Musical Meaning Musical Meaning Toward a Critical History Lawrence Kramer University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2002 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kramer, Lawrence, 1946– Musical meaning : toward a critical history / Lawrence Kramer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-520-22824-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Music—History and criticism. 3. Subjectivity in music. 4. Music, Influence of. I. Title. ML3845 .K814 2002 781.1'7—dc21 2001027819 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10987654 321 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine- free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 8 Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Sounding Out: Musical Meaning and Modern Experience 1 1. Hermeneutics and Musical History: A Primer without Rules, an Exercise with Schubert 11 2. Hands On, Lights Off: The “Moonlight” Sonata and the Birth of Sex at the Piano 29 3. Beyond Words and Music: An Essay on Songfulness 51 4. Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in the Rise of Mass Entertainment 68 5. Rethinking Schumann’s Carnaval: Identity, Meaning, and the Social Order 100 6. Glottis Envy: The Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera 133 7. Hercules’ Hautboys: Mixed Media and Musical Meaning 145 8. The Voice of Persephone: Musical Meaning and Mixed Media 173 9. Powers of Blackness: Jazz and the Blues in Modern Concert Music 194 10. Long Ride in a Slow Machine: The Alienation Effect from Weill to Shostakovich 216 11. Chiaroscuro: Coltrane’s American Songbook 242 12. Ghost Stories: Cultural Memory, Mourning, and the Myth of Originality 258 Notes 289 Index 327 Illustrations Figures 2.1. Sir Frank Dicksee, A Reverie (1895) 38 4.1. János Jánko, “Liszt at the Keyboard” (6 April 1873) 88 5.1. Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child (c. 1905) 122 5.2. Clementina, Lady Hawarden, photograph of Clementina Maude (1861–62) 123 Musical Examples 1.1. Schubert, Moment musical in A , opening figure 21 ∫ 1.2. Schubert, Moment musical in A , beginning of Trio 23 ∫ 1.3. Schubert, Moment musical in A , second half ∫ of recapitulation 25 1.4. Schubert, Moment musical in A , interior of development 27 ∫ 2.1. Beethoven, Adagio from “Moonlight” Sonata, mm. 10–19 47 3.1. Schubert, Heidenröslein (complete) 56 4.1. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, opening passage 94 4.2. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, closing passage 97 5.1. Schumann, Eusebius (from Carnaval), mm. 5–6 111 5.2. Schumann, opening passages of Arlequin, Florestan, and Coquette (from Carnaval) 114 5.3. Schumann, opening passages of Chiarina and Estrella (from Carnaval) 117 5.4. Schumann, Replique (complete; from Carnaval) 125 viii / Illustrations 5.5. Schumann, closing passage of Pantalon et Columbine (from Carnaval) 127 5.6. Schumann, excerpt from Paganini (from Carnaval) 128 9.1. Debussy, “Bones” and “Tambo” passages from “Minstrels” 211 9.2. Tippett, “Slow Blues” from Symphony no. 3 212 10.1. Weill, “Moritat von Mackie Messer,” first verse 224 10.2. Shostakovich and Beethoven, slow cello themes from Quartets no. 8 and no. 16 238 Acknowledgments For counsel, criticism, encouragement, help, intellectual stimulation, and more, thanks and appreciation to: Walter Bernhart, Marshall Brown, Nicholas Cook, the late Naomi Cumming, James Deaville, Samuel Floyd Jr., Matthew Head, Kim Kowalke, Richard Kurth, Claire Leonard, Nancy Leonard, Ralph Locke, Susan McClary, Vera Micznik, Albrecht Riethmüller, Steven Paul Scher, James Sellars, Ruth Solie, Rose Subotnik, Jeremy Tambling, Robert Walser, and Werner Wolf. Earlier versions of chapters 3 and 9 appeared, respectively, in Word and Music Studies I: Defining the Field, ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999) and Black Music Research Journal, Center for Black Music Research (Chicago: Columbia College, 16 [1996]: 53–70). My thanks to the publishers for allowing me to reserve the right to reprint this material. An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared in A Night in at the Opera: Media Representations in Opera, ed. Jeremy Tambling (London: John Libbey and the Arts Council of England, 1994); it is reprinted here, with thanks, courtesy of the University of Luton Press. Music example 10.1 is reproduced courtesy of European American Music Corporation, again with the author’s thanks. ix Introduction: Sounding Out Musical Meaning and Modern Experience The problem of meaning stands at the forefront of recent thinking about music. Whether music has meaning, what kinds of meaning it may have, and for whom; the relationship of musical meaning to individual subjectiv- ity, social life, and cultural context—these questions have inspired strong feelings and sharp debate. All of them are raised anew and given a thorough shaking in Musical Meaning, which aims to rethink as fully as possible both how the questions are asked and how they are answered. The book cel- ebrates meaning as a basic force in music history and an indispensable fac- tor in how, where, and when music is heard. In its modern form, the problem of meaning arose with the development of European music as something to be listened to “for itself” as art or enter- tainment rather than as something mixed in with social occasion, drama, or ritual. The music composed to be heard in this way eventually constituted a discovery that permanently altered the character and concept of music both inside and outside the European tradition. Yet although both this repertoire and the modes of listening it fostered encouraged a sense of aes- thetic self-sufficiency and an idealized, unitary concept of music, a variety of exceptions and variants proliferated right alongside them to challenge the emergent model. This process has been more or less continuous, and in one respect it has been very fruitful. It has encouraged the development of both analytical devices for understanding music as autonomous art and interpre- tive strategies for understanding music as meaningfully engaged with lan- guage, imagery, and the wider world. In another sense, however, the debate has been fruitless, because it is not so much about the nature of music “itself” (as if there were such a thing) as about the ways in which we autho- rize ourselves to listen to music and to talk about it. It is obvious that in practice both sides of the debate are “right,” even if in theory one is inclined 1 2/Sounding Out to prefer one side over the other—as I do myself, since most of my work has been devoted to the pursuit of musical meaning. The underlying point of this book is that the apparent dilemma of musi- cal meaning is actually its own solution. To see this, we need to view the dilemma itself, not in negative terms as a zero-sum game that can never actually be won, but in positive terms as a historical phenomenon. What this shift of perspective reveals is that the character of modern Western music regularly turns on the question of whether the music takes on con- text-related meaning in particular cases. In other words, the question of whether music has meaning becomes, precisely, the meaning of music. At least since the historical watershed just described, music has generally oper- ated on the basis of a series of contradictory tendencies: on the one hand toward the projection of autonomy, universality, self-presence, and the sub- lime transcendence of specific meaning, and on the other hand toward inti- mations of contingency, historical concreteness, constructed and divided selfhood, and the intelligible production of specific meanings. Music pre- sents this dual character in quasi-perceptual terms, analogously perhaps to the famous line-drawing discussed by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations: a figure that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, but not both at once.1 This interplay of autonomy and contingency is the general, higher-order context and condition of intelligibility for most modern Western music. It is not so much something heard as it is the vestibule through which we hear. It is a kind of template, a quasi-grammatical or a priori ambiguity to which no fixed content can be assigned. Either side of this duality may be gratifying or suffocating, vital or stale, enthralling or threatening or bewil- dering; either side may be ambivalent. Either may also recognize and make concessions to the other, which it is more likely to subordinate than to exclude. And either may lay claim to the same dimensions of musical expe- rience: the expression of feeling, for example, may be grounded in concepts like form or structure or left adjacent to them, and the feelings expressed may be understood as in some sense universal or unconditional or referred to historically specific categories. The only thing fixed among these possi- bilities, and many more, is that virtually any act of musical composition, performance, listening, or understanding will engage some and ignore or repress others, and thus define itself by giving the interplay of autonomy and contingency a particular realization, be it ad hoc or systematic, explicit or tacit, even witting or unwitting. The interplay itself, of course, is not unique to music, but it is perhaps more urgent and ubiquitous in music than anywhere else. As the art of the Sounding Out /3 ear more than the eye, music collapses the sense of distance associated with visuality, and more broadly with the whole field of concepts, images, and words.