Writing Through Music This page intentionally left blank Writing Through Music Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics WithJann a Foreword byPasler George Lewis 1 2008 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright ª 2008 by Jann Pasler Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pasler. Jann. Writing through music : essay on music, culture, and politics / Jann Pasler.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBM 978-0-19-532489-1 1. Music—Social aspects. 2. Music—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3916.P37 2007 780.9—dc22 2006037220 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my mother, Josephine Pasler, who infused my life with music and unconditional love - This page intentionally left blank Foreword george e. lewis ringing together a group of the most important and in- fluential recent essays by a major scholar whose work bridges musicology,B ethnomusicology, the sociology of art, and other fields, Jann Pasler’s Writing Through Music directly confronts one of the most perplexing anomalies in public intellectual discourse. In recent years, it has become evident that, in contrast to previous eras, the work of many of the best known public intellectuals of our time seems distanced from musical considerations, and from new and experi- mental music in particular. As a result, the practice of culturally and philosophi- cally theorizing contemporary nonliterary, nonvisual texts tends to become mar- ginalized and devalued in the public sphere—not because music scholars are not producing these works but, perhaps, simply because it is somehow assumed that music has little to teach us about the critical issues of our time. Pasler’s introduction to this book moves quickly and forthrightly to counter the effects of this lacuna, by presenting an ambitious, well-argued agenda for reasserting the centrality of music study to contemporary intellectual discourse. Implicitly accepting as given the interdisciplinary landscape in which contempo- rary scholars operate allows Pasler to move directly to an explanation of how her methods of theorizing music draw on music’s own most basic strengths. In a very real sense, scholars in many other fields could benefit from using music as, para- phrasing Pasler, a lens that focuses the analysis. Pasler acknowledges the debates that have animated musicological discussions in recent years, including canon formation, Werktreue, the role of the so-called extramusical, and so on. At the same time, her introduction is a ringing call to bring together the insights drawn from these debates in the service of a greater and more ambitious historiographical agenda. Pasler demonstrates that one crucial way of writing through music is to acknowledge that music scholars need to write ‘‘through’’ their own field to address others—not by simply deploying the tools and methods of other fields (the standard version of ‘‘interdisciplinarity’’) but by (again in Pasler’s words) using music as a critical tool to analyze contemporary critical, viii Foreword cultural, historical, and social issues whose importance cuts across fields. Here, it is not interdisciplinarity itself that matters, but the kinds of interpretational catholicity that an interdisciplinary landscape makes possible. This book introduces a younger generation of scholars to Pasler’s work, and allows Anglophone readers access to those pieces whose primary impact has been on those able to read the work in its originally published Francophone versions. This alone would have a salutary impact on the field of music scholarship. How- ever, this collection promises a considerably greater impact, in that in Pasler’s hands, the study of music becomes a prime site for the investigation of the nature of meaning itself. By prodding music scholars toward a similarly ambitious agenda, Pasler seeks to provide intellectual leadership; by deploying contemporary critical methods in innovative and often ingenious ways, she points the way toward the new historiographies that can arise from sustained engagement with music. Both ‘‘Narrative and Narrativity in Music’’ and the later ‘‘Postmodernism, Narrativity, and the Art of Memory’’ have exercised considerable influence among scholars since they first appeared, not least because of the way they remedy the rather tardy (and sometimes still grudging) engagement of music theory and mu- sicology with postmodern theory. The second essay in particular continues to challenge music scholars to engage with the implications of a globalized condition of musical postmodernity, rather than simply repositioning particular works and composers as ‘‘postmodern’’ with an eye toward recharging their cachet. Pasler is one of the most influential of her generation of scholars of nineteenth- century French music, and her use of this period as a platform for investigating twentieth-century postmodernity need not be seen as ironic or incongruous. Her mature theory of inquiry centers on her positing of ‘‘question-spaces’’ that permit a fluidity of interaction with the historicity of events and individuals. These question-spaces, in turn, open up complex networks that evince the interdepen- dence among musical, political, social, and cultural structures. Traditional notions of ‘‘extramusicality’’ have no place in such a conception. Just as literary scholars have drawn new meaning from exploring the ‘‘textuality’’ of social practice, a similar freedom of reference should encourage scholars to develop new insights about larger-scale societal organization and interaction through a well-theorized ‘‘musicality.’’ In this way, Pasler draws important theoretical insights from com- positional methodologies such as those of Pauline Oliveros or John Cage, a fact that lends further credence to her assertion of the intrinsic centrality of music study to intellectual inquiry and human experience. One expects that ‘‘Resituating the Spectral Revolution,’’ which explores the intellectual and social antecedents of spectral music, will have particular resonance in the North American context, just as French spectralism is now emerging as an important musical methodology among a younger generation of composers from that part of the world. The paucity of serious Anglophone critical perspectives on spectralism is well redressed by this essay, which, in distinction even to French- Foreword ix language writing on the subject, includes perspectives on the cultural articulation between science and race, along with the more usually invoked scientific and philosophical perspectives in the musical-theoretical literature. The vivid New Historicist approach taken in ‘‘Deconstructing D’Indy’’ finds Pasler navigating a complex network of articulations among individual ambitions, aesthetic directions, assertions of national pride and nativism, government-driven cultural policies, ethnic essentialisms, and international competition for cultural capital. Demystifying the me´tier of the composer, in Pasler’s account Vincent D’Indy’s founding of the Schola Cantorum appears as a crucial expression of self- fashioning—unto death and beyond. Indeed, self-fashioning appears as a major unifying theme in this book, as the essays on D’Indy, Augusta Holmes, Jean Cocteau, and John Cage all attest. In each piece, the artist is shown to be crucially concerned with reputation; in each, the artist interacts with contemporaneous ironies of race, national identity, and gen- der, overarching aspects of Pasler’s methods of inquiry that stand apart from much of the work on European classical music. In these pieces, Pasler’s poststructuralist approach seems to me to point toward a notion of reputation as Sisyphean recur- sion; however carefully constructed with an eye toward both immediate political careerism and a species of historically oriented altruism, reputations seem in the end to bob with the tides of history like fragile bits of seaweed. ‘‘New Music as Confrontation’’ is a signal contribution to studies of Cocteau and Stravinsky, and ‘‘The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmes’’ finds the author at her very best in contextualizing nineteenth- century French music in ways that resonate with twentieth- and twenty-first- century histories. The thoroughness and care with which Pasler mines and sifts the archival evidence is matched by a sophisticated gender analysis that, as with the work of other contemporary scholars outside the musicological field, insists on the nec- essary articulation of gender analysis with race. Similarly, ‘‘Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur’’ demonstrates the crucial relevance of perspectives from fin de siecle France to contemporary gender ideologies. ‘‘Inventing a Tradition’’ is one of the