Introduction Musicking As a Cultural Practice Unless Otherwise Noted, All
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Notes Introduction Musicking as a Cultural Practice Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are my own. Likewise, all italics within quotations appear in the original text unless indicated by my own emphasis. 1. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968). 2. For a “utopian” reading of these emancipatory practices, see Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso Press, 2012). 3. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,” in Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 89. 4. For a damning assessment of this political era from a perspective similar to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, see Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 2–3. 5. Since the early twentieth century, Berlin has maintained a strong leftist political tradition (especially, in its eastern boroughs) as well as a large and diverse alternative scene of artists, musicians, and writers. While first drafting this text, Berlin was governed by an unprecedented “red-red coalition” of the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany and the far-left Party of Democratic Socialism, which succeeded the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the Marxist–Leninist political party that had previously ruled East Germany. 6. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Briefe an Hartmut. 1974–1975 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1999), 93. 150 / notes 7. For a late capitalist study of this ideological appropriation, see Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1995). 8. EA80, 2 Takte Später, self-release, 1985, LP. 9. Peter Wicke, Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology, trans. Rachel Fogg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 174–75. This passage is taken from the text’s conclusion, which was rewritten for the English translation. Wicke’s original conclusion addresses the future of popular music in the former East Germany. See his Rockmusik. Zur Ästhetik und Soziologie eines Massenmediums (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1987), 236–50. He is Germany’s first professor for the Theory and History of Popular Music at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I kindly acknowledge Wicke for supporting my affiliation with the university’s Center for Popular Music Research during my academic stay in Berlin from 2003 to 2004. 10. Following philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s formulations on hegemony, a “cultural-revolutionary” condition is a historically specific field of possible “collective and individual subject forma- tions.” In this new cultural hegemony, people would achieve— through sound—an enhanced critical understanding of their historically and ideologically specific subjectivity. See Jürgen Link, “Kulturrevolutionäre Strategien und Taktiken—Damals und Heute (Vortrag im Mai 1988 an der FU Berlin im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung ‘Mai 68 und die Folgen’),” kultuRRevolution 21 (Juli 1989): 31. 11. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 55. 12. Herbert Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic,” in Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), ix. 13. Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), x. 14. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9. notes / 151 15. For standard historical and theoretical surveys of the Frankfurt School, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1977); David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1994). For a reveal- ing study of the school’s exile from Nazi oppression in New York and California from 1934 to 1950, see Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 16. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 199. Here, critical theory differs from post-structuralist theory and criticism by its insistence on retaining the concept of the subject, however problematic and fractured. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 230. 18. See Mário Vieira de Carvalho, “Towards Dialectical Listening: Quotation and Montage in the Work of Luigi Nono,” Contemporary Music Review 18 (1999): 37–85. 19. Mário Vieira de Carvalho, “ ‘New Music’ between Search for Identity and Autopoiesis: Or, the ‘Tragedy of Listening,’ ” Theory, Culture & Society 16 (1999): 128. 20. Peter Wicke, Proseminar: “Populäre Musik in der Theorie: Theoreme— Methoden—Konzepte—Paradigmen,” Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, October 31, 2003. 21. See Lawrence Kramer, “Subjectivity Rampant! Music, Her- meneutics, and History,” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (New York: Routledge Publishing, 2003), 124–35. Even though music’s social intelligibility is ultimately constructed 152 / notes through its discursive circulation as a material practice of real indi- viduals, it is still able to sustain a fleeting degree of aesthetic auton- omy: the metonymic slippage of musical signifiers always prevents the reification of precise semantic decodings. 22. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1997), 20. 23. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 24. Attali, Noise, 29. 25. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 9. 26. For two key cultural analyses of tonal harmony, see Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Christopher Small, Education, Music, Society (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). 27. See Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. 28. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86 and “Anmerkungen über die ideologischen Staatsapparate (ISA),” in Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate, ed. Peter Schöttler, trans. Rolf Löper, Klaus Riepe, and Peter Schöttler (Westberlin: VSA Verlag, 1977), 154–68. The latter text is only available in the original French and German transla- tion. Music serves as an ideological state apparatus, because ideol- ogy’s very act of interpellation has “clearly a conspicuously sonoric dimension.” John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 45. 29. For an important dialectical analysis of the culture industry, which includes a more positive appraisal of popular culture’s criti- cal potential, see Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996). notes / 153 30. I am grateful to Catherine Liu for suggesting this formulation. See also Benjamin’s eighth thesis of his “On the Concept of History” (SW, 4: 392). 31. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). According to philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the state of emergency was only meant to be a provisional measure. It has, however, become a normalized paradigm of governmentality in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Translated by some commen- tators as the “state of exception,” I prefer the alternate translation, “state of emergency,” since it precisely renders the need for imme- diate counterpolitical mobilization. For more information on the term’s historical and philosophical context, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) and State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 32. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 29. 33. Richard Leppert, “Music ‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence’ (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope),” Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005): 102. 34. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 310. 35. See Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” trans. Nicholas Walker, in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on