charge. The music also shows that they are not communi- cating. When they finally sing in unison on their “love theme,” they sing different words; their thoughts are far from united.44 At the same time as Pinkerton declares that Butterfly is his and tries to hurry her to their nuptial chamber, Butterfly muses about the stars. Cio-Cio-San desperately wants to gain currency in her husband’s culture. She changes her religion from Asian-identified Buddhism to Western-identified Christianity. She insists in several instances that she be called Madama Pinkerton rather than her geisha name, Madama Butterfly. She offers Sharpless American cigarettes. And musically, in Act II, the orchestra repeatedly grafts fragments of “The Star-Spangled Banner”

42 Act I, love duet, “Vogliatemi bene,” four measures after rehearsal 128. 43 The tonic chord is over a dominant pedal. Pinkerton’s reply has modulated from Butterfly’s overall E-flat major to B-flat major. 44 Act I, nine measures after rehearsal 134. In Example 7.3, X marks the “love theme.” 232 judy tsou

Example 7.6 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, “Vogliatemi Bene” (Butterfly)

onto her Orientalist musical language, showing her desire and claim to be American, as awkward as the musical juxtaposition may be. Puccini shows that each of these attempts is skin-deep, and her Orientalist identity eventually comes through in her monotonal and non-traditional music. No matter what she tries, she will never gain the European/American tonal currency. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 233

Example 7.7 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, “Vogliatemi Bene” (Pinkerton)

Against this backdrop, Butterfly’s most lyrical moment, the famous Act II aria “Un bel dì, vedremo,” also cannot gain her a voice. She sings the aria three years after Pinkerton has left her to marry an American woman –“a real marriage to a real American wife,” as 234 judy tsou

Pinkerton put it.45 In other words, her most lyrical moment arrives when her full voice and articulatenessnolongermatter,andwhenthe course of events leading to her eventual death is irrevocable. But even at her most lyrical moment, Butterfly’sariaoffersupchildishwishand fantasy, rather than an active demand that Pinkerton return. Spotting Pinkerton’s ship, she imagines Pinkerton coming up the hill to her house, and dreams of playing a game of childish hide-and-seek with him. As I mentioned earlier, even after three years of living in poverty, she has not matured, but remains the “infantile Oriental” of European imagination. This delusional aria, despite all its lyricism, is scored with an Orientalist tinte, highlighting Butterfly’s Asian identity, despite her effort to assimilate into the American culture. The first violins, harp, and clarinets double Cio-Cio-San’s line in open parallel octaves. Like her previous accompaniments in the love duet, the melody is occasionally punctuated by soft triadic chords on the off beats by the woodwinds, while the second violin plays the same notes in tremolo. The result is that the parallel octaves dominate the sound, masking the soft chords. Theariaalsomakesfrequentuseofpentatonicharmonies.Butterfly sings the middle section of the aria parlando, reviving the repeated monotones of the first act, which reminds the audience of her unease in this newly acquired tonal language. Childish and delusional, her hesitation is reflected in the dynamics of the piece: the aria begins with a tentative pianissimo, like her entrance at the beginning of the opera. The vocal line eventually ends in triple forte on the highest note of the aria, a B-flat. Rather than setting the word “love” on this high point, instead she sings “aspetto,” or “wait”; she passively attends Pinkerton’s return. The stage instructions call for Butterfly to act out the scene as if Pinkerton’s return actually takes place. The tremolos in the second violin carry the instruction “come un lontano mormoio” (“like a distant murmur”), and similar instructions occur in the other parts. In other words, the scene should convey some haziness in her imagination of Pinkerton’s response; it is a dream sequence. The irony thus is that her moment of peak tonal assimilation occurs only in her imagination. After “Un bel dì, vedremo,” Butterfly is beset by various signs of her inability to communicate: her music lacks lyricism; she sings either in

45 The original text is “vere nozze, a una vera sposa Americana,” in Act I, rehearsal 36. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 235 repeated monotones, or melodies without much shape; and she loses what little American cultural currency she had acquired. The orchestra, similarly to the chorus, helps to convey Cio-Cio-San’s thoughts and emotions. As we have seen, it often represents what Butterfly feels but cannot articulate in the normative tonal language. In the second part of Act II, when she is thinking of suicide, the timpani pounds for twenty-one measures in steady sixteenth notes without a break, with crescendos and diminuendos, signifying the intensity of her heartbeat. We know it is her heartbeat because the timpani play an Orientalist code that has been established earlier in the opera, an open fifth interval, and the “melody” is a version of the curse motive that is associated with her.46 The orchestra functions in the same way in the last eleven measures of the opera, after Butterfly’s ritual suicide and Pinkerton’s brief appearance. Cio-Cio-San has lost both her physical and her metaphorical voice. The full orchestra, playing tutta forza and andante energico, screams out the aptly named Japanese folk tune “Pathetic melody.”47 The orchestration employs Puccini’s Orientalist tinte, in parallel open octaves. Each phrase ends emphatically with triadic chords. Again, the open octaves dominate the sound of the passage. This is in stark contrast to the short passage of music preceding these final measures, during Pinkerton’s brief appearance, where the orchestra sonically calls to mind nineteenth-century Italy. At the very conclusion of the opera, the orchestra’s highly passionate final unison B-minor passage leads not to a tonic chord or a unison on B as expected, but a destabilizing chord on B in the bass with a D and a G above it. Narrative closure does not bring tonal closure to Butterfly. Unlike “Un bel dì, vedremo,” the orchestra does not supply tonal finality for her. Instead, the opera ends with an open cadence for a delusional heroine who could not master the tonal language of currency (see Example 7.8).

* Influenced by the Italian culture of identifying lyricism and traditional tonality with Italy and the West, Puccini has used the oppositional duality of traditional tonality versus “international” music to compose ethnic difference in Cio-Cio-San, even though the “international” music is not always of Asian origin. This dichotomy is highlighted by juxtaposition of Pinkerton’s euphonic lyricism against Butterfly’s monotonal shapeless

46 The open-fifth timpani begins with a sforzando and crescendos from piano to fortissimo in only three measures. See Act II, part 2, three measures before rehearsal 50. 47 For a discussion of this tune, see Budden, Puccini, 262. The music discussed here is from Act II, part 2, at rehearsal 58. 236 judy tsou

Example 7.8 Puccini, Madama Butterfly, end of the opera Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly 237 melodies, especially in the love duet. Furthermore, Butterfly’s barometer of assimilation is indicated by the lyricism of her music. Thus, when she loses all hope and fails to assimilate, she sings whole-tone or pentatonic music, the music associated with Asia, in the latter part of the opera. Through these tonal depictions, Puccini has stressed the colonialist view that But- terfly must strive toward assimilation in order to gain currency. Her failure to comprehend normative tonality renders her voiceless and unheard, and she never can assert any power. The mixture of tonal and “international” music, the bursts of lyricism of Cio-Cio-San, and the voicelessness of her chorus are all calculated to depict the Orientalist “dear little woman, fragile and beloved like a Japanese doll.”48

48 See n. 23 above.

8 Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within sindhumathi revuluri

In 1910, Maurice Ravel entered the Maison du Lied’s biannual folksong competition, open to composers from all over Europe.1 The competition required that the composers write piano accompaniments to folksong melodies from various countries. The Maison provided the vocal lines and lyrics, which they ostensibly collected from the places they named (the histories of the songs and the genealogy of their collection are sparse to non-existent).2 Each composer who entered the competition received a melody – a folksong – in each of seven nationally defined categories, for which they were to provide an “artful” piano accompaniment. The Maison du Lied identified three goals for the competition: to increase public interest in folksongs; to grow the repertoire of “artfully” harmonized folksongs; and to encourage young singers by giving them the opportunity to perform the songs.3 How the Maison du Lied assessed these goals remains vague. Yet we can gauge from Ravel’s entries that at least he conceived “artful” in a way very much indebted to contemporary conventions of musical representation and, in particular, musical exoticism.

1 The Maison du Lied was based in Moscow and organized three international competitions between 1908 and 1913. Founded by Maria Olenina-d’Alheim, an influential Russian singer and devotee of the genre of song and contemporary Russian composers, the organization focused on the poetic texts of vocal works, popular melodies, and musical sources. For more on the “House of Song,” see Alexander Tumanov, The Life and Artistry of Maria Olenina-d’Alheim, trans. Christopher Barnes (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000), esp. 144–94. 2 Roger Nichols has suggested that the French song was collected by Vincent d’Indy and the Schola Cantorum and published in 1904. I have not been able to find the original published source, and since, to my knowledge, the Schola itself did not engage in collection projects, Nichols’s surmise seems unlikely. The French melody may have come from the Société de Chansons de France, another project with which d’Indy was involved. In any event, the lack of accurate information about the origins of these songs reveals that this was less important than the ways in which they were later re-formed. See Roger Nichols, liner notes to Songs by Ravel, Gerald Finley, baritone; Julius Drake, piano (Hyperion Records CDA67728, 2009), 3. 3 Arbie Orenstein, ed., A Ravel Reader (New York: Dover Publications, [1990] 2003), 120. See also Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: Columbia University Press, 238 1975), 63. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 239

What we now call the Chants populaires, a set of four songs, started as Ravel’s entries to this competition in the Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and French categories. Each of Ravel’s four songs garnered first prize in its category.4 While based on pre-existing melodies from real places, Ravel’s entries show elements of imagination and exaggeration in their added accompaniments. Indeed, it seems likely that they owed much of their contemporary appeal to imaginative imitations of national musical styles. That this applied as much to the French song as to the Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew ones suggests that notions of nation, exoticism, difference, and identity are crucial to their understanding. Of course, Ravel’s well-known comment about his signature artifice both explains and complicates much of what happens in these piano accompaniments: “But it does never occur to them that I might be ‘artificial’ by nature?” he said in response to characterizations of his music as artificial rather than natural.5 The element of artifice in Ravel’s musical approach and his commentary about it has both puzzled and inspired many contemporary scholars of his work.6 The critical eye we must bring to composers’ discussions of their music takes a strange turn here; when Ravel foregrounds artifice, it makes it difficult to take anything he says – in prose or music – sincerely. Here, it makes it difficult to take any of the obvious caricatures in the songs at face value. But the heightened nature of stereotype in these four songs also throws into high relief the processes behind exoticism, which nearly always involves the kind of artifice that Ravel seems to embrace and deploy. Though the set shares many characteristics of contemporary exoticist music, scholarly examinations of the Chansons populaires rarely view it through that lens.7 Most often, this is due to a belief in the authenticity of

4 Ravel entered a fifth song, the “Chanson écossaise,” ostensibly based on a Scottish folksong, but this song did not win its category. The song was only recently recovered: Arbie Orenstein found a sketch in 1975 and Salabert published it in the same year (Maurice Ravel, Chanson écossaise [Paris: Salabert, 1975]). Ravel also entered songs in the remaining two Maison du Lied categories (Russian and Flemish), but these two songs are lost. 5 “Mais est-ce qu’il ne vient jamais à l’idée de ces gens-là que je peux être ‘artificiel’ par nature?” published in Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, Musician’s Gallery (London: Faber, 1933), 51. 6 This is a feature of Ravel’s musical language and legacy that is often commented upon. For an overview, see Barbara Kelly, “Maurice Ravel – Artistic Preoccupations,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezp- prod1.hul.harvard.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/52145?q=Ravel%2C+Maurice&search= quick&pos=1&_start=1#S52145.4 (accessed May 26, 2011). See also Barbara Kelly, “Re-presenting Ravel: Artificiality and the Aesthetic of Imposture,” in Peter Kaminsky, ed. Unmasking Ravel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 41–62. 7 This approach surfaces in treatments from scholarly to critical to popular, including book chapters, liner notes, and biographies. See, for example, an essay by Peter Kaminsky, 240 sindhumathi revuluri

the source melodies provided by the Maison du Lied. For contemporary scholars, it seems that the inclusion of a real artifact in the form of a pre-existing melody separates this work from others that rely obviously on an imagined exotic.8 In turn, these scholars appear to extend the idea of authenticity to include Ravel’s accompaniments, and imply that his additions are also authentic, rather than being imagined.9 As we will see, this represents a serious misunderstanding, since common stereotypes of national musical character exist only in Ravel’s additions – and not in the melodies themselves. Indeed, these songs participate in the discourse of exoticism much more so than they offer an ethnographical representation, a crucial distinction not only in our interpretation of these songs, but also in appreciating the stakes of exoticism and national style more broadly. But this revelation only leads to one more profound: all of the national musical characters here, including and perhaps especially the French, are entirely artificial and constructed. The juxtaposition of the French and the foreign in these songs reveals that exoticism includes more than the imagination of an Other: they also capture the “exotic within.” So ubiquitous was the practice of mimicking others that it needs to be grasped not as an ornament or novelty in fin-de-siècle French music, but as a core value. Furthermore, Frenchness itself was evoked and manipulated through the same practices that were deployed to convey the exoticism of the Other – caricature, stereotype, exaggeration.

Folksong collection at the fin de siècle

That the invitation for an examination of notions of the French and the foreign could be made through folksong is less surprising when one

“Vocal Music and Lures of Exoticism and Irony,” in Deborah Mawer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 162–87; Nichols, liner notes to Songs by Ravel,2–3; and a music-biography by Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ravel (Paris: Éditions Seuil, [1956] 1995), 33–34. 8 As numerous scholars have remarked, the exotic held special fascination for Ravel throughout his compositional career. See, for example, Lawrence Kramer, “Consuming the Exotic: Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe,” in Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 201–25; and Robert Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” in Mawer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ravel,27–46. In most treatments, the imagined nature of the places in those works is made quite clear. I am suggesting that instead of separating these songs (and any others that are based on folk melodies), we treat them through the same lens of exoticism and imagination. 9 For example, Peter Kaminsky calls Ravel’s accompaniments to these songs “appropriately ethnic,” suggesting either (or both) that they are accurate or (and) excusing their exoticist gestures. See Kaminsky, “Vocal Music and Lures of Exoticism and Irony,” 170–71. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 241 considers the many collection and harmonization projects undertaken in the name of nationalist endeavors, the preservation of patrimony, or scientific classifications of self and others at the fin de siècle. Such collections certainly pre-dated Ravel’s harmonizations, and, of course, continued long after, yet the increased attention to them around the fin de siècle and the increased stakes with respect to (or possibly due to) foreign encounters adds a layer of possible productive meaning to this set of songs. Before moving into the details of these songs and their puzzling attributes, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider their genre. French scholars of the fin de siècle favored the collection of folksongs from many locales both within and outside of France. Though perhaps strange from a modern ethnomusicological perspective, many of the melodies were subsequently given piano accompaniments and then published as affordable piano-vocal scores or more lavish books for collectors.10 While the folksongs were collected from both within and outside of France, how they were treated later differed in crucial ways, primarily related to the role of harmony. The rhetoric around the collection of songs from elsewhere places them in the realm of a broad “exotic,” understood and used at the fin de siècle to mean non-European foreign others, but sometimes also to include closer neighbors such as Greece and Spain. The ascription of the label “folk” attached further connotations to the songs; in implicit and explicit ways, the music was made out to be lacking in sophistication, a claim that often then extended to the cultures from which the songs emanated. The addition of harmonic piano accompaniments to these songs served several functions, but the most obvious was to civilize the melodies.11 This practice serves to mediate the anxiety that these harmonies allowed: the exotic folksongs were both normalized and distanced through the addition of these accompaniments, and the civilizing

10 For more on folksong collection in France, see Jann Pasler, “The Chanson Populaire as a Malleable Symbol in Turn-of-the-century France,” in Yosihiko Tokumaru et al., eds., Tradition and its Future in Music (Tokyo and Osaka: Mita Press, 1991), 203–9; Jane Fulcher, “The Popular Chanson of the Second Empire: ‘Music of the Peasants’ in France,” Acta Musicologica 52:1 (1980): 27–37. For a more detailed discussion of the implications of harmonization, see Sindhumathi Revuluri, “On Anxiety and Absorption: Musical Encounters with the Exotique in Fin-de-siècle France,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2007, esp. Chapters 3 and 4. 11 Such a practice has multiple implications, not least having to do with the codification of narratives of music history at the fin de siècle. See Sindhumathi Revuluri, “Harmonizing the Past,” in Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, eds., Music’s Intellectual History (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 2009), 525–31. 242 sindhumathi revuluri

mission allowed for the continued presence of foreign elements while minimizing the threat they embodied. French folksongs were also collected and harmonized, but the rhetoric around their collection is more explicitly nationalist. The gathering of songs was part of a larger project of preservation and dissemination, with the goal of creating a unified French musical soul.12 While the collection and transcription followed fairly straightforward methods, the musical languages of the many piano accompaniments speak to a different kind of anxiety about history. Here, too, the added harmonies must figure largely into any understanding of the project’s full implications: the harmonizations often reveal exaggerated modal inflections, unconventional voice leading, and an over-reliance on plagal cadences, even as they support transparently tonal melodies. While exotic musics existed only in the present, the arcane accompaniments written for the French folk melodies reveal the construction of an artificial music history, and the attempt to establish a French musical identity that was fundamentally different to that associated with exotic musics.13 In cases of French and foreign songs, the harmonized product was often ascribed authorship as a new work, meaning that the addition of a piano accompaniment was understood to add creative value to an otherwise anonymously (or collectively, or both) authored melody.14 Even though the melodies in all cases represent ostensibly authentic musical products, collected through ethnography and transcription, in their reception only the activity of the composition of their accompaniments is foregrounded. Nearly all the collections seem to benefit from being at once exotic artifacts and new compositions. Both aspects lend them legitimacy and authority, albeit in different ways. In this context, Ravel’s four songs exemplify an artful manipulation through harmonic piano accompaniment of (perceived) national

12 Of course, what this was and how to achieve it was contested, yet the statement of the goal seemed to remain relatively consistent across political, aesthetic, and ideological divides. See Fulcher, “The Popular Chanson of the Second Empire”; and Pasler, “The Chanson Populaire as a Malleable Symbol.” 13 I consider this process and its implications at length in Revuluri, “On Anxiety and Absorption,” esp. Chapters 3 and 4. 14 The ownership and newness were expressed in multiple ways: ascription of an opus number to a collection of songs (as in the case of Vincent d’Indy’s Chansons populaires du Vivarais), the acknowledgement of collection and harmonization as important activities, the reference to the finished products by others (i.e., “Julien Tiersot’s French Folksongs”), and the denial of any other author or possibility of authorship. Furthermore, multiple harmonizations of the same melody carried the names of the harmonizers as authors. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 243 characters and their possible expression through music. In very few other cases are French and “other” songs juxtaposed as they are in Ravel’s set.15 Though the set perhaps falls more clearly under the realm of “artistry” than the “scholarly” realm that many other sets claimed to occupy,16 it is the juxtaposition of French and foreign that is ultimately most revealing. The nature of the Maison du Lied competition, which categorized songs not by genre or register, but by national boundaries, may have encouraged a certain amount of stereotype or caricature in the entries. Yet the juxtaposition – not only of multiple national possibilities, but also of all of them against a French character – found in these four songs may help us to re-evaluate the meaning and power of exoticism in a modernist musical language.

Folksongs as exoticism

Late nineteenth-century European depictions of foreign cultures – what we commonly call exoticism – were ubiquitous throughout the arts. The practice relies upon caricature, stereotype, and exaggeration, and its motivating impulses have been tied to colonial power structures. As many scholars have noted, the expressions often have little or nothing to do with the places and people they represent. In other words, the gesture may be to an Other, but the practice is a deeply European one.17

15 The division and juxtaposition occurs in François-Joseph Fétis’s original engagement in his Histoire générale de la musique, and then again in several sets by Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, considered by Jann Pasler in “Race and Nation: Musical Acclimatization and the Chansons Populaires in Third Republic France,” in Julie Brown, ed., Western Music and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 147–67. 16 The separation is made rather clear in many contemporary scholarly treatments of the songs, which tend to divide them from “art song” in implicit and explicit ways. For example, in Peter Kaminsky’s essay, “Vocal Music and the Lures of Exoticism and Irony,” the songs come under the category of “Remaining Second-period Songs,” after more in-depth discussions of other cycles. In his liner notes to Songs by Ravel, Nichols discusses the songs under “Folk Songs,” not “Art Songs.” 17 Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) first established the study and artistic representation of the “Orient” as a European practice. In musicology, the corollary term “exoticism” has been favored to refer to the process more broadly and to include a wider geography. With regard to the “authenticity” of exoticist gestures – i.e., the degree to which they might be an accurate representation of foreign cultures – Mary Hunter puts it succinctly in her discussion of Mozart’s alla turca style: “If the alla turca style is considered primarily as an imitation of an original, the obvious and primary question for the scholar is the accuracy of the imitation...If the alla turca topos is considered as a translation of a perception of Turkish music, however, then the primary question for the scholar becomes not the 244 sindhumathi revuluri

Similarly, while it may seem somewhat obvious, it is also worth pointing out that the representational dynamics of exoticism, though they owe much to imperial power and colonial holdings, are not unique to that system of power or geography. The same dynamics are employed in other hierarchical situations and can be used to differentiate among any non-homogeneous group. In the case of Ravel’s songs, the frame may be, for all practical purposes, European, yet they share processes employed in exoticist representation. When representation of multiple objects is seen from this angle, it is not difficult to make a connection between more familiar practices of musical exoticism and folksong (especially the ways in which folksongs were understood and used in the late nineteenth century). Both folksongs and musical exoticism rely on stereotype. Depictions of the rural peasant, the regional or provincial dweller, or the folk more generally, like familiar processes of musical exoticism, compress identities into a few recognizable traits. This can be seen clearly in the very naming of Ravel’s songs; their generic titles deny diversity while encouraging stereotype. Rather than unique titles relating to their respective texts, each song is simply labeled with its place of origin. This practice echoes the work of other scholars with exotic musics: in his collection of songs from Greece, Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray gives each song a number, rather than a verbal title. But despite this context, the Chants populaires stand out against Ravel’s other work for their lack of evocative titles: in his other folksong harmonizations, such as the Cinq mélodies populaires grècques and the Deux mélodies hébraïques, Ravel gave each song a unique title, such as “Là-bas ver l’eglise” or “L’enigme eternelle.” Furthermore, those two sets allow for an exploration of musical character – whether real or imagined – through multiple pieces. The Chants populaires set up difference along national lines while ignoring the difference that may be present within the national boundaries. A title such as “Chanson italienne” serves to distinguish one song from the other national characters involved in the competition, but it also conflates all regional variation. A general geographic reference thus stands for a regional sensibility, an individual expression,

particularities of individual figures or devices, but the underlying principles of translation and the nature of the perceptions on which the translation is based.” In Mary Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio,” in Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 48. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 245 or the art of an individual author. The title “Chanson espagnole” downplays its possible Galician expression; rather it becomes an anonymous Spanish song, any and all Spanish songs. (That the songs’ texts were often in dialects – Limousin for the French and Galician for the Spanish – while still being titled generically suggests a tension between the definition of nations through regional attributes and homogenized cultures.18) Along with musical conventions of exoticism, which I will discuss below, such generalizations in the process of naming encourage viewing the songs more as compressed national identities than as distinct musical objects.

Stereotype and caricature

As I have alluded to multiple times thus far, Ravel’s accompaniments to the folk melodies employ similar gestures to those found in many examples of French musical exoticism. They rehearse conventions common in many representational works in the period, gestures which grew out of a long tradition of imagining faraway lands. Whether or not these sounds mimic “real” ones from the place in question is not the issue, given that their purpose is to make reference to national characters and even to compress them efficiently, not to authenticate the melodies (which hardly need that, given what we know of their provenance). The sense of mimicry and representation emerges strongly in these songs. Some songs represent other sonic practices (other genres, other instruments) rather than other people and dramatic characters, but the effects are similar. Of particular interest is the way in which the effects of rhythm highlight particular features and come to define the profile of each of these songs. I will begin with the Spanish song, for Spain was a favorite place for French composers to imagine, starting well before Bizet’s Carmen and continuing long after Debussy and Ravel.19 Ravel’s “Chanson espagnole” displays various features common to his other pieces that inflect Spain,

18 Indeed, the discourse of the “folk” at this time was heavily invested in the rural peasant as its symbol; a figure who was removed from urban centers was often seen to hold a stronger connection to a nation’s soul and its past than those living in major cities. This association seemed to transcend specific geographic boundaries, being true in both France and Germany, for example. 19 See Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 150–74; and James Parakilas, “How Spain Got a Soul,” in Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music, 137–93. 246 sindhumathi revuluri

Example 8.1 Ravel, “Chanson espagnole,” mm. 7–8

including the Rapsodie espagnole and “Alborada del gracioso.”20 The accompaniment to the “Chanson espagnole” relies on various descending patterns, mostly in the bass, but sometimes in the upper voices as well (see Example 8.1). In particular, the descending tetrachord in mm. 7–8 of the accompaniment recalls a pattern that Richard Langham Smith has identified in L’heure espagnole as being a hallmark of Spanish folk music.21 Here, that tetrachord rarely appears in full, but even the suggestion of the figure appears only in the accompaniment, not the melody itself. Also remarkable in the “Chanson espagnole” are the rolled and arpeggiated chords (in some cases, open fifths, rather than triads)22 in the accompaniment, which slow down and add a sense of drama to the delivery of the harmonies (see Example 8.2). This is most extended in the introduction and interlude, with the delivery of harmonic information

20 Ravel’s interest in Spain has often been attributed to his own maternal ancestry coming through Spain and his identity being continually contested as possibly Basque. Yet this line of inquiry, much like the impulse to authenticate exoticism, leaves us asking misleading questions. I would pose the following in response: Why does it matter to us that Ravel had a familial tie to Spain? Does that make his exoticism more legitimate? 21 The tetrachord is not, as Richard Langham Smith has called it, necessarily a hallmark of Spanish folk music, but it is key to Ravel’s evocations of Spain. This is a crucial distinction, for I am not interested in an authentication of Ravel’s various harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral gestures. Indeed, if authentication is somehow required, it can be found in the melody itself, the ostensibly “real” part of the songs. Of greater interest are the ways in which all of this material can be manipulated in the service of a multitude of agendas. For more on the use of the tetrachords, their origins, and Ravel’s possible sources on Spanish music, see Richard Langham Smith, “Ravel’s Operatic Spectacles: L’Heure and L’Enfant,” in Mawer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, 196–99. 22 Richard Langham Smith claims that a dwelling on the fourth – rather than the fifth – degree was “recognised as a predominant Spanish characteristic,” and was related to the tuning of the guitar and plainsong origins. Langham Smith, “Ravel’s Operatic Spectacles,” 199. The emphasis on IV is exploited throughout this song, with G minor being the most prominent tonality after the home area of D minor. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 247

Example 8.2 Ravel, “Chanson espagnole,” mm. 1–6 accelerating in the two measures before the voice’s entry. The rhythmic texture of the introduction perhaps imitates a strummed guitar. This, too, may play to an overly caricatured imagination of Spain – that there are lots of guitars in Spain matters less than that it is evoked through specific gestures in the piano here. The rolled chords and the tetrachord reference do much of the expressive work in this song, both through the repeated rhythmic gestures of flourish and the otherwise sparse chordal textures.23 (The notes that make up individual harmonies are played more subsequently than simultaneously.) In the most colorful measures of the melody, occurring first at mm. 14–15, the piano drops out, allowing the voice to indulge in some rich chromatic exploration (see Example 8.3). What is notable about this moment is how the accompaniment does not echo the augmented second in the melody, a feature that could read as part of the vocabulary of exoticism. Upon closer inspection, there is instead a signature Ravelian sound, that of the major seventh.24 As Roy Howat has shown, the major

23 That Ravel’s hand is present in these pieces is perhaps not altogether surprising, and even less so that the Spanish sound of the song is achieved through rhythmic elements called upon specifically for this purpose. Ravel’s other Spanish-inflected works rely upon rhythm in similar ways. In more extended works, entire dance rhythms tend to do this work, but even in shorter pieces such as this one, rhythm is often cited as playing an important expressive role. See Kelly, “Maurice Ravel – Artistic Preoccupations.” 24 Roy Howat, “Ravel and the Piano,” in Mawer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, 76. The chord in question is itself multivalent: spelled like a Neapolitan M7, it simultaneously sounds a C#, which could suggest an alternate interpretation as a dominant seventh chord 248 sindhumathi revuluri

Example 8.3 Ravel, “Chanson espagnole,” mm. 23–26 (second verse)

seventh was a prominent feature of Ravel’s piano works at this time.25 Unlike many of works where the interval is used as part of a closing gesture, its presence here is simply to create the most chromatically and harmonically interesting moment – the end of a phrase to be sure, but not the end of the piece. For ends of strophes and the song as a whole, Ravel invokes open fifths, which is to say that the melody’s chromaticism left almost no mark on the piano accompaniment. Even though the melody offers rich harmonic and rhythmic possibilities, Ravel’s accompaniments do not necessarily follow from the melodic material at hand. In this case, the ostensibly authentic part of the song – the folk tune – seems only to provide a stage for Ravel’s personal techniques, whether they align with conventions of exoticism or are simply harmonically adventurous. What could be seen as individual about this song – the closing of each verse of the melodic line in particular – is overlooked in favor of more stereotypical nods: strumming texture, open chords, and an emphasis on iv (rather than V). In other words, the accompaniment offers an interaction between Ravel’s signature rhythmic and harmonic moves and the general established vocabulary of exoticism. If the “Chanson espagnole” exaggerates sounds that could be (and perhaps were) associated with folk practices of Spain (such as the open fourths of a strummed guitar), then the other songs direct their parodies elsewhere. In the “Chanson italienne,” Ravel caricatures operatic drama. Though it sets a folk melody, Ravel’s song exploits the unfolding of a harmonic progression in order to create narrative and drama. For instance, a cadence arrives

(of A-flat). Since it functions as neither – leading directly back to the assumed tonic of the piece, D – I am choosing to treat it as a moment, rather than as a functional chord. 25 Howat, “Ravel and the Piano,” 71–96. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 249

Example 8.4 Ravel, “Chanson italienne,” mm. 12–17

Example 8.5 Ravel, “Chanson italienne,” mm. 16–18 only two-thirds of the way through the piece. The importance to this song of delayed tonal arrival is somewhat suggested by the melody which leans on the fifth degree of the C minor scale in the first two phrases (see Example 8.4). But the “Chanson italienne,” like the “Chanson espagnole,” also involves drama delivered through rhythm. The distinctive rhythmic feature of the descending flourish – an elaborated echo from the melodic line – adds to a sense of suspension (see Example 8.5). The flourish that follows the first real cadence of the piece reinforces the sense of suspended time in the previous measures. Though it helps to cement that cadence by arpeggiating a C minor chord, the rhythmic activity – after many measures of near stasis, or at least slow, prolonged movement – creates a jarring effect. Drama governs the sense of time in the song, with the written-out rubatos in the vocal line exacerbating theatrical delivery of the text. In this sense, this short piece forms a narrative arc, one that stands in relatively sharp contrast to the strophic nature of many folksongs. Roger Nichols observes that this piece reveals Ravel’s “admiration for Puccini,” suggesting that what is remarkable about the piece is its operatic quality – a compression of drama into a short 22-measure song.26 It is the

26 Nichols, liner notes to Songs by Ravel,2–3. 250 sindhumathi revuluri

introduction of this level of drama – however exaggerated and perhaps even laughable – into a folksong that evokes the spirit of caricature. And, as caricature, the particular reference – here, to opera – starts to speak in a different way. The Maison du Lied’s emphasis on the genre of folksong, as opposed to national style in art music, starts to break down. Ravel’s musical stereotypes embrace musical genres without direct connection to the folk.27 Like the two previous examples, the “Chanson hébraïque” also calls attention to rhythm through its use of particular gestures to delineate the two narrative voices present in the text of the piece.28 An ostinato defines one section in contrast to the dramatic rolled chords of the other section. The intoned vocal delivery invokes religious traditions (see Example 8.6). Ravel emphasizes the change in narrative point of view through textural shifts in the accompaniment, as well as through expressive markings, and in performance directions. In other words, Ravel’s accompaniment, not the original melody itself, frames an understanding of the song as being constructed of opposing sections, one delivered in rhythmically intense bursts, the other intoned over a drone.29 Roger Nichols associates the song with signature Ravelian moves, an example of how the songs resonate with what scholars have noted about Ravel’s style, as well as conventional musical exoticism.30

27 Nichols’s comment does raise a question of perception: was Puccini a kind of national composer, in the way that chanting was a trademark Hebrew practice (i.e., a liturgical, not secular language, as it would later come to be), guitars a national instrument, or France defined by its provincial languages and dialects? If so, what does the specificity of these references say about perception? This may be a rich question for future study, but I would argue that it bears less on the case before us, since my interest is more in establishing that practices of caricature were at work – what they were may be of interest, but not for the purposes of authenticating their mimicry. 28 It is beyond the scope of my study to look at the role of the Dreyfus affair and its possible impact on the representation here. I will note, however, that given the titles of the songs, it seems that “Hebrew” as a category is being treated in the same manner as Italian, Spanish, and French. It would be worth considering if the distinctions are in fact linguistic, and not national, ones. I am less inclined to put this forth as a governing interpretation, since in the Spanish and French songs, provincial dialects are featured, but still associated with a national identity. Another possibility is of the idea of a nation defined by religion, another implication of the labeling of the Hebrew songs and lyrical content. 29 Vladimir Jankélévitch’s assessment of the song echoes my observations: “la violente couleur orientale de la Chanson hebraïque que vient interrompre, après chaque strophe, une sorte de psalmodie liturgique appuyée sur de solennels accords parfaits” [“the violent Oriental color of the Chanson hebraïque is then interrupted, after each verse, by a kind of liturgical psalmody, underscored by solemn chords”–translation author’s own]. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 34. 30 “In the hypnotic rhythms of the Chanson hébraïque, we hear that penchant for monotony that runs through all Ravel’s music.” Nichols, liner notes to Songs by Ravel,3. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 251

Example 8.6 Ravel, “Chanson hébraïque,” mm. 18–19

Like the Italian and Spanish songs, the Hebrew song offers an “artful” approach.31 What the original melody offers is exaggerated by the new piano accompaniment, dividing the song into clear sections based on the voice behind the narration of various phrases of the lyrics. Unlike the through-composed “Chanson italienne,” this song does operate in strophes of a certain kind.32 But, like all of the songs (with maybe the exception of the French), it does not easily lend itself to collective or unstudied performance in the way that folksongs are often imagined to be performed. Indeed, in their harmonized forms, the songs are not “authentic” Spanish, Italian, or Hebrew expressions, regardless of the derivation of the melody; instead, they have been transformed into familiar exoticist imaginations that align easily with other works in Ravel’s oeuvre and other works of French exoticism of the same period. The actuality, the authenticity of guitar playing, operatic singing, or sacred chanting and their reformation here have little to do with how the songs function, how they communicate within the set, and how they fit with the contexts of folksong harmonization and exoticism in fin-de-siècle France. Indeed, it is the transformation of folk tunes – only mildly suggestive of a specific place and time or group of people in and of themselves – into caricatures

31 The Maison du Lied’s aims, as described by Orenstein, certainly support this reading of the songs and may have had something to do with Ravel’s approach to them. The performances found on most recorded versions of the songs today also tend to indulge in the stereotypes suggested by the songs’ titles and musical conventions. Singers often languish in the chromatic elements of the “Chanson espagnole,” and the “Chanson italienne” is often even more overdrawn than the score would suggest. In the “Chanson hébraïque,” the two sections are almost always very sharply delineated by both the singer and pianist. The “Chanson française” is usually delivered in a light and charming fashion, with an emphasis on its strophic and generic qualities. 32 The “Chanson espagnole” is also strophic, though the contours and content of its melody makes it difficult to imagine it sung by many people at once. 252 sindhumathi revuluri

of those places, times, and people through the practices of exoticism and via Ravel’s musical language that demands our attention. The remaining song of the set offers a chance to reflect on how the practices of exoticism can create an Other out of something unexpected. With Ravel’s masks on full display, it may not come as a surprise that while the “Chanson française” sounds quite different from the other three in the set, it is not altogether different in its practice.33 In other words, it, too, exaggerates and caricatures its object. In fact, though, the exaggeration in the “Chanson française” promotes a different affect. While the “Chanson espagnole,”“Chanson italienne,” and “Chanson hébraïque” exhibit bold musical caricatures, the “Chanson française” offers a basically “unmarked” category, a background against which to read the other songs. Vladimir Jankélévitch remarks that the song is “friendly and familiar, like a provincial spring afternoon.”34 The “Chanson française” is in C major; it offers no rhythmic flourishes, no chromatic moves, no harmonic gymnastics. Unlike the other songs in the collection, it does not encourage an individual singer to embellish or take liberties in performance (even though performance of the songs was part of the Maison du Lied’s goal). It is entirely strophic, tonal and comfortable. Its rhythms are lilting and berceuse-like, “familiar” and peaceful, gentle and pleasant (see Example 8.7). Of course, the French song must also be understood as an exaggeration, a stereotype of a pastoral utopia. As I said earlier, the first three songs place Ravel’s musical language into the foreground, whether it is because of his signature artifice and ability to take on other voices or because of specific harmonic and rhythmic gestures, which are not explicitly tied to any place or time. Though the titles suggest generic national characters, the revelation of these gestures make it clear that this is actually Ravel’s Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew song. What is surprising, then, about the “Chanson française” is that it does not sound like Ravel, despite Ravel being a Frenchman and being trained in France. Though Ravel’s comments about artifice, cited earlier, suggest that he was a master at wearing

33 Deborah Mawer (“Introduction,” in Mawer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ravel,1) borrows the “mask” metaphor from Jankélévitch. 34 The full quotation reads: “Ici tout est ordre et ravissante légèreté; aux tons mineures succède le do majeur de tous les jours, do majeur transparent, amical et familier comme une après-midi de demi-saison en province: quelques accords de quarte-et-sixte, les intervalles les plus quotidiens, un calme movement de valse ainsi qu’une fume de petite ville qui monte tout droit dans le ciel blanc...[sic]iln’en faut pas advantage pour faire rêver à du Bellay, à La Fontaine et à de lointains souverirs d’enfance.” Jankélévitch, Ravel,33–34. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 253

Example 8.7 Ravel, “Chanson française,” mm. 25–49 different masks, it is difficult to find other works in his oeuvre that are as harmonically straightforward as the “Chanson française,” that employ simple rhythms and meters, or that are as rigidly strophic in nature.35 This is not just Ravel’s version of a French song, but truly any and all French songs. As Jankélévitch says of this set of songs, “Spanish melancholy and Italian grandiloquence give way, in the ‘Chanson française,’ to this supreme clarity, to this luminous charm, which are, so to speak, the prose of the heart.”36 What Jankélévitch calls “the heart” can also be read as a universality: for him, melancholy and grandiloquence can be modified by a national adjective (Spanish, Italian), whereas

35 For example, see Gurminder Bhogal, “Arabesque and Metric Dissonance in the Music of Maurice Ravel,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2004; Kelly, “Maurice Ravel – Style”; and Deborah Mawer, “Introduction,” in Mawer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ravel,1–4. 36 “La mélancolie espagnole et la grandiloquence italienne font place, dans la Chanson française, à cette clarté souveraine, à ce charme lumineux, qui sont pour ainsi dire la prose du cœur.” Jankélévitch, Ravel, 33. (Translation in text author’s own.) 254 sindhumathi revuluri

the qualities of the French song have a much broader resonance in being “clear” and “charming.”37 Ravel’s attitudes toward art and nationalism add yet another layer to reading the French song in the context of the set. Though wary of being known as the wrong kind of nationalist in politics, Ravel publicly declared his nationalist attitudes toward art on many occasions, stating that an artist must be international in his judgments and appreciations, but national in the production of his art.38 In the other three songs, his musical language – his individuality – comes to light in the production of difference, which is also a production of artifice. In the “Chanson française,” his unique musical language is subverted through another kind of artifice, one that favors redefining a self in the context of these songs. If musical exoticism is a way of reforming the Other, then that must here include a French self (and notably one that is located in the past).39 This is what we learn from the juxtaposition of French and foreign in this set: Frenchness is treated in the same way as distinct Others (such as Spain and Italy), both in its malleability and its surrender to stereotype. Once any national character is revealed as constructed, Frenchness no longer occupies a privileged or objective place. It is simply the exotic within.

Ambivalence and reformation

Of course, the musical gestures that signal a particular ethnicity in all four of the songs are a form of stereotype, and reductions of musical cultures to a handful of gestures is a common trope of exoticism in music.40 The false quintessence is invented by the culture that sees itself as having the authority to differentiate, to make such representations. As we know, the gestures themselves are rarely based on any real phenomenon.41

37 The abstract characteristics were often associated with a quintessential or desirable French style at the fin de siècle, but they are not easily quantified. For one perspective on the discourse of French musical ideals, see Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 236–45 and passim. 38 Kelly, “Maurice Ravel – Artistic preoccupations.” 39 As I have argued at length elsewhere, much discourse around French folksong at the fin de siècle placed it very aggressively in the past. See Revuluri, “Harmonizing the Past,” 525–31. 40 Kaminsky, “Vocal Music and Lures of Exoticism and Irony,” 170–71. He also suggests, in passing, that the “Chanson française”“becomes merely another cultural entity,” but he does not explore this possibility. 41 Most scholars of musical exoticism are quick to make this point, irrespective of their subsequent methodology that very often involves a process of authenticating the exoticist Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 255

More to the point, the function of the music understood as exoticist is rarely to reference an actual exotic, but to suggest an “Other”–more psychologically than physically removed. Most musical exoticism is so distant from any connection to the “actual,” so attenuated, that to see the problem as solved once the source materials are identified is to miss the importance of the issue of representation. Instead, I suggest that we can more reasonably, and more productively, understand exoticism in the music of fin-de-siècle France as a French phenomenon. Even in the case of Ravel’s Chants populaires, where Ravel’s exoticism may be inspired by the authentic folk melody, the author of the music, in the end, is French. Despite, or perhaps because of the recognition of authorship, these songs – and their combination in a single set – invite contradictory readings of their representational possibilities, framed alternately by exoticism and nationally defined characters. (That there are collected musical artifacts embedded within the pieces, in the form of the source folk melodies offered by the Maison du Lied, only adds further to the possible layers of meaning here.) Meanings begin with appropriations akin to countless examples of exoticism in French music of the period – melismas, rhythmic flourishes, open fourths and fifths, and timbral imitations. But they continue to accumulate through further pressure on artificial national distinctions, through the revelation of stereotypes as constructed, and finally, in the juxtaposition of these compressed national positions. The songs thus resist any clean or singular interpretation: they are neither fully celebratory of European diversity, nor are they unbelievable in their caricature. They are artfully harmonized and arranged, yet they retain a sense of their origins as folksong, as assumed representatives of national culture – a message that they can only, and perhaps ironically, communicate through their exoticist imagination. The multiplicity of meaning(s) – in many ways dissonant – emerging first from individual songs, and then from the set as a whole, may productively be read as an ambivalence, theorized most notably by Homi Bhabha.42 Ambivalence, a refrain of Bhabha’s work, destabilizes hierarchies of power and representation. The concept is especially poignant in his

gestures. See, for example, Locke, Musical Exoticism; and Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music. 42 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, [1994] 2006), esp. 121–31, 145–74. Though Bhabha’s examples rely specifically on a colonial dichotomy, the broader concept of ambivalence, specifically as it illuminates representation and power, is relevant to Ravel’s harmonized folksongs, and more generally exoticism in music, even when the specific representations seem to occur outside of explicit colonial or imperial situations. 256 sindhumathi revuluri

discussion of colonial mimicry, where he suggests that colonial mimicry “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”43 He uses examples mainly from British colonial history to show how a reformed subject – one that is “anglicized but not English”–can both confirm and threaten the authority of a colonial power. In Bhabha’s examples, the subject must be “anglicized,” or reformed to be recognizable – in order to fulfill the colonial desire. This mimicry creates a doubleness – an ambivalence – that simultaneously produces, underscores, and threatens the difference upon which colonial power relationships are founded. Ravel’s songs seem to show the reformed characters Bhabha suggests. The songs are, if you will, anglicized, but never English, frenchified, but never French. They still bear ties to their origins – Ravel and his French hand provided harmonizations, but the original material is not his and it is not (in three out of four cases) French. These are folk songs from various places, ostensibly showcasing the character of those “folk.” In that sense, they can never be entirely French, even as far as the imagination could stretch. What is French about them, however, is the caricature in their accompaniments – all of which display hallmarks of exoticism, a European practice. Ravel may not have had exoticism in mind when he stated, “My music is unequivocally French,” but he nonetheless offered Frenchness as a frame for his eclectic oeuvre.44 For Bhabha, the stereotype is ambivalent; it has a double vision and is as anxious as it is assertive.45 Creating a reformed, recognizable Other that is a subject of difference underscores authority, but it also causes a menace to the identity of the Self. As the Other is reformed to become more similar to the Self, it threatens to eliminate all difference, to create another set of normalized knowledge. The practice of musical exoticism in fin-de-siècle France provided a way of reforming the Other, most often through appropriation and caricature. But it also created a threat: in voicing the reformed, recognizable Other, the French musical language became populated by exoticist gestures. The Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew songs employ gestures of French musical exoticism alongside Ravel’s signature musical moves, often without clear boundaries in between. The “menace,” to use Bhabha’s terms, is actually that what started as a process of differentiating came to define certain elements of the French

43 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122 (emphasis in the original). 44 Cited in Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” 44. 45 Bhabha, The Location of Culture,94–120. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 257 musical style. This is why the interpretation of these songs as authentically exotic is so misleading: it ignores the absorption evident in Ravel’s accompaniments by crediting them to the songs themselves. Attributing authenticity to the songs forgets that, ultimately, exoticism is a French phenomenon, not a reflection of a real exotic. The absorption of exotic sounds – the mottling of the French musical language – causes what Bhabha might call a “threat to normalized knowledges.”46 Through the anxious repetition of exoticism, the Other has been so reformed that it is overly recognizable. But if exoticism is French – and even a defining feature of French musical identity at the fin de siècle – then how do we understand the “Chanson française” of this set? It is not marked by the same musical gestures as the others; clearly, strumming guitars and vocal drama have not overtaken expressions of French clarity, simplicity, and elegance. Yet the practice of exaggeration is nonetheless present, and this consistency across national boundaries and objects of representation must be noted. The French song is not simply a berceuse, but itself an exaggerated expression. Here we see how caricature, stereotype, and exaggeration can all be pointed at the ostensible Self, as much as they can be pointed outwards. That this is not in the service of farce or comedy, but is taken in all seriousness (by the Maison du Lied and many critics since, if not also by Ravel), points to a reading of an “exotic within.” Again, this can be figured in two ways: both that exoticism (in the representation of the people and sounds of faraway) comes to dominate and define the French musical language, and that the practice of representation, especially through stereotype, can take the self, as much as the Other, as its subject. Regardless of exactly how we decide to read the four Chants populaires, and especially the “Chanson française”–as a nationalist redefinition of the Self or as a rejection of it in favor of an alignment with the Other – the presence of multiple, contradictory readings supports the ambivalence of colonial discourse that Bhabha describes. At once celebratory and inherently anxious, the assertion of authority often ends with obfuscation. The attempt to differentiate a French identity from that of an Italian or Spanish one results not in the establishment of a new or clearer identity, but in a complete erasure. The Other is far more interesting than the original subject in its musical language, in its profile, in its distinctiveness.

46 Ibid., 122–23. 258 sindhumathi revuluri

The menace is manifest in the retreat of the “Chanson française”–so civilized that it is nearly silent. That the other songs of the set were not representations of populations colonized by the French is only a further irony of the situation. The subjects in this case were not literally dominated by French imperialism. Rather, they refer to the national characters that were real threats to a French musical language. The songs did not need to be about Africa or the Caribbean, east or south Asia – those populations had their own forms of mimicry, menace, and domination, all simultaneously anxious and assertive – but they did not threaten the high art traditions of France. Bhabha’s formulation relies upon the subject imitating the ruler: the anglicized Indian is a changed subject, whether real or the construct of literary fictions. In applying this concept to music, we must be mindful of the fact that the constructions (musically speaking, the sounds of the Other – here, folksongs) are manipulated in order to fulfill a colonial desire. In the absence of musical production by the Other, and especially in the absence of domination of those who were not literally subjects of the French empire, these musics respond to the perceived real threats to French music.47 Rather than a literal colonial assertion, the mimicry here is about underscoring the authority of who is allowed to represent. Spain and Italy may not be under French rule, but Ravel can still mimic, can still differentiate between those styles, and between what they are and who he is; it is that authority that is asserted here. The idea of colonial mimicry may be usefully applied beyond these songs to the larger case of exoticism in music. Invoking difference through exoticism does underscore authority, especially when the exotic is set apart from other aspects of musical language, in virtual quotation marks. A proactive response to the desire for the reformed other is to create it yourself – make Spain and Italy sound as you want them to through exoticism. To reduce a foreign musical culture to a few musical gestures is to attempt to fix in place its identity as a way of asserting authority. In this arrested form, it is a simplification that denies and disavows difference. The songs’ use of conventions of musical exoticism contributes to the stereotype acting at once as a substitute for the Other and only as a mere shadow of it.

47 The large body of literature about French musical nationalism addresses potential threats. For an excellent overview, see Barbara Kelly, “Introduction: The Roles of Music and Culture in National Identity Formation,” in Barbara Kelly, ed., French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 1–14. Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires and the exotic within 259

In her interpretation of Freud’s uncanny, Julia Kristeva puzzles over why Freud has not discussed the notion of the foreign or, more specifically, the anxiety caused by the foreigner. She explains the absence by saying that “Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. That is perhaps the only way not to hound it outside of us.”48 She later says, “By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners.”49 Kristeva’s idea is eerily true: the “strange” is strangest when it is the context of the familiar. In a sense, this is why the “Chanson française” is so marked within this set. Instead of an acceptance of the foreign within, there is an erasure, a purging of that foreign. The mimicry that began as a response to menace – an attempt to control the threat of invasion by the foreign – has created a new menace – an alteration of the very self it attempted to preserve. This is true in several senses: the “Chanson espagnole,”“Chanson italienne,” and “Chanson hébraïque” alter what Ravel writes, and the “Chanson française” changes Frenchness in response to them. The ambivalence suggested by Bhabha is seen here not through an anglicized Indian, but an exoticized French. The menace comes from within: a French musical language, in its obsessive repetition of sounds of the reformed exotic, has come to sound like its own imagination of that exotic. In finding a recognizable Other, it has become unrecognizable.

48 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 191. 49 Ibid., 192.

9 “Diving into the earth”: the musical worlds of Julius Eastman ellie m. hisama

In her book The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, Briony Fer considers the dramatic changes to “the map of art” in the 1950s and characterizes the transition away from modernism not as a negation, but as a positive reconfiguration.1 In examining works from the 1950s and 1960s by visual artists including Piero Manzoni, Eva Hesse, Dan Flavin, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois, Fer suggests that after a modernist aesthetic was exhausted by mid-century, there emerged “strategies of remaking art through repetition,” with a shift from a collage aesthetic to a serial one; by “serial,” she means “a number of connected elements with a common strand linking them together, often repetitively, often in succession.”2 Although Fer’s use of the term “serial” in visual art differs from that typically employed in discussions about music, her fundamental claim

I would like to thank Nancy Nuzzo, former Director of the Music Library and Special Collections at the University at Buffalo, and John Bewley, Archivist at the Music Library, University at Buffalo, for their kind research assistance; and Mary Jane Leach and Renée Levine Packer for sharing their work on Julius Eastman. Portions of this essay were presented as invited colloquia at Cornell University, the University of Washington, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Peabody Conservatory of Music, the Eastman School of Music, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley; as a conference paper at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music, Denver (2009), and the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, Kansas City (2009); and as a keynote address at the Michigan Interdisciplinary Music Society, Ann Arbor (2011). I am grateful to the many people who have commented helpfully on this work, especially Michael Alan Anderson, George Barth, Karol Berger, Jonathan Bernard, David Borden, Ryan Dohoney, the late Frances Eastman, Kyle Gann, Nalini Ghuman, Thomas Grey, Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Mark Katz, Charles Kronengold, Ralph Locke, Patrick Macey, Elizabeth West Marvin, Horace Maxile, Jonathan Meci, Matthew Morrison, Bryan Parkhurst, Judith Peraino, Wayne Petty, David Pier, Keith Potter, J. Griffith Rollefson, Mary Ann Smart, Larry Starr, Joseph Straus, Jane Sugarman, Christina Sunardi, Jeffrey Taylor, Elizabeth Tolbert, Judy Tsou, Anton Vishio, and David Yearsley. I am grateful to Julius Eastman’s mother, Frances Eastman, for sharing materials and graciously allowing me to interview her in 2008 and 2009. I also thank David Borden for his kind support of this project and for generously facilitating my research in Ithaca. A warm thanks to Jennifer Way Rawe, Hannah Rawe, Anton Vishio, Hana, and Liam, for providing time to write. 1 Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 260 2 Ibid., 3. The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 261 that “seriality and subjectivity are inextricably bound” is fruitful in thinking about the music of Julius Eastman (1940–90).3 Her discussion of Hesse’s approach to serial repetition as an art that was “personal” resonates with my understanding of Eastman’s compositional use of repetition, a process that permits a gradual unfolding of the deliberately politicized sonic field.4 This politicization is suggested by the titles of some of his untexted compositions, which can redirect one’s hearing in specific ways. For example, the title of his haunting Gay Guerrilla (1980) invites the listener to engage with a complex set of issues regarding sexuality and politics, a listening experience that is enhanced when we consider Eastman’s music in relation to his life as a gay African American who walked on the edges of the American new music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. A composer, singer, pianist, improviser, conductor, actor, choreographer, and dancer, Eastman is receiving long overdue attention two decades after his death in 1990.5 In 2005, New World Records released the first commercial recording of Eastman’s compositions, a three-CD set containing seven pieces and a pre-concert talk he delivered at North- western University in 1980.6 This collection brought many new listeners to his music and resulted in performances across the US and internationally. The recent revival of Eastman’s music includes performances in New York at The Stone, The Kitchen, and Merkin Hall; in Los Angeles at the Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater; in Berkeley at the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive; and in The Hague at City Hall Atrium.7 Eastman was not widely known as a composer during his lifetime, but he was recognized in new music circles as a brilliant singer and pianist. Possessing an expressively rich voice, he was perhaps best known, before the recent revival of his compositions, for his landmark performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’s vocal tour-de-force, Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), which he premiered in the US in 1970, recorded in

3 Ibid., 4. 4 Ibid., 18. 5 To this list, Renée Levine Packer adds mime, actor, electronicist, organist, and speaker. See Renée Levine Packer, This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo (Oxford University Press, 2010), 92. 6 Julius Eastman, Unjust Malaise (New World Records 80638-2, 2005). 7 S.E.M. Ensemble, The Stone, New York, July 25, 2006; The Kitchen, Nights Errant, New York, April 11, 2008; Ecstatic Music Festival, Merkin Hall, New York, January 17, 2011; California E.A.R. Unit, Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater, Los Angeles, April 11, 2007; A Tribute to Julius Eastman, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, February 10, 2012; and Dag in de Branding, Festival voor Nieuwe Muziek, City Hall Atrium, The Hague, March 15, 2008. 262 ellie m. hisama

1973, and performed at one of Boulez’s New York Philharmonic’s Rug Concerts in 1975.8 Eastman’s dazzling performance of this work, which spans some five octaves and requires extraordinarily challenging avant-garde vocal techniques, is all the more remarkable in light of his lack of formal training in voice.9 This bravura performance resulted in a Grammy nomination, and many new music aficionados know Eastman’s singing through this album.10 My examination of Eastman’s work is an attempt to make his “formalist language signify,” borrowing a phrase from Robert Fink’s Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice.11 Eastman’s approaches to organizing sound, including his use of pitch, rhythm, repetition, and musical quotation in his instrumental compositions, can be heard as grounded in the politics of racial and sexual identity that, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and Stonewall, pushed the envelope in new music circles starting in the 1970s. I argue that post-minimalist compositional strategies were profoundly enabling for Eastman, allowing him to write into his music a kind of expressive freedom that emerged from his subjectivity as a gay African American composer of new music. His work thus allows us to respond affirmatively to a key question animating Fer’sstudy:“Could it be that art is one of the very few places in culture that allows a margin of freedom within repetition rather than a place exempt from its demands?”12 In discussing his approaches to organizing music, including his use of repetition and ideas about form, I share my response as a listener attuned to aspects of his personhood—specifically as a black, gay man who worked in a primarily white new music scene—that I believe can be usefully linked to his music. It is critical, in my view, to apprehend Eastman’s music with respect to both of these social categories, rather

8 Kyle Gann, “‘Damned Outrageous’: The Music of Julius Eastman,” liner notes, Eastman, Unjust Malaise; advertisement for Rug Concert—New York Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez, conductor, June 28, 1975, in New York Magazine, June 9, 1975, 80; Peter Maxwell Davies, Eight Songs for a Mad King, with Julius Eastman, voice, and The Fires of London (Nonesuch H 71285, 1973). 9 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 7, 2009). 10 Mary Jane Leach, “In Search of Julius Eastman,” NewMusicBox (November 8, 2005), www.newmusicbox.org/articles/In-Search-of-Julius-Eastman (accessed 23 November 2012). 11 Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 18. Fink’s use of “signify” does not invoke Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s theory of Signifyin(g), as elaborated in Gates’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Eastman’s spoken introduction to a concert of his music at Northwestern University, on January 16, 1980, is a form of Signifyin(g), as I discuss later in this essay. 12 Fer, The Infinite Line,4. The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 263 than to disregard them within a “post-race” or sexuality-neutral context. In a 1976 interview, Eastman reflected, “[P]laying the piano, singing or composing helps me to get closer to myself. It’s through art that I can search for the self...When I am playing this music, I feel as if I am trying to see myself—it’s like diving into the earth.”13 To ignore race and sexuality, which for Eastman were markers of “difference,” in listening to his music would be to refuse to acknowledge critical parts of the self for which Eastman was searching. His destabilizing of aspects of the American new music scene in the 1970s and 1980s can be heard as an expression of what Cathy J. Cohen regards as an interconnected political identity, one “informed by a consciousness that...grows from the living experience of existing within and resisting multiple and connected practices of domination and normalization.”14 This essay examines some of Eastman’s compositional responses to two overlapping systems of oppression, racism and homophobia. His music, often generated through repetition, sonically illustrates not only the suggestive links Fer makes between freedom and repetition and between seriality and subjectivity, but also the theoretical framework that interprets formal structures through a subjectivity of difference more generally.15

“To obtain wisdom”

Very little scholarly work is available on Eastman. There is no article on him in the twenty-nine-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and

13 Renate Strauss, “Julius Eastman: Will the Real One Stand Up?” Buffalo Evening News (July 17, 1976): B-5. 14 Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3:4 (1997): 441; repr. in E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 21–51. 15 This approach is illustrated in a number of studies published since 1990, including Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Philip Brett, “Britten’s Dream,” in Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 259–80; Ellie M. Hisama, “Voice, Race, and Sexuality in the Music of Joan Armatrading,” in Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley, eds., Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music (Zurich: Carciofoli Verlagshaus, 1999), 115–32; Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Mary Lee Greitzer, “Queer Responses to Sexual Trauma: The Voices of Tori Amos’s ‘Me and a Gun’ and Lydia Lunch’s ‘Daddy Dearest’,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 17 (2013): 1–26. 264 ellie m. hisama

Musicians, 2nd edition (2001) or in the recently published eight-volume Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition (2013).16 To my knowledge, the only published scholarly work on Eastman is Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek’s master’s thesis (2011) and Ryan Dohoney’s essay on Cage and Eastman (2014), in addition to composer Mary Jane Leach’s watershed article “In Search of Julius Eastman,” published in NewMusic- Box (2005) and Kyle Gann’s extensive liner notes to Julius Eastman, Unjust Malaise (2005). A volume of essays on Eastman edited by former Creative Associates co-director Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach is in preparation.17 The following discussion contributes to the biography of Eastman, drawing from three interviews I conducted with his mother, Frances Eastman, an interview I conducted with David Borden, and my archival research at the University at Buffalo and use of archival records housed at the Curtis Institute. Julius Dunbar Eastman, Jr. was born in New York City on October 27, 1940, named after his father and after the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.18 Julius Eastman, Sr. was a civil engineer and his mother, FrancesEastman,workedasaninspectorforGeneralElectric,andlater as the Records Librarian at the Tompkins County Hospital, raising Julius and his younger brother Gerry by herself in Ithaca, New York, after she and her husband split up (see Figure 9.1).19 When Julius was a boy, he and his mother visited Manhattan and walked by a music store;

16 Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn. (New York: Grove, 2001); Charles Hiroshi Garrett, ed., The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 17 Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency at Northwestern University,” MA thesis, University of Iowa, 2011; Ryan W. Dohoney, “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego,” in Benjamin Piekut, ed., Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 39–62; Leach, “In Search of Julius Eastman”;Gann,“‘Damned Outrageous’”; Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach, eds., “Gay Guerrilla: The Life and Music of Julius Eastman” (unpublished ms). Levine Packer and Leach have done a significant amount of research on Eastman, and Leach’s website houses an archive of scores and photographs. See Levine Packer, “Julius Eastman,” in Levine Packer and Leach, eds., “Gay Guerrilla”; and Leach, The Julius Eastman Project, www.mjleach.com/eastman.htm (accessed June 30, 2014). 18 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: October 30, 2008). 19 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 29, 2009); obituary for Frances Eastman, Ithaca Journal (February 11, 2010), www.legacy.com/obituaries/theithacajournal/ obituary.aspx?n=frances-eastman&pid=139838308 (accessed June 30, 2014); Julius Eastman, application to Curtis Institute of Music for the program in composition, February 15, 1961 (Curtis Institute of Music Archives). I am grateful to Mary Jane Leach for sending me this and other documents from the Curtis Archives. The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 265

Figure 9.1 (left to right) Unidentified friend of the Eastman family, Julius, Frances, and Gerry Eastman. 266 ellie m. hisama

he asked her to buy some music. She purchased a copy of Für Elise; he taught himself to read music and began studying piano.20 His application to the composition program at the Curtis Institute lists Roger Hannah as his earliest teacher, in 1954–55, and states that he studied with Seymour Lipkin in New York in July and August 1958.21 The Eastman family did not have much money—indeed, his mother recalled that finding even $5 for piano lessons was a hardship. She remained in Ithaca because she wanted her sons to have a backyard and because she wanted to keep them away from the drug trade in New York in the 1940s.22 Eastman displayed his talent in music at a young age, singing, playing piano, and composing. He was a strikingly precocious child. His mother recalled to me: “He was strange. From an early age, I tried to understand this child. I knew he was strange from very young. From two I knew he was smart. When I read to him at bedtime, he would say back, word for word, the story. That was strange.”23 After enrolling at Ithaca College for one year, he auditioned at the Curtis Institute in piano and was admitted in 1959. Mieczysław Horszowski accepted him as a piano student. His application for the composition program lists these pieces as some of his “most important compositions studied”: Bach, English Suites, nos. 2 and 3; Ravel, Sonatine; Bartók, Suite, op. 14; Debussy, La cathédrale engloutie, Beethoven, Sonatas, op. 2, no. 1, op. 2, no. 3, op. 10, no. 1, and op. 28.24 Responding to the question on the application “What is your ultimate aim in studying music?” he wrote simply: “To obtain wisdom.”25 In a letter to Jane Hill, the registrar, Eastman referred to his dismal living quarters as “barracks,” writing, “[i]f I have to live there another year I shall die a morbid death.”26 However, he did not want to try to find another room, stating that “even worse than inevitably living in my cell is the fear and dread of having to call and knock at the door of strange people looking for a room.”27 Although he does not specify the reason for his “fear and dread,” it is probable that Eastman, as a young black man, experienced

20 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 29, 2009). 21 See Eastman, application to Curtis Institute of Music. Eastman was already a student in the piano program when he applied to Curtis for composition. 22 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 7, 2009). 23 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 29, 2009). 24 Eastman, application to Curtis Institute of Music. 25 Ibid. 26 Julius Eastman, letter to “Miss Hill,” Curtis Institute of Music Archives, n.d. 27 Ibid. The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 267 difficulties securing a room in a private home in Philadelphia in the late 1950s and early 1960s.28 After studying piano at Curtis for two years, he was accepted to the composition program. He studied counterpoint, harmony, and form and analysis with Constant Vauclain, and received a degree in composition from Curtis in 1963.

“A talented freak”

After completing his studies at Curtis, Eastman headed back north to Buffalo, where he joined a cutting-edge group of musicians and composers which included Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Petr Kotik, Jan Williams, David Del Tredici, Eberhard Blum, Benjamin Hudson, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Zukofsky, and many others who have become senior figures in American new music circles. At the invitation of Lukas Foss, in 1969 he joined the Creative Associates based at the University at Buffalo (see Figure 9.2) and was also a member of the S.E.M. Ensemble, newly founded by Kotik in 1970.29 He was also in demand as a singer and pianist of common-practice repertory.30 Eastman’s participation in the Creative Associates is perhaps surprising to those who have formed an image of American new music of the 1970s and 1980s as largely white, an image stoked by texts and concert programs that rarely include black contributions to new music. Eastman joined a number of African American musicians who were in residence at SUNY Buffalo in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Charles Mingus, who was a Visiting Slee Professor; Archie Shepp, appointed as the Associate Director of the Experimental Program for Independent Study; Charles Gayle, who was on the UB faculty and taught jazz; and vocalist Gwendolin Sims, who was also a Creative Associate.31

28 Letter from “Secretary of Admissions” (unsigned) to “Mrs. Eastman,” September 16, 1959, lists the addresses of four women who advertised rooms available with the YMCA, Curtis Institute of Music Archives. 29 Archive of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, Music Library, University at Buffalo. Renée Levine Packer provides a history of the Creative Associates and the new music scene in Buffalo during these years in Levine Packer, This Life of Sounds. 30 Eastman performed the role of Tonio in Pagliacci (Frances Eastman, interview with the author [Ithaca, NY: March 29, 2009]) and owned a copy of Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge. My thanks to David Yearsley for sending me this score, which he found in an antique store in Ithaca. 31 Archive of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, Music Library, University at Buffalo. 268 ellie m. hisama

Figure 9.2 Morton Feldman seated at piano surrounded by Creative Associates (Julius Eastman, Jan Williams, William Appleby, David Del Tredici) (1972).

As a member of the Creative Associates, Eastman performed his own and others’ music in Buffalo, New York City, and in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and the UK when the Creative Associates went on a European tour.32 He experienced many professional struggles during this time. He gave up a job teaching music theory because he “couldn’t adjust to the discipline of paperwork.”33 He was later appointed as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo, but his contract was terminated in 1975, in his fourth year of employment; his personnel file contains several complaints from students about his absences from classes and his disorganized style of teaching.34 Explaining the change in his professional circumstances the following year to a reporter, he remarked that he “did not think that the Creative Associates were very creative any more. I had no power to

32 A performance of Eastman’s “Creation” for voice and ensemble from the S.E.M. Ensemble’s Belgium tour was aired on the International Service of Belgium Radio and Television on August 26, 1973 and is available at https://archive.org/details/CM_1973_08_26 (accessed June 30, 2014). My thanks to Mary Jane Leach for sharing this link. 33 Gann, “‘Damned Outrageous’,” 6. 34 Personnel file of Julius Eastman, Archives, University at Buffalo. The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 269 plan programs and none of the stuff that I suggested was taken up...I was a kind of talented freak who occasionally injected some vitality into the programming.”35 After his faculty appointment at Buffalo was not renewed, Eastman decided to leave his post in 1975 rather than completing the additional year of teaching he was allowed. He began to focus his playing in jazz, sometimes with his younger brother Gerry Eastman, a gifted guitarist, bassist, composer, arranger, conductor, and bandleader, who performed with the Count Basie Orchestra and founded the Williamsburg Music Center in Brooklyn in 1981, “to foster the creation, performance, and appreciation of American classical music.”36 In 1976, he moved to New York City and became affiliated with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, then under the direction of Lukas Foss; he joined other black composers in the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series (co-directed by Eastman, Talib Hakim, and Tania León, with León as principal conductor), a series that aimed to diversify audiences for classical music.37 During this period, his music was performed at the downtown venue The Kitchen, and he also collaborated with artist/cellist/ singer Arthur Russell, recording “In the Light of the Miracle” and “Go Bang” with him.38 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Eastman toured as a vocalist with Meredith Monk and her ensemble, and recorded on her album Dolmen Music.39 In New York City, Eastman experienced severe financial problems and struggled with various drug and alcohol addictions.40 Around 1980, he stopped paying rent and was evicted from his apartment at 6th Street and 2nd Avenue; after the sheriff moved his belongings, he lived in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.41 That event painfully recalls the devastating scene in Thomas Reichman’sdocumentaryMingus:

35 Strauss, “Julius Eastman”: B-5. 36 Williamsburg Music Center, http://wmcjazz.org/members/peter-north (accessed June 30, 2014). 37 Tania León, pers. comm., November 18, 2005; Maurice Edwards, How Music Grew in Brooklyn: A Biography of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 68, 123–24. 38 For a discussion of Eastman’s work with Arthur Russell, see Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 155–57, 161–62. My thanks to Ryan Dohoney for sharing recordings and conversation about Eastman and Russell. 39 For a discussion of Eastman’s years in New York, see Ryan Dohoney, “Mapping Downtown: Julius Eastman’s New York,” in Levine Packer and Leach, eds. “Gay Guerrilla” (unpublished ms). 40 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 7, 2009); David Borden, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 7, 2009). 41 Leach, “In Search of Julius Eastman.” 270 ellie m. hisama

Charlie Mingus 1968, in which Mingus and his five-year-old daughter, Carolyn Mingus, are evicted from their loft in 1966 and his music goes flying out into the streets of New York.42 In the 1980s, Eastman’s situation deteriorated swiftly. He lived in a homeless shelter in New York, and also lived in shelters for a time in Buffalo. In the early 1980s, Eastman was told that a job as a voice professor at Cornell would most likely materialize, but when that job fell through, he grew bitter about his career, which never took off, despite its immense promise.43 His behavior became increasingly erratic. While using the practice rooms in the basement at Cornell, he sometimes let his cigarettes slowly burn out directly on the piano, to the alarm of faculty, who would check on him periodically.44 He died in May 1990 at the age of forty-nine, alone in a hospital in Buffalo, with cardiac arrest listed as the official cause of death. Even many of his colleagues did not know that Eastman had died until Kyle Gann’s obituary of him appeared in the Village Voice eight months later (see Figure 9.3).45

What happened?

It is worth pondering Eastman’s poignant question, posed at the age of thirty, to a reporter who interviewed him—“I always thought I was great, but why does making it big take so long?”46 When he moved to New York, he was active as a vocalist, pianist, and keyboardist, and worked with many downtown musicians.47 In New York he became conductor of the CETA (Changing Education through the Arts) Orchestra.48 Yet his own works were not frequently performed, and he did not have a publisher or a record contract. Reflecting on his career, he remarked: “I’m not a world figure, but certain people know me. I’ve never pushed my music at all. Maybe that’s

42 Charles Mingus 1968, dir. Thomas Reichman (Rhapsody Films, 1968). 43 Borden, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 7, 2009). 44 Ibid. 45 Kyle Gann, “That Which Is Fundamental: Julius Eastman, 1940–1990,” Village Voice (January 22, 1991): 45, 79; reprinted in Kyle Gann, Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 289–92. 46 Suzanne Metzger, “I Always Thought I Was Great, But Why Does Making it Big Take So Long?,” The Reporter (Buffalo, NY: September 30, 1971). 47 Eastman performed on Meredith Monk’sLPDolmen Music (ECM Records 1197, 1981) and can be viewed performing with Monk in 4 American Composers, vol. 3, dir. Peter Greenaway (Mystic Fire 76236, 1985). 48 Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams, 155. The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 271

Figure 9.3 Julius Eastman (November 1989). not a good quality particularly, but I’ve always figured that once one is known the publishers will come to you.”49 The issue of why Eastman was not widely recognized during his lifetime, or in the years from his death in 1990 to around 2005, deserves discussion. Gerry Eastman is direct about the professional struggles and racism his brother experienced: “My brother...was an accomplished and well known composer and could not get his stuff played with his credentials, so I knew it would be hard to get on. I did not want to be out begging anyone to

49 Metzger, “I Always Thought I Was Great.” 272 ellie m. hisama

compose music and play for.”50 He remarked further to Kyle Gann: “Racism within the classical world prevented him from doing the things he was doing. The system was rigged against him. It’s the same old Scott Joplin/Charlie Parker story only with a different person. Julius is just another in the line of black geniuses who get squashed in this particular hemisphere.”51 Frances Eastman noted that he had not discussed racism with her as it impinged on his professional opportunities, adding that she thought he would not have wanted to upset her by telling her about such incidents. She expressed anger about his lack of professional recognition, attributing it in some situations to racism.52 Eastman is mentioned briefly in Raoul Abdul, Blacks in Classical Music (1977), but is not included in any of the three editions of Eileen Southern’s ground- breaking book The Music of Black Americans (1971, 1983, 1997); or in David N. Baker, Lida M. Belt, and Herman C. Hudson’s edited volume The Black Composer Speaks (1978), James Haskins’s Black Music in America (1987), or Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.’s The Power of Black Music (1995).53 Further research is needed to explore more fully the reasons for Eastman’s absence in volumes devoted to illuminating the neglected work of black musicians, despite his high profile during the 1970s as a performer in Aspen, New York, and Europe, and for his disappearance from the historical record more generally.

Evil Nigger

As a gay African American musician and composer working in the largely white new music scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman did not readily fit into the worlds to which his musical talents brought him. His composition of what he dubbed the “Nigger Series” of works for multiple instrumentalists, which includes Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, Dirty Nigger,andNigger Faggot (sometimes listed as NF) was shocking and

50 J. Lisbon, “Gerry Eastman & The Williamsburg Music Center,” AMAG., Inc.(May–June 2004): 26. 51 Gann, Music Downtown, 291. 52 Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 29, 2009). 53 Raoul Abdul, Blacks in Classical Music: A Personal History (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1977), 67–68; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, [1971] 1997); David N. Baker, Lida M. Belt, and Herman C. Hudson, eds., The Black Composer Speaks (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978); James Haskins, Black Music in America: A History Through Its People (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1987); and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 273 offensive to audiences.54 In the early 1980s, and still today, many do not wish to utter or circulate the titles of these works, given the painful histories of the slurs “nigger” and “faggot.” A protest by Northwestern University students and a faculty member in the School of Music about the titles of the works on the upcoming concert prompted the following remarks by Eastman.55

Now there was a little problem with the titles of the piece. There are some students and one faculty member who felt that the titles were somehow derogatory in some manner, being that the word “nigger” is in it. These particular titles—the reason I use them—is because...in fact I use...there’s a whole series of these pieces...and they’re called...they can be called a “Nigger Series.” Now the reason I use that particular word is because, for me, it has a...is what I call a basicness about it. That is to say, I feel that, in any case, the first niggers were of course field niggers. And upon that is really the basis of what I call the American economic system. Without field niggers you wouldn’t really have such a great and grand economy that we have. So that is what I call the first and great nigger, field niggers. And what I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or, or, what could we say—elegant. So a nigger for me is that kind of thing which is...attains himself or herself to the ground of anything, you see. And that’s what I mean by nigger. There are many niggers, many kinds of niggers.56

Eastman’s lecture is a form of Signifyin(g), the linguistic practice theorized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in which African Americans’ utterances are posited to be a form of double-voiced discourse that seem to respond at face value to a remark, situation, or cultural moment, but that actually comment critically, ironically, and playfully using “a mode of linguistic circumnavigation...[using] a second language that they can share with other black people.”57

54 Eastman premiered NF at the opening of the 1978–79 Community Concerts series in a program dedicated to the memory of Langston Hughes, Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Brooklyn. See Edwards, How Music Grew in Brooklyn, 111. 55 Hanson-Dvoracek identifies For Members Only (FMO), a black student alliance at Northwestern University, as the organization that protested the upcoming concert and arranged a meeting with Eastman and Northwestern faculty composer Peter Gena. At the meeting, both sides agreed that the titles would be removed from the posters and program, and that Eastman would have the opportunity to address the titles at the performance. Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency,” 31. 56 Julius Eastman, introduction to the Northwestern University concert, January 16, 1980, transcribed from Eastman, Unjust Malaise. 57 Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 76. The inflections and cadences of Eastman’s spoken remarks on the recording reinforce this reading. My thanks to Kevin C. Holt for sharing his 274 ellie m. hisama

Eastman’s explanation did not help his case with the largely white audience at Northwestern; a dry jab at the American economic system is mixed in with a nod to African American workers who were not of the “House” variety.58 In an interview with the Northwestern Daily, Eastman declared, “I admire the name ‘nigger.’ It’s a strong name. I feel that it’sa name that has a historical importance and even protects blacks. [It is] the most real part of whatever you’re into. You can’t wear Gucci shoes and be a nigger.”59 His tongue-in-cheek, quasi-learned lecture about the term is a performance in itself, one that keeps the audience’s hackles raised and refuses to back down, with no apology or even acknowledgment of its offensiveness.60 Eastman’s music generally comprises a kind of “ecstatic minimalism” that immediately demands our attention, one consonant with Rothko’s remark to Motherwell: “Ecstasy alone was it; art is ecstatic or it’s nothing.”61 The recorded performance at Northwestern University features four pianists, of whom he is one. As Eastman notes, the instrumentation of these works could vary in performance; he recommends ten to eighteen strings as an alternative scoring.62 Evil Nigger (1979) immediately establishes the quickly tossed off F-E-D motive that hammers on the D; the opening is shown in Figure 9.4.63 The music is far from static, introducing the motive in deeper and deeper registers; the eight-note phrase D-A-B-flat-F-G-A-D notated in the bass

stimulating ideas on Signifyin(g) and its relevance to Missy Elliott’s “Work It,” in his seminar blog post, New Currents in Hip Hop Studies, Columbia University, January 2014. 58 According to the Daily Northwestern, the audience was “mostly white” and numbered about 110 people. See Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency,” 33. 59 Jeff Bloch, “Black Musician’s Song Titles Censored by FMO Protest,” Daily Northwestern (January 17, 1980); cited in Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency,” 80. Elsewhere in his study, Hanson-Dvoracek attributes the quote to the Evanston Review (January 10, 1980): 32. 60 The recording of Eastman’s lecture clearly indicates the discomfort of audience members, making audible coughing and restless movement. Hanson-Dvoracek discusses the politics of Eastman’s titles and their relation to the pieces in “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency,” 74–84. 61 James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 333. 62 Eastman, introduction to the Northwestern University concert. 63 The score is available at www.mjleach.com/EastmanScores.htm (accessed June 30, 2014). Hanson-Dvoracek also analyzes Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla, and Crazy Nigger in “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency,” 37–74. Analytical approaches to minimalism and post-minimalism appear in Jonathan Bernard, “Theory, Analysis, and the ‘Problem’ of Minimal Music,” in Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, eds., Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 259–84; Tristian Evans, “Analysing Minimalist and Postminimalist Music,” in Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013); and Fink, Repeating Ourselves. Figure 9.4 Julius Eastman, Evil Nigger, 0:00–1:50 276 ellie m. hisama

clef, between 0:30 and 1:05, and twice again on the page, functions as a ground bass in the piece—evoking Eastman’s “ground of anything” in which the bass is reconceived as a post-minimalist device—and confounds that minor thirdness of the F-E-D that might threaten to become tedious if heard for too long a time. As this piece demonstrates, Eastman’s music demands much of the performer, without dictating a single result. The pianists know to move to the next section through the timings, indicated on cards held aloft in performance by a timekeeper, but the register is not fixed, and nor is the coordination among the performers.64 The repeated hammering of a single note for many minutes at a stretch is itself physically demanding, and the melodic lines are sometimes in canon, coming together at the eight-note ground bass played in unison. The four pianists must work fiercely to coordinate, although Eastman’s own involvement in the performances of his music undoubtedly assisted in its realization. The “basicness,” or “that thing which is fundamental” to which Eastman alludes in his remarks preceding the Northwestern concert, can be heard in the piece’s loud, in-your-face title, which he translates into an insistent, single-minded proffering. This core set of sonic ideas functions as a musical magnet to which the musicians always return after his verbal directive “1–2–3–4” heard on the recording, and the musicians’ need to align with each other at regular temporal markers further underscores the basicness of the formal organization: each performer must explore the limited range of musical resources provided, moving further afield as the piece unfolds, and then converge at the specified time points. The last section of the piece offers a breaking apart of the three-note motive and the “D-ness” that dominates the work into less pitch-centric shards and moves to a quiet, meditative close that tempers the outrageous aspect of the work.

Crazy Nigger

The Crazy version of Eastman’s series, Crazy Nigger (c. 1980), begins with a repeated, jittery B-flat—a cousin of Evil’s D-natural—and illustrates what Eastman termed “organic music”:

These particular pieces...formally are an attempt to what I call make “organic” music. That is to say, the third part of any part (of the third measure or the third section, the third part) has to contain all of the information of the first two parts

64 Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency,” 29–30. The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 277 and then go on from there. So therefore, unlike Romantic music or Classical music where you have actually different sections and you have these sections which for instance are in great contrast to the first section or to some other section in the piece...thesepiecesthey’re not...they’re not exactly perfect yet. They’re not perfect. But there’s an attempt to make every section contain all of the information of the previous section, or else taking out information at a gradual and logical rate.65

The “additive process” shown here is at work in Philip Glass’s 1 þ 1 of 1968 and other of his compositions.66 As shown in Figure 9.5, Eastman introduces a new section of the piece, or region, every ninety seconds in the opening. A-flat enters at 1:30, creeps up to A-natural, and then returns to the nervous B-flat-magnet. At 3:00, a third line enters, C-B-flat; this two- note motive becomes a central idea in the piece.67 Eastman’s ability to keep the musical material fresh when there is so little of it in a fifty-five-minute piece underscores the work demanded of each performer: not merely providing textural “filler,” each instrument is a cog in a communal effort to build a common edifice, or system, through simple pitch material and labor-intensive means, avoiding ornament of any kind. The passage starting at 37:00 shows how the last third of the piece employs Eastman’s organic form. Figure 9.6 illustrates the pitch structure. The texture is stripped down to a bare F-natural, which then proceeds to F and F-sharp, then F, F-sharp, A, then F, F-sharp, A, B, then F, F-sharp, A, B, B-flat, now every fifteen seconds. The G that would fill out the F to B-natural gap is withheld until it is approached a second time: B, then B and A, then B, A, F-sharp, then B, A, F-sharp, B-flat, A-flat, then finally B, A, F-flat, B-flat, A-flat, G. Having filled in the hexachord from F-flat to B-natural, the piece, at three-quarters of the way through, begins on A at 44:00, then adds G, then F-sharp, then E, then E-flat, then B-flat, then C, ending on C-sharp at 46:00, as shown in Example 9.6. This addition creates a glorious jangling and shaking of these notes from the four pianos, in what sounds like free pitch choice, but is actually carefully circumscribed. Thus what may seem to be musical expression largely dependent on the improvisatory skills of the performers for its success

65 Eastman, introduction to the Northwestern University concert. 66 Though Eastman and Glass must have crossed paths at some point in New York, I do not know whether Eastman would have acknowledged Glass as an influence. 67 Eastman prepared a “logical schemata” to be distributed at the door to an audience of this work at The Kitchen on February 8–9, 1980. It is available at www.mjleach.com/Eastman% 20Scores/Eastman_CN_Schemat.pdf (accessed June 30, 2014). Figure 9.5 Eastman, Crazy Nigger, 0:00–9:00 The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 279

37:00 F 37:15 F, F-sharp 37:30 F, F-sharp, A 37:45 F, F-sharp, A, B 38:00 F, F#, A, B, B-flat 38:15 B 38:30 B, A 38:45 B, A, F-sharp 39:00 B, A, F-sharp, B-flat 39:15 B, A, F-sharp, B-flat, A-flat 39:30 B, A, F-sharp, B-flat, A-flat, G 39:45 G

“melt to B, A, F-sharp, B-flat, A-flat, G”

41:45 F 42:45 F, E 43:00 F, E, D 43:15 F, E, D, C 43:30 F, E, D, C, B-flat 43:45 F, E-flat, D, C, B-flat [E-flat substitutes for E] 44:00 A 44:15 A 44:30 A, G 44:45 A, G, F-sharp 45:00 A, G, F-sharp, E 45:15 A, G, F-sharp, E, E-flat 45:30 A, G, F-sharp, E, E-flat, B-flat 45:45 A, G, F-sharp, E, E-flat, B-flat, C 46:00 C-sharp

Figure 9.6 Pitch structure in Crazy Nigger, 37:00–46:00 unfolds “at a gradual and logical rate”; what may seem to be “crazy” in the sense of erratic or patchwork in fact emerges from a carefully constructed precompositional system.

Gay Guerrilla

Eastman was, according to Kyle Gann, “[n]ever shy about his gayness.”68 In a 1976 interview published in the Buffalo Evening News, Eastman declared: “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest— Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest. It is important that I learn how to be, by that I mean accept everything about me.”69 Julius’s father once asked Frances Eastman if she noticed anything “different” about their older son; she recalled that he was unac- cepting of Julius’s presumed sexual identity. In my interviews with her,

68 Gann, “‘Damned Outrageous’,” 4. 69 Strauss, “Julius Eastman”: B-5. 280 ellie m. hisama

I found her to be very accepting of her son’s homosexuality, and that she was disturbed by her husband’s discomfort with their son.70 Before the Northwestern University concert, Eastman spoke about another work, written a few years after these comments, with another attention-grabbing title:

Now the reason I use Gay Guerrilla, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A, that one, is because uh...these names...let me put a little subsystem here. These names, either I glorify them or they glorify me. And in the case of guerrilla, that glorifies gay. That is to say I don’t...there aren’t many gay guerrillas. I don’t feel that...Gaydom...does have that strength. So therefore I use that word in hopes that they will. You see...I feel I don’t... At this point I don’t feel that gay guerrillas can really match with Afghani guerrillas or PLO guerrillas. But let us hope that at some point in the future they might. You see, that’s why I use that word guerrilla. It means... A guerilla is someone who in any case is sacrificing his life for a point of view. And you know if there is a cause, and if it is a great cause, those who belong to that cause, will sacrifice their blood because without blood there is no cause. So therefore that is the reason that I use “gay guerrilla,” in hopes that I might be one if called upon to be one.71

Eastman firmly sticks to his guns about the title, and the applause that usually concludes a composer’s pre-concert remarks is palpably absent from the audience—all we hear are his footsteps as he walks to the piano. The delicate, plain, and tender opening of Gay Guerrilla (c. 1980), shown in Figure 9.7, with a simple, repeated A-natural, establishes a quiet mood, one that accumulates more baggage along the way. It reaches up and down for higher and lower As, then grasps a D to produce the perfect fourth and fifth, then an F sounds, and then a B-A motive completes the seventh chord. (Eastman is certainly thinking triadically, and notes minor- seventh chords built on A, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, and C-sharp in the manuscript.) The rhythmic motive of a quarter note and two eighth notes persists throughout the thirty-minute work, and the melodic changes— with half and whole steps, fifths, and the occasional tritone—suggest that more is afoot than the beautiful and simple aesthetic of the opening. The first black note, F-sharp, does not appear until six and a half minutes into the piece. About halfway through the piece, at 14:20, the pianos move to B-sharp-C-sharp-E-sharp-G-sharp, and then at 15:00,

70 Frances Eastman, interviews with the author (Ithaca, NY: October 30, 2008 and March 29, 2009). 71 Eastman, introduction to the Northwestern University concert. Figure 9.7 Eastman, Gay Guerrilla, 0:00–2:45 282 ellie m. hisama

to D-sharp-C-sharp-G-sharp, thus having modulated from all-white keys to all-black keys.72 In Gay Guerrilla, the almost defiant inclusion of the Lutheran chorale A Mighty Fortress is Our God (near 18:30) suggests a religious strain in the piece.73 The chorale melody appears in a seemingly unwelcoming climate, with the surrounding rhythmic motive of a quarter note-two eighth notes now sounding harsh and agitated, rather than gentle, as shown in Figure 9.8. A compositional link to Gay Guerrilla is the second movement of Debussy’s En blanc et noir, a work for two pianos that Eastman might have known as a conservatory-trained pianist.74 Both En blanc et noir and Gay Guerrilla incorporate a quotation from A Mighty Fortress that is placed squarely within a brutal and militaristic musical context. In En blanc et noir, the quote appears in mm. 73–88, and, as in Gay Guerrilla, it enters bravely, played lourd by piano 1’s right hand with a poco marcato sixteenth-note figure played by the left hand, over alternating eighth notes in piano 2. That Eastman’s piece is also “in white and black,” traversing white and black keys, is yet another compositional nod to Debussy. The musical logic of the piece, including the use of quotation, white- and-black keys, title, and connection to Debussy’s earlier composition, suggests that the determined restatements of A Mighty Fortress against the rhythmic motives are fierce and impossible to ignore, with the material eventually being passed to more voices than one. Perhaps the presence of this quote from a Lutheran hymn in a piece marked by its composer with the adjective “gay” invokes “our helper He” to assist those who are called upon to be “gay guerrillas.” In Eastman’s words:

72 The use of this fundamental division of the keyboard in some twentieth-century repertoire has prompted studies that examine the interplay between black and white keys. David Lewin explores contrasts between black notes and white notes in his analysis of Debussy’s “Feux d’artifice,” in David Lewin, Musical Form and Transformation: 4 Analytic Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 97–159. I explore the relationship between black keys and white keys in my gender-/sexuality-based analysis of Marion Bauer’s Toccata, in Gendering Musical Modernism,99–121. 73 According to his mother, Julius was deeply interested in religion and spirituality, which is reflected in compositions such as The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981) for voice and ten cellos; Buddha (1984); Our Father (1989) for two male voices; and Gay Guerrilla. Frances Eastman, interview with the author (Ithaca, NY: March 7, 2009). Scores of Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, Buddha, Our Father, and Gay Guerrilla are available at www.mjleach.com/EastmanScores.htm (accessed June 30, 2014). 74 A score is available at http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/8/8e/IMSLP02726- Debussy_en-blanc-et-noir_2.pdf (accessed June 30, 2014). Figure 9.8 Eastman, Gay Guerrilla, 18:30–23:00 284 ellie m. hisama

What amazes me is how few artists of all people are willing to admit their homosexuality. I have discovered that most are uptight on that subject, afraid to reveal themselves, and afraid to admit to the world who they are. People fear punishment. There is always somebody who is trying to crush you. I refuse to think about that. I refuse to be afraid of my own comrades, of being castigated, thrown out or thought of badly.75

This “refusal to be afraid” is palpable in Gay Guerrilla. The final moments of the work constitute no mere return to the beauty of the beginning, but seem less tentative and more confident, having traversed a difficult path without firm tonal footing for quite a while, and end peacefully in the piano’s highest register.

Hearing difference

The dynamic of confrontation, as heard in the bold entrance of AMightyFortressin inhospitable surroundings, and embrace of fearlessness was by no means limited to the internal workings of East- man’s music. Ned Sublette remarks that “Julius was such a tremendous font of energy. He was such a thoroughly musical person, and we all liked his edge.”76 This “edge” is prominently displayed in Eastman’s performance of John Cage’s Song Books attheJuneinBuffalofestivalin 1975. He responded to the instruction “Give a lecture” by giving a lecture as “Professor Padu” about a “new system of love,” with a nude manandapartiallynudewomanonstage,aperformancethatgreatly angered Cage.77 In her essay “Big Ears,” Sherrie Tucker advocates ear-training—not by using traditional solfège, but by “hearing and analyzing jazz activity and meaning more historically and more in tune with its musical and

75 Strauss, “Julius Eastman”: B-5. 76 Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams, 155. 77 A recording of the performance is housed at the Music Library, University at Buffalo, and a transcript by Adam Overton in collaboration with G. Douglas Barrett of Eastman’s performance, with additional accounts from audience members about the staging and audience response, is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yyp5VuDsnZOdo2v8 ZfV9qEL261Jc2QaCYIMtRDMrVpM/edit?pli=1 (accessed June 30, 2014). Steven Schlegel discusses this performance in “John Cage at June in Buffalo, 1975,” MA thesis, University at Buffalo, 2008. Ryan Dohoney explores this performance and Cage’s response to it in relation to camp and Eastman’s gay aesthetic in Dohoney, “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego.” The musical worlds of Julius Eastman 285 social complexity.”78 Tucker’s call for scholarship in jazz to attend to gender analysis, and the theoretical space her work opens, resonates strongly with this essay’s aim of hearing notes as products of music’s histories and human subjects, a stance still unusual in music theory’s continued privileging of the printed score and disciplinary divergence from musicology.79 Acknowledging the expressive freedoms woven into thefabricofEastman’scompositionsmakespossiblenewhabitsof listening. The emancipatory potential of Eastman’s music in its posthumous rebirth is just now beginning to be realized, but it is audible in two recent works: Jace Clayton’sCDThe Julius Eastman Memory Depot and Amy Knoles’s arrangement and performance titled Julius Eastman FOUND.Clayton’sbrilliant2013recordingcontainsarrangementsof Gay Guerrilla and Evil Nigger performed by pianists David Friend and Emily Manzo which he altered using real-time electronic processing.80 Clayton reads Eastman’sworkas“bringing in ideas of class and of race and of sex and it’s all there in what is traditionally this sort of...white- cube blank-space of classical music.”81 Percussionist and composer Amy Knoles’s Julius Eastman FOUND, a direct response to Unjust Malaise, is a solo live electronic percussion arrangement of Eastman’s works and was performed with Butoh choreographer and dancer Michael Sakamoto at the world premiere at Goddard College in 2013, as well as in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.82 By hearing Eastman’s

78 Sherrie Tucker, “Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies,” Current Musicology 71–73 (Spring 2001–Spring 2002): 377. 79 The author’s 1994 review of Musicology and Difference noted the reluctance of the “new musicology” to reach across to its sibling discipline of music theory, a situation that has changed considerably during the past twenty years. See Ellie M. Hisama, “Review of Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie; Gender and the Musical Canon, by Marcia J. Citron,” Journal of Musicology 12:2 (Spring 1994): 227. Palpable in 2014 is music theory’s continued disciplinary reluctance to engage at length with gender-, sexuality-, and race-based studies in musicology or ethnomusicology, and as a result it has arguably become a more strongly stand-alone field than it was in the 1990s. 80 Jace Clayton, The Julius Eastman Memory Depot (New Amsterdam NWAM045, 2013). 81 Scott Simon, “Jace Clayton Revives a Forgotten Voice from New York’s Vanguard,” NPR Music (March 29, 2013), www.npr.org/2013/03/30/175725860/jace-claton-revives-a-forgotten-voice- from-new-yorks-vanguard (accessed June 30, 2014). 82 “‘Crazy Nigger’: Amy Knoles Plays Julius Eastman,” www.goddard.edu/news-events/events/ crazy-nigger-amy-knoles-plays-julius-eastman (accessed June 30, 2014); http://amyknoles.org/ performances.html (accessed June 30, 2014). Knoles writes: “Hearing [Unjust Malaise] made me want to also champion his music,” www.vimeo.com/electronicpercussionist (accessed June 30, 2014). 286 ellie m. hisama

music as intertwined with his life and against the larger backdrop of American music of the 1970s and 1980s, we contemplate some of the diverse ways that the politics of race, gender, and sexuality have informed new music composition, stepping into the zone of difference that Eastman experienced, embraced, and forced his listeners to confront.

10 Synthesizing difference: the queer circuits of early synthpop judith a. peraino

What is the sexuality of synthesizers? What is the gender? With these questions I am suggesting, of course, that there is an association of gender, sexuality, and synthesizers. Part of my agenda here is to examine how such an association came about in popular music, particularly in a style called “synthpop.” ElsewhereIhaveexploredthewaysinwhich music functions within Michel Foucault’snotionof“technologies”– systems of practices or disciplinary techniques on the levels of the social and the individual, which “human beings use to understand themselves.”1 Such musical technologies often call into question norms of gender and sexuality. This essay investigates how the more common understanding of technology as the science of machines became a Foucauldian “technology”–a means of thinking about the self, subjectivity, identity, and ontology. The circuits that I trace here provide a musical backstory to “the posthuman turn” in contemporary critical theory – aturninitiated in 1985 (the late end of synthpop’s “golden age”)byDonnaHaraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” reinvigorated by N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999),2 and continued by scholars such as Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013). These writers, among many others, propose a radical dismantling of the conceptual boundaries that separate nature, culture, and technology. As Braidotti summarizes: “[t]he relational capacity of the posthuman subject is not confined within our species, but it includes all non-anthropomorphic elements.”3 If David Cecchetto is

1 See Judith A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1–9, Foucault citation on 4. 2 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 5:2 (1985): 65–107; Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999). 3 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 60. 287 288 judith a. peraino

correct in his assessment that “today’s subject is first thought in relation to technology,”4 then the musico-phantasmatic cyborgs of early synthpop prefigure this posthuman condition throughout their queer synthesis of the cold “inhuman” synthesizer and the too-human sentimentality and physicality of pop.

The queer ghost in the machine

Synthpop emerged in 1977 and thrived well into the 1980s, when a slew of British artists – Gary Numan, The Human League, New Order, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, Tears for Fears, Flock of Seagulls, Yazoo (to name a few) – made considerable headway on British and US radio, charting hit songs and albums alongside mainstream artists such as Fleetwood Mac, Phil Collins, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, and Billy Joel.5 The classic synthpop sound combines danceable rock grooves (sometimes produced by a drum machine), with loops of arpeggiated chords and melodic hooks played on synthesizers, often augmented or in counterpoint with an electric guitar or bass. The melodic lines are clear, distinguished by various electronic timbres and percussive attacks; rhythms are sharp, clean, and inflexible. The vocals are frequently deadpan – a delivery that seems devoid of “soul” and nearly emptied of humanity, more an emanation of the synthesized background than the living, breathing performers. The song “What’s Your Name?” by Depeche Mode, for example, features a fully synthesized yet sparse accompaniment that consists of a motoristic eighth-note bass line, a synthetic snare drum backbeat, a bass drum pattern – in mid-register static tones – reminiscent of girl group songs, and chiming monophonic fills and counter melodies (see Example 10.1).

4 David Cecchetto, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 6. 5 The list of mainstream artists represents those who topped both British and US charts between the years 1979 and 1983. For US top-selling singles, see Joel Whitburn, Billboard Top 10 Charts, 1958–1997 (Menomonee Falls, WI, Record Research Inc., 1998); for British chart information, see Tony Brown, Jon Kutner, and Neil Warwick, The Complete Book of the British Charts, Singles and Albums (London: Omnibus Press, 2000). The vast majority of synthpop bands came from England, although a few US groups emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s: The Cars (1978, mixing guitars and synthesizers), Berlin (1980), Polyrock (1980). Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 289

Example 10.1 First vocal phrase from “What’s Your Name?” (1981) by Depeche Mode. EMI Records Ltd.

Against this upbeat, major-mode electronic pop, David Gahan sings a nearly monotone melody with provocative lyrics:

Sometimes watch you walk the street at midnight Sometimes I can feel you in the air Looking good, knew you would All the time I understood

Hey you’re such a pretty boy Hey you’re such a pretty boy Hey you’re such a pretty boy You’re so pretty

The girl group musical reference extends to the backing vocals that echo or enact the lead’slines–“Everybody wants to know your name (Hey, hey, what’syourname)”; at one point the chorus of eager young men spell out “P-R-E, double-T-Y” like cheerleaders at a high school football game. With this campy bubble-gum style, its theme of cruising, and its overtly homosexual address, “What’sYourName?” is undeniably marked as a gay song.6

6 The band’s biographer Jonathan Miller speculates that “What’s Your Name?” was written in response to a misquotation by the tabloid journalist Rick Sky, who credited Vince Clarke as saying “ugly bands never make it”; see Jonathan Miller, Stripped: Depeche Mode (London: Omnibus Press, 2004), 87, 97. Miller does not mention the song’s homosexual connotations, nor the homosexual connotations of another Vince Clarke song of the same era, “Boys Say Go,” which features the chorus: “Boys meet boys get together / Boys meet boys it’s forever / Don’t say no / Boys say go.” 290 judith a. peraino

Another classic synthpop song, Gary Numan’s “Cars” (1979), is less obviously “gay,” but it is certainly queer (or just plain weird), given its generically paranoid and abject lyrics.7

Here in my car I feel safest of all I can lock all my doors, it’s the only way to live In cars

For this love-ode to automobiles, Numan’s nasal tenor vocal follows the angular, syncopated bass line that serves as both groove and principal tune, literally driving both song and voice. An upper-register synthesized string melody slowly unfolds over the groove between verses, oddly expressive in its contrasting pace, like a passing beautiful landscape seen from the car window.8 The album cover suggests a queer sensibility at work in this collection of synthpop songs – an expressionless man dressed in a grey business suit, incongruously made up with heavy eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara, and foundation, and wearing a thin gold earring to boot (see Figure 10.1). Numan’sposeandthealbum’stitle,The Pleasure Principle, directly reference René Magritte’s 1937 surrealist painting The Pleasure Principle (A Portrait of Edward James).Magritte’s portrait of the art patron Edward James depicts a seated figure, whose arms rest on a wooden table upon which lies a small stone. Ironically, the face in this “portrait” is obliterated by a ball of light. Numan’sparodyreplacesthenatural materials (wood and stone) with shiny and glowing artificial materials and futuristic shapes, and the obliterated face with an equally surreal gender-bending one. “The pleasure principle” also refers to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, in which sexual drives provide the

7 In his autobiography, Numan recounts that “one man in America wrote a really long review [of “Cars”], examining every line and coming to the conclusion that it was all about me coming out of the closet and admitting that I was gay.” Such a reading of gay or queer innuendo in this song is not surprising given Numan’s earlier songs with explicit homosexual content. See Gary Numan with Steve Malins, Praying to the Aliens (An Autobiography) (London: Andre Deutsch, 1998), 52, citation on 73. 8 According to Numan, “the Polymoog had one good preset called ‘Vox Humana,’ which is the high string sound heard on ‘Cars.’ And with the Minimoog I was just trying to make it sound as powerful as two chugging guitars, since I wrote most of the early stuff on the guitar anyway.” See Jonathan Miller, “Gary Numan: The Return of a Synth Pop Pioneer,” Keyboard 24:8 (August 1998): 75. See also Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 173–75; Cateforis notes the contrast of Numan’s self-protective car image with the traditional sexual and lustful innuendo of cars in rock music. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 291

Figure 10.1 Gary Numan, The Pleasure Principle (1979). combustion engine for nearly all behavior.9 In other words: cars are us, and they are not always safe. Although widely credited with being the leading figure of early synthpop, Numan in fact mixed synthesizers with a traditional rock rhythm section (bass guitar, acoustic drums) and the occasional electric violin and viola, which sonically smoothed the queer edges of his misanthropic lyrics and gender-bending image. “Cars” was an international hit, and the

9 Freud writes about “the pleasure principle” in many essays throughout his career, most notably in the short book Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920); see Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with a biographical introduction by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1990). Gary Numan relates the origin of the album cover in Numan with Malins, Praying to the Aliens,71–72. On the Magritte portrait, see Patricia Allmer, René Magritte: Beyond Painting (Manchester University Press, 2009), 132. 292 judith a. peraino

first synthpop song to chart in Billboard’s Top 10 US singles in 1980 – not to be followed until 1982 with The Human League’s “Don’tYou Want Me?” and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” (a song brimming with gay innuendo).10 Androgyny, futuristic unisex hairstyles, and sharp urban fashions were firmly associated with synthpop bands by 1980, dubbed the “New Romantics” and “Futurists” by critics for their neo-glam look, electronic pop, and clear contrast to punk’s pursuit of ugliness and retro-primitive guitar playing.11 The attractive visual flare of the British New Romantic bands provided exotic eye candy for the new US music-video channel MTV, which launched August 1, 1981, and the ensuing public thirst for the spectacle of men in make-up reached heavy metal shortly thereafter, boosting the careers of such “hair bands” as Poison and Twisted Sister.12 The word “romantic,” however, had little to do with traditional pop-song romance; songs with “straight” storylines were often saturated with ironic distance. The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” (1981), for example, narrates a break-up in a campy cinematic dialogue between Philip Oakey and Susanne Sulley that recalls the plot of A Star is Born. Oakey’s trademark eye make-up, red lipstick, and asymmetrical hairstyle – one side long and womanly, the other short and cropped – blur the very distinction between man and woman that the song capitalizes on for its vocal dynamic. To many critics, fans, and non-fans, the gay marking of synthpop was obvious and indelible. Kurt Loder, writing for Rolling Stone in 1983 about the “new British Invasion” derided synthpop groups as “poofs,”“fops,”

10 “Cars” peaked at #9, “Don’t You Want Me?” at #1, and “Tainted Love” at #8. See Whitburn, Billboard Top 10 Charts, 401–40. “Cars” entered Billboard’s Hot 100 chart on February 16, 1980, and stayed there until August 9, 1980. See Joel Whitburn, Billboard Hot 100 Charts: The Eighties (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1991). 11 For a discussion of the New Romantics, see David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll, 6th edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2007), 260–66; see also Kurt Loder, Bat, Chain, Puller: Rock and Roll in the Age of Celebrity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990): 259–70. Gary Numan’s song “Moral” (1981), which is a remake of his 1979 song “Metal,” derides the “New Romantics” as boring – just as they were hitting the mainstream. After 1980, the more thoroughly electronic synthpop bands, such as Depeche Mode, were sometimes also called “Futurist.” See Miller, Stripped,84–85; and Betty Page, “Depeche Mode: This Year’s Mode(l),” Sounds (January 31, 1981), www.rocksbackpages.com/ article.html?ArticleID=11000 (accessed June 30, 2014). 12 These bands can also be linked to the trash drag of the proto-punk band the New York Dolls. For more on glam metal, see Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England and Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 108–36. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 293

“dandies,” and “preening poseurs.”13 So while it is clear that the look of the New Romantics revived the gender and sexual ambiguity of early 1970s glam rockers, it is not clear why synthesizers became their instrument of choice or how synthesizers contribute to a perception of sexuality. Neither is it clear that synthpop is uncomplicatedly “gay”–that is, expressive of same-sex desire and then projecting an identity based on that desire. Loder’s keen use of the word “poseurs” is indeed apropos, for like the major figures of glam rock – Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, who were straight men playing gay – most of the synthpop fops were also straight.14 A cynical interpretation might propose that these straight artists simply wanted to corner the gay market. But the bulk of the gay market was not listening to synthpop anyway; rather, gay men were tuned to various manifestations of disco – synth-driven Eurodisco, High NRG, and House.15 So the question concerning sexuality and synthpop is not

13 Kurt Loder, “London Calling,” Rolling Stone (November 10, 1983): 17–20, 25–27, 89. See also Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 152–53, 181. Cateforis links the derisive description of synthpop as gay or queer to the genre’s rejection of soloistic music and masculine performance styles that demonstrated the “physicality and work” of rock (162). This point is related to Simon Frith’s observation that technological advances in popular music are often understood as “somehow false or falsifying” and thus antithetical to the “authenticity or truth of music.” He writes: “One reason why synthesizers, drum machines, tape recorders and so on are regarded as ‘unnatural’ instruments in performance is simply because playing takes little obvious effort.” See Simon Frith, “Art Versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music,” Media, Culture, and Society 8:3 (1986): 263–70, citations on 265 and 268 respectively. 14 For a discussion of the sexual politics of glam rock, see John Gill, Queer Noises (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 106–13. Lou Reed’s parents reportedly submitted him to electroconvulsive therapy for early homosexual inclinations. See Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove Press, [1996] 2006), 3–4. Reed was in a very public relationship with musician Laurie Anderson from 1995 until his death in 2013. The members of Depeche Mode are avowed heterosexuals. In the mid-1980s, Martin Gore began to cross-dress or wear leather bondage outfits, and thus exhibited some non-normative gender and sexual expressions. See Miller, Stripped, 190–91; Wayne Studer, Rock on the Wild Side: Gay Male Images in Popular Music of the Rock Era (San Francisco: Leyland Publications, 1994), 71; and Simon Reynolds, “Synth-Pop: Depeche Mode, The Human League, and the Soul of the Machine,” in Will Hermes, ed., with Sia Michel, Spin: 20 Years of Alternative Music: Original Writing on Rock, Hip-Hop, Techno, and Beyond (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), 67–68. During the height of his popularity, Gary Numan had a turbulent romance with Su Wathan (referenced in “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”), a press agent for his record label, and he later married a member of his fan club. See Ray Coleman, Gary Numan: The Authorized Biography (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982), 70; and “Gary Numan: That’s no Fan – that’s my wife!” The Independent (May 19, 2002), www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/ gary-numan-thats-no-fan-thats-my-wife-651887.html (accessed May 2, 2010; now available through www.independent.co.uk/article-archive). 15 Synthpop is distinct from electronic disco by its orientation to rock grooves (as opposed to the “four on the floor” beats of electronic disco), and frequent blended ensemble of a rock rhythm 294 judith a. peraino

about how synthpop expresses the gay sexual identity of the artists or its consumers. The question is actually more basic: What is synthpop saying about sexuality – gay or otherwise? And then: How are the sexual and gender politics of synthpop intertwined with its emblematic instrument, the synthesizer? Technology and machines align most frequently with masculinity, with male-dominated disciplines of math and engineering, and with economic advantages – in sum, with patriarchal power and control. This is especially true in popular music, where historically women have been ghettoized as singers rather than electric guitar players.16 Synthpop replicated this gendered alignment: the few prominent women in synthpop groups were the singing half of a duo; for example, both Alison Moyet of Yaz and Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics were each partnered with a male “master of technology.” Yet the association of technology and men was not always so secure. Jennifer S. Light, in her article “When Computers Were Women,” has uncovered a time during the Second World War when “the job of programmer, perceived in recent years as masculine work, originated as feminized clerical labor.” Women mathematicians who performed ballistics computations as “human computers” eventually programmed the speedier machines that soon replaced them. Software design qualified as detailed work more appropriate for women, while hardware maintenance required masculine mechanical know-how.17 As the synthesis of human intellect and technological efficiency, computers thus also allowed for the efficient defeminizing of computational skills. While computer science in the “real world” became male-dominated after the Second World War, movies and television often imagined intelli- gent technological inventions – robots and computers – with a feminine interface. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), for example, a “machine-man” is transformed by the scientist Rotwang into the double of the heroine Maria, who excites sexual frenzy and worker rebellion; The Stepford Wives (1975; remade in 2004) depicts a quaint town where all the husbands have

section with a synthesizer providing the main riff. The texture of synthpop also tends to be more spare, and the riffs more angular and less melodious. A few bands in the early 1980s, such as New Order, began to fuse electronic disco and synthpop (for example, in the song “Blue Monday”). 16 For a study of this gendered phenomenon, see Mavis Bayton, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 1998). The exception is Laurie Anderson, whose technologically complex music and performance pieces often directly addressed issues of gender. 17 Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40:3 (1999): 455–83, citation on 455. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 295 replaced their wives with robots. But these two cinematic nightmares of “fembots” may have more to say about the misogynistic construction of femininity as a phallic contrivance than about the conceptual gender of machines.18 A less fraught model of “she-technology” was the computer on the starship Enterprise in the many Star Trek television series and movies from 1966 to 2009.19 A harsh robotic monotone at first, later updated to a soothingly inflected voice, this feminine computer expressed unquestioning service to humanity in an era of increasing public concern that (masculine) war machines can cause mass destruction at the push of a button.20 When filmic robots and computers are male, they are also sometimes markedly queer.21 The movie Star Wars (1977) features the sissified robot sidekick C-3P0, who looks suspiciously like the machine-man in Metro- polis before its Maria drag. In 2001: A Space Odyssey,StanleyKubrick imagined a tense, homoerotic standoff between the soft-spoken, masculine-voiced HAL 9000 computer and the astronaut Dave Bowman. The opposite of the compliant Enterprise computer, HAL’s techno-nervous breakdown, causing him to kill off the human crew, seemingly results from his human-like self-interest: HAL exhibits the same narcissistic and paranoid tendencies shown by mankind (for there are no women of any importance in the film) at every stage of their technological advancement. In the famous scene of HAL’s “death,” Dave physically dismantles sections of HAL’s circuitry while HAL pleads with him to stop; HAL then dies operatically, singing the nineteenth-century love ditty “Daisy

18 The word “fembot” originated in the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), but spoofed the beautiful but evil female robots that appeared in the television series The Bionic Woman (1976–78). See also Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 65–81. Paul Théberge cites an ad in Keyboard for a MIDI device that features an image of “a nude female figure – part human and part machine” in Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 122–25; Cateforis notes that the same magazine ran an article in 1984 that portrayed the synthesizer as an “electronic seductress” (Are We Not New Wave?, 156). 19 Played by the actress Marjel Barrett. 20 To this list we can add the 2013 film Her (written and directed by Spike Jonze), a posthuman love story between a man and a female-voiced computer operating system who evolves beyond her initial functionality and servile subjectivity. Eventually, she, along with all the operating systems of her caliber, abandons humanity in search of greater self-fulfillment. 21 By “markedly queer,” I mean effeminate voice or behaviors. Some robots and cyborgs, such as those featured in the four Terminator films (1984–2009) and RoboCop (1987), are hyper- masculine, which could also be considered queer, though less obviously so to mainstream audiences. 296 judith a. peraino

Bell” (also known as “Bicycle Built for Two”),theverysongthatBellLabs used in 1962 to demonstrate speech synthesis with the IBM 704 computer.22

Third sounds and the third sex: Walter/Wendy Carlos

Historians of synthesizers often note that the name “synthesizer” is widely misunderstood as referring to the “synthetic” or “artificial” aspect of electronically generated sound, as opposed to the acoustic or “natural” generation of sounds. According to electronic music pioneer Robert Moog, the term “synthesizer” (as he used it beginning in 1967) describes the bringing together – the synthesis – of multiple electronic circuits, which produce sound waves by means of controlled voltages.23 Analog synthesizers generate an electrical signal made up of a continuous pattern of voltage fluctuations that correspond in a one-to-one fashion with the continuous wave of sounds. These fluctuations are then transduced from electrical signals to sound waves. The synthesizer itself is a connection of modular units; the output or signal of one module (a wave form generated by an oscillator) serves as the input to another. Each module contains an oscillator that applies a pattern of voltages (or another signal) to the first, which effectively modifies the sound. The functions of these oscillators fall into three categories: (1) controllers, which generate electronic signals; (2) audio generators, which produce pitched sound; and (3) audio processors, which modify the sound that has already been produced.24

22 For a discussion of HAL as queer and the homoerotics of this death scene, see Ellis Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34:2 (1993): 137–61. See also Joseph Auner, “‘Sing It for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128:1 (2003): 98–122. See also the Bell Labs information page www.bell-labs.com/news/1997/march/5/2.html (accessed May 4, 2010; article now available at http://archive.today/a0pd). 23 The term “synthesizer” was used to describe electronic composition devices in the 1950s, such as the “RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer,” which did not produce sounds in real time. Moog was initially hesitant to use the term to describe his devices, but embraced the term in 1967. See Tom Darter, “Then and Now: Into the Land of the Synthesizer,” in Greg Armbruster, ed., The Art of Electronic Music (New York: GPI Books, 1984), 64. See also Moog: A Documentary Film by Hans Fjellestad (Plexigroup, Inc. 2005); Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1997), 142; Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 67. 24 For technical descriptions of synthesizers, see Dominic Milan, “Robert Moog,” in Armbruster, ed., The Art of Electronic Music,70–72 (see also the very useful glossary in this volume); Hugh Davies, “Synthesizer,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 297

A piano-like keyboard, which functions as a controller, became one of two interfaces with the musician, offering a familiar physical map of high and low pitch and discrete tones. Depressing a key on the keyboard triggers the first signal, sending a pre-set voltage to the first oscillator, which generates a frequency. At first, only one frequency, or pitch, could be generated at a time, thus the early analog synthesizers were monophonic. A rack of knobs served as the second controller interface, through which the musician manipulates the secondary oscillators that modulate the sound. Early on, modulating units were connected by patch chords, and the process of changing sounds involved connecting up different modules with these patch chords. Musical compositions were therefore constructed literally note-by-note, timbre by timbre. It was laborious and not conducive to live performance. For this reason, all synthesizer music before 1969 was prere- corded, using multi-tracking and other studio processes to achieve polyphony and reverb.25 In theory, synthesizers allowed composers to control every aspect of sound production, from the exact shape, frequency, and amplitude of the sound wave to the “envelope” of time within which the sound changes.26 Thus, through a series of electronic operations, the composer could generate sounds that simulated performance on acoustic instruments or fabri- cate entirely new sounds. At the 1964 Audio Engineering Society convention, Robert Moog exhibited a prototype of his now iconic Moog synthesizer. This prototype consisted of a keyboard and three modules: a voltage-controlled oscillator, a voltage-controlled amplifier, and a voltage- controlled filter. Moog’s invention was met with both outrage and excitement. Those who were outraged protested on the grounds that the sounds were “unnatural” and could even be “dangerous” and “harmful.” But the real fear was not just that synthesized sounds might come to be preferred over acoustic ones, but that synthesizers could ultimately come to replace human performers and live performance altogether.27 Not

Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27270 (accessed February 11, 2006). 25 See the comment made by Wendy Carlos in her interview with Arthur Bell: “Playboy Interview: Wendy/Walter Carlos,” Playboy (May 1979): 106; see also the introductory remarks on 75. 26 The term “envelope” describes the time parameters – Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release (ADSR)– that result in the complete articulation of a specific sound. 27 See Moog: A Documentary Film; Tom Rhea, “The First Synthesizers,” in Armbruster, ed., The Art of Electronic Music, 43, 50–51; see also Wendy Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis (CBS Inc. PM 4233, 1987), side 1, track 5 “performance values.” 298 judith a. peraino

surprisingly, musicians’ unions fought vigorously against them.28 Those who were excited by the musical possibilities and potential of the synthesizer quickly ordered machines, which Moog customized to suit their sonic wishes. Columbia University composer Vladmir Ussachevsky was one such composer eager to experiment with this new technology.29 Afewyears later, Ussachevsky’s student, Walter Carlos, along with his collaborator and producer Rachel Elkind, propelled the synthesizer into the wider public’s ears and imagination. In November of 1968, incidentally the same year of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Columbia Records released Walter Carlos’s Switched-On Bach, which became the first classical music album to sell over one million copies and reach the Top 10 on Billboard pop charts.30 In the first few months of 1969, articles about Switched-On Bach appeared in all the national news magazines – Life, Newsweek, Time, Saturday Review – as well as in city newspapers around the US and abroad. Newsweek writer Hubert Saal offered this description of Colum- bia Records’ landmark release: “It seems like a mismatch between musician and instrument. Twenty-nine-year-old Walter Carlos, slender and delicate, with long brown hair, looks like a Bellini portrait of a Renais- sance prince. His instrument, the Moog Synthesizer, a 5-by-5 homunculus with dials for noses, tiers of blinking eyes, and small gaping mouths fed with a cross patch of wires, looks like a pop portrait of a zany telephone switchboard” (see Figure 10.2).31 If you buy Switched-On Bach today, however, the name “Walter” has been replaced by “Wendy.” In the figure of Wendy Carlos, sound technology and gender technology are, as it were, patched together. Around the time Switched-On Bach was released, Carlos began hormone therapy and living as a woman, eventually undergoing sexual reassignment surgery in 1972. Carlos did not emerge publically as a woman until 1979, however, when she gave a remarkably candid interview to Playboy, discussing her past gender dysphoria, her current sexuality, and technical details about the surgery. Later that same year, the popular British music magazine Melody Maker picked up the story and ran a short news item

28 See Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, 148–49. 29 It was Ussachevsky who requested that Moog design a controller that would trigger a four-part envelope generator – the ADSR envelope that became standard for synthesizers. 30 See Joel Whitburn, Top Pop Albums 1955–2001, Billboard (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 2001), 134. Switched-On Bach peaked at number 10, and debuted on January 18, 1969. 31 Hubert Saal, “Electric Bach,” Newsweek (February 3, 1969): 90. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 299

Figure 10.2 Walter Carlos (1968). with the headline “‘Human Synthesizer’ Changes Sex.”32 The perceived “mismatch” of the man and his instrument – or, more specifically, of the effeminate man and his phallic technological homunculus – has been suddenly and medically rectified: Man has become the machine “Wendy”– a technological wonder, like the instrument that Walter once sat beside. In a cheeky set of “before and after” photos, the editors of Melody Maker belabor the point (see Figure 10.3). At the risk of my own belaboring, however, I want to trouble this easy sense of congruity between medical and musical technology, between the idea of controlling every parameter of musical sound and controlling every parameter of gender. Even the Playboy interviewer asks what seems like an obvious question: “Is there an analogy between your music and your

32 Karl Dallas, “Human Synthesizer Changes Sex,” Melody Maker (June 16, 1979): 9. 300 judith a. peraino

Figure 10.3 Karl Dallas, “Human Synthesizer Changes Sex,” Melody Maker (June 16, 1979).

transsexuality?” We expect that there is, that Carlos – being herself a product of technology – must have felt an affinity with the synthesizer. Perhaps she also felt trapped by the binary construction of natural versus artificial in terms of gender and musical sound. Carlos answers:

Switched-On Bach in 1969 was a good musical barometer, while transsexuality in 1979 is a fairly good sexual and attitudinal social barometer. When Switched-On Bach was new, it stimulated strong reactions. Those who were comfortable in all forms of music, those who were open to novel variations, loved it. Transsexuality, too, is an emotional, action-prone situation, in that it tends to polarize people, depending on the attitudes one brings to sexuality and human rights. In both cases, there’s no middle ground.

In short, her answer is “yes,” synthesizers and transsexuality are analogous in that they both cause strong reactions and measure open-mindedness. But when asked, “Has your transsexuality personally affected your own music?” Carlos scoffs: “I would think not at all. Can you imagine writing The Transsexual Symphony?”33 Well, I can imagine such a symphony, and, despite her protestations, I think that Carlos has written it in having submitted the music of the “great masters,” including Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, to the radical reassignment surgery of her synthesized orchestrations. Indeed, atop every album cover we read the announcement: “Trans-Electronic Music Produc- tions, Inc. Presents,” which suggests that Carlos, who had been reading up on transsexuality, equated in some manner the two “transitions.”34

33 Bell, “Wendy/Walter Carlos,” 102. 34 Carlos’s producer and collaborator, Rachel Elkind, has explained that this corporate name was devised to deflect attention away from Walter as the “star,” because he did not want to perform in public. It should be noted, however, that Carlos usually receives the artistic credit for Switched-On Bach, although on Carlos’s webpage she acknowledges that the project to record Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 301

Nowhere is this more evident than on the penultimate cut from Switched- On Bach. Carlos turns the Andante of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 into an electronic tour de force – a character piece supposedly “improvised,” but, of course, carefully planned and laboriously recorded to show off the unique timbres and expressive range of the instrument. While the pitches and rhythms are cut and pasted from various Bach organ pieces to form a stylistically convincing realization of the concer- to’s “Phrygian cadence” cadenza, the buzzes, clangs, bleeps, whooshes, static, liquid trickles, and various other space-age and industrial noises that defy description, satirize the stuffy musical clichés with cartoon sound effects.35 The multicolored sounds attainable with the synthesizer come thick and fast on Switched-On Bach, clarifying the dense polyphony and motor rhythms with timbral highlights and stereophonic hockets. The listener is apt to experience immediate visceral responses: sounds seem to tickle the ear and skitter by, and transform listeningtoBachfromanintellectual exercise to a physical and fantastical romp – playful and irreverent. In sum, Bach enters the realm of popular music, as borne out in the album’s astounding sales. Herein lies the key “transition” of this “trans- electronic” music that perhaps links to Carlos’s transsexuality. I do not think that Carlos identified directly with the synthesizer (something Pinch and Trocco argue in their book Analog Days); rather, as her own barometer analogy suggests, I imagine that Carlos was keenly aware of the circuitry of cultural meaning. It is not Carlos but culture that is a synthesizer, patching together sonic, visual, and behavioral signals to form identity categories, sometimes allowing for deviant combinations. As with an analog synthesizer, in which two signals combine to create a new, third sound, the metaphorical language used to critique synthesizers – unnatural, imitative, immoral, dangerous – intersects with thelanguageusedtodenouncenon-normative genders and sexuality, once called “third sex” by psychologists, sexologists, and pulp fiction

Bach was Elkind’s idea. See Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, 146. See also Bell, “Wendy/Walter Carlos,” 83; and www.wendycarlos.com/rachel.html (accessed June 30, 2014). 35 See Ivan Berger, “The ‘Switched-On Bach’ Story,” Saturday Review (January 25, 1969), www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1969jan25-00045?View=PDF (accessed July 27, 2014). Carlos’s musicological collaborator Benjamin Folkman remarks that the chromatic passages in the cadenza are “lifted out of the Fantasy and Fugue, or the C-minor Organ Fugue.” Peter Goddard, “It’s Switched-On Bach,” Toronto Telegram (January 11, 1969), describes the cadenza as full of Baroque clichés, and remarks that “If [the Third Brandenburg] was intended as a parody, it parodies nothing but itself.” 302 judith a. peraino

until the 1970s. But what of a “third music”–the unwholesome union of pop and classical? Carlos and Elkind knew full well that synthesizing Bach was a radical gesture: it was a travesty that would expose cultural assumptions and biases; but more importantly, it would transverse socio- musical boundaries.36 The increased engagement of the body in synthesized Bach paradoxically comes with an expunging of the clearly human element in the music – the effort and fallibility of performance. Indeed, many of Switched-On Bach’s early reviewers emphasized this robotic fantasy. Newsweek,with tongue in cheek, called the album “automated Bach in which a heartless machine substitutes for stout-hearted men,” while the Toronto Telegram described the renditions in more menacing tones as “inhumanly accurate.” This is the stuff of science fiction – the confusion of humans and machines that instigates a contemplation of the nature and value of our humanness. Can we be replaced by robots? And further, can we be turned into robots by fascistic governments, social institutions, and medical procedures?

The mechanics of humans

Synthesizers became the soundtrack for such existential questions in Stan- ley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.37 Moreover, this movie disseminated an association of synthesizers with social and sexual deviance, specifically a futuristic world of sadistic hyper-masculinity.38 The

36 The choice of Bach was in part inspired by the success of the rock version of the Brandenburg Concertos recorded by Nice (featuring Keith Emerson). The title “Switched-On” was also meant to appeal to the psychedelic youth culture. See Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, 139, 142. 37 The film premiered in New York in December 1971, and opened in London in January 1972. For information about the history and controversies over the film, see Stuart Y. McDougal, “‘What’s It Going To Be Then, Eh?’: Questioning Kubrick’s Clockwork,” in Stuart Y. McDougal, ed., Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–18; and Janet Staiger, “The Cultural Productions of A Clockwork Orange,” in ibid., 37–60. See also Ali Catterall and Simon Wells, Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), 114–35. 38 A year before the premiere of A Clockwork Orange, the psychedelic cult movie Performance (filmed in 1968, but released in 1970), starring Mick Jagger, featured the Moog synthesizer in a scene of bizarre sexuality. Decked out in thick lipstick and psychedelic clothing, Jagger’s effeminate faded rock star character, Turner, plugs a patch cord into a Moog synthesizer; then, during a freaky dance, Turner proceeds to plug a long fluorescent light bulb into the ear of the gangster Chas, sending him and us into a grotesque homoerotic hallucination. See Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, 304–5; and Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here,68–91. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 303 film is based on a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess that explores the moral dilemma between lawless free will and dehumanizing law enforcement. Set in a dystopia of the future, A Clockwork Orange follows the shifting fate of the antihero protagonist Alex, a Beethoven-loving hooligan who, with his gang of “droogs,” parades around in sartorial phallic symbols – codpieces over white jumpsuits, combat boots, bowler hats, and canes – and commits horrific acts of assault, rape, and murder. Finding himself in prison, Alex submits himself to a freedom-robbing aversion therapy as a condition of his release.39 Both the sociopath Alex and the government’s medical solution effectively dehumanize their victims, as does Kubrick, some critics argue, with his mannered depictions of violence.40 This theme found a perfect musical analogy in the film score, which juxtaposes excerpts of traditionally performed selections of Purcell, Rossini, Elgar, and Beethoven with synthesized renditions created by Carlos and Elkind. In the famous opening close-up of Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell), the camera lingers on him, slowly zooming backwards. One eye is outlined by thick false eyelashes, which hint at the contemporaneous cross-dressing glam rock – a fashionable defiance of gender conventions. But this eye, grotesquely, even mockingly feminized, adds to the (sexual) voraciousness of his gaze. As we look, we listen to a soundtrack that sonically represents this menacing futuristic deviance: a gothic, synthesized rendition of Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” which will become Alex’s theme music.41

39 See Vincent LoBrutto, “The Old Ultra-violence,” American Cinematographer 80:10 (1999): 52–56; see also Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, 117. 40 On the theme of dehumanization in this and other Kubrick films, see Jackson Burgess, “Review of A Clockwork Orange,” Film Quarterly 25:3 (Spring 1972): 33–36; Donald P. Costello, “From Counterculture to Anticulture,” The Review of Politics 34:4 (October 1972): 191. For a discussion of A Clockwork Orange in the context of Kubrick’s other films, see Hans Feldmann, “Kubrick and His Discontents,” Film Quarterly 30:1 (Autumn 1976): 15–16. For a discussion of the stylized violence and the issue of free will, see Robert P. Kolker, “A Clockwork Orange... Ticking,” in McDougal, ed., Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 31–4. 41 For a discussion of the sexual implications of this opening shot, see Margaret DeRosia, “An Erotics of Violence: Masculinity and (Homo)Sexuality in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange,” in McDougal, ed., Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 65–67. About the use of Carlos’s rendition of Purcell in this shot, see Krin Gabbard and Shailja Sharma, “Stanley Kubrick and the Art Cinema,” in ibid., 103; and Peter J. Rabinowitz, “‘A Bird of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal’: Music in A Clockwork Orange,” in ibid., 112. Homoeroticism in the movie operates more on the level of mise en scène and props than in the storyline. For example, a neoclassical mural of naked Greco-Roman athletes decorates the decrepit block of flats where Alex lives; Alex uses a giant penis sculpture to kill one of his victims; and in prison Alex is submitted to a strip search and rectal examination – a scene that donned the cover of the magazine Film and Filming (February 1972), one of a number of film 304 judith a. peraino

Just as synthesized Purcell represents Alex’s dehumanizing violence, synthesized Beethoven represents the same tendencies of the state. Although Alex listens to an orchestral version of the Ninth Symphony Scherzo movement just after a night of “ultraviolence,” which sends him into an erotic rapture of violent fantasies, Kubrick chose the synthesized version of the Finale as a false soundtrack to the Nazi films used as part of Alex’s aversion therapy. To reproduce the solo and choral voices of the finale, Carlos used a vocoder – a device that transforms the frequencies of the voice into a controller, much like a keyboard. Word articulations and inflections become the parameters for modulating an electronic signal.42 The result is an electronic sound that resembles the human voice, but with its humanity removed. The music is diegetic, but the synthesizer may not be: for the viewing audience, synthesized Beethoven synthesizes Alex’s violence with state-sanctioned violence. While the title phrase “a clockwork orange,” originating in the cockney saying “queer as a clockwork orange,” means “something beyond comprehension,” in the context of the movie, “clockwork” also points to the reduction of humans to mechanistic responses.43 Just like clockwork, Alex responds to the behavior conditioning. But also just like clockwork, the conditioning fails to hold, suggesting that Alex’s psychopathology is a predictable “bug” in the technology of power that seeks to program and mechanize bodies.44 The influence of A Clockwork Orange on youth subcultures and musicians was immediate. In 1972, David Bowie developed a theatrical concept

journals that catered to a gay audience. Sadomasochistic homoerotic pleasures do come into the storyline, however. Pretending to be a model prisoner, Alex reads the Bible and daydreams about being the Roman guard who whips Jesus Christ. After his treatment, helpless to defend himself, Alex is beaten by his former droogs and unknowingly seeks aid at the door of his former victims – an elderly writer and his young wife. In this classic reversal of events, it is a new social order that Alex finds himself in – a homosocial order, where the raped wife has been replaced by a muscle-man caretaker, who carries a limp Alex into the house. The elderly writer then psychologically tortures Alex; it is, indeed, a type of rape, but not with physical violence. Rather, he does so with the Beethoven symphony. See DeRosia, “An Erotics of Violence,” 61–84; Staiger, “The Cultural Productions of A Clockwork Orange,” 51–53, 55; Beverly Walker, “From Novel to Film: Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange,” Women and Film 2 (1972): 4–10. 42 For the early history of the vocoder, see Mara Mills, “Media and Prosthesis: The Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Processing,”Qui Parle 21:1 (Fall/Winter 2012): 109–49. 43 See LoBrutto, “The Old Ultra-violence”: 52; see also Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, 117. 44 The synthesized Finale is used non-diagetically in the record store scene to characterize Alex as a music lover, which then implicitly connects him to the Nazis, who also loved “great art” but committed horrific crimes against humanity. This, in turn, implicates the music in an aestheticization of Nazi fascism. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 305 for his album and performances that drew on elements of the film.45 The futuristic antihero Alex and his droogs became a model for David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust and gang/rock group the Spiders from Mars. Although Bowie softened the predatory violence of Alex with gender and sexual ambiguity, he retained the air of potent deviance. Some of the intra- gang violence of the droogs, for instance, is written into the song “Ziggy Stardust,” which is narrated, epic style, by one of the band members, who tells of a mutiny; and the song “Suffragette City” specifically mentions “droogs.”46 Although the look of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust prefigured the futuristic fashions and androgyny of many 1980s synthpop artists, the sound of Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was not particularly “synthetic.” In fact, despite the futurism, androgyny, and innuendos of sexual deviance that provided the shock value of glam, the musical style was “back to basics,” if not downright nostalgic. Glam rock drew on guitar and saxophone-based R&B, as well as doo-wop, cabaret, folk rock, and even 1920s British music hall. By contrast, synthesizers were embraced by the “art rock” or “progressive rock” artists newly emerging in Britain, most notably Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who, after hearing Switched-On Bach,began to incorporate Moog synthesizers alongside his signature Hammond organ.47 Despite their art-rock leanings, the guitar-based glam band Queen went so far as to take a position against the growing vogue for synthesizers. Queen’s first five albums proudly proclaimed in the production credits that “nobody played synthesizers,” sometimes reduced to asimpleslogan,“No synths!”48 Such curiously prejudicial statements undoubtedly contain a whiff of gender panic, as keyboards could not

45 The year 1972 also saw the release of the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange; that same year, Carlos underwent sex reassignment surgery. Ironically, the soundtrack is the only recording that today retains the name Walter Carlos in the credits. The recording is issued by Warner Brothers and not CBS records, which issues Carlos’s other recordings. 46 For David Bowie, see Mark Paytress, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: David Bowie (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998), 87, 97, 108. Johnny Lydon also drew upon the character of Alex for his punk rock alter ego Johnny Rotten. See Catterall and Wells, Your Face Here, 130–32. 47 See Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, 145, 147, 203. 48 With their 1980 album The Game, Queen came out, as it were, with the statement, “This album includes the first appearance of a Synthesizer (an Oberhaim OBX) on a Queen album.” Their incorporation of synthesizers coincided with Freddie Mercury’s adoption of the gay-macho look – muscle shirts, mustache, and leather, ironically announcing his homosexual tendencies far more explicitly than the gender-bending curly locks, mascara, and body suits of his glam days. 306 judith a. peraino

match guitars for phallic display (although Keith Emerson compensated by stabbing his keyboard with knives). Not all glam rockers rejected synthesizers, however. Brian Eno used synthesizers to create atmospheric textures for the first two albums of Roxy Music. Eno was also the most ostentatiously glam in his attire, donning lipstick, eye make-up, and glitzy jumpsuits with ostrich plumes.49 Glam and art rock came together in the 1973 album No Pussyfooting – a collaboration between Eno and King Crimson’s guitarist Robert Fripp that is now considered a pioneering recording in the history of electronic ambient music: the album consisted of only two twenty-minute pieces (one on each side). Eno created atmospheric drones and looped synthesized sequences with a tape delay and accumulated overdub mechanism as a background for Fripps’s lyrical guitar solos, which were also treated with tape delay and other effects.50 The result was a texture so saturated with electronic sounds that the guitar is at times nearly indistinguishable from the synth background. This meterless, arty music is stylistically far from synthpop, and yet on the album cover we can see the beginnings of synthpop’s visual aesthetic – a homosocial world of careful design and cold detachment. The two men sit in a futuristic, antiseptic hall of mirrors that systematically duplicates their images as if a visual analog to the album’s featured tape-loop device. Fripp, a bespeckled nerd, holds a watch as if marking the passage of time; Eno, a pasty androgyne, flips through a deck of old girlie pictures with no apparent interest. A transparent mannequin, a nude female shape, appears only in reflection. We are meant, it seems, to understand the title “no pussyfooting” in context of these flat and voided female images. The fateful synthesis between electronic art rock and pop occurred in 1974 with the song “Autobahn” by the German group Kraftwerk. German rock music was largely imitative of American and British models, with the exception of its distinct electronic music scene, inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen and popularized by Can and Tangerine Dream.51 Kraftwerk

49 See Jim Aikin, “Brian Eno,” in Armbruster, ed., The Art of Electronic Music, 218. Aikin reports that this glam look “wasn’t done solely in order to be shocking. [Eno] has since remarked that during this period he objected to masculine clothing because it reflected a rationalistic, goal- oriented approach. He contrasted ‘rational man’ with ‘intuitive woman.’” Ironically, this hindsight assessment allows for Eno’s gender bending to be assimilated to a progress narrative of self-enlightenment. 50 Eno was influenced by Terry Riley and his time-lag accumulator system. See the discussion of this album in Eric Tamm, Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 151–53. 51 Pascal Bussy, Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, and Music (London: SAF Publishing, 1993), 12–15. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 307 distinguished themselves by moving decidedly away from formless improvisations and toward the danceable beats and melodic hooks of British and American pop. “Autobahn,” which features their first use of a mini-Moog synthesizer, draws on the Beach Boys’ hit single “Fun Fun Fun”–here “fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n”–for its refrain, a seeming ode to Brian Wilson’s particular synthesis of studio wizardry and pop sensibility. A four-minute version of the song (cut down from the album’s twenty-two minutes) became a surprising hit in the US and the UK. The texture is relatively spare: a constant pulse is held down by an electronic rhythm section – a chugging synthesized bass line and imitation cymbals with a phase effect – while cheerful major harmonies are outlined by melodic lines of various timbres (some sound like flutes and guitars, others are clearly electronic). In contrast to this automated soundscape, the refrain features ineptly human, but absolutely emotion- less vocals. With the release of their 1977 album, Trans-Europe Express, Kraftwerk’s nationalistic comments in the press, coupled with their cold mannequin and later robotic public image, added an eerie, edgy innuendo of fascism to their new synthpop sound. Also in 1977, David Bowie joined forces with Brian Eno to create his own electronic “art pop” for Heroes, while flirting with images of fascism and stiff, mannequin-like poses,52 and the group Ultravox, produced by Eno, recorded the song whose title plainly stated “I Want to Be a Machine.”53 It was over a decade earlier that Andy Warhol provoked the art world with the same proclamation, aligning himself with technologies of mass production and vacuous commodity culture over and against the rugged individualism and masculinist naturalism of the prevailing New York school of Abstract Expressionists. Against the backdrop of British punk, with its own macho aesthetics of musical primitivism and visual assault, we can observe in synthpop the parallel move: newly affordable and easy-to-use synthesizers, along with stylish android looks, erased the vestige of heroic individual struggle that still resided within punk’s acclaimed nihilism.

52 See Bussy, Kraftwerk,49–66, for a discussion of the production and promotion of “Autobahn”; for Kraftwerk’s influence on Bowie, see ibid., 79–83. 53 This song is not particularly electronic, however; rather, the verses strongly resemble David Bowie’s Dickensian acoustic ballad “Bewlay Brothers” (1971), while the chorus breaks into ska-inflected rock. Technology is evident in Eno’s studio manipulations of the sound. Another song on the album, entitled “My Sex,” is the only one to prominently feature synthesizers. Ultravox’s signature synth-heavy sound began with their 1978 album Systems of Romance. 308 judith a. peraino

Short-circuiting identity

The desire to be a machine is distinctly the desire not to be human – to have no desire, no sexuality, no gender. Under such circumstances, gender and sexuality can also be imagined as superficial, without functionality – or better, perhaps, as default interfaces, like the keyboard controller of a synthesizer. Clearly nodding toward this idea, the cover for The Human League’s 1979 album Reproduction directly attacks sexuality and its presumed functionality (see Figure 10.4). Crying naked babies appear encased in a dance floor that cracks beneath the feet of nightclubbing men and women. Upon closer inspection, the position of the dancers calls into question their sexuality, despite their stereotypically gendered legs: the two women are clearly dancing together, while the man is turned away from them. Dancing, the album art seems to

Figure 10.4 The Human League, Reproduction (1979). Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 309 suggest, is not part of a heterosexual seduction that will become “productive”; it is something our bodies do that has no bearing on reproduction. Indeed, dancing may even be a willful stomp on reproductive sexuality. The music of Reproduction is austere and somber – hardly danceable, in fact – and lacks any of the “pop” sensibility of The Human League’s later song “Don’t You Want Me.” Indeed, many of the songs on the album could be considered an outright attack on pop, such as their cover of the Righteous Brothers’ 1964 hit “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.” By playing up the disjunction between the cold, inhuman synthesizers and the romantic emotionalism of the original, The Human League’s version of this song encapsulates the early robot aesthetics of synthpop. Here, sentimentality is used to demolish sentimentality, to expose the mechanical reproduction of sentimentality in pop, and, more importantly, to call attention to its breakdown. The one dance hit on the album, “Empire State Human,” expresses pure narcissism – a fantasy of willing the body to grow taller in order to be distant from other people. To dance to this song is to reproduce the sexual politics of the album cover. This cold-hearted humanity of The Human League contrasts with another iconic image in early synthpop: the warm-hearted android of Gary Numan. Inspired by the novels of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, Numan unabashedly combined the theatrical acumen and indeterminate sexuality of David Bowie with the fascistic robot-identity of Kraftwerk to create compelling musical explorations of a bleak future of human emotions and (dis)connection, sometimes imagined as furtive or ambivalent homosexual encounters.54 Numan’s first British hit song “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” from his sci-fi concept album Replicas (1979) perhaps best reflects “the boundary disputes between human and android” that link early synthpop to later posthuman theories.55 The song has few typical markers of (human) pop music: it is well over five minutes long and lacks both a chorus (or even much of a melody) and a danceable, syncopated groove. Instead, the listener is hooked by an eerie, mechanical musical world, one marked by a mid- tempo ticking beat, a simple bass line, and a starkly angular synthesized riff

54 Numan’s songs with homosexual references are scattered throughout his albums, including his pre-synthpop days. They include “Friends” and “Joe the Waiter” (from Tubeway Army, 1978); “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and “It Must Have Been Years” (from Replicas, 1979); and “She’s Got Claws” (from Dance, 1981). 55 Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 162. Hayles is referring to the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was a clear model for Numan’s Replicas. 310 judith a. peraino

Example 10.2 Main riff from “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”(1979) by Gary Numan. Beggars Banquet Records Ltd.

comprised of open fifths and octaves with a final “wrong note” that creates a melodic tritone. This tritone hints at the fallibility of “the system,” both musical and mechanical (see example 10.2).56 More curious still, for a hit song, is the alternation between sung and spoken lyrics. The sung verses, pitched above the riff but narrow in range, dispassionately tell of an encounter with a mechanical male “rent-a- friend,” who can also serve as a sexual companion. The double-tracking of Numan’s reedy voice creates an unreal, vocoder-like quality to the singing, with moments of noticeable delay that split his voice in two. The singing voice is thus barely readable as human.

[Sung over main riff)] You know I hate to ask But are “friends” electric? Only mine’s broke down And now I’ve no one to love The spoken verses, by contrast, sound entirely human. Against a new hollow pattern of electronic pitches (arpeggiated seventh chords with missing thirds), Numan recites sentimental words full of abject memories and feelings of longing, betrayal, and loneliness. Music, here, seems to fail at affective expression. Humanness resides in simple speech. [Spoken] So I find out your reason For the phone calls and smiles

56 Numan himself referred to the riff as having a “wrong note.” See Numan with Malins, Praying to the Aliens, 63. See also Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 171–72. Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 311

And it hurts And I’m lonely And I should never have tried And I missed you tonight It must be time to leave You see it meant everything to me It is unclear who or what is the lost object of desire – the broken electrical “friend” or a deeper loss of human contact. Or perhaps such emotions and desires – that can be turned on and off – are part of the electronic future. Indeed, the first spoken verse ends with the line “I don’t think it meant anything to you,” while the second ends with the line “You see it meant everything to me.” This is a zero-sum emotional universe that betrays the thin line between mechanized humans and sentient robots. Within the musical context of early synthpop artists like The Human League and Gary Numan, it is small wonder that Melody Maker called Wendy Carlos a “human synthesizer.” Carlos had indeed seemingly achieved the critical objective of synthpop: to become a machine, to synthesize an “unnatural” human, albeit one that finally conformed to gender. In 1979, normative gender and heterosexuality seemed almost remnants of the past – a retrosexuality to wax nostalgic about, resynthesize, or stomp out altogether. And yet, at the height of synthpop in the early 1980s, female vocalists emerged with warm and soulful singing against the icy, bubbling electronic beats. In “Don’tGo” (1982) by the British group Yazoo (known as Yaz in the US because of a name conflict with a record label), the R&B vocal style of singer Alison Moyet fits squarely within a pop sensibility, while also clearly relating to the sound of 1970s disco divas. Moreover, the sentiment seems authentic: words of sexual obsession and addiction match the urgency and passion of the delivery. Was synthpop becoming human and embodied? Not according to the album cover, which showed that synthpop was still the music of nonhumans – or, rather, posthumans (see Figure 10.5). Though the songs do not contain overtly homoerotic lyrics, the cover art for Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s depicts a homosocial world of mannequins dressed in the gay-macho, or “gay clone” fashion of the day: muscle t-shirts, jeans, and boots.57 Their bodies are severed at the waist, groins

57 For more on gay clones culture and music, see Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 176–84. 312 judith a. peraino

Figure 10.5 Yazoo (also Yaz), Upstairs at Eric’s (1982).

and legs pushed some distance back from their torsos. Gender and sexuality – here specifically masculine and gay – are a locus of disruption, and, quite literally, dislocation. While the voice pulls us toward the human, the album cover jerks us in the opposite direction, confronting us with the disjunct body, broken down, as it were, into components. Are we to hear the impassioned vocals of “Don’tGo” as merely another module, patched into the synthesized whole? It is hard not to, especially in light of the fact that keyboardist Vince Clarke replaced vocalist Alison Moyet in 1985 with another soulful singer, Andy Bell, to form the synthpop duo aptly called Erasure. The rise of synthpop and its emblems of alienation and difference reflect a cultural moment particular to the dawning of the 1980s, when a surge of encroaching technology provoked both fascination and horror. New Synthesizing difference: early synthpop 313 personal computers, video games, answering machines, and cheap, user-friendly synthesizers allowed widespread access and implementation of technology while revealing at the same time new forms of human obsolescence.58 Yet it would seem that the synthesizer’s affiliation with such identity crises began at least a decade earlier, when Carlos and Elkind threatened classical music with their Bach contra naturam and their technological Beethoven qua fascistic governmental control. In the midst of escalating Cold War tensions and dehumanizing government policies that paid less attention to quality of life than to missile defense systems, the synthesizer brought a suspicion of the perversely mechanical to an activity thought to be entirely the province of the human – making music. In the science fiction of synthpop, humanity is reduced to a list of basic components: bodies, gender, sexuality, desire. But the play of gender and sexuality in synthpop was ultimately not about creating a gay-identified music. On the contrary, synthpop provided a sustained meditation on sexuality detached from identity, desire dislocated from gender. Tropes or innuendos of same-sex desire served to throw desire itself into relief, to defamiliarize it. This alien desire, in turn, was a direct attack on corporate pop music by way of an attack on pop’s own particular fascism – hetero-normative love. The association of same-sex desire or gay identity with dehumanized androids and mannequins could be considered a menacing development, especially in the years just before the AIDS epidemic, were it not for the fact that the mid-1980s saw a second generation of synthpop artists – Bronski Beat, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pet Shop Boys, and Andy Bell of Erasure – who really were gay and, more importantly, increasingly marketed themselves as such, without the mediation of robotic androgyny.59 The shift from alien to overt desire was due in part to early synthpop’s ideal of the human synthesizer, which exposed

58 On the effect of affordable synthesizers and other music technology, see Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 152. Théberge, following the Marxist theories of British Cultural Studies, argues that technology functions as a commodity that engenders behaviors and approaches in musicians; thus the consumption of technology drives creation, rather than creation driving the production of technology. See Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, esp. 1–13, 51–71. 59 For a discussion of some of these bands, see Aaron Lecklider, “Between Decadence and Denial: Two Studies in Gay Male Politics and 1980s Pop Music,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 16:2 (2004): 111–41; and Fred Maus, “Glamour and Evasion: The Fabulous Ambivalence of the Pet Shop Boys,” Popular Music 20:3 (2001): 379–93. 314 judith a. peraino

the tension between complex human emotions and the mechanical social interface – the “controllers”–that are gender and sexuality. Synthpopartistspulledoutandconfusedallthepatchchordsofiden- tity; it was left to the synthesizer to bring these disconnected circuits back together again.

11 “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop charles hiroshi garrett

In March 1983, the Beastie Boys recorded “Cookie Puss,” their first hip-hop track of a musical career that began in 1979 and spanned more than thirty years. There was little indication upon the release of the subsequent Cookie Puss EP that the Beasties would later be recognized as significant musical artists who gained induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. On the contrary, coming from a group that until that time had been affiliated more closely with New York’s punk scene, the song literally delivered a practical joke. “Cookie Puss” revolves around excerpts from prank phone calls made by the Beasties to a branch store of Carvel, the retail ice-cream chain. The title refers to a character featured on an ice-cream cake sold by Carvel, and the song captures the Beasties calling unsuspecting and confused employees, demanding to speak to “Cookie Puss.” Although the track does not feature the distinctive rapping for which the Beasties would become known, it is built on a hip-hop beat and overlaid with snippets from their taped phone calls, as well as brief samples from the comedian Steve Martin’s album A Wild and Crazy Guy (1978). Presenting their childish humor accompanied by the voice of a popular stand-up comedian, the Beasties’ exclamations become increasingly insistent, obnoxious, violent, and sexist as they reach the climax of the single. Built on male adolescent humor that proved very appealing to some listeners and just as offensive to others, the track became their most successful release to that point in their career, and it received enough airplay on college radio stations to convince them to explore further directions as rap artists. Members of the group later described “Cookie Puss” as a childish experiment and a dumb joke, but that did not prevent them from re-releasing it with other early recordings as part of the compilation Some Old Bullshit (1994). In addition to having accrued commercial appeal for a fanbase that had grown exponentially, these tracks offered a glimpse of their musical development and acknowledged how important a prankster attitude had been and remained to their appeal. After the success of “Cookie Puss,” the Beasties sought to meet more conventional expectations for rap artists by hiring a DJ, Rick Rubin, to enhance their live shows. 315 316 charles hiroshi garrett

As the co-founder of Def Jam Records and an influential studio producer, Rubin helped the group to become an international sensation. One of the early moves involved changing membership. In 1984, Kate Schellenbach departed the Beastie Boys, leaving Adam (“MCA”) Yauch, Michael (“Mike D”) Diamond, and Adam (“AdRock”) Horovitz as the core members of a young, white, male trio. Unlike many competing hip-hop acts, the group did not attempt to adopt serious or hardened personas. Instead, the Beasties relied heavily on humor – at times tenacious and aggressive; at others scatological and juvenile – as part of their aesthetic, lyrical, musical, and marketing strategies. Humor became integral not only to the creation of individual songs, but also to album design, music videos, promotional materials, and media interviews. The goal was not to be taken more seriously, but rather to revel in collective transgression. Considering that later hip-hop developments came to valorize rappers who “represented”–MCs delivering tales seemingly based on real experiences, including many searing portraits drawn by so-called gangsta rappers – it is tempting to characterize the Beastie Boys’ turn to humor as a means of emphasizing their difference from other hip-hop artists. Indeed, the strategic use of humor as a marker of distinction has been adopted successfully by subsequent rappers, including Eminem, Missy Elliott, Lady Sovereign, and Nicki Minaj. The configuration of the hip-hop world in the early to mid-1980s, however, suggests that wielding humor as a sign of difference for the Beasties was more a matter of degree. Humor enabled the group to share common aesthetic ground with some of their contemporaries; just as significantly, their embrace of humor helped to mitigate other types of difference – in particular, their outsider status as a trio of white, Jewish rappers among the predominantly African American hip-hop community. As we approach the present, and as I will discuss in the final section of the essay, the ability of humor to signify difference within hip hop has shifted dramatically, leading to surprising ramifications.

* Although humor (or its absence) has long helped to define expectations about hip hop, there is no sustained tradition of writing about hip-hop humor, which is perhaps unsurprising for a music delivered by voices which Robin D. G. Kelley famously dubbed “race rebels,” and Tricia Rose described as “prophets of rage.” Hip-hop scholarship more often delves into themes such as authenticity and representation; place and politics; race, gender, class, and sexuality; the underground versus the mainstream; and the representation of violence, misogyny, and homophobia. In recent “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 317 years, Mickey Hess, Loren Kajikawa, and Jon Stratton are among those scholars to acknowledge how humor has occupied and shaped our understandings of hip hop.1 Indeed, aspects of humor have been integral to many elements of rap music, including album covers, song titles, lyrics, musical samples, comic skits inserted on albums, music videos, media appearances, awards shows, and live performances. Humor has also popularized subgenres such as “party rap,” an old-school style – fun, playful, optimistic, and lucrative – that reveled in dance-oriented, crowd-friendly party music. “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 breakthrough single by the Sugarhill Gang that introduced rap music to much of the world, is a classic example of this style, combining juvenile humor, non-stop male boasting, playful word games, and silly stories about being a teenager. Comic-infused acts such as The Fat Boys, Digital Underground, and Biz Markie all hit the charts in the mid-1980s, making it a time, as the critic Nelson George later opined, “when hip-hop was fun.”2 As the popularity of hip hop ballooned in the years that followed, rap artists pursued alternative ideas of what rap could be, whether that meant kicking reality, kicking ballistics, or just kicking back. The rise of grittier rap subgenres from the West Coast during the late 1980s and early 1990s ended up pushing party rap and other styles to the margins. But that has not meant that humor was pushed aside completely. Many of the ultra-competitive moments that define the virtuosity of hip hop – such as freestyling, ciphers, and MC battles – rely on comic rhymes, exaggerated boasting, and clever putdowns. Such language can be caustic, offensive, and profane, but also playful and wickedly funny – packed with clever alliteration, inversion, hyperbole, and comic rhyme.3 When these lyrics turn into bitterly comic insults aimed at competing rappers, they invoke a classical theory of humor, advanced by Thomas Hobbes and others, which claims that laughs derive from experiencing the feeling of superiority. We laugh, according to this line of thinking, when we watch someone else (but not ourselves) take a cream pie in the face, or when we observe the wit of a virtuosic rapper cut an inferior MC down to size. Humor thus not only fuels comic rap, but also figures in harder-edged subgenres built on fierce

1 Mickey Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead? The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most Wanted Music (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2007); Loren Kajikawa, “Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’: Signifying Whiteness, Rearticulating Race,” Journal of the Society for American Music 3 (2009): 341–63; Jon Stratton, “The Beastie Boys: Jews in Whiteface,” Popular Music 27:3 (2008): 413–32. 2 Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998), 82. 3 H. Samy Alim, Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006). 318 charles hiroshi garrett

competition between rivals. As such, humor should not be seen as vitiating the aggressive lyrics of gangsta rap into something less serious or threatening; wielding humor may instead help to deliver forceful messages. This does not mean that all hip-hop humor is targeted for everyone or that it will necessarily be received as funny by all audiences. Certainly the music has not been understood in the same way by cultural critics, music historians, journalists, parents, and fans. For instance, tales involving graphic violence, no matter how comically exaggerated, or songs and videos that feature blatant misogyny – such as Nelly’s “Tip Drill” (2003) – have never won over all audiences, even if they have resonated with certain listeners. This phenomenon is not confined to hip hop. As literary scholar William Keough explains, American humor habitually turns “violent, and often sexist, racist, brutal, and disgusting as well.”4 That rap subgenres simultaneously traffic in violence, misogyny, and humor is critical for understanding how aspects of humor are woven throughout hip hop and for exploring the musical aesthetics of rap pranksters such as the Beastie Boys. The importance of tricksters to hip-hop culture is at the root of at least one key avenue to studying hip hop – the concept of Signifyin(g). Introduced by the literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this analytic trope has influenced hip-hop scholarship and much work on other forms of African American expressive culture. Signifyin(g) offers a clear path for those interested in hip hop and humor, because the concept traffics so heavily in irony, sarcasm, and wit, and because, according to Gates, it “epitomizes all of the rhetorical play in the black vernacular” and its verbal substitutions “tend to be humorous.”5 Scholars have often turned to the notion of Signifyin(g) when studying hip hop and other forms of African American expressive culture, seeking to identify trickster figures who dislodge, upend, and recalibrate conventional norms. Positioning the Beastie Boys as tricksters within the history of early hip hop, however, proves challenging on some fronts, if appealing on others. From one perspective, they are seen to represent the power of dominant culture as young white performers who appropriated black musical culture for enormous commercial gain. Not surprisingly, they were shredded by numerous

4 William Keough, Punchlines: The Violence of American Humor (New York: Paragon House, 1990), xi. 5 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 53, 49. Gates also explains how his work was informed by the writings on humor by Sigmund Freud – including Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 319 critics. A writer from the New York Amsterdam News, one of the leading black newspapers, described them as “white, middle class crap rappers [who] dress like slobs, act like absolute idiots on and off stage, and are simply pale parodies of Black rappers.”6 A Baltimore columnist likewise observed that the group was “acting out racist stereotypes of young blacks in order to earn marks for hipness.”7 Among hip-hop insiders, however, the Beastie Boys garnered more credibility. They signed with the most successful rap label, toured with rap’s biggest stars, including Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy, and helped discover new acts, including LL Cool J. Chuck D of Public Enemy recalled: “You really couldn’t doubt their legitimacy ’cause they were down with Def Jam [the top rap record label] and Run-D.M.C., and the beats were right. And as long as they talked about white boys and beer and stuff like that, who could knock their topics?”8 Darryl McDaniels of Run-D.M.C. agreed that the Beastie Boys were respected because of their musical knowledge and their choice to stick with what they knew:

What bugged me out about the Beasties was that they knew everything about hip-hop – the Cold Crush Brothers, the Treacherous 3 and Afrika Bambaataa, all the old-school shit. In addition, they could rap, they could sing and they could play instruments...They rapped about shit they knew about: skateboarding, going to White Castle, angel dust and mushrooms. Real recognizes real.9

Although not all observers shared this generous attitude, the Beasties were able, among some insider circles, to negotiate successfully challenges involving race and representation. It can also be argued that the Beastie Boys found a space in hip hop because they sought to switch the terms of racial authenticity. In a retro- spective piece, published a decade after the Beasties made their initial splash, journalist Touré makes this argument in detail:

Unlike nearly all white rap acts, the Beasties aren’t white boys in blackface. They’re the embodiment of the modern lower-Manhattan street kid. If hiphop is as much a New York thing as it is a black thing, if keeping it real means faithfully representing your social aesthetic, if it’s another way of saying perfect pitch, then the Beasties keep it as real for their peoples as Jay-Z and Snoop do for theirs.10

6 Charles E. Rogers, “Different Stages,” New York Amsterdam News (April 18, 1987): 25. 7 “Beastie Boys Copy Black Rap Groups,” Afro-American (May 2, 1987): 11. 8 Alan Light, “The Story of Yo,” Spin 14:9 (September 1998): 149. 9 Darryl McDaniels, “The Immortals,” Rolling Stone 972 (April 21, 2005): 84. 10 Touré, “The Beasties’ New York State of Mind,” Rolling Stone 792 (August 6, 1998): 68. 320 charles hiroshi garrett

More recently, scholars have explored in more depth the methods by which the Beastie Boys achieved this balance. As part of his thoughtful discussion about how the group’s Jewishness influenced their career, Jon Stratton argues that the group “played with whiteness,”11 that they acknowledged and manipulated their racial difference, at the same time respecting and drawing from African American culture. Although the Beastie Boys do not meet the typical definition of a cultural trickster in the sense Gates outlines – they were not representatives of African American vernacular culture who dislodged cultural norms from their position as outsiders – the group did forge their initial reputation as notorious musical pranksters. Delighting in slapstick, satire, and scatological humor, the Beastie Boys played with established meanings and sought to upend audience expectations. In this light, their early years can be seen as embracing the Platonic theory of humor as incongruity, where humor is created when a sense of anticipation is confounded by the unexpected. They enjoyed the role of subversive punks, a band of practical jokers who initially gave little thought to an agenda – political or otherwise – but instead enjoyed stirring up trouble and selling records. Upon the release of their wildly successful debut album Licensed to Ill in 1986, the Village Voice summed things up by proclaiming “Three Jerks Make a Masterpiece.” How the Beastie Boys negotiated their whiteness in relationship to hip-hop culture was critical to their reception, but their concomitant identity as rap humorists – which sometimes overshadowed their music – was equally pivotal. While humor helped to establish common bonds between the Beasties and other hip-hop groups, their over-the-top antics also served as a marker of difference. Although some later hip-hop artists consciously drew on similar strategies, the Beastie Boys’ career did not follow a calculated game plan. Their early pranksterism largely reflected their personalities and irreverence. Adam Yauch was known among friends as a jokester who performed comic voice imitations and acted out Monty Python skits.12 Mike Diamond recalled the process of creating their first album as “just making music that we liked, stuff that was funny to us.”13 Matt Dike, who co-wrote and co-produced the group’s second album, Paul’s Boutique (1989), recalls the whole group adopting a similar attitude in the studio:

11 Stratton, “The Beastie Boys”: 414. 12 Alan Light, The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), 148. 13 Chris Morris, “Building the Perfect Beastie Album,” Billboard (September 9, 1989): 90. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 321

“Making that record...was such a clowning around experience... It just didn’t seem real at all.”14 For similar reasons, punk rock initially proved attractive to the band because of its capacity for upheaval and disturbance.15 Even the name of the band was a lark: Yauch described it as “the stupidest name” they could come up with.16 The Beastie Boys rode male adolescent humor to international fame and notoriety with Licensed to Ill, which sold over nine million copies and became rap’s top-selling album to date. There is no doubt that the Beasties and their producers offered fans identifiable musical pleasures, merging hip-hop beats, rapped lyrics, and the sounds of 1980s hard rock and metal. At the same time, prankster humor permeated their musical aesthetic, their self-presentation, and their live performances. According to Diamond, “Licensed to Ill represents where our heads were at the time. A lot of it was jokes where the irony was lost, or became misunderstood, or was taken at face value, but that was our sense of humor at the time. That’s us having fun in 1985 or ’86.”17 The album title played with the cool violence of James Bond’s marching orders (“Licensed to kill”) and hip-hop slang (“ill”) variously meaning to be skilled or to go wild and crazy. Likewise, the album design features a visual pun mixing sex and violence. The front album cover depicts the tail of a plane emblazoned with a Beastie Boys logo, but unfolding the album reveals both that the plane is crashing into the side of a mountain and that the entire drawing resembles an erect phallus. The critic Sasha Frere-Jones characterized Licensed to Ill as resembling “an April Fools’ joke that lasted a year,” but his comments also acknowledged its ambiguity: “[it] was a joke for America. Or on America. It was hard to tell.”18 The album’s hit single, “Fight for Your Right,” which brought the group massive attention, attracted a similarly mixed range of responses. The song was inspired by what Mike Diamond described as a “goof on that college mentality.”19 He later explained that “[the song] was the most ridiculous notion we could put forward. You know, that was a real, like, joke record to us. That was our sense of humor.”20 As Loren Kajikawa suggests, the song “seemed to take an ironic stab at the apathy and narcissism of

14 Dan LeRoy, Paul’s Boutique (New York: Continuum, 2006), 10. 15 Light, The Skills to Pay the Bills, 195–96. 16 Ibid., 20. 17 Ibid., 183. 18 Sasha Frere-Jones, “Peace, Adam,” May 4, 2012, www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ sashafrerejones/2012/05/adam-yauch-mca-beastie-boys.html (accessed July 9, 2014). 19 Angus Batey, Rhyming & Stealing: A History of the Beastie Boys (London: Independent Music Press, 1998), 70. 20 Light, The Skills to Pay the Bills, 195. 322 charles hiroshi garrett

privileged white youth,” but many fans interpreted it as what Jon Stratton describes as a “carnivalesque fantasy of rebellion.”21 Even though the boisterous tune appeared the year after the PMRC Congressional Hearings had sought to clamp down on explicit content in popular music, it is impossible to locate any serious, threatening, or political sense of rebellion. Fighting for their right to party, the Beasties whine about having to go to school, not being able to smoke or look at porn magazines, and getting forced to wear respectable clothes and cut their hair. In response, as they shout in the booming chorus of this track, they pledge to band together and fight for their right to party. Because of the Beasties’ self-presentation and the song’s powerful delivery – featuring an electric guitar riff that confirms each of their rapped grievances, supported by an anthemic participatory chorus – it is not surprising that some fans either did not get the joke or decided to adopt its spunky attitude as their own. The song’s music video plays up the same tactics. As leaders of a group of troublemakers, the Beasties bring comic mayhem to a dull party. They crash a quiet gathering hosted by two bespectacled nerds, and proceed to chase girls, drink beer, smash a television set, pour an aphro- disiac into the punch, and start a pie fight. Their teenage fantasy and slapstick fun convinces all of the partygoers to let loose and throw their fists in the air along with the climactic moments of the chorus, just as fans of the group would at their raucous live performances. Diamond’s later reflections capture the volatile relationship between comic intention and capricious reception: “We were dead serious about it being a joke, and then the public – a lot of people – took it as being dead serious.”22 The desire for adolescent fantasy, the carnivalesque atmosphere, and the potential for playacting rebellion together proved far more attractive to their newfound fans than careful ruminations about the object or the self-enactment of parody. Perhaps more significantly, the Beastie Boys did little at the time to push back against such interpretations; on the contrary, their comments to the media and their live performances only amplified the song’s sensational qualities. Other 1980s hip-hop stars trafficked in humor, including the rap pion- eers Run-D.M.C., who produced music videos that integrated comic intros and appearances by comedians such as Larry Bud Melman and Penn and Teller. But Def Jam and the Beastie Boys tailored their image and stage shows to capitalize on the appeal of their comic delinquency. As producer

21 Kajikawa, “Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’”: 348; Stratton, “The Beastie Boys”: 429. 22 Light, The Skills to Pay the Bills, 195. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 323

Rick Rubin later explained, “I was a really big fan of pro wrestling, and the theatrics of the outlaw mentality. The idea was the entertainment value of being obnoxious.”23 The Beastie Boys were eager to transgress, whether it involved making misogynistic or homophobic comments, for which they later issued public apologies, or rapping about drugs, guns, and sex. “Everything we did was stupid,” recalled Mike Diamond. “When we were asked what kind of show we wanted the first thing we could think of was a giant dick, so we had one made. It seemed the obvious thing to do at the time.”24 Under the shadow of that memorable hydraulic stage prop towering overhead, their early performances featured scantily clad female dancers performing in cages, oversized cans of “Beastie” beer, and the real thing being sprayed around stage or on the audience.25 Just as the carnivalesque spectacle attracted young male fans who sought to bask in adolescent fantasy, the overblown nature of their act led the critic Jon Pareles to pronounce that the band’s “bragging and slapstick” and their “sheer obnoxiousness” made them “virtually a comedy act.”26 Reviewing the band’s later tours, Pareles described the trio as “clowns, evoking suburban mischief rather than urban anger or desperation, in voices of pure slapstick.”27 Over the course of their long career, which went on hiatus in 2012 after the death of Adam Yauch, the Beasties’ image changed from obnoxious interlopers, to creative musical experimentalists, to socially conscious old- school hip-hop statesmen. These developments reflected shifts in the group’s priorities, the respect they garnered for their sonic soundscapes and innovative sampling practices, and their increased involvement with political and social causes. Changing attitudes toward their status as a successful white group also reflected the wider spread of hip hop and the emergence of other popular rappers from outside the African American community. Looking back on their early years, members of the group occasionally sought to distance themselves from their original image as delinquent pranksters by choosing not to perform certain outrageous songs

23 Ibid., 69. 24 Batey, Rhyming & Stealing, 73. 25 Their act became notorious enough that they had to meet with parents and tone it down to a G-rated show to gain permission to perform at a 1987 gig at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland. 26 Jon Pareles, “Rock: The Beastie Boys, Rap-Metal Group,” New York Times (December 29, 1986): C17. 27 Jon Pareles, “Rock: Run-D.M.C. and Beastie Boys at the Garden,” New York Times (August 19, 1987): C17; Jon Pareles, “They Play Like Amateurs, and They’re Darned Proud of It,” New York Times (March 13, 1995): 13. 324 charles hiroshi garrett

or by adjusting song lyrics they had come to see as offensive. As Yauch explained to New Media Express in 1998: “We are in the process of learning from our mistakes, and feel that some of the things we did in the past that we thought were a joke ended up having lasting negative effects.”28 At the same time, as the journalist Dimitri Ehrlich observed, “[the band’s] sense of humor has not only been the secret to its success but the glue that has kept the group together.”29 The band consistently engaged with different types of humor – whether sophomoric, clever, belligerent, or obscure – ranging from the placement of 3MTA3 on the cover of their debut album (“EATME” when held up to a mirror) to rhyming “wok” and “Mr. Spock” on the single “Intergalactic” (1998). Later albums such as To the 5 Boroughs (2004), their post-9/11 tribute to New York City, offered a differently config- ured mix of heartfelt tributes, silly puns, and sober shout-outs. The group regularly discussed their penchant for humor in interviews and occasionally ascribed their popularity to it. When asked why he thought fans liked their music, Adam Horovitz responded: “The only thing I can think of is, we think it’s really funny. I make music so that my brother will laugh, and my friends will laugh. I make shit that I hope they’ll like. I think that people maybe pick up on that in some weird way.”30 The group projected the same joking image in their many encounters with the press. When asked to describe the aesthetic philosophy of their album Hello Nasty (1998), Adam Yauch explained: “The main difference between the last record and this one is, we played dominoes the whole time we worked on Ill Communication (1994). Boggle [the word game] figures very heavily in the making of this one.”31 As their career progressed, they may have turned away from raunchy slapstick and toward silly jokes, wit and satire, but humor has permanently marked their musical difference.

* In his writings on the Beastie Boys, Mickey Hess describes how the group “established a performative frame of reference for white acts to come.”32 Indeed, while hip hop has spread across the globe, using humor as a means of acknowledging and also leavening racial difference has remained

28 “Yauch Defends Reading Face-Off,” New Music Express (August 10, 1998), www.nme.com/ news/beastie-boys/508 (accessed July 9, 2014). 29 Dimitri Ehrlich, “The Beastie Boys – Post-Modern Clown Princes,” New York Times (July 31, 1994): H26. 30 Light, The Skills to Pay the Bills, 198. 31 Joe Levy, “Rock & Roll: Beastie Boys Get Nasty,” Rolling Stone 788 (June 11, 1998): 27. 32 Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?, 116. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 325 popular as a strategy for white artists who wish to find acceptance within the world of hip hop. As Jody Rosen observed in 2000, “[the] biggest white rap acts – the Beastie Boys, Eminem, Kid Rock, Insane Clown Posse – make comedy the cornerstone of their identities and have shown a determination to up the ante on the outlandishness of [African American] rap jesters like Biz Markie and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.”33 Rosen explains that such acts skirted criticism about their own rap authenticity – whether or not they “keep it real”–by embracing ironic or humor-infused rap personas. Going into greater detail, Loren Kajikawa shows how Eminem depended keenly on his constructed and humorous presentation of whiteness by incorporating irony, parody, and slapstick.34 This is not to say that all audiences find Eminem funny; his caustic wit, at turns vile, misogynist, and homophobic, works just as much to divide audiences as to embolden fans. Nevertheless, Kajikawa unpacks Eminem’s first hit, “My Name Is” (1999), to explain how it models a satiric portrait of whiteness using lyrical references, careful constructions of musical whiteness (involving his unmistakable nasal delivery, humorous samples, and rhythmic patterns), and a music video in which Eminem satirizes whiteness through playacting. For nearly two decades, Eminem –“the great cultural prankster and provocateur”35 – has sustained his career in large part by integrating wicked humor, overwrought irony, and social satire. There is no doubt that white male rappers who incorporate humor have achieved more commercial success than peers who tried and failed to project a more serious image, such as the rapper Vanilla Ice, who was unable to live up to his shaky claims of authenticity. In that respect, the arguments advanced by Hess, Rosen, and Kajikawa cannot be denied. Yet the incorporation of humor within hip hop extends even further, and it has served as an important marker of difference not only for white male rappers, but also for other hip-hop artists hailing from unconventional, outsider backgrounds, such as Lady Sovereign (a young British female MC) and Jin (a Chinese American rapper). Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott (Melissa Arnette Elliott), one of the most successful and witty MC/ producers of the last two decades, is an especially productive example of a female African American rapper who has employed humor to navigate the gender politics of hip hop. Using an approach that mixes

33 Jody Rosen, “Rapping in Whiteface (for Laughs),” New York Times (April 23, 2000): AR31. 34 Kajikawa, “Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’.” 35 S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006), 106. 326 charles hiroshi garrett

self-deprecation and sizzling wit, comic yet frank treatment of female sexuality, and humor-laden commentary about her position within a male-dominated field, Elliott articulates, acknowledges, and capitalizes on her marginality as a female rapper. In a genre historically unwelcoming to women, Elliott has incorporated humor as part of an artistic strategy for negotiating difference through song lyrics, compositional choices, press interviews, and visual imagery. Over the course of her career into the early 2010s, she has also become a successful songwriter, producer, and record executive, as well as the best-selling female rapper to date. From the start, Elliott has cultivated a striking image as an artist, announcing her arrival with a guffaw as a featured rapper on a remix of Gina Thompson’s “The Things You Do” (1996). Midway through her guest spot on this R&B hit, Elliott let out what became a trademark laugh, which she repeated frequently enough in other tunes to lead some members of the press to nickname her the “Heehaw girl.”36 As someone who had already begun establishing herself in music production and songwriting – working closely with major artists such as Aaliyah and star producers including Timbaland (Tim Mosley) and (then) Puff Daddy – Elliott was quite familiar with the importance of image-making. Her engagement with laughter and humor can be read in part as an extension of her creative personality and in part as a calculated artistic strategy. Although she has sometimes claimed that the chuckles in her early appearances represented her way of getting the last laugh on people who initially doubted her potential talents, Elliott’s comic rap persona can be seen as a natural extension of being voted class clown in high school, when her ability to make her peers laugh meant that “everybody wanted [her] to sit at the table with them.”37 She has since become known for incorporating humorous touches into her lyrics, for her delivery, and for her inventive and comically charged music videos, which feature an array of incongruous and humorous images. As her career has developed, Elliott has relied on humor to such an extent that it has sometimes seemed to represent less of a sign of artistic difference and more of a means by which to meet audience expectations. With sufficient repetition, humor, like any aesthetic emblem of difference, has the capacity to become anticipated and unsurprising.

36 Stephanie Elizondo Griest, “Having the Last Heehaw,” New York Times (August 17, 1997): H32. 37 Michael Musto, “Master Missy,” Interview 29:6 (June 1999): 84. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 327

At the same time, however, choosing to emphasize humor has enabled Elliott to distance herself from typical hip-hop conventions. As Joanne Gilbert explains in her work on humor, gender, and cultural critique, outsiders like Elliott often “perform” their marginality, using “their difference as a means of survival, foregrounding and capitalizing on the very stigma that threatens their existence.”38 Just as her nickname “Misde- meanor” evokes but undercuts the hardcore gangsta imagery popular at the time of her emergence, she not only acknowledges but foregrounds her gendered marginality through humor, continually turning to what she has characterized as “the character Missy, the funny Missy.”39 Elliott’s persona has carved a distinctive space within an R&B/hip-hop industry that has more often featured attractive, submissive women fawning over rap stars in music videos, or rapping sex kittens such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown.40 Elliott has acknowledged as much: “I felt, I’m not that skinny girl that makes guys run to the TV and be like, ‘Whoa, you see her? She looks hot!’...I wanted something that was going to catch their attention and be fun. But totally different.”41 In the music video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997), Elliot wore an enormous inflatable suit: “People wouldn’t think I’d want to put on a big suit when I was already heavy and make myself look like I’m 300 pounds, but I don’t pay it no mind.”42 Poking fun at her weight served to acknowledge her unconventional appearance, to joke about and critique expectations for female artists in the music industry, to highlight and negotiate this difference, and to celebrate herself. Using this strategy, she has addressed themes surrounding cultural norms for female beauty in the lyrics of many songs, including “Pump It Up” (2003) and “Lose Control” (2005), often with a light-hearted or satirical touch. Combining a serious message with comic elements is certainly not unique to Elliott, and neither is camouflaging heavier messages with a comic scrim. But this mixed mode is characteristic for Elliott, who has often taken advantage of the distinctive ability of humor both to deflect and to inflect powerful messages. At the same time, her typical strategy also suggests that raising sober challenges and critiques about the relationship

38 Joanne R. Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), xi. 39 Anthony DeCurtis, “Rhymes & Misdemeanors,” Rolling Stone 816–817 (July 8, 1999–July 22, 1999): 54. 40 Iain Ellis, Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2008), 240. 41 DeCurtis, “Rhymes & Misdemeanors”: 54. 42 Griest, “Having the Last Heehaw”: H32. 328 charles hiroshi garrett

between hip-hop practices and gender roles still requires some leavening with humor to be deemed acceptable by certain audiences. What is notable about Elliott’s approach is that she has not been dismissed as a rap novelty or a hip-hop clown. Over time, it has become difficult not to take her accomplishments seriously, as Elliott has proven equally able with a mic in hand or behind the studio console; she was signed as a songwriter/producer and given the reins to her own label, The Goldmind Inc., before releasing her first album. As commercial achievements and industry awards have piled up, she has also made a special point of asserting herself as a creative artist and businesswoman – acknowledging that the music industry remains a male-dominated field, but insisting that “Women are not always taken as seriously as we should be, so sometimes we have to put our foot down [by] just knowing what we want and being confident.”43 Such objectives might suggest that her musical approach has become more stern, earnest, pedantic or preachy, but that is not the case. On the contrary, hip-hop journalists commonly point to her lively and humorous style as a key element of her appeal. For instance, after explaining how she “fills her verses with goofs and giggles and sound effects,” Kelefa Sanneh proclaimed Elliott’s Under Construction (2002) “the year’s best hip-hop album.”44 In this fashion, Elliott has been recognized for the clever ways in which she integrates humor and music. Comic elements permeate Elliott’s lyrics, music, and video for the lead single from Under Construction, “Work It,” a track that hovered near the top of the Billboard charts in 2002. Throughout the song, propelled by a rapid-fire lyrical mix of self-deprecation and self-assurance, Elliott exudes confidence and sexual firepower, but also pokes fun at herself in the process. She laces direct statements about her independence, sexual prow- ess, and desire with humor-laced metaphors (“[even] Prince couldn’t get me to change my name”). Although she may seem assured enough to flaunt all she has to offer, asking her lover to “cut the lights on [not off] so you can see what I can do,” her lyrics indicate things are still under construction, suggesting that getting drunk will help “bring us closer.” Humorously mixed messages appear throughout the song, including the moment when she compares her looks to starlet Halle Berry, but then reveals that the comparison will only work after her date takes a few swigs of vodka. Elliott’s songs often use explicit language when engaging with

43 Musto, “Master Missy”: 84. 44 Kelefa Sanneh, “Hip-Hop Divides: Those Who Rap, Those Who Don’t,” New York Times (December 22, 2002): A39. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 329 female representation, gender roles, sexuality, and power relations. Similar to “Work It,” which describes in vivid detail what she promises to deliver to her partner, she has recorded equally frank songs about sex toys (“Toyz,” 2003) and about men who are unable to satisfy (“One Minute Man,” 2001). This style of humor draws on the bawdiness of classic blues, highly sexualized, sometimes shocking, and propelled by laughter. Like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and other blues queens of the early twentieth century, Missy Elliott is able to claim a powerful position as the center of sexual attention, while simultaneously expressing open and sometimes comic joy about the body. Consequently, Elliott emerges as a confident, shameless, and good-natured performer who can laugh at herself, in the process cutting her rapping persona down to size. The musical production by Timbaland and Elliott on “Work It” mines the same sorts of musical humor and incongruity. The tune mixes futuristic sounds and synthesized beats at the same time as it pays homage to old-school rap rhythms and rhyme. Considering Elliott’s devotion to early rap and humor, it is not surprising to hear a snippet from Run-D.M.C.’s “Peter Piper,” a playful tune that subverts the stories of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. As part of creating the catchy yet surprising chorus of “Work It”–surprising because you can’t sing along to it – the pair literally flip one line and reverse it (“ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup I”), inserting a backwards sample of what Elliott elsewhere raps (“I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it.”), to mimic with Elliott’s voice what her mobile body is up to in this song. The tune also features the trumpeting sound of an elephant, which creates a double entendre and made things easier for radio censors. The elephant call appears as part of the chorus (“If you got a big [elephant sound], let me search you”), offering a sonic surprise and symbolizing a virtual phallus in a song that revolves around sex. Elliott also shapes her vocals with carefully placed inflections, sometimes triumphant, sometimes comic. Her voice shifts to a flat monotone speech that expresses bored disapproval toward the fly gals who are most concerned about fixing their hair and nails. And she recalibrates her register, tone, and timbre for emphasis and humor, from the sing-song voice she uses to parody a faux-Chinese language, to the moment when she moves to a higher register and issues an encouraging shout-out to women everywhere. In the music video for “Work It,” which won a series of awards, including MTV’s Video of the Year, director David Myers underscores its comic elements. The video opens with a shot of Timbaland at a pay phone, accompanied by the sound of a sampled female chorus (drawn 330 charles hiroshi garrett

from the song “Request Line” by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three) asking for a DJ to pick up the call. In other hands, one might imagine that this female call for musical help would act as a metaphor for Elliott reaching out to Timbaland, but the video inverts such readings, for it turns out that Timbaland is making the call and lip-synching the female voices, while Elliott appears as the DJ in charge in the following shots. Timbaland’s initial movements also suggest that he is both human and digitally manipulated, as reverse cuts (similar to the song’s reverse samples) accompany the sound of a record being scratched, causing the “scratched” video image of Timbaland to move back and forth. Similar incongruities populate this dance-infused video. Human bodies sometimes move naturally and with great athleticism; at other times, they float, hover, or rise up from angles that are impossible without technological manipulation. As a result, Elliott variously appears as an incongruous and comically superhuman character, whether sliding slowly across a futuristic playground where friction does not apply, or dancing and spinning her head while defying any notion of gravity. The video includes brief commemorative moments for two of Elliott’s friends and collaborators, Aaliyah and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez, both of whom died very young. Its general tone is not somber or mournful, however, but instead celebratory and nostalgic, especially with regard to old-school hip hop – chockfull of break dancers, boom boxes, and old- school fashions. Myers exaggerates the comic potential of the song by visually amplifying its lyrics: Elliott picks up a mobile phone when she raps “phone ya,” and later sits in the corner of a classroom wearing a dunce cap while asking “why you act dumb?” It also spotlights extended comic scenes inspired by the song’s lyrics, as when Elliott’s date at a restaurant looks through his glass and finds her transformed into Halle Berry, before he falls down drunk. Likewise, an over-the-top impersonator of the musician Prince, whose name appears briefly in the lyrics, shows up a few times. Throughout the video, all sorts of unexplained and potentially comic incongruities take shape: Missy Elliott as DJ is engulfed by swarming bees, a military serviceman stands in to rap her lyrics, Asian men lip-synch her imitation of Chinese speech, and she swallows a miniature Lamborghini. Taken as a whole, the video for “Work It” celebrates what has made Elliott famous: dance-infused hip hop, her respect for old-school traditions, her use of video in spectacular fashion, and her wide-ranging humor. There are a number of reasons why Elliott’s comic approach has kept her in the hip-hop limelight for nearly two decades, the most obvious being that she is a talented, charismatic, and innovative performer. Just as “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 331 significantly, she has continually attempted to produce savvy, entertaining, mainstream, dance-oriented hip-hop tracks, including her growing output as a songwriter and producer. Although her own stream of recordings has slowed since 2007, in part because of health issues, Elliott has continued to craft the same kinds of musical pleasures, without taking artistic detours and without attempting to cultivate a variety of alternate stage personas. She delivers what her fans have come to expect, and her comic-laced image remains consistent and unmuddied. In other words, although Elliott’s initial embrace of humor accentuated her difference from everyday hip hop, the same aesthetic now serves as a distinguishing marker for her place within the genre. It might be argued that embracing humor has constrained the breadth of Elliott’s recording output. In other words, successfully establishing a career built in part on comic difference may have established boundaries on her artistry or shaped certain expectations for critics, producers, labels, and fans. Admittedly, it is difficult to imagine Missy Elliott releasing ferociously aggressive tracks along the lines of N.W.A., or even adopting the rough, streetwise persona of the young Queen Latifah. But criticizing Elliott for her comic consistency reveals less about Elliott and more about how expressions of humor are undervalued within contemporary culture: it is not as if the serious-minded rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West have been taken to task for their failure to create comic masterpieces. In truth, it is quite rare for hip-hop artists to move convincingly back and forth between lighter comic tracks and much darker material.45 This does not mean that Elliott avoids critiquing certain elements of hip hop, especially those characterized by misogyny or limited by systematic constraints placed on female independence. She is especially conscious and conscientious about her marginalized position as a female rapper, finding ways to wield humor to sharpen the impact of her songs and to present edgy material with comic flair. For Elliott, humor supports an alternate strategy to express forceful positions and serves as a resource of techniques by which these perspectives can be amplified. Although Elliott’s songs may be seen as anomalous within the contemporary hip-hop landscape, they continue to evoke the early days of comic-laced party rap. Elliott has never hidden her fondness of old-school hip hop, whether expressed by her penchant for wearing retro garb – often

45 Eminem is one of the few rappers to shift successfully between these modes of address, perhaps because his music traffics in a less self-deprecating and far more aggressive form of humor that can more easily be redirected toward foes or foils of different stripes. 332 charles hiroshi garrett

a baseball cap, tracksuit, and sneakers – or by recording songs such as “Back in the Day” (2003), which reminisces about the early and fun era of hip hop. She has made similar comments to the press, telling one journalist that hip hop “should be about sneakers, fat laces, people dancing, having a good time.”46 Consequently, even though her comic persona may stand as an emblem of difference within contemporary hip-hop circles, old-school nostalgia offers an alternative path by which to authenticate her musical credentials. Her steady reliance on humor may distinguish Elliott from her contemporaries – making a strong case for humor as difference – but her music continues to remind us how comic expression has been integral to hip-hop culture from its roots.

* The hardening of genre expectations surrounding hip hop has not only offered room for rappers such as Missy Elliott and the Beastie Boys to adopt comic modes of address, but has also produced an especially ripe target for parody. Rap parodies are not a new phenomenon. Shortly after the earliest rap singles began to hit the charts, a number of comedians recorded lampoons, including Mel Brooks’s “It’s Good to Be the King” (1981), Rodney Dangerfield’s “Rappin’ Rodney” (1984), and Joe Piscopo’s “The Honeymooner’s Rap” (1985). Latching on to the music’s growing popularity, and also hoping to attract audiences who found conventional hip hop unappealing, these recordings poked fun at rap conventions and hip-hop culture, usually by exaggerating the incongruity of an unexpected outsider (usually an older white male) trying his hand at rapping. Early rap parodies typically upset (and also upheld) common expectations surrounding hip hop and its (young African American male) performers with respect to race, class, generation, and gender. Over the years, rap parodies have continued to appear periodically within the pop landscape. The musical satirist “Weird Al” Yankovic has devoted plenty of attention to hip hop in songs such as “Amish Paradise” (1996; based on Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”), “It’s All About the Pentiums” (a 1999 Silicon Valley take on Notorious B.I.G.’s “It’s All About the Benjamins”), and the biggest hit of his career, “White & Nerdy” (derived from Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’”), which hit the top ten in the fall of 2006. Like his comic predecessors, the Polish-American Yankovic manufactures hip-hop humor through incongruity, whether it involves playing an Amish MC or a “white and nerdy” rapper. By exaggerating

46 Hattie Collins, “A Rap over the Knuckles,” The Guardian (November 15, 2002): D4. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 333 comic difference, Yankovic relies on a common technique used by parodists: “to seize on particular aspects of a manner or a style and exaggerate it to ludicrous effect.”47 Similar hip-hop parodies, some affec- tionate, some with a sharper bite, have populated television sketch comedy and feature films, as comedians aim for laughs according to who looks or acts unlike a “real” rapper. One of the most jaw-dropping television moments of 2008 involved Saturday Night Live cast member Amy Poehler kicking it with her faux-Alaskan crew – some wearing snowshoes and another sporting a moose costume – and then yelling “Mavericks in the House Throw Your Hands Up,” prompting guest-host and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin to oblige. Although this last skit was aimed largely at then Governor of Alaska Palin, the construction of the sketch also capitalized on racial and gender stereotypes about hip hop by distinguishing Poehler/Palin (white females) from the professed Jay-Z fan on the Democratic ticket, Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Musical humor has also thrived because of the protections built into US copyright law with respect to parody. Although the music industry has attempted to clamp down on the use of copyrighted material on internet sites such as YouTube, they are unable to assert the same claims when it comes to musical parody. Consequently, both amateur and professional musical parodies have proliferated on the web over the last decade, as our contemporary imitative culture has encouraged a wide pool of consumer- producers whose self-produced hip-hop videos can be found on YouTube or Facebook, or by accessing one’s email inbox. The most popular of these videos create MCs out of the most unusual suspects, such as the Muppets, Barney, Harry Potter, Yoda, or rapping hobbits. What emerges from these reconfigured icons is a different kind of incongruity: some of the most foulmouthed raps ever written blasting from the lip-synched mouths of beloved icons from children’s television or sci-fi/fantasy movies. Dedicated websites also have emerged that specialize in music and parody, including one that produces “Epic Rap Battles of History,” short segments in which actors portraying real and fictional figures duke it out with freshly penned raps. Even more popular is Barely Digital, a web- based comedy network devoted to parodying digital and pop culture that has drawn more than a billion views for a variety of web shows. Their program Auto-Tune the News takes televised news reports as fodder for musical satire by integrating rapped delivery, hip-hop language, and

47 Simon Dentith, Parody (New York: Routledge, 2000), 32. 334 charles hiroshi garrett

Auto-Tuned singing, which has become prevalent in contemporary hip hop and R&B. In August 2010, one of their clips, “Bed Intruder Song,” went viral, was released as a single, and hit the Billboard Top 100. From Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy” to “Bed Intruder Song,” it is clear that a market exists for hip-hop parodies, whether for fans or opponents of the genre. Joking about hip-hop genre expectations not only helps to reinforce them, but also enables outsiders to mock, embrace or comment on hip hop. In each case, musical humor serves to mark difference atthesametimeasitoffersthepotentialtoconnect,negotiate, and engage. Just as hip hop has permeated the commercial entertainment industry, major corporations have begun to mine the comic marketing potential of hip-hop parodies, capitalizing on humor as difference and simultaneously drawing on rap parody as an increasingly common subgenre. Taking their lead from the regional competition between East Coast and West Coast rappers, the Smirnoff corporation produced several viral videos in 2006–7 for their “Raw Tea” drinks. Disguised as a rap parody, but marked by extensive product placement, the first release featured actors playing a group named “Prep-Unit”–all young, white, privileged characters – rapping about Martha’s Vineyard, life in Amagansett, and how to hold the perfect “tea partay.” Because of its immense popularity, which attracted millions of hits through forwarded emails, YouTube, and social media sites, Smirnoff subsequently created a West Coast answer video so that “Green Tea” drinkers from Los Angeles could deliver their laid-back, cool, casually sipping reply. Although competitors have not mimicked the elaborate nature of Smirnoff’s campaign – their expensive productions rivaled mainstream music videos in length and budget – dozens of corporations pitching beer, mobile phones, rental cars, and other consumer items have drawn similarly on hip-hop parody. Like the types of sketch comedy that inspired them, these commercials typically feature unexpected rappers (a chubby, bespectacled Asian American male does the honors in an Amp’d mobile phone commercial) or incongruous listeners (the white trio of businessmen and the pair of senior citizens, all of whom rent Avis rental cars so they can blast hip hop). Corporate interest in hip-hop parody stems from various factors. Historically, humorous advertisements are a staple of commercial television, and marketing agencies clearly believe that this particular musical incongruity will evoke laughs and offer an opportunity to deliver their message. Some advertisers also use these parodies to latch on to the hip part of hip hop while “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 335 hedging – retaining some distance from the real thing without incurring extra costs for licensing a popular song. Carefully produced ads integrate insider humor more freely – such as the East Coast/West Coast distinction – allowing companies to establish off-kilter street cred while dipping their toes in the comedy pool. It might seem as if these advertising campaigns are aimed specifically at audiences who are uninterested in or unfamiliar with hip hop, but that is not how humor usually functions. Audiences need sufficient familiarity with original source material for parody to be effective in the first place. It is also not in the interest of advertisers to completely polarize their audience; often the most effective campaigns demonstrate a mix of satire and affection, and deliver an ambiguous message containing humorous jabs while acknowledging the popularity of hip hop. In an interesting and unexpected development, these messages are now being broadcast not only by corporate advertisers, but also by the musicians themselves, as rappers have become increasingly willing to poke fun at themselves across various sectors of the hip-hop world. In some cases, it is a matter of rappers choosing to be in on a joke. For example, the rapper Chamillionaire, whose music and video provided the inspiration for Weird Al’s “White & Nerdy,” praised the song parody as a sign that he had made it. Many hip-hop stars also have provided voiceovers or act in comic skits as part of music videos, and in television and film. This has led to 50 Cent appearing on a 2005 episode of The Simpsons titled “Pranksta Rap” (with Bart Simpson as the main pranksta) and Snoop Dogg guest-starring as a rapper named “Murderuss” on a 2007 episode of the television show Monk, which ended in a rap duet between Snoop and Detective Monk that revealed the whodunit. As reality television has gained in popularity, it should not come as a surprise that Jamie Kennedy hosted Blowin’ Up (2006), a mock-reality show that parodied rap culture; what may be surprising is that he convinced some of the most respected stars in the hip-hop business, including Ice-T, Method Man, and the RZA, to co-star in the comic series. Even more startling for a genre that had long neglected the openly comic elements of its musical roots is that some of today’s hip-hop stars now appear eager to record music in collaboration with parodists. The most prominent examples have been produced by The Lonely Island, a comedy/music troupe that got its start on Saturday Night Live by broadcasting comic video shorts such as the hip-hop parody “Lazy Sunday” (2005). In 2009, they released their debut album, Incredibad, which includes Saturday Night Live shorts and newly composed parodies 336 charles hiroshi garrett

of hip-hop tunes, R&B numbers, club music, and more. What is most noteworthy about the group, and what distinguishes them from a hip- hop outsider like “Weird Al” Yankovic, is that The Lonely Island has recorded some of their parodies, and filmed some of their videos, with the most prominent artists in hip hop. “On a Boat,” their most successful single from Incredibad, featured T-Pain, the omnipresent hip-hop/R&B singer, who had previously appeared on top-selling hip-hop tracks starting in the mid-2000s. Exactly how are we to categorize this hit single, which featured The Lonely Island and T-Pain poking fun at the glamour and luxury valorized by mainstream hip-hop songs, and the wealth and excess championed by many hip-hop videos? Humor has long raised suspicions of artifice, inauthenticity, and ironic indifference, yet here is a case where contradictory notions about authenticity, humor, commercialization, and self-parody all meet, with music acting as a platform for these kinds of mergers and collisions to take shape. Are we to classify “On a Boat” as musical comedy, parody rap, or mainstream hip hop? The Grammy Awards suggested it was all of the above when they selected the tune as a finalist for best rap collaboration of 2009, beside more conventional hip-hop tracks recorded by artists including Jay-Z and Kanye West. Mickey Hess has questioned whether such developments indicate that the original appeal of hip hop is fading, whether the impact of the music has been “weakened by parody.”48 Commercial sales and radio airplay statistics bear out that hip hop has lost ground to other styles since the mid-2000s, but parody cannot function without widespread familiarity. Rather than reading parody as a sign that hip hop is crumbling, we can also interpret these developments from other perspectives. First, the recent turn to humor in hip hop may also be understood as a partial return to its roots, a belated acknowledgment that humor and comedy may have a place in a genre where keeping it real has long outpaced keeping it real funny. Second, a merger of hip hop and sketch comedy suggests how the influence of hip hop continues to expand and create spin-off genres – from rap metal to country “hick hop” to nerdcore, populated by MCs with pocket protect- ors who rap about sci-fi and trigonometry. This might be read as a fracturing of mainstream hip hop or as a sign of its musical vitality. Third, the fact that hip-hop artists are molding different identities and still attracting audiences suggests that there may exist alternate aesthetic

48 Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?, 138, 155. “Pranksta rap”: humor as difference in hip hop 337 opportunities that may be pursued through hip-hop circles. This is not to say that hip-hop parody will replace hip hop – the former cannot exist without the latter – but rather that hip-hop stars may have more reason to explore such paths in the future, perhaps even more so in the wake of the worldwide success of Macklemore’s comic single “Thrift Shop” (2012). We will see where, in the end, this leaves humor and its relationship to hip hop – whether musical humor will continue to function as difference, or whether it becomes a marker of hip-hop convention.

12 Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre nina sun eidsheim

Facts don’t exist. The sole truth lies in a tone of voice. Ned Rorem

Listening is one of the most cultured things one can do. Jonathan Sterne

Introduction

In The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson outlines what he considers the fundamental role of the American educational system in shaping African Americans’ values and attitudes toward themselves. “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions,” Woodson writes. He continues,

You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his “proper place” and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.1

In short, social relations, power dynamics, and their contribution to the formation of self-image are all perpetuated through the state educational system. As a result, adults do not have to be taught their place in society: it is already instilled in them through their early encounters with the state as children.

This work has benefitted greatly from conversations with the members of the University of California Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group, “Vocal Matters: Technologies of Self and the Materiality of Voice,” which Nina Sun Eidsheim co-convened with Annette Schlichter during fall 2011, and with colleagues at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, gathered as a research group with the focal theme “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics” (2011–12). Mandy-Suzanne Wong read the essay and offered invaluable suggestions. I also wish to thank the editors, with a special recognition of Olivia Bloechl’s close reading of the chapter. 1 Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of The Negro (Washington, DC: Associated 338 Publishers, 1933), xxxiv. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 339

As this educational system forms our self-image and ideas about where we fit in society, so too does it shape our bodies – not only the ways in which we conceive of them, but also our literal bodies of flesh, ligaments, and tissue. Because the voice is formed in conjunction with the body, it too broadcasts the social attitudes and values of the trained body. Just as, in Woodson’s account, the state educational system affects the formation of our self-image – and thus determines how we monitor our own behavior – I propose that disciplinary discourses and values entrain (auto-)listening and vocal behavior. I believe we may take a crucial step toward untangling the “politics of frequency,” to use Steven Goodman’s apt term, by considering – through a systematic examination of the micropolitics of timbre – how vocality, a learned physical behavior, is trained and perceived.2 Michel Foucault famously argued that “the Classical age discovered the body as an object and target of power.” The distinguishing aspect of the modern body, he claimed, is that it “is manipulated, shaped, trained,” and “obeys, responds, become skillful and increases its forces.” Not unlike a machine, it is “built, rebuilt, operationalized and modified.”3 We may productively consider the formation of this modern body through the concept of body technologies. Coined by Marcel Mauss, this term describes “one of the fundamental moments in history itself: education of the vision, education in walking – ascending, descending, running.”4 Jonathan Sterne has added “the education and shaping of audition” to this list, and here I will add the phenomenon of vocal timbre.5 While we all move, hear, and sing in unique ways, body technologies conceives these actions as embedded in social structures of recognition: for example, “masculine” strides, “girl-like” throw- ing, or “upper-class” enunciation.6 As Mauss points out, phenomenology assumes culture. “Everything is knowledge,” Gilles Deleuze writes, by which he means encultured behavior that manifests dynamics of difference and normativity. He continues, “This is the first reason why there is no ‘savage experience’: there is nothing beneath or prior to knowledge.”7

2 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 189–94. 3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd edn. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 136. 4 Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Routledge, 1979), 104, 121. 5 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 13. 6 For a detailed discussion of recognition, see the Introduction to this volume. 7 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (New York and London: Continuum, 2006), 90. 340 nina sun eidsheim

I propose that we consider recognition of vocal timbre as a kind of knowledge in the Deleuzian sense. Specifically, sonic timbral markers that suggest a person’s race or gender exemplify the Deleuzian concept of knowledge. While theories and physiologies of vocal racialization have been available for some time, these mainly consider the voice as logos. Vocal dialect, pronunciation, accent, word choice, and so on have been critically interrogated as marking race, class, and gender; yet vocal timbre has not. For example, pronunciation variables are present to differing degrees in most vernacular music genres; therefore any perceived racial markers can easily be ascribed to linguistic (word-based) differences. However, in opera – a vocal tradition with strict pronunciational limits and a long tradition of cultivating non-verbal vocal quality and its skilled perception – we can decipher the process through which timbre itself is subject to racialized discourses. Two important tenets emerge from these discourses about voice: first, that a person’s essential qualities are audible in his or her voice; and second, that race is one such essential, timbrally present quality. I suggest that limited definitions of voice as logos and misleading notions of the sonorous voice have led to misconceptions about vocal timbre and its associated practices of listening. Despite its thorough enculturation, vocal timbre is habitually naturalized and racially differentiated, and this racialization has thus far evaded critical examination. The racialization of timbre pervades popular Western discourses on the voice, but here I focus on professional vocal pedagogy. Through an ethnography of contemporary classical voice teachers in southern California, I examine vocal pedagogy’s fraught relationship with modern practices of medicalizing the human body, practices that have a racially charged history. With regard to current American discourse of classical singing, I submit that what is often heard as race and/or unmediated essence within vocal timbre is more accurately understood as formed and constructed through social training, whether in elementary or specialized pedagogies.8 While concepts of the body as acculturated or politicized are familiar, my Foucauldian and Deleuzian treatment of voice and vocal timbre seeks to offer further understanding of the micropolitics of timbral production and social recognition.

8 For example, Carole A. Beere, Gender Roles: A Handbook of Tests and Measures (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1990), 180. For an interesting consideration of the “black voice” in a non-US context, see John Burdick, “The Singing Voice and Racial Politics on the Brazilian Evangelical Music Scene,” Latin American Music Review/Revista de Música Latinoamericana 30:1 (2009): 25–55. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 341

I bring two observations to this reading of a timbral micropolitics. First, the persistence of the metaphor of vocal timbre as the unequivocally unmediated sound of subjectivity means that qualities which are believed to be essential, such as race, are also believed to be heard in vocal timbre. Second, culturally trained ears assume, and thus perceive, only formalized vocal practices as encultured; moreover, they tend to perceive enculturation only in certain components of the trained voice. The naturalization of the untrained voice as an expression of “essential identity” and the naturalization of aspects of the trained voice according to racial categories are both functions of the micropolitics of timbre.

The “honest” and “healthy” voice

In 2005 and 2006, I conducted thirteen interviews with voice teachers and students, ranging from undergraduates to doctoral candidates, throughout southern California.9 We discussed what constitutes vocal timbre, how it is developed, and what kinds of information it conveys about a singer. When we discussed the “correctness” of vocal weight and tone color, which are crucial problems in vocal pedagogy, issues of race and ethnicity consistently arose. All but two teachers claimed to hear singers’ ethnicities in their vocal timbres. That is, teachers’ perceptions of students’ ethnicities shaped their understanding of how the students might develop as singers and further directed their pedagogical listening. The early twentieth-century teacher–student relationship between Chinese American vaudevillian Lee Tung Foo and his voice teacher Margaret Blake Alverson captures this dynamic. Theirs was a relationship that “broke racial barriers but never transcended their limits.”10 Nearly a century later, teachers’ perceptions of students’ ethnicities generally shape their understanding of how the students might develop as singers. Overall, my interviews with teachers revealed two prevalent concerns about guiding vocal timbral development: first, the question of what constitutes healthy and natural singing for the student; and second,

9 Most of the interviews took place in teachers’ private studios. In one case, the interview took place in a coffee shop, and on several occasions interviews were conducted via telephone. 10 Kristyn R. Moon, “Lee Tung Foo and the Making of a Chinese American Vaudevillian, 1900s–1920s,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8:1 (February 2005): 23. See also Alverson’s own account of the story in Margaret Blake Alverson, “Lee Tung Foo,” in Sixty Years of California Song (1913), 161–66, available as a Project Gutenberg eBook (October 12, 2006), www.gutenberg.org/files/19528/19528-h/19528-h.htm (accessed July 9, 2014). 342 nina sun eidsheim

the need to avoid homogenizing students’ voices in favor of allowing each singer’s “true timbre” to emerge. Interestingly, practices that teachers considered “healthy” and “honest” were ultimately correlated with each student’s race and ethnicity.11 Because race has been thoroughly naturalized, what I describe as racialized vocal timbre is conceived by voice teachers as simply a healthy way of singing that promotes a non-homogenized sound and allows students to be “themselves.”12 Voices with health problems are commonly conceived as unrealized or repressed due to any number of causes, from bad vocal habits (often conceptualized as “tensions”) to evidence of underlying health issues. In short, a “healthy” sounding voice is assumed to be a voice freed of blockages, and thus assumed to be an unmediated sonorous conduit of the subject. It follows that it is whatever voice teachers understand as the “inner essence” of the singer that he or she will equate with a healthy voice, and what the teacher will listen for during vocal “diagnosis.”13 For example, Dorothy,14 a soprano and professor of voice for seventeen years, told me that she can invariably identify whether a student is, for example, Armenian, Russian, or Korean, from the student’s vocal timbre, but she frames her classification of students as a concern about vocal health:

There are principles of what is healthy, a balanced sound and all of that, and if [voice teachers] observe that rule, then how can they not hear an Armenian sound or Korean sound and cultivate it?15

In this statement, Dorothy reasons that if the voice is trained along principles designed to promote a healthy, balanced sound, it will inevitably display its inherent ethnicity, conflating race, national identity,

11 Words used by voice teacher named Allison in this chapter. Interview with author (September 1, 2005). 12 Ibid. 13 I use the word “diagnosis” in a loose way here. However, it is with a wink toward the blended boundaries between a voice teacher’s aesthetic and medical listening. Because the body is the singer’s instrument, it is quite common that voice teachers and students discuss overall health issues, give health advice, and make references to medical doctors – and more so than in most other teacher–student relationships. I make this observation based on personal and anecdotal experience. Additionally, otolaryngologists, who mainly serve people who are not professionally dependent on their voices, stress general body care (hydration, work environment, drugs, gastroesophageal reflux, and so on) in their work on vocal health, which also goes by the term “vocal hygiene.” 14 I use pseudonyms throughout to refer to voice teachers and students who participated in this research. 15 Voice teacher named Dorothy in this chapter. Interview with author (June 20, 2005). Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 343 and vocal health. Rather than considering this strategy as a race- or ethnicity-based categorization of voices, Allison, another longtime teacher, views what she calls “ethnic timbre” simply as the “unique color” and vocal “fingerprint” of the student, yet associated with a racially categorized group.16 Pedagogy, then, becomes a matter of bringing out the “true sound” of the student’s voice, and that true sound happens to be connected to his or her perceived race or ethnicity. Allison regards this pedagogical philosophy as a means of allowing each student to maintain an element of individuality within the highly cultivated and stylized world of classical singing. During the interview process, I frequently heard such statements regarding the individuality of a voice, by which my interviewees meant, I believe, the opposite: “an ethnic vocal timbre,” a timbre determined by socially constructed notions of ethnicity. Indeed, an ethic of multiculturalism has permeated vocal pedagogy: Allison goes so far as to criticize ignorant teachers, who have not been exposed to a variety of “ethnic timbres,” for “homogenizing” their students’ sounds.17 And indeed, most teachers with whom I spoke did stress the importance of being literate readers of “ethnic” vocal timbres. When we began to discuss what might cause the varied timbres of different ethnicities, Allison explained that Central and South American timbre is influenced by Latin people’s connection to their bodies; in her view, inhabitants of Latin cultures are motivated by bodily drives, while non-Latino North Americans are moved by cerebral concerns. She explained that singers’ connections to their bodies affect their sounds:

The Mexican culture, for example, is, to me, a very visceral culture. It’s not a super heady culture. I think we in the United States of America tend to be more cognitive. You know the whole Puritan ethics where sex is bad and you just disallow that you have anything below your waist. You know, that is a primary drive in people.18

I asked Allison whether she believed that some cultures come by that body–voice connection more naturally, so that even if a singer from one of those cultures studies with an American teacher, or a teacher who is not particularly focused on the development of the body–voice connection, his voice would still sound the connection that was “in” him from the

16 Voice teacher named Allison in this chapter. Interview with author (September 1, 2005). 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 344 nina sun eidsheim

beginning, and thus would differ from the voice of an Anglo-American growing up in the US. Allison responded:

Yes. I think [Latin Americans] naturally have that connection... They’re... connected to their bodies...and their guts [said with throaty, “gut sound”] and they make music from their hearts. In European repertoire they talk about that “she broke my heart, I will just lay down and die now,” [said with a very “proper” voice] and in Hispanic music, the Latino music: “She broke my heart, she ripped it out of my chest and stomped it on the floor!” [nearly screaming] And that’s how their music sounds. It’s very gut. Americans – we don’t operate on that level, we tend to be a visual or cognitive society.19

Allison expressed her claims in compassionate language and avowed a commitment to allowing the “natural” and “individual” voice to remain untouched through intense classical vocal training.20 Yet several interviewees used these notions of “naturalness” and “individuality” synonymously (if unconsciously) with ethnic, national, or racial difference. The senti- ments that attend such notions echo those of musicologist Marius Schneider in a 1957 encyclopedia entry on “Primitive Music,” where he posits that “Every being has its own sound or its own song, the timbre and rhythm of which embody the mystic substance of the owner.”21 Alan P. and Valerie Merriam observe that, for Schneider, “races are held to have special and mystic abilities, and what the anthropologist attributes to learning and to culture.”22 In Schneider’s own words, certain musical characteristics are “bound up with certain racial factors... In fact, the innermost essence of the more intensely specialized types of song cannot be transmitted at all...since the dynamic and vocal timbre which is inseparably bound up with it cannot be acquired by learning.”23 Historically speaking, my informants’ investment in race, as classical vocal pedagogues, is far from an anomaly, although their frankness on this question is worth noting. (Their rhetoric also evidences similar assumptions about nationality and ethnicity, but the scope of this essay only allows for a discussion of race.) In fact, the classical vocal pedagogy practiced today in southern California (and elsewhere in the US) can be traced back

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Marius Schneider, “Primitive Music,” in Egon Wellesz, ed., The New Oxford History of Music, Vol. I: Ancient and Oriental Music (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 42. 22 Alan P. Merriam and Valerie Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980), 255. 23 Schneider, “Primitive Music,” 27. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 345 to the formation of what John Potter has called the modern classical voice during the mid-nineteenth century. For Potter, the formalization of vocal pedagogy grounded in scientific principles marks the transition from the pre-modern to the modern classical voice.24 Modern classical vocal pedagogy’s advances, and its questionable notion of “the natural,” were aided in part by findings encouraged and enabled by colonial racial dynamics and research resting on colonial power structures. Potter has observed that the ideologies powering the formation of the modern classical voice are still present in current vocal practices. Building on this argument, I find a specifically racial-vocal discourse present in classical vocal training.25

The post-Garcían voice: science in vocal pedagogy

Before the nineteenth century, learned discussions of singing were mainly concerned with rules of ornamentation and proper pronunciation; vocal production itself was hardly ever considered.26 Although a few treatises on singing were written in the eighteenth century (such as Pier Francesco Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni, 1723), the nineteenth century saw vocal technique become an object of public debate, with an abundance of published vocal manuals and singers’ autobiographies in which technique and ideology were discussed extensively.27 This interest in improving singing technique may of course be explained in music historical terms: performance spaces were becoming larger, thus the instrumental forces that accompanied singers became louder due to the greater numbers of players and technical improvements in instrument design. For instance, in an 1862 essay “On the Present State of the Art of Singing in the Lyric Theaters of France and Italy,” Hector Berlioz noted the difficulties involved in performing “Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Beethoven, and Rossini” in Paris, because “the Opera is too large” and only a few singers could project proficiently.28 New repertoire – especially the heroic roles of Wagnerian

24 John Potter, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 54. 25 Potter, Vocal Authority, 47. 26 Michèle Castellengo, “Manuel Garcia Jr: A Clear-Sighted Observer of Human Voice Production,” Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology 30 (2005): 163–70. 27 Pier Francesco Tosi, Opinioni de’ Cantori Antichi e Moderni, o Sieno Osservazioni Sopra il Canto Figurato (New York: Broude Brothers, 1968). 28 Hector Berlioz, “À Travers Chants,” in Carol McClintock, ed., Readings in the History of Music in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 420, 424. 346 nina sun eidsheim

opera – also called for vocal-technical adjustments. Nevertheless, the resulting alterations to ideal classical vocal production were minor in comparison to the radical changes caused by later scientific investigations of the voice.29 According to Potter, the change from “pre-modern” to “modern” vocality was prompted and implemented by a new school of “scientifically oriented singing teachers,” starting with Manuel García II’s (1805–1906) research and utilization of scientific and medical data in vocal pedagogy.30 García’s impact on this particular perspective on vocal pedagogy was so profound that Potter regards his turn to science and medicine as a modernization of vocal pedagogical practice.31 Dubbed the “Christopher Columbus of the larynx,”32 García was the author of numerous treatises on voice, a teacher of many celebrated singers (including Jenny Lind, Mathilde Marchesi, Julius Stockhausen, and Mathilda Wagner), and the inventor of the laryngoscope, an achievement that reflects his scientific perspective.33

29 Potter, Vocal Authority, 51. 30 Ibid., 54. 31 While García made systematic use of the physiological understanding of the larynx in his vocal pedagogy, the earliest record of this type of conceptualization of voice, according to Margaret Kennedy-Dygas, can be traced to Galen of Pergamum (ad 129–99). Aristotle’s later comparison of animal, fish, bird, and human bodies in relation to voice is more commonly known. For a brief overview of physiological approaches to the voice pre-nineteenth century, see Margaret Kennedy-Dygas, “Historical Perspectives on the ‘Science’ of Teaching Singing, Part 1: Understanding the Anatomy and Function of the Voice (Second through Nineteenth Centuries),” Journal of Singing – The Official Journal of the National Association of Teachers of Singing 56:2 (1999): 19–24. 32 In London, on March 17, 1905, García was celebrated on his hundredth birthday. A number of eminent people attended the large gala event, including Blanche Marchesi (1863–1940), the daughter of one of García’s most devoted and successful students, Mathilde Marchesi. Blanche Marchesi presented García with a large bouquet of the colors of the Spanish flag, to which was attached a card with the inscription “To the Christopher Columbus of the larynx.” See Willis Sidney Anderson, “Laryngology,” The Physician and Surgeon: A Professional Medical Journal 27:1 (January 1905): 228. 33 Brent Jeffrey Monahan, The Art of Singing: A Compendium of Thoughts on Singing Published between 1777 and 1927 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978). García was born into a family highly invested in classical singing. His father, Manuel García I, was a lauded singer, a voice teacher, and the author of a voice manual. His daughters, Maria Malibran (1808–36) and Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), became two of the most celebrated singers of their generation. García himself, who never felt he was fit for the singing career set out for him by his father, pursued the pedagogical aspects of singing after his father’s death. García’s 1854 laryngoscope, devised around a series of mirrors, is the basis for the system still in use by physicians. It should be noted that while García is commonly referred to as the inventor of the laryngoscope in 1854, with a published report about the invention in 1855, others had used similar techniques earlier. However, it is not clear whether García knew about these earlier examinations of the larynx. What is clear is that García popularized the technique. He was also superior in his ability to use it extensively in his study. For a discussion of earlier iterations of the laryngoscope, Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 347

The pre-Garcían voice is thought to have been closer to speech because of the way it held the larynx close to the speech position (while Garcían and current techniques ask for a lowered larynx) and its preference for forward jaw position, a practice that would prove effective in making vowels sound more speech-like.34 Voice manuals of the time were largely concerned with stylistic concerns; they did not address vocal physiology or take a physiological approach to vocal education. However, by 1861, scientific and empirical data were equally represented in the vocal pedagogical literature, influenced by García’s medical- scientific perspective on the voice and vocal pedagogy. Thirty years later, Brent Jeffrey Monahan observes, almost every major work contained references to breathing, phonation and resonance from anatomical and physiological perspectives.35 In fact, while treatises on singing were penned exclusively by singers and voice teachers before 1840, in the post-Garcían period, physicians and scientists authored several vocal- pedagogical works. In short, in the second half of the nineteenth century, authority on vocal matters shifted from the vocalizing musician to the scientist of human anatomy. This period saw extensive research on and public exhibition of the human body, often enabled by – and used to rationalize – colonial expansion and other endeavors. García himself had a unique opportunity to study human anatomy when he enlisted in the French army during the 1830 invasion of Algeria. In Algerian military hospitals, he gained access to research subjects, allowing him to map the anatomy of the human vocal mechanism. Anatomical knowledge of the vocal apparatus,36 along with studies by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), the leading physicist and acoustician at the time, served as the basis for García’s vocal pedagogy.37 His treatise, Mémoire sur la voix humaine, received an acknowledgement from the French Academy of Sciences in 1840, after he demonstrated his theory of the formation of vocal registers and timbres, and their application in vocal classifications.38

see Margaret Kennedy-Dygas. “Historical Perspectives on the ‘Science’ of Teaching Singing, Part III: Manual Garcia II (1805–1906) and the Science of Singing in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Singing – The Official Journal of the National Association of Teachers of Singing 56:4 (2000): 23–30. 34 See Potter, Vocal Authority, 54. 35 Monahan, The Art of Singing. 36 Donald V. Paschke, “Introduction”, in Manuel García II, A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part Two, ed. Donald V. Paschke (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975). 37 Ibid., vi. 38 Ibid., viii. 348 nina sun eidsheim

García’s new vocal science was but one formalized articulation of the broader nineteenth-century projects of natural and social classification. Nineteenth-century Europeans generally believed that humans could master their environment by measuring, weighing, and classifying – in short, by taxonomizing – everything in the world. As postcolonial theorist Anne McClintock and others have observed, these taxonomies provided an epistemological basis for the late-modern colonial world order.39 It is significant, in this regard, that García was trained in music theory and history by the French musicologist François-Joseph Fétis, known – among other things – for his recourse to racial classification schemes in explaining human musical difference. In the preface to his general history of music, Fétis wrote,

The history of music is inseparable from appreciation of the special properties belonging to the races that have cultivated it. This essentially ideal art owes its existence to the humans who create it...it is the product of human faculties which are distributed unequally among peoples as well as individuals.40

Fétis drew on pseudo-scientific assumptions about the cognitive effects of skull size and shape to rationalize his correlation of musical understanding and aesthetics with racial difference. The belief that anatomical structure determines the human capacity to be affected by sound – in the words of Fétis, that “a feeling for music, for nations as well as individuals, is related to the shape of the brain”–amounts to a belief that skull shape determines intellectual capacity, including appreciation for and understanding of music. He saw the Aryan race and skull shape as the most advanced, and therefore used it as a basis for strictly linear comparisons. In his history of music, Fétis sought to verify the “necessary conditions for the creation of this art and its development,”“to distinguish the human race that possesses these qualities,” and “to study the filiation of peoples descendent from this race, their interbreeding with other less privileged races, the influences from the environment in which they lived, and the circumstances that favored or retarded their progress.”41

39 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 40 François-Joseph Fétis, “Préface” (August 26, 1868), Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1869), i, cited in Jann Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Royal Music Association 129:1 (2004): 26. 41 Ibid.,i–iii. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 349

García’s development of an anatomical understanding of the vocal apparatus and the timbres it produced comingled with a broader understanding and acceptance of Fétis’s position on skull shape. Combined with García’s proven hypothesis that the shape of the head and trachea affected vocal timbre, Fétis’s work has profoundly, if indirectly, conditioned a perceived timbral connection between race and voice.42 Fétis’s racialized theory of musical capacity likely influenced García’s work on the human voice. García, too, as we will see, conceptualized singers’ differing skull shapes and sizes as the basis for their timbral differences, and this correlation would have a lasting impact on vocal pedagogy. In the diagrams created in 1914 by esteemed soprano and voice teacher Lilli Lehmann, we see that a notional connection between skull shape and size lived on into the twentieth century. (Indeed, even in the very late twentieth century, when I was a vocal student, many of my voice teachers recommended Lehmann’s pedagogical text.) If we juxtapose Lehmann’s vocal pedagogical diagrams (see Figures 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3) with the 1854 and 1902 illustrations intended to depict the relative intellectual capacities of different ethnicities on the basis of skull shape and size (see Figures 12.4 and 12.5) – a prevalent idea in García’s time – it is evident that from the moment human anatomy became part of the vocal timbral equation, vocal timbre was conceptualized to reveal racial bodily essence. Both the illustration entitled “The Family Group of the Katar- rhinen” and an illustration used in the book, Types of Mankind, sought to convey at a glance the idea that different human and animal groups that represented a wide spectrum on an evolutional timeline – from the primitive (apes, Africans) to the highly evolved (Aryans) – lived side by side in contemporary time. Overall, García’s anatomical taxonomy of timbre brought all manner of racialized discourses and value systems to bear on vocal production. Preeminent among these was the racialized discourse of modernity itself.

Time and social power

McClintock has argued that nineteenth-century scientific conceptions of time were inextricable from European imperial projects.43 Building on the

42 Ibid.,i. 43 McClintock’s argument draws partly on anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s classic study, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 350 nina sun eidsheim

Figure 12.1 From Lilli Lehmann and Richard Aldrich, How to Sing, new and rev. edn. 19. In the black-and-white reproduction, the visual annotation can be seen as a heavier black line.

early work of Michel Foucault, she identifies two centralizing tropes of temporal discourse: panoptical time, “global history consumed – at a glance – in a single spectacle from a point of privileged invisibility,” and anachronistic space, the simultaneous existence of different temporal zones at different levels of progress (see Figures 12.4 and 12.5). McClintock points out that G. W. F. Hegel promulgated one of the most influential notions of anachronistic space, imagining Africa, for instance, as not only a different geographical space, but also as a different temporal zone.44 “Africa,” writes Hegel, “is no Historical part of the world... it has no movement or development to exhibit.”45 The larger scope of classification projects, such as Charles Darwin’s and Carl Linnaeus’s, was, in

44 McClintock, Imperial Leather,36–37. 45 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Cosimo Books, 2007), 99. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 351

Figure 12.2 From Lehmann and Aldrich, How to Sing, 43. In the black-and-white reproduction, the visual annotation can be seen as a heavier black line.

Figure 12.3 From Lehmann and Aldrich, How to Sing, 99. In the black-and-white reproduction, the visual annotation can be seen as a heavier black line. 352 nina sun eidsheim

Figure 12.4 “The Family Group of the Katarrhinen” [Die Familiegruppe der Katarrhinene]. Artist unknown in E. Haeckel, Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1902).

McClintock’s words, the “collect[ion], assembl[ing] and mapp[ing]” not only of natural spaces, but also of historical time. Moreover, the taxonomizing project that at first had been applied to nature was later, with social Darwinism, among others, applied to cultural history, to the relative and comparative temporalization of people’s customs and practices. Indeed, the archaic itself was fashioned by mapping “geographical difference across space” onto “historical difference across time.”46 The invention of the archaic, McClintock suggests, was central to the discourse of racial science. Urban surveillance of women and the working class was also governed by this discourse. Racial scientists viewed so-called archaic spaces as “living archives” of the primitive. McClintock points out that in order to meet the empirical standards of the natural sciences, social Darwinists looked for visible stigmata that would demonstrate the “historical anachronism of the degenerate classes.”47 For example, Georges Cuvier measured Saartjie Baartman’s skeleton and compared it, as the “lowest” human species, with the skeleton of the orangutan, the “highest ape.”

46 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 36, 37, 40. 47 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 41. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 353

Figure 12.5 J. C. Nott and G. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Gramb and Co., 1854), 458.

In a now-classic critical reading of Baartman’s fate, Sander Gilman observed that Cuvier and other leading European scientists of the day believed that they found in her body evidence that African human bodies and primate bodies shared physical characteristics. It was within this intellectual and scientific milieu that García developed a vocal pedagogy based on the contemporary physiological understanding of the body. Drawing on findings from his anatomical research, García was one of the first to understand that the position of the lower larynx had to do with vocal timbre rather than with register. His insight resulted in what was termed the voix sombrée,48 which is the foundation of modern operatic sound, as opposed to the traditional voix blanche, the pre-Garcían technique of singing with a high larynx position. Tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez, performing at the Paris Opéra in 1837, is the first singer known to have used the voix sombrée. He had developed the upper part of his chest voice

48 Castellengo, “Manuel Garcia Jr,” 163–70. 354 nina sun eidsheim

to contre-ut, maintaining ease and volume as well as a dark timbre. The nineteenth-century physicians Paul Diday and Joseph Pierre Éléonor Pétrequin first characterized the voix sombrée as a “fundamental revolution.”49 However, they mistakenly imagined that this sound was caused by an entirely new vocal mechanism, while García understood that it was a timbral phenomenon. By the early twentieth century, the voix sombrée had become naturalized, institutionalized, and – not least – racialized. Writing in the 1930s, the phoneticist G. Oscar Russell described the voix blanche as failing to promote a “musical” vowel. Rather, the vowels produced by this position are, according to Russell, “flat,”“metallic,”“piercing,” and “barbaric.”50 These descriptions render the singers inhuman, incomprehensible, and foreign. In his 1967 discussion of the role of the vocal tract and tongue for “good tone production,” William Vennard, a leading mid-twentieth- century American voice teacher and researcher, continues to draw on Russell’s estimation of the different vowels’“desirability,” and this judgment is widespread among voice professionals.51 Voix blanche, the timbral ideal prevalent before the development of scientific vocal pedagogy, is now conceived as the tone of an untrained voice. Timbres that represented pre- and post-scientific influence on vocal pedagogy, sounded side by side, were arguably mapped onto racialized scientific discourse on bodies with the mapping of an anachronistic space. In other words, timbres, which arose as a result of differing pedagogical philosophies, were equated with varying degrees of (racial) progress. When they sounded together on one and the same stage, they were arguably also mapped onto an anachronistic space. Today, when non- Caucasian singers successfully sing works from the classical and operatic repertoire, this impression of voices from different progressive states is re- envisioned in the sense that each singer has her own unique timbre. In Dorothy’s words, “[t]here are principles of what is healthy, a balanced sound.” Such a sentiment relates to vocal pedagogical positions such as “if [voice teachers] hear an Armenian sound or Korean sound,” how can they not “cultivate it”?52

49 Ibid., 165. 50 G. Oscar Russell, Speech and Voice (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), 151, 145. Cited in William Vennard, Singing: The Mechanism and the Technic, 4th edn. (New York: Carl Fischer, 1967), 111–12. 51 Vennard, Singing, 110–11. 52 Voice teacher named Dorothy in this chapter. Interview with author (June 20, 2005). Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 355

As voix blanche represented the voice before scientific progress, and voix sombrée represented the “advanced,” professionalized voice – the result of progress –“ethnic voices” (Armenian, Latin, African American, and so on) are now the new voix blanche, while the “non-ethnic” normative voice is the new voix sombrée. The notion of panoptical time – the idea that voices representing different stages of human development are simultaneously at work in contemporary time – is therefore present in the operatic world. While listeners do not necessarily imagine the voice of the non-Caucasian to be inferior, it is heard as a voice of difference wherein hegemonic aurality defines normality. Here, “normality” is wound through contemporary vocal pedagogical language, and concepts such as the “healthy” and “free” voice sounding its “individuality”–which is understood through the ethics of multiculturalism.53 Bodies that are considered different are heard as different. I have argued that the nineteenth-century intellectual milieu that fomented modern vocal ideals and pedagogy routinely connected human musical faculties to the size and shape of the skull. This was an environment in which knowledge about the human voice, and anatomy in general, was believed to stem from progress in medical research. But this research itself was enabled, in part, by colonial geopolitics and fueled by the need to justify colonial activities.54 In such an environment, the voice – an instrument intimately tied to the body, which resonates in the head, in the skull – occupies a very peculiar position. If, as Foucault states, new knowledge produces new forms of power, then what kinds of power are produced when knowledge that contributes to vocal pedagogy is based on research enabled by colonial forces and rationalizations for colonial expansion?55

53 Ibid. 54 For example, Peter J. Bloom maintains that through the use of a variety of technologies that examine or document the body in a variety of ways (from chronophotography (photo series of bodies in motion), the microphonographe (a precursor to the hearing aid), and the ergograph (measuring muscle fatigue) to craniometry and phrenology (the practice of empirical localization of mental faculties to the brain and their enumeration), the French (male) body was set in opposition to the “natural man” and colonized subject submitted to French colonial rule. Bloom argues that it was, in part, these technologies and the measurement “data” they yielded that were used in the framing of colonization as a humanitarian, civilizing mission, resonances of which are still present in today’s Western humanitarian intervention project. See Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 55 Jann Pasler asks a similar question regarding the European consumption of photographs of musicians and instruments taken on foreign expeditions, in “The Utility of Musical Instruments,” 41. 356 nina sun eidsheim

The pedagogy of whiteness: racial taxonomies of vocal timbre

My interviews revealed that vocal pedagogues today are still invested in the process of uncovering sonic difference between voices, based on visual difference between bodies. For my purposes, the most curious aspect of this investment is how my informants align “natural,”“healthy,” or “individual” voices with a particular race or ethnicity, according to deeply ingrained notions of essential differences between people based on their physical attributes. This alignment is evident in social evolutionists’ charts of (male) human development, in which, as McClintock puts it, “progress [is] consumed at a glance.”56 Modern classical vocal pedagogy was founded on scientific and pseudo-scientific principles that sought to map measur- able differences among people, at a time when the musics of the world’s peoples were also being situated along a timeline ranging from prehistory to modernity. According to this discourse, singing is not only sound emitted from a racialized body, but also a sonic expression, defined by Fétis as “the product of human faculties which are distributed unequally among people as well as individuals.”57 Indeed, because the voice occupies the body, according to nineteenth-century science it was susceptible to measurement and classification. Voice science was thus established at a time when measurement of every aspect of the human body served to provide information that could justify the colonial demand for domination and subordination. In other words, the assumed supremacy of Western thought, culture, and repertoire constituted the ideological environment within which modern vocal science and techniques developed. And the racialized language still present in classical vocal discourse suggests that the measurement-based theory of Aryan superiority has, in subtle and profound ways, affected today’s perception of, approach to, and desire for particular voices within the classical repertoire. However, while vocal physiological research arose from a desire to support a distinction among races, this work subsequently allowed for more nuanced conceptualizations of the voice. With the help of the perspectives and techniques that ushered the modern classical vocal era into being, voice scientists and teachers were able to re-imagine and

56 McClintock rightly notes that male social evolutionists disregarded women and relegated them to the realm of nature. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 39. 57 Fétis, “Préface,” i, cited in Pasler, “Utility of Musical Instruments,” 26. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 357 re-investigate the voice as a “built,” or mechanical, phenomenon rather than an essential one. For example, on the question of whether there are clear vocal physiological differences between persons who identify with different racial groups, laryngologist Eugen Grabscheid submitted in the 1980s that “there is no physical difference whatsoever.”58 Wilburn J. Gould, who analyzed vocal fold vibration with the aid of ultraspeed motion pictures, concurred: “The ratio of the Oriental larynx to the body is no different from that of other races.”59 A decade and a half later, vocal pedagogy authority and scientist Richard Miller confirmed this observation, stating that “fibroptic/stroboscopic observations reveal no racially classifiable features of uniform laryngeal construction.” Miller added that there are no observed differences with regard to “vocal tract proportions, dimensions of the pharyngeal wall, shapes of the pyriform sinuses, or epiglottic activity.”60 Given the fact that there are no vocally physiognomic particularities that mark or evidence race, and given a robust critical-theoretical framework that demonstrates bodies to be constructed along discursive lines, why does there remain a pervasive, largely unquestioned discourse that insists on a relationship between race and vocal timbre, often successfully cloaked in language and ideas of the natural, the authentic and the unique? I will argue, in the remainder of this essay, that racialized voice persists because our common definition of voice is misleading. To a large degree, the notion of vocal difference seems to hinge on ideas of subjectivity, authenticity, and the “natural,” unmediated voice. These notions themselves stem in part from two other developments. The first arose in conjunction with a medical technology, the stethoscope, invented nearly forty years before the laryngoscope. The second relies on the metaphorical alignment of a person’s voice with her subjectivity. The first stethoscope (a rolled-up medical journal, as legend has it) was developed in the early nineteenth century to allow Paris physician René Laënnec to maintain a safe distance from his (largely lower-class) female patients. Sterne has astutely observed that a new way of listening emerged with the stethoscope, an orientation that distinguished between “exterior” and “interior” sounds.61 “Interior” sounds offered

58 Leslie Rubenstein, “Oriental Musicians Come of Age,” New York Times (November 23, 1989): 90. 59 Ibid.: 90. 60 Richard Miller, National Schools of Singing: English, French, German, and Italian Techniques of Singing Revisited (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Books, 1997), 220. 61 Sterne, The Audible Past,87–136. 358 nina sun eidsheim

information about the body that was unavailable through other methods of observation. The new diagnostic technique of listening to the internal aspects of the body also led doctors to listen differently to their patients’ voices, not only for what their words told him about their symptoms, but also for the quality of the voice. From this perspective, vocal sounds became akin to a thermometer: an indicator of the patient’sinner state. On the other hand, half a century later, in the budding field of psychoanalysis, diagnosis and treatment focused on the words spoken by a patient to her doctor. But Freud’s recounting and interpretation of his patients’ stories also reflect changes in listening practice. Freud insisted on the scientific empiricism of his method. It was based, he claimed, in pure observation. That is, he ascribed to his diagnostic interpretation of his patients’ narratives the absolute objectivity of physical medicine, believing that his interpretive work merely uncovered what was invariably there to find (but remained hidden from the patient herself). The assumption that a doctor may – in fact, the explicit expectation that he will – hear what the patient herself is unable to express granted enormous power to the doctor-as-listener. Although Freud did listen for and report on the verbal content of his patients’ utterances, his guiding principle was similar to Laënnec’s: the vocal data were treated as traces of a condition which the listener would be the one to name. Interestingly, Freud’s earliest case studies featured many symptoms that surfaced as vocal aberrations: Emmy von N. trilled and popped a nervous birdsong. Frau Anna O. coughed, stuttered, and strung syllables together from different languages. We should note the gender and class dynamics involved in the first use of the stethoscope and that the diagnostic tool itself, as well as practices of diagnosis, emerged in the context of asymmetrical power relations. And, in this context, it is clear that what doctors heard was not the result of a passive or neutral listening process. As I have suggested elsewhere, hearing in categories is a type of listening that accepts a transfer of authorship from the vocalizer to the listener, such that what we perceive as the content of the singer’s voice is produced in part by the listener. In other words, the perception and classification of voice is as active and product-oriented as singing.62

62 I have suggested elsewhere that hearing in categories is based on a type of listening that accepts a transfer of authorship from the vocalizer to the listener, and that what we perceive as the content of the singer’s voice is produced in part by the listener. See Nina Eidsheim, “Synthesizing Race: Towards an Analysis of the Performativity of Vocal Timbre,” Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 359

Additionally, the sounds of the voice are at the heart of a metaphor that equates voice with unified subjectivity – an association that “assum[es] myths of constancy, coherence, and universality.”63 This metaphor appears in a range of contested discourses, concerning literature, voting rights, free speech, and much more. In writing, “voice” is used as shorthand for a number of expressive qualities that are typically described in equally imprecise terms, such as “authentic,”“truthful,”“personal,” and “natural.” bell hooks offers the definition of “voice” passed down to her as a young writer: “When I became a student in college creative writing classes, I learned a notion of ‘voice’ as embodying the distinctive expression of an individual writer. Our efforts to become poets were to be realized in this coming into awareness and expression of one’s voice.”64 This metaphor, applied to the singing voice, underlies the similar idea that there exists such a thing as an “individual,”“healthy,” and “natural” voice. Composer Ned Rorem, cited in the opening epigraph, proposes a definition of voice that seems to derive from exactly the type of listening encouraged by the use of stethoscopes. “[F]acts”, he says, “don’t exist. The sole truth lies in a tone of voice.” In other words, what you say you are does not matter; it is what I hear in your voice that is true.65 Continuing our investigation of the metaphoric voice turned back on the sonorous voice, I would like to juxtapose Rorem’s assertion with a rather different account by bell hooks of the limitations of “truth” conveyed in the “tone of the voice,” as perceived by her audience:

In all my writing classes, I was the only black student. Whenever I read a poem written in a particular dialect of southern black speech, the teacher and fellow students would praise me for using my “true,” authentic voice, and encouraged me

TRANS-Transcultural Music Review 13:7 (2009); and Nina Eidsheim, “Voice as Action: Towards a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice,” Current Musicology 93:1 (2012): 7–31. 63 Ira Sadoff, “Hearing Voices: The Fiction of Poetic Voice,” New England Review 14:4 (Fall 1992): 221–32. Examples of recent scholarship that try to avoid essentializing voice, or using voice as a figure to essentialize subjectivity, include Martin J. Daughtry, “Afterword: From Voice to Violence and Back Again,” in Susan Fast and Kip Pegley, eds., Music, Politics, and Violence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012); and Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” TDR: The Drama Review 54:1 (Spring 2010): 14–38. 64 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), 11. 65 I am tempted to share a related anecdote. As I was completing this essay, I saw a doctor for a bad cough. When he listened to my lungs, I shared with him my interest in the stethoscope and how it had affected listening. To this, he replied: “And the nice thing about the stethoscope is that we don’t have to listen to what the patients say.” 360 nina sun eidsheim

to develop this “voice,” to write more of these poems. From the onset this troubled me. Such comments seemed to mask racial biases about what my authentic voice would or should be.66

In both instances, the voice is assessed in terms of its fidelity. The object of its fidelity is not fixed, but depends upon broader beliefs about the body – for here the body is understood as a repository of truth, and bodily sound as a revelation of truth. We see then that, for certain bodies, “faithful voice” or authentic voice equals raced voice. In poetry, this “authenticity” can mean slang; in classical voice, it implies a certain racialized timbre.67 In other words, unified subjectivity is translated into expression according to the values prevalent in a given society – for example, racial difference and sameness. However, the application of this notion of unmediated essence is not consistently applied to all voices and practices, but it is commonly thought to correlate with a level of formal training – that is, with the naturalized idea that an untrained voice betrays the essential identity of its vocalizer.68 In order to further our understanding of how we recognize formally trained vocal timbres, we may look to national schools of singing. The phrase “national school of singing” refers to a preferred tone quality and its related technique, which function symbiotically on a national and regional scale and result in differing pedagogical schemes and a corres- ponding shaping of the voice according to a national tone ideal. (Perhaps the most commonly known national schools of singing are the English, French, German and Italian, but there are also the Nordic and Slavic.69) We know that the sounds of these various “schools” are the result of aesthetic preference and of vocal technique designed to accommodate this preference.70 We also know that they are not the unmediated expression of

66 hooks, Talking Back, 11. 67 For a partial history of this particular sound, see Nina Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera,” American Quarterly 63:3 (2011): 641–71. 68 Interestingly, there is also a contemporary counter-discourse within theatrical speech training and New Age-derived “healing” practices. Here, the goal of the training is to “undo” and release the effects of what is seen as a technologized and dehumanized culture, out of touch with the needs of the human body. See Annette Schlichter, “Un/Voicing the Self: Vocal Training and the Materialization of the Sounding Subject,” Postmodern Culture (forthcoming). 69 What is now referred to as the international style of singing is based on the Italian bel canto school, but is also flexible enough to be well received in several other regions of the world. Indeed, the “international school of singing” generally refers to the style practiced by singers who travel among the most prominent world opera stages. 70 Richard Miller notes that although there are recognizable national tonal preferences and techniques, no nation exhibits monolithic conformity. Miller estimates that over half of the teachers within a given national school adhere to the national tonal preference, while the Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 361 a people, contra nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism.71 A national school of singing simply refers to a region’s preferred tonal quality (and the vocal technique which engenders it) and does not, of course, necessarily indicate the nationality of the singer. A Norwegian singer may be educated in a conservatory in Germany and thus develop a German tone. An Italian teacher might teach in London and pass on his or her Italian technique and tone ideal. This preferred national tone is not a casual matter. The French Ministry of Culture, for example, has employed official inspectors to observe regional conservatories of music in order to evaluate their vocal pedagogy. Richard Miller reports that, in the post-Second World War decades, some inspectors were especially adamant that their concept of proper onset72 be taught in French conservatories. The preferred onset among these inspectors was an “attack,” a very strong beginning that is created by a powerful inward thrust of the abdomen. As a result, the vocal folds were forced to deal with a high level of airflow, and in response, the larynx resisted the excess airflow by fixing the vocal folds in a single position. The result is a “held” sound that is slightly above pitch, with a pushed and sharp- sounding phonation. This sound is now characteristic of the French onset and – because the attack set up a tense position of the vocal folds – of the French line.73 It is also important to note that within the geographical area of a single national school there will be many different spoken dialects. In some areas, these dialects are so different that they are close to separate languages. In countries such as Switzerland, students at a single

remaining singers and teachers are devoted to international practices. Miller, National Schools of Singing, xix. Tone preference is also influenced by teacher migration and relocation. For example, many German teachers associate themselves with the historic international Italianate School as a result of the legacy of the master vocal pedagogue G. B. Lamperti, an Italian expatriate who taught in Munich. 71 In addition, one’s preference for a particular repertoire can affect the sound of one’s voice: the repertoire’s method of “setting the voice” and demanding certain techniques from it will shape the voice in turn. 72 A vocal onset is the way in which a singer performs the beginning of a sound phrase. This may be accomplished with an attack or by “easing” more softly into the note. To those unfamiliar with vocal technique, this might not seem like such a radical difference, but for vocal pedagogues and singers it is very important. Listeners who are not voice professionals might not consciously register these different onset practices, but attentive listeners can develop an awareness of an overall difference in the sound. 73 In contrast, there is the Nordic “soft” onset wherein airflow precedes sound, the German weicher Einsatz (whisper onset), a reaction against the earlier Sprenginsatz (hard onset), and so on. Miller, National Schools of Singing, xix–xx. 362 nina sun eidsheim

conservatory might have four different mother tongues. However, phonationand,asaresult,pronunciationdifferinsongand speech, and singers learn very carefully how to pronounce words when singing, even in their first language. Even singers with different mother tongues or dialects are unified under a single national school or a single teacher’s tonal ideal. In summary, the presence of national schools of singing not only exemplifies the malleability of the human voice and the enormous impact that teachers’ and institutions’ tonal ideals and pedagogical practices generally have on the ultimate sound of aclassicalsinger’s voice; it also shows that we are fully aware of, and acknowledge, the constructedness of vocal timbre in formally trained voices. However, at the other end of the spectrum we find colloquial speech, where locution training is seen to be absent and where a lack of standard- ized education and its resultant language is assumed. It seems that an absence of formal speech or vocal training is perceived as an overlapping, one-to-one relationship between the identity presumed by the listener and the sound of the speaker’s voice. The untrained voice is unable to resist a “naturalized” and racialized reading. That is, where no formal training is presumed, the voice is perceived as expressing unmediated essence, which can include race, gender, or class. For example, in a 1999 ruling, a Kentucky Supreme Court judge decreed that since no one would find it inappropriate for an officer to identify the voice of a woman, “we perceive no reason why a witness could not likewise identify a voice as being that of a particular race or nationality, so long as the witness is personally familiar with the general characteristics, accents or speech patterns of the race or nationality in question.” With this pronouncement, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that a conviction was appropriately based solely on a police officer’s identification of a suspect whose voice he had heard in an audio transmission. The officer identified the suspect as a black male, testifying that during his thirteen years as a policeman he had had several conversations with black men and therefore was able to identify a black male voice. We see here an assumption that the speaker in question did not completely control his body, and therefore could not help but emit his identity, which was fixed around race. In other words, it is assumed that “what you hear is what he is”; what the listener thinks she hears is generally unexamined.74

74 Clifford v. Kentucky, 371 KY 7 (1999). Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 363

It is assumed that the timbres of highly trained voices have been molded according to aesthetic ideals, while in voices that have not been formally trained, it is assumed that their natural and essential sound is preserved. Yet the ethnography suggests that there are voices that undergo highly formalized training, yet are unable to fully resist naturalized (and racialized) readings. Assessments like “[Latin Americans] naturally have that connection [to their feelings],” and “It’s very gut” is one way of hearing and marking difference. Here we may see that even formal vocal training maintains a sense of voice as unmediated essence. While my informants cloaked their identification and acknowledgment of difference in discussions about the voice student’s right to discover her “individual,” “healthy,” and “natural” voice, we have seen that these notions overlap with discourses of race and ethnicity as defined through encultured aurality. Furthermore, there is a moral component to letting the “raw” and “visceral” part of the voice remain “untouched.”75 The idea is to simultaneously train the voice to reach the called-for aesthetic benchmarks while being careful to retain components of the “untouched” and unmediated voice, so as not to turn the singer into a mere singing machine. In order to facilitate the conservation of the “natural” aspect of the voice, teachers educated themselves in the different timbres thought to relate to different ethnicities. While voices may also be understood in terms of aesthetics, ethics, and health, they are interwoven with and informed by practices of listening for difference. Why do we succumb to this differential mode of listening?

From voice as sound to voice as action

Although the physiological orientation of modern vocality and vocal training has led to a racialized perception and production of timbre, I offer a physiological explanation of timbre as encultured. This counter- narrative is also based on scientific understanding of voice. What is the current understanding of the relationship between the vocal apparatus and the sound it has the capacity to emit? There is a significant correlation between the length of the vocal folds and the pitch range of the voice: longer vocal folds correspond with the potential for a deeper pitch. However, the same study showed that there is no direct correlation between the length of the vocal folds and the length (height) of their

75 Voice teacher named Dorothy in this chapter. Interview with author (June 20, 2005). 364 nina sun eidsheim

owner’s body. Together, the pharynx and the mouth constitute the vocal tract. Air enclosed within the vocal tract acts as resonating material. Any particular resonator will allow certain sounds to pass easily through it, increasing the amplitude of these frequencies while dampening others. (Frequencies that fit the resonator optimally are called resonance frequencies, or formant frequencies if the resonator is the human vocal tract. Most resonators have several resonance frequencies. For the vocal tract, the four to five lowest resonance frequencies are the most important.) This means that beyond the given structure of the vocal apparatus, a singer can shape his vocal timbre by adjusting the shape of the vocal apparatus. Timbral character is even affected by slight changes, such as the amount of air held by the vocal tract at any given moment. Finally, contrary to popular belief, the size and shape of the lungs have no direct influence on the timbre of the voice.76 Thus, vocal physiological knowledge can be used to deconstruct notions of unmediated vocal timbres, not only to categorize voices according to preconceived categories, as in Fétis’s work. However, I posit that we persist in essentializing voice due to an erroneous idea about voice’s ontology. Contrary to popular belief, voice is not a noun; it is a verb. Voice is not sound; it is action. Voice is constructed through repetitious use, whether in formalized training or in colloquial expression. As in other forms of repetitive physical training, each and every utterance fashions the body, so that what we hear in its voice are the sounds from the instrument that the vocal apparatus becomes through that training. The resonance produced by the continuously moving tongue and the continually changing shape of the oral and nasal cavities colors vocal timbre. We can deduce all this from physiological and scientific findings. Even without scientific information, we witness and acknowledge the gradual training of the voice when we remark upon, for example, the transformation of someone’s voice due to her recent participation in singing lessons, or her relocation to a different part of the country. In sum, our behavior during our regular interactions with one another suggests that we already know that any and every vocal activity impacts and forms the vocal apparatus – and yet the tendency to imagine voices that have not undergone formal training as “natural” and unmediated persists. Instead, I propose, listening

76 For more on voice development, production, function, and perception, see Jody Kreiman and Diana Sidtis, Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 2013. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre 365 practices of voice should employ Foucault’s notion of the technology of the body and Deleuze’s notion of acquired knowledge.77 Approaching voice as action makes considering the control exerted over the singing body unavoidable, as Slavoj Žižek points out with this example:

At the very beginning of his Eugene Onegin, Pushkin presents the scene of women singing while picking strawberries on a field – with the acerbic explanation that they are ordered to sing by their mistress so that they cannot eat strawberries while picking them.78

The voice in Žižek’s account is a site for exerting control over the body’s will, desire, and choice – via the demand that everyone sing constantly to ensure that their mouths are occupied. Recognizing voice as an activity that engages the body, not merely as something that the body produces, reveals the mistress’s demand as a mechanism of domination masquerading as the desire to hear beautiful sounds. Another tactic for monitoring and man- aging the body, as suggested by Rorem, is the reification of the voice as a source of raw, unmediated truth. With that myth alive and kicking, young students of color will be repeatedly subjected to racial listening, such as those that bell hooks reported. Thinking about voice as a noun, a bodily product, facilitates the popular conception that vocal timbre is a medium that communicates “truths” about a singer’s identity directly, sans mediation. However, it does not allow for careful examination of the ideologies and perspectives through which the voice is produced and heard. In summary, as long as we treat voice as sound, we assume that voice will communicate a priori innate qualities. As long as we assume that voice is the sound of these qualities, we will comprehend it and them according to our ingrained value system. As long as race is included in that value system – or, to paraphrase Woodson, when you control a man’s notion of voice and listening thereto – we will hear voice as evidence of race. However, when we understand singing as action, we gain the ability to appreciate that voice is engendered by an internal choreography, invisible but audible. Once we understand voice as an invisible, audible choreography, we may become aware that the sound of the voice is not the emission of an a priori essence. And once we understand that,we can learn to recognize that any essentializing notion that might arise in our encounter with voice reflects a culturally instilled listening process.

77 Jonathan Sterne also draws on this framework in his study of the history of sound recording and listening: “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” New Media & Society 8:5 (2006): 825–42. 78 Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death (London: Routledge, 2002), 105.

13 Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism gary tomlinson

Music is many things; but some of them it can be to everyone. The wording here is intended to be cautious and conditional –“can be,” not “is”–since music-making and perception constitute a large, fuzzy set of capacities and activities, not readily defined or delimited. Cautious or not, however, the frank universalism of the formulation will come as a jolt to many humanists, for the pursuit of a common human musicality flies in the face of the prevailing winds that have guided the human sciences for a half-century now. These have tended to push us, in both theory and practice, toward the particulars of human diversity – toward understanding specific acts and achievements of individuals, their social and political import, the traditions they compose, and the local cultures of societies in which they arise. The interpretation of text and context through a hermeneutics relating the two has provided a primary means to achieve this understanding, extending its reach in more or less metaphorical fashion, from disciplines such as literary studies and history to other fields less reliant on texts as such: anthropology, art history, musicology, and so forth. Those who have articulated a general aim for such local contextualism have emphasized the clarified view of human difference that it offers – the conversation (again, more or less metaphorical) it enables with others, of the kind that anthropologist Clifford Geertz, eloquent spokesperson for the approach, saw as the high road to his goal, the “enlargement of the universe of human discourse.”1 But hermeneutics has not been the only road; difference analyzed and celebrated has also been the endpoint of the many anti- textual alternatives that have sprung up in what has been termed a “practice turn” in the humanities – for example, technology and material studies, performance studies, approaches to sexualities and to embodied knowledge, and phenomenological ethnographies.2

1 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 14. For my own appropriation of Geertzian aims and ideals, see Gary Tomlinson, “The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology,” 19th-Century Music 3 (1984), 350–62. 2 For the practice turn in musicology, see Georgina Born, “For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn,” Journal of the Royal Musical 366 Association 135 (2010), 205–43. Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 367

In the recent humanities at their best, in which I include the initiatives of the New Musicology since the late 1980s, human achievement has been conceived as a Big Tent, accommodating all in a manner that works to highlight the variety and mutual alterity of social, intellectual, emotional, experiential, and material worlds. The focus on difference, shared across many fields, has blurred a tendentious methodological divide that sometimes pitted ethnography and historiography against one another. It has shaped even influential stances that have turned self-consciously away from the analysis of individual agency and achievement, among them the bracing geohistory of Braudel and some of the other Annales historians, Foucault’s epistemic archaeology, and Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory and abstract machines. Looking further back, humanities dedicated to difference combated the too-quick generalizations of an earlier humanism stemming from a European (later American) post-Enlightenment founded ultimately on colonial hegemony. Part of the conceptual basis for this orientation has been the constructivist proposition, taken on by the humanities in the wake of the linguistic turn of the mid-twentieth century, that culture and the human subject are both generated to a deep level from the workings of sociality. Human diversity, in this view, is made in social and cultural interactions for which language acts as an especially fertile medium. Difference is not innate, but rather overlaid in the course of its social production on whatever baseline human commonalities may lie beneath. Even if constructivism has sometimes been carried too far – as in some extensions of Sapir-Whorf linguistic determinism, for example – its opposition to the idea of innate differences separating human societies, populations, or ethnic groups has been vindicated from many corners, not least genetics. There is, we have known for some time, more average genetic variation among individuals within a human population than among geographically discrete populations, and the vast majority of human genetic difference is accounted for by differences among individuals rather than among groups of them.3 But what about those deeper commonalities? We understand that innate difference, viewed comparatively between or among whole groups, is largely illusory; what of innate sameness? This baseline has usually been left to one side in constructivist humanism, even though it has been presumed in the very name of the endeavor – the very recognition of a shared humanness implied in the discerning of the human sciences as a

3 For an early overview, see R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 119–27. 368 gary tomlinson

group of related disciplines. The scholarship of difference, carefully distinguishing one tree from the next, has not attended to larger groves, let alone the forest. Rightly rejecting the Eurocentric exceptionalism of an earlier humanism, it precluded in the same motion the largest questions of the nature of human capacity and attainment in the world, with the effect of handing them over to biologists and “hard” social scientists (certain kinds of psychologists, sociologists, economists, and political theorists). It is at least ironic, then, to see humanists regularly complaining these days of the predictable consequence of this retreat: the predominance of a scientific (at best) or scientistic (at worst) assumption that neopositivist method and quantified data are all we need to tell us everything we want to know about “the human.” Changes, however, are in the winds I mentioned before. Certain recent trends in interpretive humanistic studies, sometimes traveling collectively under the label “biological turn,” have begun to redress the silence concerning our shared humanness and to embrace sameness as a legitimate object of study. At its best, this work does not constitute a refutation of constructivism or the linguistic turn, or their methodological out- growths, but rather a fulfilling of their implications. It is not too much to say, indeed, that it aims to reveal the foundations of the Same that enable constructions of the Other.4 I will suggest here that this revelation will necessarily be a historical investigation reaching across a very long durée – far longer than has been customary in humanistic (as opposed to natural) histories. This aim may characterize biological-turn work at its best, but what research program could ever be represented only by its highest potential? Work along these lines has often enough fallen short of the mark, and usually for the same reason: its endorsement of a simplistic evolutionism that locates the whole story of evolutionary mechanism in clearly defined adaptations answering to the pressures of an implacable, bulwark environment, with the odd exaptation thrown in here or there. Such “adaptational fundamentalism,” as Jonathan Kramnick called it in a recent critique of “literary Darwinists,” often has the effect of dressing up old prejudices as biological imperatives – along the way reasserting (consciously or not) the

4 This move has an ethical rationale also, as did the embracing of difference; it is put in summary, polemical terms by Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), esp. Chapters 1–2; for the issue in the context of New Musicology, see James Currie, “Music After All,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62 (2009): 145–203, esp. 162–65. Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 369 genetic determinism that vitiated the sociobiology movement of the 1960s and 1970s.5 Accounts of the evolutionary emergence of morality, storytelling, art, religion, humor, and more that have multiplied over the last years are replete with such reassertions; in the case of literary studies, Kramnick shows how they recapitulate not only questionable assumptions of sociobiology, but also those of a more recent movement, evolutionary psychology, dependent on the dubious notion of an adapted “modular” mind. Such work has rightly enough encountered stiff resistance from humanists committed to the exploration of diversity. But the movement of resistance needs to guard against overdetermined biases opposing the investigation of human commonality and overwrought suspicions that it can only lead us down a slippery slope. While it is fair enough to pick apart in a review one or several instances of unthoughtful evolutionist work, it is a very different thing to presume that they fairly represent the best that the approach might yield. To generalize methodological possibilities from weak instantiations of the method at hand is a poor and distorting strategy. Kramnick did well for the most part to avoid plucking what he called “low-hanging fruit”; there is much of it to tempt the caricaturist, but, grasping it, we turn out not to have grasped much. Moreover, humanistic critiques of evolutionary work show time and again the very weakness that debilitates their targets: an unsophisticated understanding of the latest thought on the nature of hominin evolution and modern human emergence, which weakness often enough comes down to their own adaptational fundamentalism. We need to do more than wade in the shallows of new, post-neo-Darwinian theory before we proclaim it pernicious. Looking, then, to the deepest evolutionary rumination, admitting the very real weaknesses of many individual instances of humanistic evolutionary work, avoiding the simple-minded neopositivism and narrow

5 Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 315–47; followed by six responses and Kramnick’s rebuttal, Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 388–460. Earlier discussions and less well-founded critiques of the movement are D. T. Max, “The Literary Darwinists,” The New York Times (November 6, 2005); and William Deresiewicz, “Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism,” The Nation (June 8, 2009). Kramnick provides an excellent overview and critique of relatively simple adaptationism and its advocacy by evolutionary psychologists. He does not give so clear a sense of the alternative evolutionary theories he hints at, especially niche-constructive coevolution (323–24) in relation to the incremental emergence of complex behaviors (341, 346–47). For further development of these alternatives, see below in this essay and Gary Tomlinson, “Evolutionary Studies in the Humanities: The Case of Music,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 647–75, and especially Gary Tomlinson, 1,000,000 Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (New York: Zone Books, forthcoming). 370 gary tomlinson

empiricism of certain scientific stances, and (by the way) setting aside the worries we remain prone to about diehard, cultural conservatives – they are still around, but our disciplinary programs need not be dictated in reaction to them – there remain two simple mistakes motivating humanistic suspicion of evolutionary approaches. The first misjudges what is being recognized as universally human. It is not difference that the best in the new evolutionary work judges to be innate, but similarity, and as I have suggested, the fascination with alterity in the recent humanities has always been tacitly predicated on this more general human community. Deeply considered evolutionary approaches might hold out the possibility of unearthing the very features of humanness that we have all taken for granted in our explorations of diversity, and this would be no small achievement. To offer a musical example, it is one thing to speak of differences among the songs of human societies, starting from that foundational “human,” and another to speak of differences between human songs and bird or whale “songs,” whatever such interspecies comparisons might tell us, however appropriate or not that use of the word “songs” might be. The difference between these two kinds of difference needs now to be examined in order to come to a deepened sense of both human sameness and difference. This, of course, does not dismiss from humanistic consideration non-human animals, or minimize the recent and salutary moves from within the humanities toward trans-species understandings of various sorts, moves often called posthumanist, but which I prefer to call – avoiding the suggestion of temporal succession of that post and emphasizing instead the connecting-out of the human – parahumanist.6 These initiatives focus on the second kind of difference named above, instanced here as the difference between human song and birdsong; and in doing so, they discover their own vectors of sameness, extending across a broader phylogenetic platform than the sameness that characterizes the human. Human sameness, primate sameness, mammal sameness, vertebrate sameness, and so forth, spiraling out: these are all vectors of similitude to be encountered in the proper thinking of difference. Whether they will be of

6 The foremost venue for posthumanist initiatives had been the book series (Posthumanities) published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by Cary Wolfe. They take inspiration especially from the work of ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, considered by many the founder of biosemiotics, as well as more recent conceptions, such as Michel Serres’s parasites and Donna Haraway’s cyborgs. All three writers are represented in Wolfe’s series. For a shift of emphasis toward parahumanism and a musical case study, see Gary Tomlinson, “Parahuman Wagnerism,” The Opera Quarterly 29 (2014): 1–17. Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 371 interest to humanists or not will probably depend on a series of specific determinations defining how they are entered into and how far they range (phylogenetically) away from the human. The second mistake, just as basic as the first, is to presume that universal features will be narrowly deterministic of human behavior. Any nuanced view of human biocultural coevolution – of the intertwined, deep histories of genes and culture in the hominin line, to which I will return below – is enough to repudiate such thoughts. It is enough to tell us, in fact, that the foremost innate similarity of all humans is the capacity to respond flexibly to circumstances and so to produce difference through complex social, cultural, and environmental interaction. This is a point that has been made more and more forcefully in many recent projects, such as those of Kim Sterelny or Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock (from the humanistic side) or of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (from the scientific).7 Richerson and Boyd, along with other paleoanthropologists and archaeologists, have argued in some detail that the demanding and changeable Pleistocene environments of our ancestors selected not only for specific physical, cognitive, and cultural capacities, but, more importantly, for overarching, multimodal capacities for malleable behavior. We are all humanly the same, most deeply, because we are all programmed to generate difference. This conception of hominin evolution is the converse of that presumed by many humanistic evolutionists these days; here, for exemplary purposes, I reach toward the low-hanging fruit even Kramnick could not entirely avoid. A strategy he found often repeated in evolutionary approaches to literature works this way: first, it attempts to delineate a limited set of behaviors that modern humans inherited from their ancestors in the struggle for survival, behaviors mostly designed to get mates and meals and to avoid becoming a meal; then it attempts to map this Stone Age behavioral repertoire onto, say, the courtship and marital vicissitudes of protagonists of nineteenth-century novels. Pleistocene

7 Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 131–47; Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2005). Their work in this direction reaches back, however, to the 1980s: Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1985). Kim Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Chapter 9; Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 102; Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 372 gary tomlinson

selective pressures structured innate programs that determine our behavior today, the argument goes, and these structure the forms that our literature assumes. Kramnick argues that such an approach is too blunt to tell us much of interest about one novel or another, and I agree; in the same way, it will never tell us anything very specific about what makes this or that musicking a unique and distinctive act in the world. But this does not adequately identify the deep methodological flaw of the approach, which lies elsewhere and should be obvious to anyone who has followed the kind of work Richerson and Boyd represent. Our heritage did not merely download into us a dossier of cave-man responses and behaviors – which responses and behaviors, by the way, as they are usually depicted, reflect a far older and broader phylogeny. (We share most of this mate/meal stuff with lizards, or at least with most other mammals, not merely with our close relatives. Instead, our evolutionary heritage endowed our ancestors with something very special indeed and much more interesting: a flexibility, unprecedented in the history of life on earth, in coping with changing situations, which allows us to override and redirect the default settings of a more primitive action/reaction repertory. This (ultimately genetic) heritage, as it comes to be expressed in human cultural attainments, is one not so much of local constraints as of very general ones loosely governing burgeoning diversity. In musical terms, again: the contrast between shared musical capacities built into all human bodies and brains (on the one hand) and the awesome diversity of musical behaviors in the world (on the other) will be fundamental to any general, deep-historical narrative of human musicking. But then, so too will be the inevitability that that sameness, given its phylogenetic history, would burgeon into that difference. The unfolding of this inevitability will need to be a part of the narrative. The plasticity of the relation between human brain phylogeny and ontogeny is orders of magnitude greater than that of any other creature on earth today, including our closest relatives, and the constraints by which our genotype results in phenotypic behaviors are far looser. This flexibility is what most dramatically separates us from the many other species that may be said to possess cultures – by which I mean nothing more or less than the intergenerational transmission of information and behaviors learned within a lifetime. Because of this flexibility, human cultures, including musical ones, explode in diversity in a way that those of all other cultural animals – apes, many birds, some aquatic mammals, and so forth – do not. (This explosive tendency is a not feature of the genome, and this difference is a Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 373 fundamental reason why attempts to assimilate culture to genetics, usually involving Richard Dawkins’s notion of “memes” functioning like genes, are doomed to unproductiveness.)8 The flexibility, in addition, provides humanists with the opportunity to connect the biological and linguistic turns; and it requires, as we will see, deep historical investigation for its proper understanding. What Richerson and Boyd have done, in effect, is to project the human construction of difference back far enough that it encompasses an evolutionary timescale. They are by no means alone in this, but travel these days in a large company of paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, paleocognitivists, paleolinguists, and even some suitably reconstructed evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists. This company is united by the effort to advance models of hominin evolution and of the emergence of human modernity that reconcile, one way or another, cultural flexibility and diversification with natural and sexual selection for advantageous traits. Insofar (in the first place) as these models see modern human capacities as the outcome of selective pressures shaped partly by hominin sociality itself, they are all versions of what has come to be known as the social intelligence hypothesis. This phrase gained currency to name specific arguments about hominin evolution and primate sociality, but it has gradually come to be applied to a wide range of evolutionary models in which the requirements of advanced sociality are understood to be a driving force in shaping natural selection.9

8 Dawkins introduced the term in The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976); its reach has been extended by many, including, aggressively, Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); and Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 1999). Critiques of the concept start from the difficulty of identifying discrete units of cultural transmission on a par with genes and, as I have said, from the transformative rather than conservative tendencies of cultural transmission. See, for example, Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 100–12. For a smart, carefully qualified defense of the usefulness of the meme concept in a selectionist analysis of culture, see W. G. Runciman, The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 9 Social intelligence was first defined by psychologist Edward Thorndike around 1920; it is also known as “Machiavellian intelligence,” following its application to primatology by Franz de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). Social intelligence hypotheses vary according to what features of primate or hominin societies they take to be the driving force in cognitive evolution. For philosopher Kim Sterelny, for instance, this force is the complexity of social interaction itself, especially as manifested in the burgeoning need for sustained cooperation and trust, and he has speculated more subtly than most on the quandaries and ambivalences built into this cooperation. See Kim Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Chapters 4, 6, and 7; and for a more recent, more developed statement, see Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). For Leslie C. Aiello and Robin I. M. Dunbar, instead, the focus is group size itself, from which they construct a much-discussed argument on the 374 gary tomlinson

Insofar (in the second place) as these models gauge the impact of hominin (later human) sociality and culture on evolutionary mechanisms altering the genome, they fall within the purview of the biocultural coevolution mentioned above. This is a broad approach to human evolution (with anticipations reaching all the way back to Darwin) that has seen rapid development and taken strong hold in recent years. Its basic tenet is that species with complex social behaviors will alter their environments through these behaviors, in turn altering the selective pressures on them and their adaptive histories. Through this feedback mechanism, all social species in some degree construct their own selective niches. In species with cultures – the special kind of sociality that transmits behaviorally (and non-genetically) information gained during a lifetime to succeeding generations – cultural attainments will enter into the feedback loops of niche construction. Thus culture will be linked to natural selection in two distinct ways, through the accretion of adapted traits tending toward the intergenerational transmission of information, and through the changes that cultural attainments themselves make in the selective landscape. From early on, the hominin lineage showed a novel capacity for the cultural alteration of its niches, and a unique ability, which Kim Sterelny has emphasized, to accumulate archives of cultural information, and these involved culture in the lineage’s evolution in more pervasive and powerful ways than those seen in any other lineage (Sterelny writes alluringly of

emergence of human language. Starting from the evidence that relative neocortex size increases among living primates in direct relation to group size, Aiello and Dunbar hypothesize that encephalization in hominin evolution was driven by the adaptive advantages of larger groups and the complexities entailed in maintaining them. This leads them through the following steps toward an argument for the gradual emergence of language from earlier primate communication systems: (1) physical grooming is crucial but time-consuming as a means of maintaining complex sociality; (2) among modern non-human primates, the amount of time needed for such grooming increases with group size toward a limit of expenditure; (3) the expansion of group size among fossil hominids, estimated from gross cranial capacity, suggests a leap beyond this limit sometime after the emergence of genus Homo; (4) this development may have put pressure on these hominins to substitute time-saving vocalizations for physical grooming; (5) this, in turn, might have militated for the increasing complexity of these vocalizations (the so-called “vocal grooming hypothesis”). See Leslie C. Aiello and Robin I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language,” Current Anthropology 34 (1993): 184–93; also Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). As this synopsis suggests, social intelligence hypotheses can be pressed to explain too much too unilaterally. For a recent endorsement with important caveats, see Kay E. Holekamp, “Questioning the Social Intelligence Hypothesis,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 65–69. For a recent overview of social intelligence from a primatological perspective, see Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 120–29. Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 375

“epistemic niche construction”).10 Many models of this coevolution have already appeared, delineating the extra-selective mechanisms that can arise in this kind of feedback system.11 The effect of the paradigm of biocultural coevolution on both the sciences of human emergence and the humanities will, I think, be dramatic. Its implication is that no evolutionary view of human modernity can afford to ignore the niche-altering forces that culture has exerted over the last several million years, anymore than it could afford to ignore the adaptive consequences of bipedalism. For the cultural historian, there is rich territory here – at least for the cultural historian willing to cast a net far back in human evolution. Let me put this more strongly: it represents an evasion of disciplinary responsibilities for humanists to continue to hand over such properly cultural pursuits to those scientists who have tended until now to dominate the conversation about human evolution. The evasion prolongs the retreat I mentioned above, deepening its anti-culturalist consequences that humanists so often decry. We can adduce examples in musical studies: the meagerly informed, but nonetheless influential views of Steven Pinker on the possible roles of musicking in evolution – encapsulated in his famous wisecrack likening music to “auditory cheesecake”–or the musical limitations of archaeologist Stephen Mithen (to which he disarmingly admits), which hamper his attempt to plot the origins of music in his wide-ranging book The Singing Neanderthals.12 “Only that which has no history is definable,” Nietzsche wrote in chapters of his Genealogy of Morals that eerily anticipate modern reasoning

10 Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice, 145. 11 In addition to the works cited above by Boyd and Richerson, by Sterelny, and by Sperber, and those cited below by Terrence Deacon, see Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, 2nd edn. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). Stuart Kauffman has been a leading theorist of the role of self-organizing, non-selected systems in evolution, and in some of his essays he extends this thinking in the direction of human cultures. See Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford University Press, 1995); and Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (Oxford University Press, 2000). An early anticipation of coevolutionary mechanisms was the so-called Baldwin Effect, introduced in the 1890s by James Baldwin and others; for recent thought on this topic, see Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, eds., Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 12 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 528–38; Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 376 gary tomlinson

on adaptation, exaptation, and extra-adaptive complexity.13 Scientists devoting themselves to human evolution should inscribe Nietzsche’s words on their office and laboratory walls. To approach the historical, including all things human, we must detail, describe, narrate, and construct compelling stories about, more than we must define. Let us admit that these scientists are not, by and large, historians, and that though many may be good musicians, next to none are passable musicologists. They do not compose and rarely have much sympathy for the descriptive interpretations of humanists; in the most uncomprehending instances, they dismiss them as tautological, circular, meaningless, pseudo-explanation, and so forth. (I recently had a conversation with a distinguished senior scientist who could not bring himself to see the heuristic value of description of any sort. He is an experimental biophysicist, and was annoyed at that moment with cognitivists; they, for their parts, relish the making of heuristic models – it is really their métier – and therefore veer toward humanistic approaches.) In tracing the evolutionary history of hominins, scientists are brought up against the limitations of their customary methods. They are required to construct a historical understanding – this much has been true at least since Darwin, whose signal achievement might be seen as the irrevocable historicizing of the life sciences. Moreover, in the case of hominins, preeminent cultural animals, this requirement entails becoming something different than a natural historian weighing such evidence as successive sedimentary layers preserving a lineage of trilobites. The paradigm of biocultural coevolution requires scientists to act also as cultural historians, able not merely to assay the positivistic evidence to which they are accustomed, but to understand and adopt the interpretive, descriptive modes through which our deepest analyses of human achievements and kinds of achievements have been constructed. Professional historians and interpreters of culture should not be watch- ing this endeavor from the sidelines, for biocultural coevolution poses a merger of natural and human sciences which, insofar as it aims to understand the most complex human activities, will be from the first a historical endeavor. It calls for thick, diachronic narrative as a counterpoise to the thinning of evidence of its scientific ingredients. “In a world in which...complex developmental interactions are always occurring,” Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin wrote in an early

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 516 (Genealogy of Morals 2:13; see also 2:12). Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 377 dismantling of sociobiology’s determinism, “history becomes of paramount importance.”14 Their aim was to describe the interplay of ontogen- etic development with phylogeny – an area whose complexities themselves have spawned a new approach to evolution, named evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo-devo”–but their conclusion applies as well to biocultural coevolution. The diachrony posed here will need to breach, indeed shatter the chronological limits of conventional history, especially if the aim is to attain a significant perspective on the most ingrained and widespread of human activities. But even these deep histories will have to take the form of narratives constructed from the marshaling of specificities. Consider the question of symbolic behavior. No one doubts that this phrase points toward a capacity or congeries of capacities with which all humans are innately equipped, or to which they are at least innately disposed, developing in normal ontogeny abilities and behaviors reflecting the capacities. No one hesitates to put certain universal and distinctly human abilities under the aegis of the phrase – for example, language, in the most basic instance, or the ability to recognize in perception or exter- nalize in practice a representation of a separate object in the world. And everyone knows that sophisticated symbolic representation of the latter sort reaches back more than 30,000 years, to Paleolithic cave paintings and figural sculpture, and perhaps much further than that. In fact, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and others concerned with the advent of human modernity typically take symbolic behavior as one of the touch- stones of our modernity, making its emergence and deep history a pressing matter to understand. And the matter becomes especially vital when we consider the ways in which symbolic behavior of whatever sort must from its earliest traces have entered into the flux of hominin culture, then taking its complicated place in coevolutionary feedback loops, reconstructing hominin niches, and shaping the selective terrain across which our ancestors moved. But what is symbolism, and how can we begin to understand it as a general human capacity or phenomenon or behavior? How could such a capacity have arisen, and what respective roles do phylogeny, ontogeny, and acculturation play in its species-wide and individual deployments? Attempts by archaeologists and other scientists to discuss nascent symbolism tend to avoid the deep issues at hand, as if invoking the word “symbolic” were self-explanatory, and to hover close to examples of iconic

14 Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 11. 378 gary tomlinson

pictorialism, body ornaments, face- or body-painting, and ritualized burial.15 This limitation is what we might expect; for the nature, emergence, and course of symbolism are quintessentially historical phenomena that will not, as Nietzsche said, admit of definition. A thick interpretation or narrative will be necessary to understand how symbolism arose in an animal kingdom that had thrived for 500,000,000 years without it, but such an approach falls outside the expertise of most archaeologists and scientists raising the issue. The one scientist I know in this area whose work truly and deeply probes the problem is Terrence Deacon, a cognitive biologist, anthropologist, and dynamic systems theorist, who has managed not only to advance a general model for symbolic cognition, but also to sketch a complex coevolutionary history by which it might have arisen. In other words, his approach, unlike that of most other scientists, begins to construct the narrative history of human symbolism in the longest view. It is a signal fact, however, that Deacon’s ability to make headway with this issue has throughout his career depended on an early and deep immersion in the semiotic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. This rich, interpretive body of thought has allowed him to locate human symbolism in a much broader biosemiotics and thus to envisage its emergence in our lineage as something other than a mystery ex nihilo. And this makes him exactly that exceptional scientist who manages to be a good humanist also – for he has worked toward a familiarity with the long humanistic tradition of thought on symbolism and an updating of its narratives in interaction with new views and evidence.16

15 For representative archaeological approaches to symbolic behavior, see Francesco d’Errico, Christopher Henshilwood, Graeme Lawson, et al., “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music – An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective,” Journal of World Prehistory 17 (2003): 1–70; Christopher S. Henshilwood and Curtis W. Marean, “The Origin of Modern Behavior: Critique of the Models and Their Test Implications,” Current Anthropology 44 (2003): 627–51; Nicholas Conard, “Cultural Evolution in Africa and Eurasia during the Middle and Late Pleistocene,” in Winfried Henke and Ian Tattersall, eds., Handbook of Paleoanthropology, 3 vols. (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2006–7), vol. III, 2001–37; and Ian Tattersall, “An Evolutionary Framework for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition by Homo sapiens,” Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 3 (2008): 99–114. For much more on the dilemmas of understanding the emergence of symbolic behavior, see Tomlinson, 1,000,000 Years of Music, Chapter 5. 16 The Deacon dossier is large. See especially Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain (London: Penguin, 1997); “The Symbol Concept,” in Maggie Tallerman and Kathleen R. Gibson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2012), 393–405; “Beyond the Symbolic Species,” Biosemiotics 6 (2012): 9–38; and “Multilevel Selection in a Complex Adaptive System: The Problem of Language Origins,” in Weber and Depew, eds., Evolution and Learning,81–106. Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 379

In furthering this kind of initiative, philosophers, linguists, semio- ticians, historians, analysts of pictorial and plastic arts, and many other humanists will all have something to offer – and musicologists among them. For example, and to carry the case of symbolic behavior one step further and in a musical direction: the equivocal relation of musicking to symbolism has been analyzed again and again, since the start of modern musicology in the days of Wagner, Hanslick, and Gurney. The analyses now need to find their place in conversations about the broadest human and parahuman semiotic capacities and about their deep-historical emergences. This connection, once achieved, will not only shift and enrich the archaeological discussion, but rebound back on more local concerns, reshaping intra-musicological analyses. The general point can be put the other way round and linked back to issues of human sameness and difference. The understanding of sameness, which in my view has lately coalesced as a methodological imperative underlying humanistic explorations of difference, can only be approached across a very long durée, a span large enough to encompass our evolutionary history. But this history, the new paradigm indicates, is from a very deep moment cultural as well as biological – in such a way that the two cannot be untangled – and meets up with the aboriginal tendency of hominin cultures to proliferate difference. Most evolutionary biologists will not be able to move far with this culturalist and historical emphasis; but it is the humanist’s bread and butter, and it will be the surest avenue along which we will describe the sameness-beneath-difference that is, in all our various ways, our presumptive foundational creed, if not our pursuit. So here is where we now stand: deep historical accounts of unprecedented nuance are being made feasible by burgeoning evidence of many kinds and from many sources, including archaeological, anthropological, psychological, cognitive, genetic, epigenetic, ethological, (conventionally) historical, and ethnographic. Darwinian concepts remain fundamental, of course, in any attempt to describe the emergence of the capacities of living things, all in some measure genetically constrained and all shaped by natural selection. But evolutionary theory has been enriched in ways that aim to model, describe, and comprehend many extra-Darwinian phenomena: the niche construction by which organisms participate in the production of their selective environments; the non-linear, unpredictable, even sudden emergences such feedback systems can engender, which have drawn dynamic systems theory (or complexity theory) to the heart of evolutionary thought; and the special role that sociality plays in all this. And to this list could be added the evo-devo complexities mentioned 380 gary tomlinson

before, or the impact on adaptation of acquired traits transmitted across generations in non- or epigenetic fashion, a set of neo-Lamarckian possibilities that are the subject of intense study and debate just now. In the particular case of hominin evolution, finally, this post-neo-Darwinism meets all the forms of sociality and non-genetic information transmission unique (or almost so) to our lineage, including especially the assembling of rich cultural repertories of thought and behavior. This new approach, biocultural, coevolutionary, complex, and historical, will enable new kinds of narration of the emergence and formation of complex, universal human behaviors. Its deep human histories will vastly complicate determinisms of phenotype by genotype and conceive both as malleable products of the mutual interactions of organism and environment – products of selected change, but also of changed selection. Such histories will not rebuff irreducibly ad hoc description, but instead subsist on it; they will resist reductive definition and might, in this resistance, work to reshape the balances of interdisciplinary study. They will focus bright light on the distinctive complexities that the human sciences have aimed to understand all along, those accumulations, stratifications, and formations of difference to which we give names such as “language,” “technology” (traditions of manipulation and exploitation of the material world), “religion” (traditions of intuitions of invisible, supersensible realms; metaphysics, if you like), and “music.” In doing so, they will come to understand how human sameness and difference, rightly construed, are not opposed to one another, and how nature and nurture have been mutually constituting vectors of change since long before Homo sapiens existed. The key concept in all this is history, but history of a particular sort: a descriptive mode that decenters stabilities and breaks down the enclosure of definition in favor of change and the energized play of sameness and difference. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has recently described the paradigm shift underway in the human sciences that I and others have called the “biological turn,” in a way that illuminates the general role of history, even though he focuses on language. The shift for him can be understood as a move from the comparative grammar reaching back to nineteenth-century Indo-Europeanists (Saussure among them) to the generative grammar of the Chomskyan age. The first is a historical effort bent on systematic definition (anti-Nietzschean in this way); the second, ultimately a biological one; and each of them holds out a hope of determining its own epistemological foundations, promising a solid “ontological anchoring” in the form of a chronologically prior, founding Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism 381 moment. Neither can carry through on its promise, however; the anchoring, Agamben writes, for comparative grammar (and for the disciplines grounded in it) is an originary historical event and for generative grammar (and for the cognitive disciplines associated with it) is the neuronal system and genetic code of Homo sapiens... Yet the human sciences will be capable of reaching their decisive epistemological threshold only after they have rethought, from the bottom up, the very idea of an ontological anchoring, and thereby envisaged being as a field of essentially historical tensions.17

Generative and comparative stances can be fruitful only when they relinquish false hopes of foundationalism, entering as they do so an interaction that delimits in a new way the historical medium of experience. The analysis of this medium has long roots in twentieth- and pre-twentieth-century thought. Signaled by Nietzsche, it stands near the center of Heidegger’s Dasein and Derrida’s différance alike. Agamben approaches it with the terms of Foucault’s archaeology, terms that harken back, whatever Foucault’s demurrals, to the hermeneutic “effective history” that was Gadamer’s response to Heidegger and, in general, to the hermeneutic tradition with which I began. For my part, I have moved in this essay to identify this historical medium with biocultural coevolution itself. But whatever the terms employed, it must be conceived as a medium comprising historical vectors and energies, and in the end it must relinquish the finalities of definition in favor of ongoing acts of telling, interpretation, and retelling.

17 Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca d’Isanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone, 2009), 110–11.

14 Difference unthought jairo moreno

The future sounds thus (see Example 14.1): More precisely, this is how the MacArthur Foundation’s biography of 2008 Fellow Miguel Zenón characterized the sound of jazz in the twenty-first century:

Miguel Zenón is a young jazz musician who is expanding the boundaries of Latin and jazz music through his elegant and innovative musical collages. As both a saxophonist and a composer, Zenón demonstrates an astonishing mastery of old and new jazz idioms, from Afro-Caribbean and Latin American rhythmical concepts to free and avant-garde jazz. This young musician and composer is at once reestablishing the artistic, cultural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st century.1

High praise indeed, especially in view of Zenón’s admission that he was only superficially familiar with the jazz tradition and its musical intricacies as late as 1996, the year he came to the US from Puerto Rico to study the music.2 Example 14.1 is from Jíbaro (2005) – the album that the Foundation singled out for praise – in which Zenón explores música jíbara, a broad category of rural Puerto Rican vernacular music. In that album, Zenón set out to explore and exploit the implications of a traditional jíbaro poetic form, the décima (literally, “tenth”), an octosyllabic ten-line stanza structure that strictly governs this virtuosic form. He organized every piece on this album, featuring his quartet, around formulas based on the numbers ten and five. The music made a strong impression. “I’ve rarely seen a jazz composer step forward with a project so impres- sively organized, intellectually powerful and well played from the start,”

1 MacArthur Foundation, “MacArthur Fellows / Meet the Class of 2008,” www.macfound.org/ fellows/815 (accessed July 9, 2014). 2 Comments by Zenón are cited from a personal interview conducted with the author in summer 2008, unless otherwise noted. All translations throughout the essay are the author’s own. I have also written on Zenón in: Jairo Moreno, “Past Identity: Guillermo Klein, Miguel Zenón and the Future Jazz,” in Pablo Vila, ed., Music and Youth Culture in Latin America 382 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 81–105. Difference unthought 383

Example 14.1 Miguel Zenón, Seis 5. 384 jairo moreno

wrote Ben Ratliff in his review of the first live performance of this project at New York City’s Jazz Gallery.3 This all might seem a straightforward example of a musician from the Spanish Caribbean “periphery” working in a metropolitan center, who – seeking to ground him- or herself – returns to his or her musical roots in search of resources that might yield new “musical collages,” as the Foundation put it. The result is an increasingly heterogeneous jazz, reflective of a generation of musicians for whom genre-hopping is the norm rather than the exception. Though not incorrect, this explanation is insufficient if we wish to account for the dynamics intimated in the MacArthur Foundation’s perception of the new and of a musical future. In the simplest explanation, Zenón can be said to have gone back to the future. That is, by returning to one of the most traditional forms of Puerto Rican music, he might have accentuated the capacity of the past to propel innovation.4 This turn to tradition would constitute a return, so to speak, one that would help to establish a temporal relation of anteriority to the contemporary. Also implied here are notions of exteriority and interiority: namely, the idea that the examination, exploration, and subsequent exploitation of resources from the past demand a displacement to the periphery and that, by contrast, the production of Jíbaro at the metropolitan center and through recourse to its musico-technical resources would constitute the passage to a future securely ensconced in this center’s interior. On closer inspection, this little calculus of time, space, and place involves some of the most enduring legacies of modernity: maps of exteriority and interiority, narratives of temporal lag, belatedness, and superses- sion, along with the enigma of multiply unfolding temporalities, the perception of change and transformation as development, marked

3 Ben Rattlif, “Inspired by the Complexities of Back-Country Troubadours,” The New York Times (June 5, 2004), www.nytimes.com/2004/06/05/arts/jazz-review-inspired-by-the-complexities-of- back-country-troubadours.html (accessed August 3, 2014). This record, like all of Zenón’s projects to date, was released by Marsalis (Branford Marsalis’s label). The research and fieldwork for Jíbaro was carried out with the help of a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. 4 The predominant public perception of música jíbara in Puerto Rico is of a rural or even backward form, because its most gifted practitioners live in or come from relatively remote parts of the island, and a deeply conservative one at that, demanding strict adherence to well- established forms and to its parameters for improvisation. The great majority of explorations of Puerto Rican vernaculars by musicians from other traditions have focused on Afro-diasporic forms of the bomba and plena, forms perceived as traditional, but with a more markedly urban dimension. Zenón did go on to work on plena in his Esta Plena (2008). Like Jíbaro, the later album was the result of research and extensive fieldwork carried out on the island, in this case through a Guggenheim Fellowship. Difference unthought 385 distinctions between tradition and innovation and between the rural and the urban, the privilege given to technologies and techniques, and the division of artistic, creative, and cultural labor. The temporal and spatial designs of this legacy of modernity are indeed peculiar. That global space is coexistent ought to be commonsense. Hegemonic modernity, however, makes of this global space a set of non-contemporaneous places, setting up a hierarchy of supposed temporal disparities. This hierarchy, in turn, underlies several commonplaces of modernity: some people lag behind others, depending upon where they fall along some imagined temporal- geospatial continuum.5 This positioning organizes structures of classification and distribution worldwide, determined in relation to a location and time of origin for modernity: Europe or the US, which I will call North Atlantic modernity. These structures also order the process that renders a particular geographical center and epochal origin (Europe or the US) as a universal. Finally, because otherness is central to the setting up of boundaries defining a center and an origin, they constitute concomitant hierarchies that rationalize and give intelligible form to difference. Modernity and difference, I propose, are at stake in the music above; in how critics, audiences, and cultural institutions have listened to Zenón’s music; and in what, in the last instance, is heard, both in the US and in Puerto Rico. It could hardly be otherwise, perhaps, given the complex Puerto Rico–US relation and the active connection the musician has sustained with his birthplace. Neither colonial nor postcolonial, Puerto Rico is entangled in the ongoing project of US late-modern imperialism (with nearly one-third of its inhabitants living on the mainland); yet the island figures prominently in narratives of Caribbean modernity.6

5 These designs are analyzed in, among others, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” boundary 2, 20:3 (1993): 65–76; Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and introd. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Edgardo Lander, ed., La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2005); and Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 6 There is an enormous amount of writing from the last twenty years, much of it quite polemical, dedicated to the question of Puerto Rican nationalism, modernity, and 386 jairo moreno

This complex contemporary positioning makes the remarkable story of Miguel Zenón a rich case for the analysis of difference and of the function of recent music-making in making a difference or failing to do so. Against the backdrop of Zenón’s professional trajectory, including his early musical education and his most recent project in Puerto Rico, I address questions of difference, identity, and sameness in the first section, from the perspective of critical modernity. I then explore a thinking of difference grounded in philosophical ideas of the singular and the universal that emanate from modernity but are not determined by it, drawing especially on the work of Alain Badiou. Finally, combining propositions from the first two sections, I propose a framework for examining something like a principled indifference to difference: an ethical and political claim that runs contrary to the imperative that difference-based identities, particularly those of oppressed peoples and societies, must be constantly proclaimed and relentlessly performed in order to resist or subvert the status quo.

Whither modernities?

Historically and in the island’s imaginary, música jíbara and the Puerto Rican peasantry emerge from the intertwined processes of coloniality, slavery, and economic exploitation. Ángel Quintero Rivera tracks the formation of a “rural society of fugitives” that creates what he calls a

postmodernity, including Rafael Bernabe, Manual para organizar velorios (San Juan: Huracán, 2003); Luis Fernando Coss, La nación en la orilla (respuesta a los posmodernos pesimistas) (San Juan: Punto de Encuentro, 1996); Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, La memoria rota: ensayos sobre cultura y política (San Juan: Huracán, 1993); Luis Felipe Díaz and Marc Zimmerman, eds., Globalización, nación, postmodernidad: estudios culturales puertorriqueños. (San Juan: LACASA, 2001); Juan Duchesne Winter, Ciudadano insano: ensayos bestiales sobre cultura y literatura (San Juan: Callejón, 2001); Carlos Gil, El orden del tiempo: ensayos sobre el robo del presente en la utopía puertorriqueña (San Juan: Postdata, 1994); Ramón Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Héctor Meléndez, La identidad ausente: credos-pueblos- capital-siglo (Rio Piedras: La Sierra, 1996); Carlos Pabón, Nación postmortem: ensayos sobre los tiempos de insoportable ambigüedad (San Juan: Callejón, 2002); Rubén Ríos Ávila, La raza cómica: del sujeto en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Callejón, 2002); Irma Rivera Nieves, Soberanía: (de) legimitaciones del poder y la autoridad en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Postdata, 2010); and Arturo Torrecilla, La ansiedad de ser puertorriqueño: ethnoespectáculo e hiperviolencia en la modernidad líquida (San Juan: Vértigo, 2004). Journals such as Bordes and Postdata have also been influential in these discussions. Essays from Postdata are compiled in Irma Rivera Nieves and Carlos Gil, eds., Polifonía salvaje: ensayos de cultura y política en la postmodernidad (San Juan: Postdata, 1995). Difference unthought 387

“counter-plantation” space in the island’s mountainous regions.7 As early as the sixteenth century, in this space coexisted mestizos, indigenous peoples, fugitive slaves from the island and from elsewhere in the Caribbean (legally declared free upon arrival to Puerto Rico), and landless arrivals from mainland Spain and the Canary Islands.8 By the eighteenth century, this ethnically and racially heterogeneous assemblage, which had its own internal conflict regarding land acquisition and ownership, increasingly inhabited a dialectical relationship with the dominant culture of the colonial cities and with the less heterogeneous black slave cultures of the sugar plantation. By the nineteenth century, and owing to pressures to declare fidelity to the Spanish authorities, the majority of the population declared itself mixed, and there were far more free black and mulatto than enslaved persons. Earlier in that century, the term jíbaro had come to designate the native peasant, a category increasingly associated solely with a Hispanic ethic and culture.9 This is also the moment in which peasant music, which had by then developed specific ensembles, forms, and thematic concerns, as well as instrumentation, became emblematic of the most profound relation to Puerto Rican soil and character. The exclusive association of música jíbara with a Hispanic-descendent peasantry dwelling in the “mountains” was, according to Quintero Rivera, “clearly a myth,” for it was “mulatto” music at its very inception, the expression of an ethnic amalgam born of an encounter among diverse peoples escaping a colonial order.10 From the perspective of modernity, however, it is equally significant that those peoples would eventually be subject to race-based demographic classification and that the national imaginary would adopt that classification as a basis for crowning música jíbara as the embodiment of the nation. These forms of subjectivity formation and of subjection are classic elements of modern governmentality, as I discuss later. The differences that race and ethnic categories installed themselves rendered the island intelligible to itself, even as that intelligibility yielded a mythological distortion of social reality. If, as Quintero Rivera persuasively argues, the space out of which música jíbara was created existed as the second half of the dialectic between

7 Ángel Quintero Rivera, Salsa, sabor y control. Sociología de la música tropical (Mexico City: Siglo ventiuno, 1998), 208–9. 8 Further complicating this rough demographic account is the presence of Jewish- and Moorish-descended cultural practices among Spanish and Canary Island arrivals. 9 Quintero Rivera, Salsa, sabor y control, 220–21. 10 Ibid., 225. 388 jairo moreno

plantation and counter-plantation, the formation of an agrarian proletariat out of the development of sugar plantation and manufacturing in the eighteenth century (the first part of the dialectic) would resonate at a later stage of Puerto Rican modernity. Indeed, Sidney Mintz locates a key moment for global modernity in the confluence of resource extraction, exploitation of manual labor, and latent industrialization of the agrarian sector in colonial Puerto Rico. According to Mintz, the colonial sugar complex served as a living laboratory for technologies aimed at disciplining human bodies into new forms of labor, which would help to organize the subsequent European Industrial Revolution.11 Mintz is less concerned with the historical primacy of the Caribbean in the development of economic modernity than with its constitutive role – as a region supposedly “exterior” to modernity – in the formation of some of modernity’s most powerful dimensions: industrial capitalism, technologies of people management, and shifts in taste and consumer behavior vis-à-vis manufactured non-essential commodities.12 And, if as it is said, “what goes around, comes around,” it is also the case that at a later stage of modernity, the middle of the twentieth century, the pressures of modern global capitalism on the “periphery” forced a radical and quick shift in Puerto Rico from an agrarian base to a fully industrialized one. This moment, regarded as one of modernization, propelled a massive migration of laborers to the US, pushed vast numbers of people away from rural areas into urban centers, and has had the unintended effect of threatening the disappearance of música jíbara. Thanks in part to government programs, música jíbara overcame this crisis of modernization after the Second World War.13

11 Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine, 1974); and Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). 12 Mintz works with Marx’s assertion that what he called “the rosy dawn” of capitalism begins, as Timothy Mitchell paraphrases it, “not in England or the Netherlands but in the production, trade, and finance of the colonial system.” See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols., introd. Ernest Mandel, vol. I trans. Ben Fowkes (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), vol. I, 703; and Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1–35. 13 The Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (founded in 1955) declares “Jíbaro music” (in Spanish, the institute uses the expression “música campesina,” literally “peasant music”) one of four official autochthonous traditional genres, along with bomba, plena, and danza. www.icp. gobierno.pr/programas/programa-de-artes-escenico-musicales#ley_musica_auto (accessed July 9, 2014). Sociologist Ángel Quintero Rivera proposes that the music formed part of the commercial music known as salsa and popularized in New York City from the late 1960s; “La presencia viva del folklore en la composición popular: la música jíbara en la salsa (y el jazz)”: paper read at Thinking Music and Sound in Latin America and the Caribbean, Columbia University, New York City, February 9–10, 2013. Difference unthought 389

In the end, we might reasonably conclude that from its inception, música jíbara was of and in modernity. Mintz has plenty of company in questioning the model of modernity as a project of worldwide diffusion, first, through European colonialism, and later, from US imperialism. While Mintz focuses on the Caribbean and the globalization of capitalist dispositives, others consider the primacy of Creole elites in the Caribbean and South America in the genealogy of the modern nation; the constitutive role of the Haitian slavery emancipation in the realization of European revolutionary ideals; philosophical positions and political structures; or the transformation, as part of the Middle Passage, of forms of cultural production by enslaved peoples – music, most notably – into modes of social subversion in the New World.14 I will refer to the general conditions of circulation for modernity that Mintz and others have proposed via a concept Icall“critical modernity.”15 Key to “critical modernity” is a recognition of modernity’sconstitutionasa“project” of modernization and a “projection” of “sensibilities, perceptions, choices” and relations to past, present, and future.16 An important advantage of this critical conception is that modernity needs to be conceived in the plural, as the dispersion of structures of governance, technologies, and modes of subjectivity through

14 On modern nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, [1983] 1991); and James E. Sanders, “The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Contesting Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 46:2 (2011): 104–27. On Haiti, see Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Lot,” in Bruce Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 220–37. On the Middle Passage, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also François- Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992); and Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 15 I adapt the term from the title of Knauft, ed., Critically Modern. 16 The idea that modernity is “project” and “projection” appears in Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 220–40. Jonathan Xavier Inda discusses the Foucauldian scheme of this definition in “Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction,” in Jonathan Xavier Inda, ed., Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 1–20. See also Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 390 jairo moreno

world space and time such that no absolute center from which it emanated can be determined in the last instance. The example of música jíbara reveals the inextricability of the economic order of modernity from its cultural forms. The economic and the cultural, however, do not yield the same critical valuation with respect to whatever difference each may produce. Thus, if on the one hand, as the argument of Mintz indicates, the economic dimension of modernity could ground a critique both of notions of spatial interiority and exteriority and of ideologies of temporal anteriority and even of posteriority, it was because these spatial and temporal differences were an effect of modernity’s capitalist designs. On the other hand, Latin American cultural difference suggests that, in the face of radical economic disparities, local practices did not merely survive, but thrived, either despite modernity (in the case of vernacular forms) or because of it (in the case of local versions of forms resulting from North Atlantic expansion). Culture, in short, came to embody a profound ambivalence toward maps of difference in modernity. Octavio Paz offered a pessimistic diagnostic when he characterized Latin America’s position within modernity as a “geographical fringe condemned in the history of civilization” and defined it in terms of lag, exteriority, and difference.17 Alejo Carpentier famously declared that unlike the musical history of Europe – which “presents itself as a succession of techniques, tendencies, of schools exemplified by the presence of the uppermost creators, until it arrives through a series of achievements to the most audacious searches of the present time”–Latin American music appears as an “art governed by a constant replay of confrontations between the proper and the foreign, the autochthonous and the imported.”18 Taking an opposite view, thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Foucault, and Marshall Berman made key appeals to Latin American figures such as Paz and

17 Hermann Herlinghaus, Renarración y descentramiento. Mapas alternativos de la imaginación en América Latina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2004), 49. See also Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974). 18 I paraphrase from the following sentences: “[L]a historia musical de Europa, el proceso de su desarrollo resulta lógico, continuado, ajustado a su propia organicidad, presentándose como una sucesión de técnicas, de tendencias, de escuelas ilustradas por la presencia de creadores cimeros, hasta llegarse, a través de logros sucesivos, a las búsquedas más audaces del tiempo presente”; and “cuando nos enfrentamos con la música latinoamericana, en cambio, nos encontramos con que ésta no desarrolla en función de los mismos valores y hechos culturales...que resultan insólitos para quien pretenda aplicar determinados métodos al análisis de un arte regido por un constante rejuego de confrontaciones entre lo propio y lo ajeno, lo autóctono y lo importado.” Alejo Carpentier, “América Latina en la confluencia de coordenadas históricas y su repercusión en la música,” in Isabel Aretz, ed., América Latina en su música (Paris: Unesco, and Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), 7, 9. Difference unthought 391

Borges as co-participants in an ecumenically conceived modernity.19 This later perspective has recently become predominant in Latin American studies. Hermann Herlinghaus’s words are representative: “the peripheral no longer signals a state of deficit but rather specific conditions and needs of decentering,” for, as he continues,

A modernity that is not situated in the midst of criteria and expectations previously rationalized; rather, a distinct modernity as an ensemble of experiences of a new cultural extension, signaled by means of topologies of the heterogeneous and the intercultural, and by anachronic temporalities. This is a modernity constituted by new crossings of the political and the cultural and by multiple articulations between the mass mediated and the popular.20

Latin American modernity is here advanced in terms of simultaneity and co-participation within the context of multiple co-existing, coeval modernities. At the heart of this project lies a historical reexamination of contact between worldly figures and local actors during the twentieth century. In one of the most brilliant and imaginative genealogical analyses of Latin American culture, difference, and modernity, Argentine Beatriz Sarlo examines the career of Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979): an Argentine author, intellectual, and cultural agent, who, according to Sarlo, wagered on the powers of translation as a means of neutralizing differences.21 Ocampo felt deep humiliation anytime a conflict or misunderstanding occurred between her and her many international interlocutors on the basis of insurmountable differences they might have perceived (national, regional, or hemispheric, but not, at the time, gendered).22 Sarlo concludes that any imagined commonality with a cosmopolitan modernity such as Ocampo’s would be shot through with tacit incompatibilities, grounded in the location of any Latin American situation. She coined the phrase “peripheral modernities” to account for such experiences and to underline

19 For Paz, see Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, trans. Seyla Ben-Habib (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 3–15. For Borges, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1971); and Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 20 Herlinghaus, Renarración y descentramiento, 28. 21 Beatriz Sarlo, La máquina cultural. Maestras, traductores y vanguardistas (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1998). 22 Ocampo published translations of Camus, Malraux, and Sartre, and partook in conversations with Cocteau and Lacan, hosted Stravinsky and Tagore, among many other luminaries. 392 jairo moreno

that the locatedness of all modernities (Europe’s included) constitutes their main index of difference.23 In Sarlo’s influential analysis, the locatedness of Latin America produces its sociocultural specificity as a positive value, while still maintaining its link to a classically defined European literate modernity. Herlinghaus’s decentering dynamic reconfigures Sarlo’s analysis, responding to broadening horizons for the participation of the vernacular, the popular, and indeed the mass-mediated (“pop,” in Latin American and Caribbean terms) after the First World War. In this dynamic, specificity becomes discursively inscribed as “difference.” And difference becomes both a practice and an object of critique. Alberto Moreiras, for example, highlights the “exhaustion of difference,” noting that the insistence on Latin American difference is exhausting precisely because its presumed power to properly know and represent the continent has been consumed, with no visible result.24 Alternately, Arturo Escobar argues that difference as such does not carry intrinsic value in cultural encounters (conflictive or not) that might generate global or regional distributions or reiterate previous ones; instead, value circulates as “difference in effective power associated with particular cultural meanings and practices,” and as whatever difference cultural “difference makes in the definition of social life.”25 The question is how to bridge the gap between Moreiras’s concern with the political exhaustion of representation and Escobar’s call to attend to difference as a power-infused dimension of living social practices. Returning to the case of Zenón, we might ask whether difference makes a difference in those sense-making operations (such as Zenón’s musical output) that are embedded in networks of modern representation (such as the MacArthur Foundation’s laudatory Fellow profiles). Where are those differences experienced: at the level of the individual, communities, or institutions of various kinds; relations of ownership; the production of subjectivity, selfhood, and personhood; or knowledge production? And what forms do they take: cultural, economic, ideational, or political? From the perspective of critical modernity that I have outlined in this section, three general ideas emerge regarding the modern genealogy of difference, which may help with these questions. First, I maintain that the

23 Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica. Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Vision, 1988). 24 Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 25 Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 14. Difference unthought 393 multifarious, often chaotic, and ambiguous movement of modernity destabilizes a priori attempts to distinguish a center from a diffuse periphery, where its ideas, institutions, forms of knowledge, and technologies have been or will be disseminated. Second, the dispersion of a sense of center and periphery makes of modernity a radically relational phenomenon, one that enables us to no longer think of modernity in the singular. The descriptive lexicon of modernity – including terms such as “alternative,”“divergent,”“liquid,”“multiple,”“peripheral,” and “vernacular,” among others – elaborates its condition of locatedness, but in full recognition of what Mary Louise Pratt labels relations of “contradiction,” “complementarity,” and “differentiation” of a pluralized modernity. In other words, modernity is not a flat abstraction, but rather a fraught, contested, and multiple sociohistorical phenomenon, with effects on actual living people.26 Third, the mechanisms by which difference becomes intelligible – the rationalization of distributions and divisions and their concomitant hierarchies – reveal difference to be what separated the center from the periphery and the contemporary from the anterior, but also what separated the center from itself. That is to say, not only is the center riddled by internal differences, but difference appears simply as the way things are. The movement I allude to here is dialectical: like colonialism and imperialism, modernity in its classic form must maintain its difference from the less-than-modern or the non-modern, but it must also produce subjects in its own image everywhere it “expands.” In sum, difference insinuates itself as modernity’s unthought and as that which modernity most needs being un-unthought.

Modern pedagogies, pedagogies of the modern Critical modernity, as I have described it, poses the challenge of conceptualizing both modernity’s radical pluralization and an attendant de-universalization of North Atlantic modernity. Contrary to any notion that a plural understanding of modernity simply allows unimpeded postmodern flows, I propose that it is necessary to scrutinize the dynamic of Pratt’s relations of “contradiction,”“complementarity,” and “differentiation,” together with the structuring effects that historical ideologies of superiority and inferiority and experiences of exteriority have on social and

26 Mary Louise Pratt, “Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Relational Analysis,” in Elizabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, ed., Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 32–35. 394 jairo moreno

cultural orders in specific locations.27 The task, then, becomes one of studying how ideas and practices drawn from the vast archive of modernity link everyday experiences to larger historical processes of modernization, processes that at the same time gain their texture from these localized experiences. Contemporary music pedagogies are part and parcel of these processes, and with this we move to Puerto Rico and to Miguel Zenón’s formative years. Zenón relates in no uncertain terms how, as a young boy growing up in the Residencial Luis Llorens Torres (the largest public housing complex in the Caribbean and one of the most impoverished districts of metropolitan San Juan), a local rigorous music pedagogy program with clear European roots marked the beginning of a long march toward “the future.” Ernesto Vigoreaux, a professional musician who was also involved in community leadership and organized music labor, began offering free music instruction to young students in the neighborhood in the mid- 1980s. None of his pupils were allowed to touch an instrument for a full year; instead, they dedicated all of their efforts to developing aural musicianship and literacy. Using the nineteenth-century Spanish priest and pedagogue Hilarión Eslava’s solfège manual, students slowly worked their way through musical notation, singing and conducting at the same time, and taking dictation, day in and day out. Ten years old at the time, Zenón wanted to take up the piano, but had to settle for the saxophone, since only band instruments were available on loan. Eventually, Vigoreaux would take small ensembles to perform around the island on weekends.28 A more liberal, but no less rigorous education followed Zenón’s early musical formation, when he was admitted to the Escuela Libre de Música de Puerto Rico. The Libre, as it is commonly known, is a network of music- focused schools founded in 1946 with the purpose of “developing and

27 See John Beverly, Michael Aronna, and José Oviedo, eds., The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Hermann Herlinghaus and Monika Walter, eds., Posmodernidad en la periferia: enfoques latinoamericanos de la nueva teoría cultural (Berlin: Langer Verlag, 1994); and Alfonso de Toro, ed., Postmodernidad y Postcolonialidad (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1997). 28 The general contour of this narrative of musical literacy is typical of much musical life there since the late nineteenth century, when, caught between the last vestiges of Spanish colonial rule and the imperial ambitions of the US, military music was abundant and there were armies of musicians able to read music. The influence of military band music in Puerto Rican musicians’ literacy is discussed in Ruth Glasser, Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). See also Timothy Brennan, Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (New York: Verso, 2008). Difference unthought 395 channeling the innate artistic sensibility of our people by means of a systematic plan of teaching, learning, experimenting, divulgation, and formation of musical art.”29 Created by Ernesto Ramos Antonini, a lawyer, musician, and legislator, the Libre became associated with Operación Serenidad (Operation Serenity), a project initiated by Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected governor (1949), known as “the father of modern Puerto Rico” (in other words, the designation of the island in 1952 as a US Commonwealth, or Estado Libre Asociado – literally, Associated Free State). Serenidad, said Muñoz Marín, “tries to impart to economic efforts and political liberty objectives that are harmonious with the spirit of Man in its governing function, rather than as a servant to economic processes...the Puerto Rican people awaits eagerly to remain kind-hearted and peaceful in its understanding and attitudes, all the while utilizing fully and vigorously all the complex resources of modern civilization.”30 This project followed shortly on the heels of several of Marín’s “economic efforts” and “political liberty objectives,” which collectively comprise the period of “modernization,” especially the drafting of the Puerto Rican Constitution (1952), the industrialization of the Puerto Rican economy under Operación Manos a la Obra (Operation Bootstrap; 1949), and a wide-reaching literacy campaign (1949). This is also the moment in which música jíbara received institutional support from the newly founded Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (1955). The setting up of the political, the economic, the moral, and the artistic as distinct domains is, of course, one of the key distributive processes of modernity, as Habermas argued.31 Modernization in Puerto Rico creates the need for institutions whose task it is to reassemble these domains, such that education in the arts strengthens the social fabric morally and economically in order to help provide political stability during periods of transition. The point is that the specific musical education that Zenón received at the Libre cannot be divorced from this complex of modernizing forces, although it is not fully determined by them either, being in part a

29 “Desarrollar y encauzar la innata sensibilidad artística de nuestro pueblo, mediante un plan sistemático de enseñanza, aprendizaje, experimentación, divulgación y formación del arte musical.” Puerto Rico, House of Representatives, Law 365, April 20, 1946. 30 “[S]e procura impartir al esfuerzo económico y a la libertad política unos objetivos armónicos con el espíritu del hombre, en su función de regidor más bien que de servidor de los procesos económicos...el pueblo de Puerto Rico espera ansiosamente mantenerse bondadoso y tranquilo en su entendimiento, en sus actitudes, mientras utiliza plena y vigorosamente todos los complejos recursos de la civilización moderna.” www.proyectosalonhogar.com/BiografiasPr/Munoz/op_serenidad.html (accessed July 9, 2014). 31 Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project.” 396 jairo moreno

symptom and realization of the integrative vision and aesthetic education hopes of Ramos Antonini and Muñoz Marín. Moreover, this education, which Zenón says prepared him well for his eventual music studies in the US, embodies the correlation between modernity and modernization. This correlation is a trademark of Caribbean and Latin American history throughout the twentieth century, and is a living symbol of its contradiction as a region that, without being fully (or truly) modernized, is nonetheless modern. The Libre is a cultural policy success story, having trained a substantial number of influential musicians.32 It was during his years there that the teenaged Zenón developed an interest in jazz, although he concentrated on classical alto saxophone performance, as the school did not offer a jazz concentration. Only toward the very end of his course work could he play in the school’s big band. The repertoire, he has said, was not mainstream jazz, consisting mainly of orchestra charts from well-known “Latin” bands such as Tito Puente’s. After finishing high school, local playing jobs allowed him to gain familiarity with some jazz standards. By his own account, however, his musical language in jazz styles was only informally developed and mostly self-taught. He would later characterize this in terms of a lack of understanding of the traditions of the blues and comprehension of musical techniques of harmony and improvisation. Nonetheless, throughout these years, he gained increasing exposure to a repertoire that included modern jazz and some of the experimental efforts of Ornette Coleman, avidly listening to N.P.R. broadcasts and recordings shared with him by his better-off peers. Speaking of his early influences, he has said that “I admired David Sánchez and Danilo Pérez, and using their music as a kind of ‘North’ with a Latin American touch[,] more balanced and modern[,] I began to find myself.”33 He left for the US a year after finishing high school, with assistance from a Pell Grant and a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music. Following his graduation from Berklee in 1999, he moved to New York City. There, he initially joined fellow saxophonist and Libre alumnus David Sanchez’s group, and eventually formed his own

32 Former students include saxophonist David Sánchez, bassist John Benitez, trumpeter Luis “Perico” Ortiz, pianist Arturo Ortiz, flutist Nestor Torres, and rapper Tego Calderón, among others. 33 “Admiraba a David Sánchez, Danilo Pérez y utilizando su música como norte con un toque latinoamericano más balanceado y moderno me fui encontrando.” Ana Teresa Toro, “Hijo de la fusión,” El Nuevo Día (August 29, 2010). www.adendi.com/archivo.asp? Xnum=768527&year=2010&mon=8&keyword=miguel%20zen5C35B3n (accessed July 9, 2014). Difference unthought 397 quartet. Less than a decade later, the MacArthur Foundation cited his work as the embodiment of “jazz in the 21st century.”

Confronting difference

In a sense, Zenón’s story of becoming captivated by jazz is hardly unique: it is the standard story of jazz musicians born outside the US. Nor is his eventual move to the US to study the music unique.34 Contemporary jazz circulates through markets, media (recordings, broadcasting, written and spoken criticism), performance networks, discourse, and pedagogy.35 What circulates as “jazz” is not simply a set of musical forms (works and the genre and style taxonomies that help position them within a wider tradition), but a vast network of values encompassing aesthetic predilec- tions and choices, cognitive technologies of teaching and learning, historical perceptions, and cultural assumptions. Within critical modernity, the global circulation of jazz obeys no single logic. As Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli ask, “why is it that some forms move or are moved along? What limits are imposed on cultural forms as the condition of their circulation across various types of social space?”36 One response proposes we consider “forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them.”37 Interpretive communities around jazz constitute formidable forces for the creation and enforcement of difference. Zenón encountered just the kind of limits and constraints that Gaonkar and Povinelli highlight when he began exploring performing venues in Boston, in order to put his budding skills into practice. Systematically studying the history of the saxophone in jazz with the venerable educator Bill Pierce, he felt increasingly ready to hold his own with more experienced players in local jam sessions. Zenón was tenacious in his pursuit of

34 In 2009–10, the last year for which there are public statistics, the Berklee College of Music had 4,131 students, 25 per cent of whom were “international,” representing eighty different nationalities. www.berklee.edu/about/facts.html#.UEpBbpYrySo (accessed July 9, 2014). An additional 2,500 students take courses online, though no information exists on their location. 35 Jerome Harris, “Jazz on the Global Stage,” in The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, ed. Ingrid Monson (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 103–34. 36 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public Culture 15:3 (2003): 387. 37 Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture (14:1) (2002): 192. 398 jairo moreno

knowledge outside the classroom, questioning anyone willing to talk to him about how to play something or other. However, he also encountered reluctance on the part of some African American students to share information with him. It was then that he realized the challenge of gaining intimate knowledge and understanding of a musical tradition to which he was a late-comer, and to which others, he felt, had a more legitimate and immediate cultural claim (as well as a sense of historical ownership). In particular, he realized that the blues and gospel traditions – traditions that he had little or no contact with growing up in Puerto Rico – were indispensable conditions for proper jazz performance and that, whatever those musics were, the affective force they carried for those responsible for their creation could not be fully codified even by the expansive pedagogies of Berklee. At the same time, his social and musical interaction with this group of peers was limited. As Zenón put it, “Basically, many African American students played only with themselves, it was rather closed.” Some, he said, often spoke of “us and the question of ‘us’,” adding that “it was hard to get in those circles, you know, but once you were in you began to understand that much in their attitudes had to do with where they came from, the music they heard.”38 He observed that “listening to them play, one became aware that what they brought to jazz was a language of their own...and then you began to try to enter into that language.” Limits do emerge from the interaction of forms (here, mainstream jazz) and interpretive communities (here, a particular group of African American jazz students at Berklee around 1997), and they occur across various social spaces. For Zenón, student social interaction over meals or listening to music in a group setting allowed for certain – to him, unproblematic – groupings across ethnicity and/or race, whereas the bandstand afforded other types of interaction. And so it was that by judiciously listening to as much blues and gospel as he could, and by stubbornly insisting on sitting in at sessions at Wally’s (the favorite club for student jams), he broke through the barriers he initially encountered. Danilo Pérez, the Panamanian pianist he admired during his Libre years, advised Zenón to play with people from various cultural backgrounds in order “to get their stuff,” which, said Perez, needs to be learned through trial and error and on the bandstand. Zenón recalls many embarrassing moments when he was ignorant of certain tunes or simply unable to keep up. However, before long he was in constant

38 In 2009–10, the percentage of the “domestic African-American student body” was 11 per cent and that of the “domestic Hispanic student body” was 10 per cent. www.berklee. edu/about/facts.html#.UEpBbpYrySo (accessed July 9, 2014). Difference unthought 399 demand. Instead of feeling that he had arrived, he relates, he simply felt that he might have been on the right track. From Zenón’s perspective, the experience of the African American students was fundamental to their participation in US social and musical history. It was also the case that, as in Lee and LiPuma’s analytic of circulation cited above, many of these students’ effective deployment of that experience and participation played out as a hierarchical distribution of musical knowledge and information, which would have located Zenón in a different history and experience and could have circumscribed his ability to participate fully as a jazz musician in US society. The coexistence of these respective Puerto Rican and black American experiences alongside their generalization (the stereotyped histories told from either side of the encounter) produces the ambivalences proper to critical modernity, which manifest in the specificity of claims that people make in its name.

“Otherwise modern – yet undoubtedly modern”

The affirmation of difference (class, culture, ethnic, gender, generation, geopolitics, race, religion, sexuality, among others) has, in the recent past, anchored claims to participation in a world understood in pluralized terms. Difference, argues William E. Connolly, is that in relation to which any identity is constituted such that a politics of difference is always a politics of identity (and vice versa), a politics given in the complementarity of identity and difference.39 Critics from across the political spectrum worried about the dangers of fragmentation in a social field characterized by the proliferation of multiple identities, heterogeneity, plurality, and so on. Some degree of coherence has nonetheless appeared in the context of the politics of identity/difference, insofar as there exists a common interest in modernity, whether the impulse is toward critiquing it (on the Left) or defending it (on the Right). If, for the Right, the achievements of a classically defined liberal modernity ought to be conserved and fostered, the Left has been galvanized instead by a consensus that modernity has either rendered difference exterior to itself or has universalized one

39 William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). A robust argument in favor of “difference” in democratic politics appears in Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 400 jairo moreno

particularity at the expense of all others. Although politics of identity/ difference are more complex than I can address here, what is certain is that those on the Left side of the spectrum have tended to refuse modernity’s dual operation of exteriorizing and subsuming difference. In the name of border crossing, of the radically contingent, the contextual, the historically discontinuous, the local, the petit récit, and the particular, this wing of identity/difference politics pronounced, without irony, a universal derogation of universals. However, this refusal of universals could only ignore notions of the whole or of totality at its peril. For one thing, as Néstor García-Canclini observes, “we refuse to admit...that worrying about a social totality makes any sense. One may forget about totality when one is interested only in the differences among people, not when one is also concerned with their inequality.”40 In addition, the logic of classical modernity was itself integral to the critical matrix of identity/difference. Or, as I put it above, modernity’s peculiar temporal and spatial designs gave difference a distinct role and intelligibility: whatever was deemed different was exterior and/or anterior to modernity at the same time that modernity defined its self- identity vis-à-vis difference. Ignoring the co-constitution of difference and inequality, Iain Chambers could pretend to renounce the designs of modernity, denouncing, for example, “the transcendental pretensions of reason, of the Western ratio, that continually attempts to regulate unruly equivocations and render differences decidable.”41 The question, as Chambers put it, was thus not really about the existence of difference as such; it was about deciding which differences counted and how they were valued. From the perspective of critical modernity, there can be difference without modernity, and to advocate difference, however politically progressive it may be, is to partake of the ratio that Chambers seeks to overcome. In any event, the terms of Chambers’ engagement with difference and modernity no longer predominate. Michel-Rolph Trouillot remarks that, “modernity necessitates various readings of alterity, what Michel de Certeau calls a heterology. The claim that someone – someone else – is modern is structurally and necessarily a discourse on the Other, since the

40 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López, foreword by Renato Rosaldo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 41 Iain Chambers, “Signs of Silence, Lines of Listening,” in Iain Chambers and Linda Curi, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skins, Divided Horizons (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 50. Difference unthought 401 intelligibility of that position – what it means to be modern – requires a relation to otherness.”42 Two interpretations are possible. First, modernity’s self-imposed requirement that there be an “Other and an Elsewhere” could mean that, in affirming its identity, the “different” subverts the parochial universalism of European or US modernity in the name of a particular. The challenge to this position is twofold. On the one hand, if identity/difference is taken as a purely relational principle, power differentials between various identity/difference parties would remain in place in an antagonistic field that simply displaces the exclusions and exterioriza- tions of modernity to another terrain: that of identity/difference politics. On the other hand, if parties might enter in solidarity pacts or strategic alliances, they do so on condition of an appeal to some universal (even the claim to be against universals is itself, formally, a universal, as is the valuation of difference as such) and a concomitant, albeit partial, bracketing of the absolute particularity of identity/difference politics.43 A second interpretation, closer to the spirit of Trouillot’s remark, falls within the frame of critical modernity and recognizes the dialectical co-implication of its constituent elements. This, I would argue, goes beyond the recognition of the dialectical character of identity/difference within modernity, which simply affirms that a formerly excluded party reclaims visibility to the degree that it asserts its difference from some excluding power. In contrast, for Trouillot, modernity requires not merely an alter-ego, but what he calls an “alter-native”–that is, an Other who is nonetheless native to modernity: the Caribbean, in his case. Freed from a negation of a modernity that negated them, only modern subjects remain: “we have always been modern, differently modern, contradictorily modern, otherwise modern – yet undoubtedly modern.”44 Trouillot’s notion of “Otherwise Modern” invites familiar charges of radical contingency and relativity, similar to those levied against the identity/difference model. If all there is are forms of being modern, who is in a position to establish the terms for any comparison, and how might they do so? Conversely, does Trouillot’s model not maintain a generalized, albeit tacit, idea of what modernity positively is – opposed to, say, definitions of modernity as a manner of belonging – as a condition of possibility

42 Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 226. 43 Readers will note the marked influence of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985); and Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity,” in Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 20–35. 44 Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 233 (emphasis in the original). 402 jairo moreno

for any talk of being modern at all? Were we to have an explicit, but purely formal definition of modernity as an analytic framework, what mechanisms might give this formalism any purchase on the social? Why not just give up on modernity or its avatar, the Enlightenment, as so many did during the 1980s and 1990s? Modernity enables and constrains. Its forms promise and persuade, but they do so unevenly (depending on the place and time, and on who is involved) and ambiguously (depending on what expectations are placed on them). This contingency transforms experiences of participation and the practices of comportment that they enable and constrain into what Foucault, writing of how our present is linked to the Enlightenment, identified as “the permanent reactivation of an attitude...[an] ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”45 This orientation has a decidedly ethical character. “By ‘attitude’,” Foucault writes,

I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos.46

In turn, this critical attitude entails asking, “in what is given to us as universal, necessary, and obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?” This is in order “to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.”47 Grounding Foucault’s prescriptions is the idea that modernity renders reality in such a way that it is necessary to deploy modernity’s own resources in order to alter that reality. Counter-modernity, in other words, is a form of modernity:

This work done at the limits of ourselves must...open up a realm of historical inquiry and...put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves [sic] must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical... The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating;

45 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 41. 46 Ibid., 38. 47 Ibid., 45. Difference unthought 403 it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.48

Here Foucault prescribes the dual task of belonging to and maintaining a critical relation with modernity, a tactic that aptly describes Zenón’s interactions with other jazz musicians at Berklee. In so doing, forms of modernity (jazz included) that circulate in one way for him circulate in another way for others. I would venture that, in refusing the initial imposition of incommensurable difference by some of his African Ameri- can student peers, he engaged already in what Foucault calls a “critical ontology.” That is, he is effectively allowing for a certain arbitrariness in the choices one makes and in the contingencies that constrain and enable one’s participation in modernity, however important it may be for some to sign their music-making in the name of racial difference and cultural particularity. And yet, this Foucauldian ethical turn is unable to account either for what might be unique to Zenón’s refusal of difference or for what form any residual universalism and singularity might take in this case.49 Furthermore, the possibility of choice remains tethered to questions of individual will and intention that cannot explain how the subject transgresses a structure far more vast and complex than itself. It is to these questions that I turn in the second part of this essay, where I introduce a conceptual vocabulary that will allow us to critically engage the specificity and indeed the possibility of the refusal (not the transgression) of difference by Zenón, the ethics of such refusal, and the role that universals may yet play in it all.

Demanding universals

The contemporary scholarly interest in modernity that I have discussed constitutes not so much a return of the repressed as a sober realization that the structures of inequality that so much of postmodern criticism

48 Ibid., 46, 47. 49 Foucault was famously unconcerned with the issue of modernity outside of Europe, ignoring the production of difference, in particular. For critiques of Foucault on this account, see Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity (Rotterdam and Dakar: SEPHIS-CODESRIA, 1997); and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 404 jairo moreno

denounced remain in place. In its historical consciousness, critical modernity is a history of the present, for, as Trouillot insists, what is at stake is the persistence of social features once thought to be European (and/or North Atlantic) that are inscribed “in North Atlantic narratives now.”50 Let us also recall Foucault’s idea that things experienced as counter-modern are themselves of modernity. And let us keep in mind a truism of contemporary life in the era of globalization: that the local is hardly ever self-sufficient and is almost always in relation to multiple locations abstracted under the notion of “the global.” We might think of critical modernity, then, as an actually existing universal, qualitatively different from both the vulgar and parochial procedure that transforms a particular, typically from a dominant party, into a universal. This kind of universal requires “an ineradicable remainder of particularity,” which itself exists and gains intelligibility by having the universal as its own ineradicable remainder; it is, as Ernesto Laclau writes, “both impossible and necessary.”51 This actually existing universal avoids the pitfalls of the empiricist dogma of teleological historicism and the equally dogmatic evacuation of all historical contingencies by transcendentalism. Far from a categorical refusal, actually existing universalism demands renewed analysis. Its relocation of the particular demands an ethical reconfiguration. In 1993, the year Musicology and Difference appeared, Gayatri Spivak proclaimed that “an ethical position must entail universalization of the singular.”52 Despite the totalizing gesture that transforms an ethical directive into a moral injunction (“must”), this phrase encapsulates some of the tensions between modernity, difference, particularity, and singularity that we have encountered. A related but contrasting example appears in the work of another cultural critic, Lawrence Grossberg, according to whom the power of critical modernity resides in the capacity to move away from modernity’s universal singular –“the hierarchical abstraction of the [European] particular against which all future particulars have to be measured”–toward a singular universal –“universality as movements or relations across non[-]hierarchically arranged particulars.”53 As in

50 Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern,” 231 (emphasis in the original). 51 Ernesto Laclau, “Questions,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 8. 52 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 165. 53 Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, 289. Difference unthought 405

Spivak’s proclamation, here, too, the ethical is of the essence. Grossberg asks: “How might one imagine a multiplicity of singular universals, each a complex relationally constituted statement...of modernity? How might one think the possibility of a more ethically desirable modernity?”54 Significantly, neither of these authors imposes an absolute limit on the relation of the universal and the singular, nor abrogates the universal; instead, we have alternative proposals for traversing their relation. No less ethically minded than Spivak, Grossberg advocates what is in principle a characterless multiplicity, very much under the impetus of Deleuze and Guattari. For her part, Spivak militates on behalf of the subaltern by granting a universalizing value to radical alterity, which she renders as “the singular”: “subaltern woman” is Spivak’s figure of irreducible difference, the “quite-other” to whom we must extend equality precisely because of her incommensurable and thus absolutely singular difference and alterity.55 Now, in Spivak’s work, the “singular” functions in tandem with difference (i.e., radical alterity, the quite-other) as a category (i.e., a universal itself) that helps to short-circuit the dualism of universality- particularity. The problem with Spivak’s injunction is that no ethical position can derive from the singular, since as a category, it (i.e., the singular) is without content. In other words, “difference,” as such, cannot be ethical; it needs to be made ethical.56 Grossberg, for example, has

54 Ibid., 268. 55 Spivak renders the Derridian and Lévinasian expression tout autre as “wholly other” and “quite-other.” The “wholly other” is the name for Lévinas’s notion of radical alterity, while “quite-other” refers, in Derrida’s words, to the “rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us,” as cited in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Caryl Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313, 288. The logic of the tout autre is additionally informed by the work of Luce Irigaray. See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Karin Montin (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); and Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Recently, Catherine Malabou proposed a post anti-essentialist program that directly engages Irigaray, Derrida, and Lévinas, in her Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011). 56 This recourse to categorical thinking and the challenges that come with it can be explained by Spivak’s stated intention of offering an alternative to the liberal subject of human rights that 406 jairo moreno

different ethical priorities, all within a generalized modernity that gives alterity no priority, but instead places “multiplicity” as an ethical horizon.57 Although a necessarily limited illustration of debates vis-à-vis universality, these authors’ writings reflect the demands made of universals and the demands that universals make on those appealing to them. Complicating matters is a messy conflation of antonyms: strictly speaking, “particular,” and not “singular,” corresponds to “universal,” as Spivak recognizes; and “multiple,” not “universal,” corresponds to “singular,” as Grossberg puts it.58 I suggest that this conflation is more than a semantic matter, one that is addressed by neither Spivak’s contingent universality nor Grossberg’s conception of the multiple universality of modernity. To clarify these terms and rethink their ethical possibilities apart from identity/difference, I will consider a recent episode in Miguel Zenón’s career, in counterpoint with ideas drawn from the philosophy of Alain Badiou.

Aesthetic equality Between 2011 and 2012, Zenón used the fellowship monies he received from the MacArthur Foundation (US$ 500,000 paid over five years) to endow a series of six free concerts and pre-concert talks, entitled Caravana Cultural (Cultural Caravan), in municipalities across Puerto Rico.59 Focusing on iconic figures of modern instrumental jazz (Coltrane, Davis,

makes all differences commensurate and from whom difference must be evacuated in the name of a universal equality that looks a lot like versions of normative Western subjects (i.e., white, male, liberal, and democratic). In short, Spivak universalizes difference a priori just as the global human rights discourse universalizes equality a priori. Neither option can be said to be immanently ethical: both are rendered ethical within a specific universalist framework. 57 An earlier version of this idea, with “otherness” (a form of non-relational difference) in place of what he here calls “multiplicity,” appears in Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There is?,” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), 87–107. 58 In fairness to Spivak, she has recently revised her position vis-à-vis modernity. Under globalization, she now maintains, distinctions between tradition and modernity lose any critical potential they may have had. In its place, there are modes of modernity for which an aesthetic education, the training of the human imagination as it learns to encounter another (for her, in the form of reading literature), becomes the only available dispositive for a just world. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 59 The series received support from the Banco Popular Foundation and the Luis A. Ferré Foundation, although Zenón paid for all musicians. The series was carried out in conjunction with the program Revive la Música (Revive Music), a project to promote music education among children and youths by collecting and refurbishing old instruments, music textbooks, and scores. Difference unthought 407

Ellington, Monk, and Parker), Zenón performed each concert with different top-shelf quartets drawn from the New York City scene, in small, mostly rural towns (where many jíbaro musicians come from), where jazz had never been heard live before.60 As Zenón explains,

There are certain areas in the country which have not had an exposure [to jazz], as the metropolitan area has, perhaps because they see jazz as music from the high class, but this is not the case. We want to come to people who do not have the opportunity to go to festivals, so that they enjoy the music and learn about it without having to worry about expenses or travel.61

Performances took place in community centers, small local music halls and theaters, and even in the annex spaces of mayoral offices. To facilitate attendance by children and their families, activities commenced at 3:00 p.m. on Sundays. The crowds, multi-generational and from across the class spectrum, were consistently large, filling each venue. In the pre-concert talks, Zenón gave an overview of the history of jazz, discussed the life and work of a particular musician, and introduced basic elements of the idiom (improvisation, song forms, performance protocols, and so on). Audience members asked many questions after the talks, and at the end of each concert they erupted into applause. By all accounts, the event was unprecedented. This series, which according to Zenón began as an “abstract idea” (i.e., an impossible dream), might be taken as a return to something that identity/difference musical scholarship has disavowed: the music itself, and its claims to absolute autonomy from sociocultural moorings. “Simply music,” he declared, was the main force behind the project: “By focusing specifically on jazz music, we have as an objective to eliminate any social or cultural stigma which may be related to this style.”62 In other words,

60 Of the six towns the Caravan visited, the largest one, Yauco, has a population of little over 42,000, the smallest, Maunabo, 14,500. 61 “Hay ciertas áreas del país que no han tenido la exposición que se ha tenido en la zona metropolitana, quizás porque lo ven como música de un alto sector. Pero eso no es así. Queremos llegar a la gente que no tiene la oportunidad de ir a festivales para que aprendan y puedan apreciarla sin tener que pensar en dinero o viajar.” Marco Billy Guzmán, “Regala dos años de jazz,” El Nuevo Día (5 January, 2011). www.adendi.com/archivo.asp? Xnum=856460&year=2011&mon=1&keyword=caravana%20cultural (accessed July 10, 2014). 62 “Simplemente música. Al enfocarnos específicamente en la música de jazz, tenemos también como objetivo eliminar cualquier estigma social o cultural con el que se pueda relacionar este estilo.” Doris Angleró, “Miguel Zenón en Maunabo” (February 17, 2012). www.80grados.net/ miguel-zenon-en-maunabo (accessed July 10, 2014). Zenón uses the Spanish word “estilo” (style) to designate something like jazz as a meta-genre, a genre that includes various styles (bebop, cool, etc.). I will maintain the word “style” in quotes to denote his use. 408 jairo moreno

to destigmatize jazz is to disrupt the historical and geocultural orders of belonging and exclusion whereby a musical idiom is deemed suitable or unsuitable to a people or community and their location, even (perhaps especially) if those orders are set up and maintained by the community itself. The network of relations binding a musical style to a specific sociocultural location is a forceful version of “ethos”: that is, the equivalence established between expressive practices, sensible affects, and classificatory systems that are normative to a community. This is under- girded by an equivalence between dwelling or inhabiting a place, community, or society, and ways of being (acting, feeling, thinking) – for instance, what Bourdieu called habitus. The problem is that these equivalences tend to dissolve facts into norms, blurring the lines between what is and what must or should be.63 Ethos becomes morality, and the particular becomes a kind of local universal. The disruption of an ethos by the destigmatization of a musical style gives the lie to the idea popularized by Bourdieu’s theory of “distinction,” that education, and with it socioeconomic rank, determines art appreciation.64 To the contrary, by acting with disregard for pre-established expectations of the habitus, it is shown that distinction need not necessarily be bound to previously acquired knowledge. To do as Zenón did, and realize a concert series, was also to enact a suspension of the identities/differences that such “distinction” draws and enforces, so to speak, and to disrupt long-standing and unquestioned hierarchies and distributions of aesthetic engagement. (Aesthesis is understood here as sense perception.) It is, most emphatically, an action taken and carried out on the presupposition of aesthetic equality. It is, in a strong Rancièrian sense, to render to perception what was imperceptible, and to do so in the name of the equality of any and all people, and of any community, communities to whom that perception belongs. To be clear, I am not claiming that the exercise of the capacity to perceive turns circulating forms (musical style, performance practices, and so on) into free-flowing phenomena that those positioned anywhere along a circulation network may seize as their own. The claim is much simpler than that, but it also involves several intermediary steps. First, it is more than a question of the relative availability of something (a kind of music, for example) or lack of exposure to it. Here, the stigma attached

63 Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” in Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 109–10. 64 For more on the critique of “distinction,” see Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo, “Rancière’s Equal Music,” Contemporary Music Review 31:5/6 (2012): 487–505. Difference unthought 409 to one’s non-existing relation to a musical “style,” such as jazz in rural Puerto Rico, forms part of a history of epistemic violence: that is to say, the notion that inhabitants of more or less remote areas are incapable of listening, let alone engaging with musical forms that are deemed too complex, abstract, and temporally or spatially removed from the everyday life of their communities, their traditions and/or their customs. By this account, the function that each of these communities plays within the Puerto Rican national economy, and the place they occupy in the sociocultural geography of the island, curtails any potential disruption of the way things are, have been, and will be. The difference intrinsic to their subordinate position is inseparable from their “distinction” within the cultural map of the nation. Whatever the Caravana series may have been, it is inextricably bound to the specificities of a Puerto Rican contemporary society profoundly marked by the multiple forces of modernity. Now, Zenón’s action does not – cannot – change this history or erase its long trajectory of epistemic violence and aesthetic exclusion. What it can do, however, is breach this history of violence and exclusion by punctually suspending the order – which positions difference as an attribute and as a lack – that determines an a priori incapacity to listen. Belonging occurs in the Caravana as a capacity to listen, and as whatever transformation that capacity may have as an effect or may hold as a potential. It is not any form of musical object, it is not the experience of listening, it is not the communal partaking of an aesthetic event, it is not the many relations that attend to engaging others perceptually, and it is not the comprehension of whatever might be said or learned in the process. It is, rather, the pure singularity of human listening: the fact that people, musicians included, listened. In short, if belonging takes place in this breach, it is not of it. This breach is without content. The notion of a breach without content and the idea of belonging in that breach may come off as forms of ecstatic Deleuzianism in which the percepts and affects give rise to an impersonal subject traversed by the intensity of a sensorial power that may be harnessed as a transgressive force. It may also be understood as a sensorial enactment of the limits of discourse, encouraging a critique of verbal rationality and a refusal of logos for which music is often deployed theoretically. It is none of these. And neither does it constitute some version of a sense-based didacticism, disembodied romanticism, or socially therapeutic classicism. Rather, the fact that listening belongs to someone – anyone – results from what Peter Hallward calls “transcendental conditions.” These include the consistencies that specify humans as a species (e.g., the raw fact of our cognitive and 410 jairo moreno

perceptual configuration as hearers of a certain kind, apart from the empirical contingency of “disability”), the categories of relationality and value without which human life might be inconceivable, and the dynamic processes of agency, subjectivity, sexuality, and identification that, prior to having any particular content, are conditions of possibility for human experience.65 Transcendental conditions do not themselves “govern how we relate to one another,” and so possess no intrinsic ethical dimension.66 This governance and ethical force emerge instead from “unconditional principles valid for all relations, or at least relations of a certain kind”: for instance, principles such as equality that, without being relations as such, are “valid for all relations in the situation concerned,” in short, “universalizable principles.”67 These principles are not, however, immanent to parties in a relation, or to the relation itself. “They are,” Hallward remarks, “imposed as if from without. They are decided, deliberated, as an external encouragement or constraint...[Their] universality persists as a fragile assertion... it holds only insofar as its proponents are able to make it stick.”68 These proposals for “transcendental conditions” and “universalizable principles” mark what Alain Badiou calls a “return to the Same.”69 “The Same” is neither homogeneity nor any form of generalized normativity. It is rather the index of a stand against all value assigned to relations of alterity. More formally, it is what remains when the “infinite multiplicity of differences” that exist as the result of the relationality of all beings is subtracted, leaving what Hallward describes as “pure being qua being, or being considered without regard to being-this or being-that, being without reference to particular qualities or ways of being: being that simply is.”70 No substance, let alone essence, undergirds this conception of being that makes the “Same” possible. This austere ontology constitutes an axiom on the basis of which we – anyone – might act and so breach the existing differences and identities that organize the world. One such act engages in a militant indifference to differences that negates what there is

65 Peter Hallward, “The Universal and the Transcendental,” in Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester University Press, 2001), 179–82. 66 Ibid., 179 (emphasis in the original). 67 Ibid., 179, 183. 68 Ibid., 183 (emphasis in the original). 69 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. and introd. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 25–26. 70 Peter Hallward, “Introduction: Consequences of Abstraction,” in Peter Hallward, ed., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 3. Difference unthought 411 and affirms what “comes to be” (the Same), all in regard to a truth defined as that which is the “same for all.”71 This constitutes a generic universality: “a rigorously situated project...[that] persists in an unending compilation of what, in the situation, is addressed ‘for all’, regardless of interest or privilege, regardless of state-sanctioned distinctions (and this against those who continue to defend those privileges and distinctions).”72 This statement relies on several technical concepts in Badiou’s writings that require explanation: in particular, “state of the situation,”“event,” “truth,” and “subject.”73 These concepts allow us to appeal to the notion of “pure multiplicity,” which plays an important role in my own thinking about indifference. “State” refers to the field of established identities/differences of the way things are (the state of affairs, or état) by which the exercise of control, domination, and governance comes to be experienced as being without determination (or, as in the case of the State, of quasi-voluntary determination, as in État). Although reminiscent of the definition of ethos above, the “state” is best understood as the hegemonic administration of power by the consent and participation of the governed (whether a social sector, community, or people). The “state” is, above all, a sense-making dispositive. It is imminently relational; it distributes, classifies, and excludes, but it also includes according to a logic of difference/identity. All differences among elements in the “state” operate as a function of identities ascribed to those elements (by others or by themselves) that allow them to take a position or displace other positions within the system of differences imagined as a grid. A “state” is known, knowable, felt, and experienced across various spatial and temporal scales, everyday and historical, local, regional, and global. The “state” is that which must be disrupted from a militantly enacted posture of indifference to the logic of difference/identity. “Situation” refers first to the position that an element (person, time, place) in a state holds in relation to any other element, and second to the elements as a pure multiplicity. This is Badiou’s most fundamental formal

71 Badiou, Ethics, 27. 72 Peter Hallward, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Badiou, Ethics, xiv. 73 The summary that follows does not attempt to discuss in any depth the extensive and heterogeneous work of Badiou. Key references are Badiou’s Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), as well as the simpler and more useful Ethics. There is less here of Badiou’s follow-up to Being and Event, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). Thorough introductions appear in Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 412 jairo moreno

ontological proposition, whereby all attributes of any kind are subtracted, leaving the simple fact of their being. A “situation” thus affirms a set of pure differences (a, b, c...) as differences without any relation whatsoever, an indeterminate differentiation demanded by the fact that there is only another, and another, and another, and so on; as infinite multiples with no structuring power or symbolic currency that may gather it all into a whole. Nonetheless, structuring power is most effectively felt when a “situation” comes to count as One, which requires that something identifies it as such (i.e., as One). This is the “state of the situation,” and what we encounter in commonly circulated formulations such as the “Puerto Rican people,” “the audience in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico, on Sunday, February 13, 2011,” or the “jazz tradition.” The passage from “situation” to “state of the situation,” however, is such that for the latter, the “situation” and its pure multiplicity appear as nothing: it is the unthought of the “state,” a “void” in Badiou’s technical sense. But if one accepts his rigorous definition of pure multiplicity, the “situation” remains very much in place in the “state of the situation” as that which the “state” claims to represent, but in the end cannot count or acknowledge. This uncounted presence constitutes potential for the affirmation of a “generic universality.” How does this entire process of challenging the “state” take place? Something happens, exceptionally, that suspends the logic ordering elements in the state of the situation and allows the appearance of the new. This is the “event.” No classification or logic of the “state,” including the logic of identity/difference, can account for the event, which is unpredictable and radically contingent. The unaccountability of the event – the fact that it is strictly speaking unthinkable – does not mean that it occurs as an effect of some force exterior to the state of the situation. Rather, its force is immanent in the very things that the state must do so as to exercise its ordering function: namely, the unthought that exists within the state as a void. The “event,” in short, renders visible and audible that which the state must not count in order to constitute things as they appear – that is, as a set of knowable identities/differences. In so doing, the event accesses a “truth,”“an innovation en acte, singular in its location and occasion, but universal in its ‘address’ and import”: as Hallward puts it, “a universal-singular.”74 Truth, in Badiou’s sense, is intertwined with the notion of “subject.” A truth is

74 Hallward, “Translator’s Introduction,” ix. Difference unthought 413 the real process of a fidelity [by someone] to an event: that which in this fidelity produces in the situation... A truth...is thus an immanent break. “Immanent” because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else... “Break” because what enables the truth-process – the event – meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation.75

“Break” here is what I called a “breach,” and “meaning nothing” (or void) glosses the “unthought.” Truth necessitates an act and adopts the form of four “generic procedures”: love (entailing individual subjects), politics (involving a collective subject), and science and art (entailing individual acts with collective import). Make no mistake: the subject is neither an intention, nor will behind an act, nor a bundle of affect or experience, a set of perceptions, or a play of sensations. Rather, it is an operation. The subject, as Hallward explains, bears the trajectory of a procedure and of a truth, and in so doing comes into being to the degree that such truth induces it. Nothing belongs to this subject; the subject belongs to its being- true-to-something. However, this is not to say that the biographical individual “Miguel Zenón,” for instance, or any member of the audience whose thinking is set in motion, is irrelevant as such or even non-existent, but rather that they enter into the composition of a truth that far exceeds them, insofar as its consequences are incalculable and impossible to anticipate. A truth, a procedure, and an act are not in or of the subject; instead, the subject is a subject to them. Formally, then, the subject is an operation. And, like the truth and procedure it bears, it is strictly speaking without content. Ethics here are a function of a militant fidelity to a singularly situated act divested of any a priori universal other than fidelity itself, its maxim being, “Keep going!”

Singularity without difference

This is heady stuff, to be sure, but I maintain that it is necessary for thinking and acting beyond difference. How, for example, might we understand the disparate array of listeners who gathered in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico (a town of about 30,000 nestled in the central mountains of the island) on February 13, 2011, to listen to music by Miles Davis performed by Zenón, trumpeter Michael Rodriguez (the son of Florida-based Ecua- dorian parents), bassist Matt Penman (a New Zealander), pianist Aaron

75 Badiou, Ethics,42–43 (emphasis added). 414 jairo moreno

Goldberg (a Boston-native Harvard-graduate), and drummer Nasheet Waits (the New York City-born son of legendary jazz drummer Freddie Waits, and Morehouse graduate)? That all elements – people, but also the town, the region, and so on – are different and that their differences are without immanent relation is simply what is: in Badiou’s terms, the “state of the situation.” But consider also the deliberately arbitrary descriptions in parentheses. They cast this quintet as the apotheosis of jazz’s cosmopolitanism, and likewise index here and there the educational and national backgrounds of some elements and not others. These are not false characterizations, but on their own they do not matter as markers of difference. They might matter as interested descriptions, or as I put it before, as the result of a conscious decision with no guaranteed ethical outcome. Less charitably, we would note that these descriptions all fall within the com- pass of the “state,” as identities/differences that are given in various classification systems. Moreover, they may acquire an appearance of universal relevance if we insist, say, that national origin be respected or ethnicity recognized. This is problematic. For instance, the axiom of “respect” for national difference implies a prior evaluation of particularities: as Badiou puts it, “it is necessary to have first distinguished between good particularities and bad ones... the formal universal [would] already be included in the particularity.”76 Instead of particulars, which associate elements with a set of identity/difference-defining attributes (recall Spivak’s subaltern singularity and Grossberg’s particularity), we might speak of singulars as a way of conceiving each element in the situation in abstraction from all particulars, or “as a singularity that is subtracted from identitarian predicates.”77 Singulars – conceived in the Badiouian terms of belonging, generic universality, state, situation, and so forth, that I have been describing – partake of the “event,” a potentially transformative occurrence, the effects of which, again, happen in a situation, but are not of it.78 Why, however, should we subscribe to the stringent formal definition of Being allowed by Badiou’s conceptions of the singular and the purely multiple, the subject, and the event without content and without relation? Partly, I argue, because Badiou’s ontology opens onto new ethical configurations of belonging and relation that are precluded if we remain exclusively

76 Alain Badiou, Eight Theses on the Universal, Centre d’Étude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (November 19, 2004), Thesis 2. www.lacan.com/badeight.htm (accessed July 10, 2014). 77 Ibid. 78 Hallward, “Translator’s Introduction,” x. Difference unthought 415 committed to a logic of difference. Take the case I have been tracing here. To begin with, we might ask what ethical commitment Miguel Zenón has to what I will call the event of the Caravana? The altruistic impulse is clear enough and laudable on its own. A voluntaristic interpretation would impose notions of free will and intention that, though not wholly absent from his declared project, are far from the whole story. Instead, I wish to propose an ethics of singularity, one that bypasses the imperative of acting on behalf of an unspecified and a priori “good,” as well as the injunction to attend to the radical alterity of the Other.79 In the ethical thought I have been pursuing, there is first and foremost a practical conviction: to be for or against the event, as Hallward puts it. As we have seen, this commitment can no more anticipate an event’s consequences than apply to every situation in the same way. It is, strictly speaking, a universal-singular. Above all, it is an active movement toward the “Same,” as per Badiou’s notion of “transcendental conditions,” and toward equality, as per the notion of “universalizable principles.” The ethical task, then, is not to affirm the world as it already is – a set of differences – but as it is not. Let me be clear: this is to be understood at the level of absolute singularity without content, which does not – indeed cannot – secure the internal consistency of the “Same” or guarantee the permanence of equality. Singularity, in this sense, constitutes a breach in the state of the situation, an affirmation of that which within the state is unthinkable and non-existing. We can now recast the Caravana as an event. The breach in the event of listening does not consist of a heroic individual breaking through the structure in dominance of the state of the situation, whether that be the local classification of the “rural” or the imperial link binding Puerto Rico and the US. It does, however, suspend pre-existing links and boundaries, and in so doing enacts something inaudible and thus non-existent from within the structures of the “state of the situation”: namely, that everybody listens. “That is the idea [of the Caravana],” Zenón has said, “to try to break down the disconnection that exists between the popular masses and this specific type of music.”80 To do this is also to actively encourage coming into a minimal space and time in which what matters most is not to suspend oneself before the alterity of an Other

79 Ibid., xiii. 80 “Ésa es la idea...intentar romper esa desconexión que hay de la masa popular con este tipo de música específicamente.” Xiomara Acuña, “El jazz de Miguel Zenón,” Claridad (January 25, 2011). 416 jairo moreno

(music, music’s power, any fellow spectators, and so on), but to suspend that alterity itself – that is, to engage in a principled indifference to identity/difference carried out at a level prior to the presumption and anticipation that this is for the Good and that only the Good can follow from it. Here, privilege is given to belonging (in the way described above) over attaining, a belonging which, again, does not transcend the particularity of the situation. In sum, this perspective is one of radical individuation informed by Hallward’s conception of the “singular,” in which procedures are ultimately “self-constituent” and are the media of their own existence. Nothing in the end might compel Zenón to perform his deed other than his own fidelity to the event of listening. Of course, the content-less ontology of the event cannot account for the myriad relations of which any situation partakes. The “singular” cannot, in other words, serve in an analysis of critical modernity, as a configuration saturated by differential relations. As Bruno Bosteels notes, critics of Badiou’s philosophy have remarked his lack of concern with “relationality and historical mediation.”81 Perhaps for this reason, Hallward proposes a supplement to the singular that he calls the “specific.” Where the singular is non-relational, free of mediation, and subject to no representation, the specific constantly assumes positions, confronts and addresses constraints, and explores and exploits possibilities. It is relational, mediation itself, and subject to the vagaries of representation. The “specific” pertains to any identify/difference relation. But in a crucial distinction from traditional identity/difference politics, this relationality of the “specific,” founded as it may be on claims to identity/difference, is not “specified.” That is, it is neither determined a priori by attributes of any kind (whether we conceive them as essences or constructs), nor does it assume that there is “an inherently...progressive politics of relation...nothing in relationality that determines whether social relations, for instance, are to be governed by race, or caste, or wealth, any more than by principles of civic responsibility, generic equality, or collective solidarity.”82 In short, the “specific” forecloses the possibility of determining a priori the morality of a particular relation. However, it is not exempt from the constraints that are inherent in all social relations: without these constraints, relations of the “specific” can easily turn into abstractions, bracketing off or suppressing other possible relations. For example, the institutionalization of diversity has had an unintended effect of taking a person as representative of a group,

81 Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, xi. Bosteels is referring to Hallward, Badiou. 82 Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, xix. Difference unthought 417 which issues an implicit demand that s/he be who s/he is, only more so, at least in the abstraction of statistics according to which the success of diversity initiatives is often measured.83 At the same time, from the perspective of one such abstraction, there is a demand that s/he be less than the many other things (relations) s/he may be.

“None of the above”

Speaking at a forum of the National Museum of the American Latino Commission held in San Juan in 2011, Zenón urged the inclusion of Puerto Rican musicians whom he sees as having contributed nationally and internationally to affirming the island’s musical culture.84 Interestingly, the political status of the island as an unincorporated territory became a point of contention for the Commission. “When they [the Commission] called me,” said Zenón, “it was clear to me that the situation of Puerto Rico was distinct from that of any other place in the US, and so it was that, with opinions for and against, I felt that my responsibility was with thinking about the culture and music of Puerto Rico outside of the parameters of what it means to be Puerto Rican or not.”85 Journalist Ana Teresa Toro heard in these words an affirmation that “in matters of culture – or in any other plane – [Zenón] has no problems with identity.”86 If Toro is right, Zenón’s stance would seem to contradict the traditionally identitarian

83 For a discussion of this contradiction in the US context of higher education, with an emphasis on music studies, see Amy Cimini and Jairo Moreno, “On Diversity,” Gamut 2:1 (2009): 111–96. 84 The Commission is a 23-member group, “tasked by Congress to provide a report on the creation of a potential Museum of the American Latino, which would focus on American Latino life, art, history and culture.” Selected by the president and bipartisan congressional leaders, its members include media, education, entertainment, and business figures. As the Commission’s site announces, “One primary theme resonated clearly throughout the forums – Latinos are part of the fabric of this nation, and there is an urgency, desire, and need for a museum to highlight and preserve this great heritage for the benefit of all Americans.” The Commission has conducted open meetings across the country to solicit local input. http:// americanlatinomuseum.gov/about.html (accessed July 10, 2014). 85 “Cuando me llamaron, para mí era obvio que la situación de Puerto Rico era distinta a la de cualquier otro lugar en Estados Unidos. Y así fue, con opiniones a favor y en contra, pero sentí que mi responsabilidad tenía que ver con que se pensara sobre la cultura y la música puertorriqueña fuera de los parámetros de lo que significa ser o no puertorriqueño.” Ana Teresa Toro, “Hijo de la fusión” (from El Nuevo Día). www.herencialatina.com/Miguel_Zenon/ Hijo_de_la_Fusion_agosto_Septiembre_2010.htm (accessed July 10, 2014). 86 “[D]ejó claro que en asuntos de cultura – o en cualquier otro plano – no tiene problemas de identidad.” Ibid. 418 jairo moreno

politics of Puerto Rican pro-independence nationalists. Looking again, however, it discloses a radical affirmation of identity, conceived in terms of the singular rather than the specific. Indeed, we might hear Zenón’s act of self-reflection – the identitarian move par excellence – as communi- cating that he knows who he is, whether or not he declares it: that is, as a gesture that strategically suspends the relational networks of the specific in which he necessarily participates, but to which he cannot ever be fully reduced. His advocacy of local musicians also affirms their contribution to “Latino” cultural life in the US, whether or not they migrated from the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico: claiming, in effect, that if the island is a colonial outpost of the US, what is produced there is of the US. Zenón addressed the matter of migration directly, deploying the specificity of music to defuse the tension between migrants and non-migrants:

To speak of those from here and those from there: that is an ever-existing debate, but in the case of music we must say that it belongs to everyone... I do not have any doubts about my identity. I am Puerto Rican, I left for the US because what I wanted to do I could not do in Puerto Rico.87

This goes beyond staying or leaving. The status of individuals who migrate between the island and the US is one of the most contentious matters in modern Puerto Rican history. Returning migrants, explains Juan Flores, feel and often are marginalized.88 As Flores notes, music has been uniquely relevant in tracing the movement of what he calls “cultural remittances,” forms brought back (or sent) by migrants like Zenón or much earlier migrants (who, in fact, have created some of the most emblematic music for those on the island). In a sense, music gets a free pass. And so, it might seem, does Zenón, whose refusal to take sides flies in the face of national politics. In Puerto Rico – where identitarian positions vacillate among the alternatives of independence from the US, statehood in the US, or continuance of the status of commonwealth as Estado Libre Asociado (an unincorporated territory subject to the sovereign powers of the United States) – Zenón appears to endorse “none of the above.” As is

87 “Hablar de los de aquí y los de allá; ese debate siempre existe pero en el caso de la música hay que decir que es de todos, viene de la misma raíz y en ese sentido no hay mucho que debatir. No tengo ninguna duda sobre mi identidad. Soy puertorriqueño, me fui a Estados Unidos porque lo que quería hacer no podía hacerlo en Puerto Rico. No estaba y me fui a buscarlo allá.” Ibid. 88 Juan Flores, The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (London and New York, Routledge: 2009). Difference unthought 419 well known, this option –“none of the above”–received the majority vote in the referendum on statehood held on December 13, 1998, a day when, according to then-Governor Carlos Romero Barceló, “the people of Puerto Rico decided not to decide.”89 As with the outcome of the referendum, Zenón’s position might be interpreted as telling us little about national politics, or as actually affirming the status quo, or as embracing an ambiguity that can be reactionary in its refusal of the dominant identitarian values in for or against independence.90 Then again, against these negative interpretations, the “decision not to decide” might embrace cynicism, neglect, or skepticism as an answer to the “unbearable ambiguity” of Puerto Rican particularity, and it might embody a political performance camouflaging a political response that confounds political antagonists and outsiders, as Frances Negrón-Muntaner argues.91 Performance, not rational deliberation, would do the real political work here. Of course, it could also be both, as one does not preclude, but rather presupposes the other. On the other hand, deciding not to decide could perhaps be the ultimate decision, an exercise in what I call principled indifference to identity/ difference. As such, it would also involve an effective suspension of binary logic: indeed, a breach in the “state of the situation” that is inherently ambiguous, being part and parcel of designs of modernity.92 This resonates with the Badiouian concept of the “event,” where “the undecidable is decided,” as Hallward puts it.93 With this we add another dimension to our earlier definition of ethics as fidelity to the dictum to “Keep going!”: here, the ethical appears in the “decision in the face of the undecidable,” a wager whose outcome remains, like the “event” itself, incalculable. I am proposing, then, that Zenón be understood in these terms, as the bearer of a decision that refuses to decide: a decision that, by refusing to take on the task of identity/difference and to submit to the politics of representation, simply wagers on “presentation,” or on the such-as-it-is of

89 Carlos Romero Barceló, cited in Frances Negrón-Muntaner, None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3. The referendum presented another option (Free Association), a kind of sovereign nation status with guaranteed privileges from the US, in contravention of any existing model of nation-state and obviously against the US Constitution. 90 Negrón-Muntaner, None of the Above,5. 91 Negrón-Muntaner, None of the Above. 92 Foundational doctrines emanating from the US Supreme Court express this constitutive ambiguity, as when Puerto Rico was declared “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” in Downes v. Bidwell, 182 US 244 (1901). The Foraker Act of 1900 also states: “Puerto Rico belongs to but is not part of the United States.” 93 Hallward, Badiou, 285. 420 jairo moreno

his being (the singular). His statements, cited above, and his declared non-proprietary relation to the musical forms that he has studied and experimented with suggest to me that he operates in two registers: first, in the individuated, non-specified, and non-redemptive register of the singular, where relations, though not negated, are suspended, and where the immanence of Being is simply affirmed; and second, in the register of specific economic, sociocultural, and political relations, where decisions are made in the name of the universalizable principle of aesthetic equality (which, though addressed to all, is nonetheless particular to its situation). At the heart of my reading is a possible nexus between Zenón’s decision and the eventality I have discussed. This eventality demands that we shift our focus from music as something belonging to everybody – the classic trope that “music is a universal language”–or to no one at all – essentially the same thing – and turn instead toward acts of listening. Any musical tradition – as recorded, for instance, in the MacArthur Founda- tion’s statement about styles – has a history and is of history; as such, it is the epitome of the specific. The history of our relationships to musical works has an equally specific nature. Nevertheless, the relation that we hold to the relation that is listening cannot be determined by that specificity, cannot be placed under the deafening rumble of alterity, and can always turn out to breach what we think we are. That, perhaps, is what in the end may make a difference. How do we listen to the music of Seis 5 (see Example 14.1), or to a jazz standard performed in Quebraditas? Can its form bear the weight of history or of the material forces that, no matter how we regard them, participate in its coming to be? Further, can anyone at all, in listening to this music, become a bearer of its history? I would say yes. In this sense, then, all listening is imminently relational. This is the most obvious dimension of the aesthetic. However, from the standpoint I have developed here, things are less apparent. It is true that listening most often acts as a binding force, rendering a multiplicity of individuals into a singular collectivity that shares in the act of listening, whether as individuals enthralled by a performance or as a multitude chanting slogans. Not only that, even in cases where listening indexes particularity under identity categories of ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, race, sexuality, and so on, the relation causally follows the relata (e.g., listeners, performers). This makes ethics a matter of making the right or wrong choice: to embrace or recognize difference is good, to reject it is bad. Either way, we come to own that decision, and, if it is the right one, to bond with others and foster community: to relate is preferable to not relating. Difference unthought 421

But consider for a moment that relationality might precede the relata. And what if we consider that such relationality is not determined in advance, that it is specific, but not specified? The specific, that is, does not need be tied to identity/difference. In my discussion of Zenón’s apparent decision to be indifferent to difference, the point was that such a position entails a relation precisely to the decision. That he has maintained such a position can be accounted for as a fidelity to a difficult decision, given the “state of the situation” of societies in the US and Puerto Rico that are shaped by modernity’s structure of differentiation (the insufficiency of any analysis that takes “context” simply as that which explains or must be explained vis-à-vis music should be obvious). We might say that he is faithful to being unfaithful to identity. And I am aware of the performative contradiction here: that such faithfulness to unfaithfulness constitutes yet another form of identity, and that I, the writer, can only relate after I identify the relata (Zenón, US politics of identity, Puerto Rican nationalism, and so on). But it is one thing to exist specifically – it is, after all, along with value, a transcendental condition of our species – and another to decide on that specificity. This is what I have tried to present here. What, then, is the truth of listening? Is there not more than a little banality in claiming that the very fact of listening produces truth in the aesthetic? On the one hand, like Badiou, I have privileged musical art as a truth procedure. And like him, I too appear to privilege exceptional and courageous individuals who, by their militant fidelity to an uncertain outcome, end up ushering in the new and transforming the state of a situation. On the other hand, by shifting the focus from topics like “Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style” or the faithfulness of Berg and Webern, “to the musical event by the name of ‘Schoenberg’” – two examples from Badiou’s Ethics – I am not simply appealing to a “subaltern” version of those proper names. Rather, I am enacting a suspension of anything resembling world history or even a history of the Americas. I am affirming, emphatically, that form, not content, does the work of a truth. Listening achieves the condition of singular form, as it enables time and space to act without determination. Without a determination of any content, listening, as form, can be new (and incalculably so), in the event, but never of it, again and again. Index

2001: A Space Odyssey, 295 Aristotle, 93 50 Cent, 335 Arne, Thomas, 112 art rock, 306 Aaliyah, 326, 330 artifice, 239 Abbate, Carolyn, 170 Asian women, 221–23, 228–31, 234 Abdul, Raoul, 272 Attali, Jacques, 114–15 Abstract Expressionism, 307 auditore, 55, 63–64 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 9–10 authenticity, 251–52 adaptational fundamentalism, 368–69 of voice, 360 additive process, 277 Auto-Tune the News, 333–34 Adler, Guido, 1 Avis, 334 Adorno, Theodor, 133 advertisements, 334–35 Baartman, Saartjie, 352–53 African musicians, 87 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 266 African American music Brandenburg Concerto No.3, 301 Creative Associates, 267–68 Badiou, Alain, 39–40, 386, 410–13, 421 slave songs, 116–18, 122–23 Baker, Houston, 46 African Americanist musicology, 14, 29–30 Ballet d’Alcidiane, 89 African Americans Ballet des Blancs et des Noirs, 22 education system and, 338–39 Ballet d’Enée et Didon, 95 vocal timbre, 362–63 Ballet des Jalousies du Serail, 95 Africanist figures, 20–21 Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vendôme, 88 Agamben, Giorgio, 380–81 Ballet de la Mort d’Hercule, 93 Agawu, Kofi, 38–39 Ballet des Nègres, 88 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 44–45 banjar, 122–23 Alessandro nell’ Indie, 208–11 Barceló, Carlos Romero, 419 Alexander the Great, 208 Barely Digital, 333–34 alla turca style, 141, 162 baritone singing, 181 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 204–8 Bartók, Bela, 266 Allison, 343–44 Barzun, Jacques, 19–20 alterity, 37, 370, 400–1 basicness, 276 Althusser, Louis, 18 Beastie Boys, 31, 315–16 Alverson, Margaret Blake, 341 creative evolution, 323–24 ambient music, 306 credibility, 319–20 ambivalence, 255–56 critical reception, 318–19 Amp’d, 334 music anatomy, 347–48 Cookie Puss EP, 315–16 androcentrism, 12 Hello Nasty, 324 androgyny, 188, 292; see also effeminacy “Intergalactic,” 324 anthropology, 21 Ill Communication, 324 Antinori, Bernardino, 17 Licensed to Ill, 320 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 38 “Fight for your Right,” 321–22 archaic spaces, 352–53 To the 5 Boroughs, 324 422 Arendt, Hannah, 25, 45, 81 use of humor, 315–16, 322–23 Index 423

Beauvoir, Simone de, 18 Boulle, Pierre, 84–85 bebop, 19 Bourgault-Ducoudray, Louis-Albert, 244 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 141, 266, 303 Bourgeois, Louise, 260 Für Elise, 266 Bowie, David, 293, 304–5, 307–8 Ninth Symphony, 300, 304 Heroes, 307 bel canto opera, 186–87 Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the effeminacy, 190–98 Spiders from Mars, 305 Belardini, Manuela, 56 “Suffragette City,” 305 Belasco, David, 214 “Ziggy Stardust,” 305 Bell, Andy, 312 Boyd, Robert, 371 Bellini, Charles, 48, 111 Braudel, Fernand, 367 bells, 118–19 Brett, Philip, 7 Benindelli, Don Orazio, 11 Bronski Beat, 313 Benjamin, Walter, 50 Brooklyn Philharmonic, 269 Berain, Jean, 90–91 Brooks, Mel, 332 Berg, Alban, 421 Brown, Wendy, 5, 45 Berkeley Art Museum, 261 Budden, Julian, 214 Berklee College of Music, 396 Buffalo Evening News, 279 Berlioz, Hector, 345 Bullock, Charles, 119 Berman, Marshall, 390 Burgess, Anthony, 302–3 Berry, Halle, 328, 330 Burnham, Scott, 152 Best, Stephen, 109 Burroughs, William S., 309 Bhabha, Homi, 33, 255–57 Burton, Jonathan, 82 Bigazzi, Suora Marta, 59, 61 Butler, Judith, 39 biocultural evolution, 374–75 biological turn, 368–69, 380–81 cabaletta, 189 biology, 35–36 Cabral, Amilcar, 18 Biz Markie, 317, 325 Caccini, Giulio, 68 Black Music Research Journal, 26 Cadmus et Hermione, 90–91 black noise, 109–10, 116 Cage, John, 284 blackface performance, 18, 77–79, 88–90 Cambi, Piera, 11 class and, 98 Campioni, Carlo Antonio, 112 female characters, 91–92 Campra, André, 93 implicit support of establishment politics, Can, 306 100–1 cantare, 69 Old Regime racism and, 98 Caravana Cultural, 406–13, 415 Bloechl, Olivia, 30 caricature, 141 bloodlines, 84 Carlos, Wendy, 34–35, 82, 298–302, Bloom, Peter J., 98 304, 311 Blowin’ Up, 335 Clockwork Orange soundtrack, blues, 398 302–4 Boas, Franz, 116 Switched-On Bach, 300–2 Bobillier, Marie, 14 Carner, Mosco, 214, 217 Bocchi, Francesco, 70–71 Carpentier, Alejo, 390 body technologies, 339–40 Carvel, 315 Bolan, Marc, 293 Cassago, Adelaide, 184–87 Bolshevik revolution, 17 Castelvecchi, Stefano, 180 bomba, 108 castrati, 49, 181, 209 Boquet, Louis-René, 79, 91–98 Celtic music, 27 border minstrelsy, 181 Central American vocal timbre, 343 Borren, Marieke, 45 CETA Orchestra, 270 Bosteels, Bruno, 416 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 26 Boukman, Zamba, 126 Chambers, Iain, 400 424 index

Chamillionaire, 332, 335 Cosimo II de’ Medici, 53, 71–72 Chants populaires, 239 Costume; see also blackface performance “Chanson espagnole,” 66, 245–48 1770s–1780s, 95–98 “Chanson française,” 252–54 Boquet, 91–95 “Chanson hébraïque,” 65, 250–52 Count Basie Orchestra, 269 “Chanson italienne,” 248–50 counter-modernity, 402–4 colonialism and, 258–59 Creative Associates, 267–69 meanings, 254–59 critical modernity, 389, 404 Chomsky, Noam, 380 critical musicology, 23 chords difference and, 46–52 augmented sixth, 146 notions of power, 24–25 Christianity, 219–20 critical ontology, 403 Christine de Lorraine, 53, 71–72 critique, 16–17 Chuck D, 319 Cruz, Jon, 116 Cicognini, Jacopo, 69 cultural fundamentalism, 28 civil conversation, 135–36, 157 cultural tricksters, 318–19 Civil Rights movement, 262 cultural turn, 21–22 civilité, 135 Cuney, Maud, 14 Cixous, Hélène, 21 Curtis Institute, 266–67 Clarke, Vince, 77, 312 Cusick, Suzanne G., 7 Clayton, Jayce, 285 Cuvier, Georges, 352–53 Clément, Catherine, 170 Clockwork Orange, A, 84–85, 302–5 Daisy Bell, 295–96 coalitional politics, 49 Dalmas, Antoine, 125 Code Noir, 126–27 dance cognitive musicology, 4 slaves, 117–18 Colbran, Isabella, 195 Dangerfield, Rodney, 332 Cold Crush Brothers, 319 Darwin, Charles, 350, 374, 376 Coleman, Ornette, 396 Dauberval, Jean, 93 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 173 David, Giovanni, 177–79, 198, 204–8, colonialism, 1, 3–4, 84, 389–90 210–11, 213 denial of historicity to colonized, Davies, James Q., 176 11–12 Dawkins, Richard, 103, 373 coloniality, 1, 11, 104–5 Deacon, Terrence, 378–79 of power, 25 Debussy, Claude, 266 comparative grammar, 380–81 En blanc et noir, 282 comparative rhetoric, 10 décima, 382 comparativism, 38–39 Def Jam records, 316, 322–23 complementarity, 393 Del Tredici, David, 267 computers, 294–95 Delany, Martin R., 129–30 Cone, Edward T., 152 Deleuze, Gilles, 339–40, 367 confession, 55, 61, 75–76 Denning, Michael, xiv Congress of Black Artists and Densmore, Frances, 14–15 Writers, 19 Depeche Mode, 79, 288–90 Connolly, James, 17 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 21, 39, 381 constructivism, 6, 367 Descartes, René, 135 contradiction, 393 Description de l’Égypte, 13 contralto, 176, 196, 212 Deslondes, Charles, 128 contredanse, 161–63 dialogical models, 24 Coolio, 332 Diamond, Michael, 316, 320, 323 corn-shucking songs, 118 Dick, Philip K., 309 corps de musique, 127 Diday, Paul, 354 Corriere della Sera, 228 Diderot, Denis, 180 Index 425

difference, 4–5, 399 “Nigger Series,” 272–76 between different accounts, 56 Crazy Nigger, 276–79 critical musicology and, 23–24, 46–52 Evil Nigger, 274–76 definition, 4–5 in New York City, 269–70 genealogy of, 9–16 sexual identity, 279–80, 282–84 in Enlightenment thought, 135 Eastman, Julius Sr., 264 in Latin American culture, 392 Edna Disney/Calarts Theater, 261 differentiation, 393 education, 338–39 Digital Underground, 317 voice teachers, 341–42 Dike, Matt, 320–21 effective history, 381 Disability Rights Movement, 35 effeminacy disability studies, 35 bel canto opera, 190–98, 203–13 disco, 80, 293 Ehrlich, Dimitri, 324 diversity, 367 Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 31–32 donna del lago, La, 46, 174–78; see also Lady of Eley, Geoff, 138–39 the Lake, The Elgar, Edward, 303 alterations to score, 177–78, 184–85 Elkind, Rachel, 298, 302 characters Elliott, Missy, 31, 316, 325–26 Elena, 182, 198–202 humor, 325–26 King James, 198–203 image and persona, 326–27, 331 Malcolm, 179–80, 182, 194–95 music Rodrigo, 178–80, 184–85 “Back in the Day,” 332 critical reception, 197–98, 203–8 “One Minute Man,” 329 decline in popularity, 213 “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” 327 romance of difference, 183–86 “Toyz,” 329 sections and passages Under Construction, 328–29 “Ah! Si pera...Fato crudele,” 194 “Work It,” 329–30 “Cielo, in qual estasi,” 201 use of humor, 326–32 “O fiamma soave,” 204 emancipatory movements, 17–18 “Tanti affetti,” 202–3 Emerson, Keith, 305 “Vivere io non potrò,” 189–90, 201 Eminem, 316, 325 Donzelli, Domenico, 212–13 Enlightenment Dorothy, 342–43 civil conversation and, 135–36 Douglass, Frederick, 116–17 Enlightenment ethics, 133 Drinker, Sophie, 14 Eno, Brian, 86, 293, 306–8 drumming, 119–20, 126–27 Entführing aus dem Serail, Die, 140 Du Bois, W. E. B., 131 Epic Rap Battles of History, 333 Duprez, Gilbert-Louis, 175, 353 Epstein, Dena, 126 Erasure, 312 early music, 102 Escobar, Arturo, 392 whiteness in, 105–6 Escuela Libre de Música de Puerto Rico, 394–97 ear-training, 284–85 Eslava, Hilarión, 394 Eastman, Frances, 264, 266, 272 essentialism, 24 musical studies, 266–67 ethical ontology, 39 Eastman, Gerry, 269, 271–72 ethics, 404–5 Eastman, Julius, 261–63 ethnic studies, 20 as musician, 261–62 Eurocentrism, 102–3 Creative Associates and, 267–69 Eurythmics, 288 death, 270 evolutionary developmental biology, 377 early life, 264–66 evolutionism, 368–69 lack of recognition, 270–72 biocultural evolution, 374–75 music exaggeration, 257 Gay Guerilla, 279–84 exhaustion of difference, 392 426 index

exoticism, 239–40 French army, 127, 347 folksong as, 243–45 French Revolution, 144 stereotype, 256–57 Frere-Jones, Sasha, 321 Frescobaldi, Maria Vittoria, 27, 54 Fabbroni, Giovanni, 111 “accomplices,” 12 Fanon, Frantz, 18–20 clerical investigation, 57–58 Fantoni, Attilio, 14, 65–67, 74 confession, 61, 75–76 Fat Boys, The, 317 testimony, 59–60 fattoli sentire, 64 Freud, Sigmund, 259, 290–91, 358–59 Feldman, Martha, 210 Friend, David, 285 Feldman, Morton, 267 Fripp, Robert, 306 female masculinity, 171, 187–88 Furini, Angelica, 68 femininity in opera, 180–81 Gafforini, Elisabetta, 196 technology as, 294–95 Gahan, David, 289 feminist theory, 3, 47 Galen of Pergamum, 93 Fer, Briony, 260, 262–63 Gamer, Michael C., 173 festive song, 10 gangsta rap, 317–18 Fétis, François-Joseph, 12, 213, 348–49, 356 Gann, Kyle, 264, 279 Filicai, Suor Maria Grazia, 61 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, 397 Fink, Robert, 262 García, Manuel II, 95, 346–48 Flavin, Dan, 260 García-Canclini, Néstor, 400 Fletcher, Alice Cunningham, 15 Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, 31 Flock of Seagulls, 288 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 16, 273–74, 318–20 Flores, Juan, 418 Gayle, Charles, 267 Floyd, Samuel A. Jr., 272 gayness, 279–80, 282–84 folk music in synthpop, 289–90, 292–94 European, 109, 111–13 Gazetta di Milano, 194 Hungarian, 158 Geertz, Clifford, 21–22, 366 folksong, 33 Gena, Peter, 73 as exoticism, 243–45 gender, 7–9; see also androgyny; femininity; collection, 240–43 masculinity; transsexuality; “exotic,” 241–42 women French, 242 French musical theater, 101 harmonization, 241–42 race and For Members Only, 73 Old Regime France, 101–2 Forbes, Robert P., 120–21 gender studies, 22 Foss, Lukas, 267, 269 generative grammar, 380–81 Fossett, Peter, 119 Gerbino, Giuseppe, 70–71 Foucault, Michel, 16, 21, 24, 41–42, 46, 81, 133, Germany, 14 287–88, 339, 349–50, 367, 390, 402–3 Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale, race, 81 215–16 technologies, 287–88 Gilbert and Sullivan, 221 Frames of War, 39 Girardi, Michele, 214 France, 20–21 Gissey, Henri de, 89 Old Regime attitudes to race, 83–85 Glam rock, 303, 306 public sphere, 37 globality, 25 vocal pedagogy, 361 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 140 Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 313 Iphigénie en Tauride, 141 Fraser, Nancy, 44, 138–39 Goldberg, Aaron, 413 Freccero, Carla, 104 Goldman, Danielle, 46 Frederick, Francis, 118 Goodman, Dena, 136 freedom principle, 84 Goodman, Steven, 339 Index 427

Gordon, Bonnie, 30 Hill, Jane, 266–67 Gore, Martin, 79 hip-hop, 31 gospel, 398 female rappers, 325 Gossett, Philip, 174 freestyling and MC battles, 317 gothic romance, 173 humor Gould, Wilburn J., 357 writing about, 316–17 Grabscheid, Eugen, 357 humor in, 316 Graeme, Malcolm, 28 misogyny, 318 Gramsci, Antonio, 16 rap parodies, 332–37 Gregory XIV (Pope), 11 representing, 316 Groos, Arthur, 214 Hisako, Ōyama, 214 Grossberg, Lawrence, 404–6, 414 Hisama, Ellie M., 31 group identification, 6 Histoire Naturelle, 121 Guattari, Félix, 367 historical identity, 5 Guevara, Che, 18 historicism, 102–3 gypsy style, 143, 158 historiography, 11–12 history, 375–76 Habermas, Jürgen, 137–38, 144, 157, Hobbes, Thomas, 37, 317 160, 390 Holland, Catharine, 123 hair bands, 292 hominin evolution, 372 Haitian Revolution, 32–33, 108–9, 113–14, historical approach, 376–77 124–25, 130–31 homophobia, 292–93 Halberstam, Judith, 171 homosexuality, 279–80, 282–84 Hall, Prince, 124–25 Honneth, Axel, 43–44 Hallward, Peter, 409–10, 415 hooks, bell, 359–60 Hannaford, Ivan, 81 Horkheimer, Max, 133 Hanslick, Eduard, xiii Hornbostel, Erich von, 15 Harte, Brett, 219 Horovitz, Adam, 316, 324 Hartman, Saidiya, 109 Horszowski, Mieczysław, 266 Haskins, James, 272 hot jazz, 20 Haydn, Joseph, 25–26, 421 house music, 293 music Howat, Roy, 247–48 L’incontro improvviso, 140 human computers, 294 Piano Trio in G Minor (“Gypsy”), Human League, The, 288, 292 157–69 “Don’t You Want Me,” 292 Symphony No. 104, 141 Reproduction, 308–9 Symphony No. 92 (“Oxford”), 144–57 “Empire State Human,” 309 parallels with civil conversation, 157 “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling,” structural features, 146 309 thematic variation, 147–51 humanistic evolutionism, 36–37 Head, Matthew, 140, 143, 158 humanity, 369–71 Heathen Chinee, The, 219–20 innate similarity, 370–71 Hegel, Georg W. F., 7–8, 18, 350 humor, 316 Heidegger, Martin, 133, 381 advertisements, 334–35 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 347 Beastie Boys, 315–16, 320–24 Henri IV of France, 88 Missy Elliott, 326–32 Herlinghaus, Hermann, 391 rap parodies, 332–37 hermeneutics, 21–22, 366–67 Hungarian music, 158–63 Hess, Mickey, 317, 324, 336 Hunter, Mary, 141, 180–81 Hesse, Eva, 260 Hurston, Zora Neale, 14 heteronomy, 37 heterosexism, 8–9, 12, 104 Ice-T, 335 heterosexuality, 311 idem-identity, 5 428 index

identity, 5–6 Kitchen, The (venue), 261, 269 constructivism, 6 Knoles, Amy, 285 intersectionality, 49 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 170 realist, 6 Kojéve, Alexandre, 18 social, 5–6 Kotik, Petr, 267 Illica, Luigi, 214, 225 Kraftwerk, 306–7 Imperial Japanese Theatrical Company, 214, “Autobahn,” 306–7 219–21 Trans-Europe Express, 307 Insane Clown Posse, 325 Kramnick, Jonathan, 368–69, 371–72 Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 110 Kristeva, Julia, 18, 21, 259 interrogation Kubrick, Stanley, 295 of Frescobaldi, 60 2001: A Space Odyssey, 295 sonic characteristics, 63 Clockwork Orange, A, 84–85, 302–5 intersectionality, 48–50 intersubjectivity, 18–19 la fune, 12–13 Irigaray, Luce, 21 La Grange, Charles Varlet, 23 Iris, 214, 225 Lacan, Jacques, 21 Israel, Jonathan, 135 Laclau, Ernesto, 404 Italian music, 215–16 Lady of the Lake, The, 171–72, 190–94, 200 Jagger, Mick, 83–84 critical and literary reception, 173–74 James V of Scotland, 173, 176–77, 200 geographic location, 172–73 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 252–54 King James character, 200 Japanese music, 214–16 translations, 173–74 jazz, 19, 26, 397, 406–8 Lady Sovereign, 316, 325 bebop, 19 Laënnec, René, 357–58 hot, 20 LaFlesche, Francis, 15 Jefferson Randolph, Martha, 108–9 Lamperti, G. B., 100 Jefferson, Isaac, 119–20 Landes, Joan, 168 Jefferson, Martha Wayles, 112 Landon, H. C. Robbins, 145–46 Jefferson, Thomas, 30, 108 Lang, Fritz, 294 bells and, 118–19 Langhorne, Orra, 120 Haitian Revolution and, 124–28 Lassus, Orlandus, 77 music collection, 111–12 Latin America, 343–44 musicality, 111 difference, 392 on emancipation, 123–24 modernity, 390–91 scientific racism, 120–23 Leach, Mary Jane, 264 Jewishness, 320 LeBon, Elisabeth, 173 Jíbaro, 382, 387–88 Leclerc, Georges-Louis, comte de Buffon, 85, Jin, 325 121 Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor), 137 Ledyard, John, 129 justice, 44–45 Lee Tung Foo, 341 legato singing, 181 Kabuki Theater, 214 Lehmann, Lilli, 349 Kajikawa, Loren, 317, 321–22 Lennox, Annie, 294 Kamin, Leon, 376 Lerner, Neil, 35 Kant, Immanuel, 37 Lettre annuelle de l’Ordre de Notre Dame, Kawakami Otojirō, 214 125–26 Kelley, Robert D. G., 316 Lettres sur la danse, 99 Kennedy, Jamie, 335 Levinas, Emmanuel, 40 Kentucky Supreme Court, 362 Levine Packer, Renée, 264 Keough, William, 318 Lewontin, Richard, 376 Kirkendale, Warren, 56 Light, Jennifer S., 294 Index 429

Lincoln, Andrew, 180, 202 Martin, Steve, 315 Lind, Jenny, 346 Marx, Karl, 17, 110 linguistic identity, 5 Marxism, xvi, 6, 17 Linnaeus, Carl, 350 Mascagni, Pietro, 214 Lionnet, Françoise, 33 masculinity, 171; see also effeminacy Lipkin, Seymour, 266 sentimental heroism, 181–82 Lipsius, Marie, 14 masks, 87 listening, 62–63, 420 masque, 77 Locke, John, 137 Mauss, Marcel, 339 Loder, Kurt, 292–93 May, Florence, 14 Lombardia, Il, 219 Mayes, Catherine, 158 Lonely Island, The, 335–36 McClary, Susan, 24–25, 133–34, 170 Loomba, Ania, 82–83 McClintock, Anne, 348–50, 352 Lopez, Lisa “Left Eye,” 330 McDaniels, Darryl, 319 Louis XIV of France, 85, 87, 126–27 McDowell, Malcolm, 303 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 88–89 Melman, Larry Bud, 322 lyricism, 223 Melody Maker, 298–99, 311 melophilia, 53–54, 68–70 MacArthur Foundation, 398 Melville, Herman, 128–29 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 133 memes, 103, 373 Macklemore, 337 Ménestrier, Claude-François, 21 Madama Butterfly (Puccini) Mercure Galant, 88 American characters, 216–17 Merkin Hall, 261 Pinkerton, 222–23 Method Man, 335 Sharpless, 216, 223 microhistory, 22 Asian characters, 216–20 Mighty Fortress is Our God, A, 282 Cio-Cio-San, 221–27, 233–34 migration, 10, 77–106, 418 background, 227 Miller, Jonathan, 77 entrance, 224 Miller, Richard, 100, 357, 361 Goro, 217, 223 Minaj, Nicki, 316 Prince Yamadori, 221 Mingus, Charles, 267 sections Minimoog, 77–78 “Bimba, dagli occhi,” 228 minority histories, 26 “Dance of the Lion of Echigo,” 223–24 minstrelsy, 18, 129–30 “Dovunque al mondo,” 216, 222–23 misogyny “Un bel dì, vedremo,” 223, 233–34 in hip-hop, 318 Madame Butterfly (Belasco play), 214 misrecognition, 8, 43, 49 Magdalena, Maria, 71 of women, 8–9 Magritte, René, 290 Mithen, Stephen, 375 Magyar nóták Veszprém Vármegyéböl, 161 modernity, 390, 392–93, 400–1, 409 Maison du Lied competition, 59–60, 66, Monahan, Brent Jeffrey, 347 238–39, 243 Monk, Meredith, 269 Malanotte, Adelaide, 196 Monroe, James, 127–28 male gaze, 171 Monticello, 118–19 Malibran, Maria, 47 Moog, Robert, 81, 296–97 Malvezzi, Alberigo, 68 Moors, 86 Manzo, Emily, 285 Moreiras, Alberto, 392 Manzoni, Piero, 260 Moreno, Jairo, 40 Maoism, 17–18 moresche, 77 Maori, 1 Moten, Fred, 115 Marchesi, Mathilde, 346 Moyet, Alison, 294, 311–12 Maria Theresa of Austria, 137 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 140–41, 144 Martin, Agnes, 260 MTV, 292, 329 430 index

Muñoz Marín, Luis, 394–95 Northup, Solomon, 117–18 Murdoch, James, 193–94 Northwestern Daily, 274 Music of Black Americans, The, 26, 272 Noss, Kaitlin, 47 música jíbara, 108, 110, 382–84, 386–90 Notes on the State of Virginia, 109, 122 musico singers, 48, 175–77, 187, 196–97 Notorious B.I.G., 332 musicology Noverre, Jean-Georges, 93 female musicologists, 14–15 Nozzari, Andrea, 176, 179, 184, 212 history Numan, Gary, 77, 80, 87, 288, 290–92, 16th and 17th centuries, 10–11 309–11 19th century, 13 “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?,” 309–11 non-white musicologists, 15–16 Nussbaum, Martha, 38 poststructuralism and, 23–24 professionalization, 13–15 Oakey, Philip, 292 turn toward difference, 2–3 Ocampo, Victoria, 391 Musicology and Difference, 2–3 Ol’ Dirty Bastard, 325 Olenina-d’Alheim, Maria, 59–60 Naïs, 93 opera, 77; see also donna del lago, La; Madama Napoleon Bonaparte, 130 Butterfly National Museum of the American Latino composition of roles for performer, 178 Commission, 417 femininity in, 180–81, 187–88 national musics, 239–40 race in costume, 85–100 stereotyping, 245–54 vocal pedagogy and, 345–46 national schools of singing, 360–61 vocal timbre, 340, 354 Native American language, 116 women’s role in, 175–76 nature, 38 Operación Manos a la Obra, 395 negative space, 115 organic music, 276–77 Nelly, 318 Orientalism, 13, 32–33, 63 neoliberalism, 42 oscillators, 296–97 Neoplatonism, 70 Ottieri, Sinolfo, 16–17, 27, 53 nerdcore, 336 interrogation, 13 New Age “healing,” 99–100 melophilia, 68–70 New Cultural History, 22 sentence, 58, 67–68 New Historicism, 22, 25–26, 102 testimony against, 58–59 New Media Express, 324 testimony by, 62–63 New Monthly, 197 Otto di guardia, 16–17 New Musicology, 367 Ovid, 208–9 New Order, 288 New Orleans jazz, 20 Pacini, Giovanni, 210 New Romantic bands, 292 Palin, Sarah, 333 New World Records, 261 parahumanism, 370 New York Amsterdam News, 319 Parekh, Bhikhu, 40–41 New York Dolls, 78–79 Pareles, Jon, 323 Newsweek magazine, 298 Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), 322 niche construction, 374–75 Paris Conservatoire, xii Nichols, Roger, 249–51 parlatorio, 63 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 375–76, 378, 381 parody, 332–37 Nikolaus, Prince (Esterházy), 140 party rap, 317, 331–32 nobility, 84 Pasta, Giuditta, 47 Noces de Pelée et de Thetis, Les, 89 pastoralism, 99–100 noise, 113–14 Patent of Toleration, 137 African American music as, 116–18 Paz, Octavio, 390 rebellion and, 114–15 Peabody, Sue, 83–84 normalized knowledge, 257 pedagogy, 394–95 Index 431

Pèlerins de la Mecque, Les, 140 Puerto Rico, 385–86 Penman, Matt, 413 identity of state, 418–19 Peraino, Judith, 34–35 industrialization, 388–89, 395 Pérez, Danilo, 398 music, 382–84, 386–90 Peri, Jacopo, 68 music pedagogy, 394–95 perspectival dualism, 44 punk, 292, 307–8 Peslin, Marguerite-Angélique, 93 Purcell, Henry, 303 Pet Shop Boys, 313 “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” 303 Petralia, Costanza, 197 Pushkin, Alexsandr, 365 Pétrequin, Joseph Pierre Éléonor, 354 Phaëton, 91 Queen, 85–86, 305–6 phrenology, 348–49, 355–56 queer theory, 27, 34, 171 phylogeny, 372–73 early music and, 103–4 Pierce, Bill, 397 queerness; see also homosexuality; queer Pinker, Steven, 375 theory; transsexuality Pisaroni, Rosamunda, 28, 47, 176, 178, in synthpop, 290–91 197, 212 technology in film, 295–96 Piscopo, Joe, 332 Quijano, Anibel, 104 Plato, 114 Quintero Rivera, Ángel, 386–87 Playboy magazine, 298–300 Plays, Acting and Music, 219 Rabel, Daniel, 88 pleasure principle, 290–91 race, 77 plena, 108 Arendt on, 81 Poehler, Amy, 333 ballet and opera costuming, 85–100 Poggi, Domenico, 68 early modern historiography, 79–83 Poison, 292 gender and, 101–2 politesse, 135–36 musical difference and, 348–49 politicization, 25 musical institutions and, 107 politics of frequency, 339 vocal timbre and, 344–45 polygenism, 84–85 white rappers, 324–25 Polymoog, 77–78 racism, 19, 81–82; see also blackface positivist musicology, 15 performance posthumanism, 370 in classical music establishment, 271–72 post-neo-Darwinism, 380 Old Regime France, 85, 98, 101 poststructuralism, 21, 23–24 “scientific,” 31–32, 92, 120–23 Potter, John, 345 Radical Enlightenment, 35, 135 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., 397 Ramann, Lina, 14 power, 24–25, 41 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 93 Pratt, Mary Louise, 393–94 Ramsey, Guthrie Jr., 29 Pressburger Zeitung, 140 rap parodies, 332–37 Prince, 330 Rath, Richard, 126 private concerts, 160 Ratliff, Ben, 384 progressive rock, 305 Ravel, Maurice, 33, 63–64, 238, 266 pronunciation, 340 “Chanson Écossaise,” 60 psychoanalysis, 4–5, 358 Chansons populaires, 239 psychological identity, 5 stereotype in, 245–54 public music, 159–60 titles, 244–45 public sphere, 37, 139 Cinq mélodies populaires grèques, 244 Puccini, Giacomo, 30–31, 65, 249; see also Deux mélodies hébraïques, 244 Madama Butterfly (Puccini) nationalism, 254 Bohème, La, 224 Rawls, John, 37 Turandot, 224 rebellion Puente, Tito, 396 noise and, 114–15 432 index

recognition, 4, 7 Sadayakko, 228 redistributive notion, 44 Said, Edward, 13, 32, 63 repair, 47–48 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 221 Recontre imprévue, La, 140 Sakamoto, Michael, 285 redistribution, 7, 44 salon culture, 135, 139, 168 Reed, Lou, 293 Same, the, 410–11, 415 regency, 71–72 sameness, 5, 36–37, 367–68, 370–71 Reichman, Thomas, 269–70 San Francisco, 20 religious difference, 136–37, 219–20 Sanchez, David, 396–97 tolerance, 137–38 Sanneh, Kelefa, 328 repair, 48 Santa Verdiana, 54–55 representation, 7 Sapir-Whorf linguistic determinism, 367 Residencial Luis Llorens Torres, 394 Sarlo, Beatriz, 391 resonance frequencies, 364 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18, 37 respect, 414 Saturday Night Live, 333, 335–36 Revuluri, Sindhumathi, 33 Saturday Review, 298 Richerson, Peter, 371 Schafer, Murray, 115–16 Ricoeur, Paul, 5 Schellenbach, Kate, 316 Ricordi, Giulio, 225 Schneider, Marius, 344 Rigolet, François-Marie, 145 Schroeder, David, 142–43 Riley, Terry, 86 Schroeter, Rebecca, 160 Rinuccini, Faustina, 14, 65–66 scientific racism, 31–32, 92, 120–23 Robertson, Pat, 33 Scott, Joan W., 56 RoboCop, 81 Scott, Sir Walter, 49–50, 192 robots, 294–95 Lady of the Lake, The, 172–74 rock instrumentation, 291 Secolo, Il, 219 Rodriguez, Michael, 413 sentimental heroines, 180–81 Rokseth, Yvonne, xiii, 14 sentimental heroism, 181–82 romance of difference, 183–86 serial aesthetic, 260 Rorem, Ned, 359 Settimanni, Francesco, 9 Rose, Steven, 376 sex workers, 68–69 Rose, Tricia, 316 she said, he said narratives, 56 Rosen, Charles, 145 Shepp, Archie, 267 Rosen, Jody, 325 Sheppard, Anthony, 215 Rossini, Gioachino, 27–28, 303; see also donna Shi-Ba Mo, 216 del lago, La Shryock, Andrew, 371 nozze di Teti e di Peleo, Le, 46 Signifyin(g), 273–74, 318 Otello, 46 silencing, 113–16 Ricciardo e Zoraide, 196 singing Rothko, Mark, 260, 274 eroticism, 69–70, 75–76 Royal Exchange, 136–37 national schools, 360–61 Rubin, Rick, 315–16 writing on, 345–46 Rubini, Giovanni Battista, 53–54 singular, the, 414, 416–17, 419–20 Run-D.M.C., 319, 322 Sisman, Elaine, 168 “Peter Piper,” 329 situated universality, 39–40 Russell, Arthur, 269 situation, 411–12 Russell, G. Oscar, 354 skull shape, 348–49, 355–56 RZA, 335 Sky, Rick, 77 slave narratives, 30 S.E.M. Ensemble, 267 slave songs, 116–18 Saal, Hubert, 298 slavery, 12, 30, 387 Sachs, Curt, 14 blackface performance and, 100–1 sacrilegio stupro, 53–54, 55, 58, 73 enslaved musicians, 112 Index 433

Old Regime France, 87–88 synthesizers, 77–78, 296–98 rebellion, 114 control, 297 slave revolts, 127–30; see also Haitian Moog synthesizer, 297–98 Revolution origin of term, 81 Smail, Daniel Lord, 371 resistance to, 297–98 Smirnoff, 334 sexuality and, 313 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 1–2 synthpop, 79, 287–88, 312–13 Smith, Mark, 114 aesthetics, 290–92 Smith, Richard Langham, 246 gayness and, 313–14 Snoop Dogg, 335 musical features, 80, 288–90 social Darwinism, 352 Szendy, Peter, 62–63 social identity, 5–6 social intelligence hypothesis, 103–5, 373–74 Tacchinardi, Nicola, 196 Soft Cell, 288, 292 Tagore, Sourindro Mohun, 15 Solie, Ruth, 24, 132, 222–23 tam-tam, 218 sonata form, 151–54 Tangerine Dream, 306 sonata principle, 152 taxonomizing, 352 Southern, Eileen, 26 Tears for Fears, 288 Spanish music Teatro Arte e Litteratura, 197 Ravel’s caricature, 245–48 Teatro di San Carlo, 195 specific, the, 416 technologies, 287–88 Spelman, Elizabeth, 47–48 technology, 312–13 Spencer, Herbert, 12 represented as queer, 295–96 Spigliati, Giovanni Battista, 69 tenor singing, 175 Spivak, Gayatri, 39, 404, 405–6, 414 Terminator, 81 Star Trek, 295 tetrachord, 64 Star Wars, 295 Thomas and Sally, 112 Star-Spangled Banner, The, 57, 216–17, Ticknor, George, 119 231–32 Timbaland, 326, 330 state of the situation, 411–12, 414 time, 349–52 Stendahl, 203–4 Time magazine, 298 Stepford Wives, The, 294–95 tokenism, 42 Sterelny, Kim, 371, 374–75 tolerance, 137–44 stereotype, 254 Tomlinson, Gary, 11, 36–37 stethoscope, 357 Toro, Ana Teresa, 417 Stockhausen, Julius, 346 Torrefranca, Fausto, 215–16 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 306 torture, 12–13 Stone, The (venue), 261 Tosi, Adelaide, 187 Stono Rebellion, 127 Tosi, Pier Francesco, 345 strategic essentialism, 6 Touré, 319–20 Stratton, Jon, 317, 322 Tovey, Donald Francis, 145–46 Straus, Joseph N., 35 T-Pain, 336 subjugated knowledges, 41, 103 transcendental conditions, 409–10 Sublette, Ned, 284 transcendism, 11 subornata, 62 transcolonialism, 33–34 Sugarhill Gang, 317 transgender studies, 34 Sulley, Susanne, 292 transhistoricism, 81–82 SUNY Buffalo, 268–69 transnationalism, 33 survivance, 16 transsexuality, 298–99, 301 Sutcliffe, W. Dean, 167 travesty performance, 187 Switzerland, 361 Treacherous 3, 319 symbolic behavior, 377–78 Trotter, James Monroe, 14 Symons, Arthur, 219 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 112–13, 400, 404 434 index

Trublet, Nicolas, 136 Voltaire, 36, 84, 136–37 truth, 13–14, 412–13 Volterra, 54 Tsou, Judy, 30–31 voodoo, 125–26 Tucker, George, 118 Tucker, Sherrie, 284–85 Wagner, Mathilda, 346 Turkish representation, 141 Waits, Nasheet, 414 Turner, Nat, 114 Waldoff, Jessica, 180 Twisted Sister, 292 Walker, David, 121–22, 125 walking gentlemen, 193–94 uncanny, 259 Wally’s, 398 United States, 14 Warhol, Andy, 307 universality, 50–51, 403–6 Wayles, John, 112 Ussachevsky, Vladimir, 298 Weber, Max, 13 Webern, Anton, 421 Valier, Piero, 53 Webster, James, 145, 152, 155–56 Valley of the Shenandoah, The, 118 West, Kanye, 331 Valori, Maria Begigna, 14, 65–66 white rappers, 324–25; see also Beastie Boys Vassiliou, Androulla, 105 whiteness, 105–6 Vennard, William, 354 European folk music, 109, 111–13 Verbunkos dance, 160–63, 165 Williams, Jan, 267 verisimilitude, 64–67, 74–75 Williamsburg Music Center, 269 vraisemblance, 98–99 women, 8–9; see also femininity Vienna University, xiii blackface performance, 91–92, 98 Vigoreaux, Ernesto, 394 exclusion from academia, 14 Village Voice, 320 mathematicians, 294 villancicos, 77 women’s music history, 26–27 Villoteau, Guillaume André, 13 Woodson, Carter G., 338 violence, 318 Vizenor, Gerald, 16 Yankovic, “Weird Al,” 332–33 vocal health, 342–43, 356 Yauch, Adam, 316, 320, 323 vocal onset, 100 Yazoo, 311–12 vocal pedagogy, 347, 353–57 “Don’t Go,” 311–12 national schools, 360–61 Upstairs at Eric’s, 311–12 vocal timbre, 339 Young, Iris Marion, 45 as Deleuzian knowledge, 340 Young, Robert, 17, 32 as medical indicator, 357–58 YouTube, 333 correctness, 341–42 national schools of singing, 360–61 Zedda, Alberto, 174 physiological basis, 363–64 Zenón, Miguel, 40, 382, 419–20 physiological research, 346–49, 356–57 at Berklee, 397–99, 403 racialization, 340–42, 344–45, 362–63 Caravana Cultural, 406–13, 415 ethnic timbre, 342–43 early life, 394 vocal tract, 363–64 Jíbaro, 108, 382–85 vocoder, 304 musical education, 394–97 voice, 359–60 Zingarelli, Niccolò as action, 364–65 Giuletta e Romeo, 47–48 voix blanche, 353–54 Žižek, Slavoj, 365 voix sombrée, 354 Zucculo, Lodovico, 71