ABSTRACT: This essay proposes and then explores the view that the most profound and beneficial changes in the field of music theory within the last decade have come about in response to pressures from without to relinquish the notion of music as autonomous. I ask anew why our field has waited so long to acknowledge that the creation, performance, and study of music cannot help but be implicated in both past and present social, cultural, and political concerns. My overview celebrates the inspired contributions of individuals who have recently demonstrated how music theory can embrace ever broader cultural contexts without at the same time abandoning the analyst's commitment to interpreting the musical score.
[2] I submit today that these new cultural and social concerns are the ones to have exerted both the most profound and the most beneficial changes our field has seen in the last decade. Before dismissing this observation as pure cant, please think about it with me. Profound? Beneficial? On what grounds can I make these claims? And if I can indeed substantiate them, then how did it happen that the field of music theory seems as if to have waited for the 1990s before even tentatively beginning to investigate such concerns?
[3] This last question engages countless elusive issues--academic,
political, philosophical, sociological, dare I say even "purely
musical." For the record, Susan McClary's sharp critiques of our
field have from the very outset been complemented by her efforts to
provide explanations for our behavior. In the following statement,
from as early as 1988, her judgment is gentle yet firm: "Feminism has
been very late in making an appearance in music criticism, and this is
largely owing to the success composers, musicologists, and theorists
have had in maintaining the illusion that music is an entirely
autonomous realm."
[4] In Pat's view, in other words, our entree itself into the academy
depended upon the following achievements of our American founding
fathers--Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte: first, they regained
intellectual respectability for music theory by shaking off its stigma
in this country as mere pedagogy; second, they accomplished this by
demonstrating most especially through twelve-tone, Schenkerian, and
pitch-class set theories that our field is both a rigorous and a
creative mode of thought. As what Pat calls "the driving intellectual
forces of the discipline," these two "central poles" "share a value
system that explicitly privileges rigor, system, and theory-based
analysis and implicitly share an aesthetic ideology whereby analysis
validates masterworks that exhibit an unquestioned structural
autonomy."
[5] Imagine our surprise, then, when our perhaps uneasy but ostensibly
self-assured relationship with musicology began to show signs of
crumbling in the early 1980s. The appearance of two sharp-pointed
attacks on our kinds of analysis--from Joseph Kerman in 1980 and Leo
Treitler in 1982
[6] But let's face it: as a postmodernist phenomenon, the "new musicology" has itself been phenomenally slow to arrive. How can we fathom that it took so many musicologists as well as theorists, most of us generally humanists at heart, such a long time to investigate the idea that the creation, performance, and study of music simply cannot help but be implicated in both past and present social, cultural, and political concerns? And, to this day, how comfortable have we become with the notion that music theory might actually profit from an engagement with some of the great outcries for social change our society and our world have seen in this century--movements towards real equity in respect to race, gender, and sexual orientation, with concomitant efforts to undercut bigotry and parochialism by breaking down cultural hegemonies?
[7] As McCreless readily explains, a Foucauldian assessment of any
discipline treats the discipline as a social institution that
regulates, or controls, individuals through its discourse; in Pat's
words, Foucault "tends to focus on discourse as an abstract site of
knowledge, and to remove from this arena the motivation and action of
the individual subject."
[8] Few would deny that the rise of the professional theorist in this
country during the 1950s was partly, and "first of all"--as Milton
Babbitt says--"a result of Schenker and of people who came over here
who were Schenker students."
[9] If our field has now begun to drive in new directions, this has
once again come about most especially, I think, as a result of the
passionate, persuasive, persistent, and highly productive efforts of
certain remarkable individuals. Where have these scholars come from?
Not, initially, from the rank and file of the Society for Music
Theory, it must be admitted; and not even so obviously from the core
of the AMS. Maynard Solomon's profoundly stimulating biographical
studies of Beethoven, Ives, Schubert, and Mozart suggest a remarkable
contact with the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis.
[10] Whether or not the ideas of Solomon, McClary, Kramer, and Abbate
have directly or even indirectly inspired the profusion of
interdisciplinary, cultural, deconstructive, feminist, gender,
sexuality, reception, popular, jazz, and rock studies in music since
1991, we have certainly witnessed this outpouring, now emanating from
the more central card-carrying ranks of musicology and music theory.
Amongst musicologists, consider, for example, Jeffrey Kallberg's work
on the rhetoric of genre and on the subject of sex in receptions of
Chopin's music, or Kristina Muxfeldt's arduous documentary studies on
the question of Schubert's sexuality.
[11] From within the membership of our SMT, let's especially celebrate
the individual contributions of Fred Everett Maus, Marion Guck, and
Joseph Dubiel on such issues, among many, as masculine discourse in
music theory, analytical fictions, and deconstruction.
[12] It really does seem to me, in short, that the kinds of
contributions I've just mentioned have had a tremendously creative and
liberating affect on our field; and there are so many other
contributions I've had to neglect. It is of course absolutely
essential to note, as Paula Higgins has done so emphatically,
[13] On the other hand, some might ask, Just what gave music theory permission not to address issues of social context for so long? As a society and a field of inquiry, we've not exactly played a leadership role here; and as the individual who stands before you right now, I'm a good case in point. But, for the very reason that I have not until now publicly entered the arena of feminist or postmodernist writings about music, I represent the majority of SMT members, while, at the same time--and I hope like others in my position--I've been openly receptive to these issues. From this perspective, perhaps I can claim to bring an unbesieged and undefensive enthusiasm for the postmodernist breakthroughs I think our field has made over the course of this last decade. As your next SMT President, I feel obliged, moreover, to let you know where I stand.
[14] Let me begin with several heartfelt tributes. First, as one who
has been and probably always will be intensely involved with matters
of form in tonal music, I cannot thank Scott Burnham enough for having
aspired to recontextualize A. B. Marx's gendering of sonata form in
face of the embarrassingly superficial and misconstrued
decontextualizations of Marx that have become a trademark of feminist
critiques. Burnham's thorough examination of Marx's views really
ought to put to rest the going assumption that the Marxian sonata-form
plot tells of the triumph of the "masculine" main theme in its
subjugation of the "feminine" secondary theme.
[15] Second, let me note how fortunate we've been that two of our most
impressive leaders in the recent expansion of theoretical domains just
happen to have been the two most recent Presidents of our SMT--Patrick
McCreless and Joseph Straus. Thanks to these two, and to the hard
work of numerous volunteers, our society now has a Committee on
Diversity and a Committee on Professional Development, with both of
these serving as outreaches that have long been overdue. Like
McCreless, Joe Straus has artfully carried our discipline across the
border into the land of literary theory; and, like Kevin Korsyn, but
in vastly different ways, Straus has provoked some healthy anxiety
about how Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence might serve as yet
another death threat to the notion of absolute music.
[16] Has the field of music theory really changed in profound ways
over the last ten years? Well, here's a small but significant sign:
we've certainly become more adept at avoiding third-person masculine
pronouns. And, even if we're not Charles Rosen, Edward T. Cone, or
any other distinguished male writer, we might be less likely to expect
that our journal editors will delete every one of our first persons.
Speaking of distinguished persons, we know that our field has
changed, and that it will always be capable of change, when we note
that Allen Forte--our first SMT president, also known as the inventor
of pitch-class set theory and the author of some of the most
influential hard-core theoretical writings of the last thirty
years--has recently published a book on the American popular ballad.
For this extraordinarily diversified and versatile soul, it was no big
deal to shift from pitch-class set genera and octatonicism to Kay
Swift and Duke Ellington. And it was just as easy for Allen then to
turn to a book on the atonal music of Anton Webern.
[17] Have the changes we've seen really been beneficial? You bet they
have! Like Allen Forte in particular, the field of music theory in
general has recently expressed a remarkable new diversity; in doing
so, it has found ways of achieving greater inclusiveness and
generosity. But what's so beneficial about that? To say the obvious,
every aspect of the world we live in--and that includes our musical
world--has itself become more diverse. How can we justify not
responding to this simple fact of our professional and personal lives?
Probably very much like all of you, I'm currently teaching tonal
theory to a class of young women and men from white, black, Asian,
Indian, Hispanic, Philippine, and other backgrounds. Some of these
elementary theory students would recognize the opening of Beethoven's
Third Symphony; some would not, but they may know a lot about rock
music, jazz, or African drumming. And, if they're interested in
knowing more about nearly any culture on this planet, they can
virtually surf over to check it out, through the mere flick of a
finger or two online. How can I ask these students to come with me on
journeys into the realms of early chant or Purcell or Mozart or even
Gershwin if I know nothing about the musical trips they might also
want to be taking, or if I can't help them recognize the differences
among styles and musical cultures that theory and analysis can help to
articulate? These same students may not be ready to tackle the
sophisticated essays in that wonderfully forward-looking new
collection Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945, edited by
Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann; but this collection was not
meant so much for them as for the likes of me.
[18] In many of the recent writings and talks about popular, jazz, rock, and performance-artist repertoires, one senses that rare kind of enthusiasm arising first and foremost from a deep, personal involvement with the music. The most exciting of these and other new studies seem to be the ones that take a cue from recent ethnomusicology: rather than simply transferring old analytic techniques to new styles, they seek new approaches from within those styles and the cultures that have produced them. As always, however, it's the personal engagement and commitment that count the most; and this brings me back to the idea of "keeping the score."
[19] The field of music theory has been emphatically urged to branch out. Perhaps we can see a case of Foucauldian institutional regulation in the pressure music departments now exhibit to hire tonal and atonal theorists who can also teach world music, jazz, rock, and music by women. As one feminist has privately put it to me, a feminist victory will truly have been achieved on the day when jobs and tenure for women musicologists and theorists do not depend on their ability to teach courses about women in music, so that the "really good" music--by men--can be taught by the men. But institutional, societal, or peer pressures tend, in the long run, to be the least effective motivation for personal change; our individual efforts to branch out will count for little unless they come from the heart.
[20] Finally, I'll maintain that we theorists have not only the right but the obligation to "keep the score"; that is, we should never feel the need to apologize for our interest in close readings of musical scores, nor should we have to justify our love of musical details, our endless fascination with compositional craft and musical coherence. There is one very obvious reason why music theory, by contrast with our sister disciplines musicology and ethnomusicology, has been historically, perhaps even definitively, bound to the musical score: to theorists has fallen the task of music pedagogy; and this domain will most likely always include the teaching of how to read, hear, and attempt to interpret Western score notation. But there are some other good reasons why the music text cannot be abandoned. I'm surely not the only one who has sometimes resisted feminist and postmodernist music criticism for the simple reason that the argument at hand has rested on what seem like superficial and unconvincing, if not downright inaccurate, music analyses. Even if we have fully come to accept the truism that analyses, and the interpretations they yield, are nothing more, or less, than documents of what we hear, what you and I hear will always be somewhat different, and the distinct details we choose for describing our individual responses will inevitably yield different interpretations, both musical and cultural. If theorists must continue to take collective pedagogical responsibility for the development of aural, score-reading, and interpretative musical skills, as well as responsibility for the exercise of self-criticism, historical knowledge, and good judgment in the preparation of analytic interpretations, then we theorists are beholden more than ever before to work together with our colleagues in musicology in the training of those young people who will perhaps be addressing our societies ten years from now. Yet another extraordinary series of changes may well be our topic at the SMT celebration in the year 2007; but I both hope and expect that we will still be talking about the texts of music--that we will still feel free to cherish and keep close to the score.
2. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Return to text
3. McClary, "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music
Composition," Cultural Critique 12 (1989), republished in Keeping
Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid
Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1997), 64.
Return to text
4. Patrick McCreless, "Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory," in
Keeping Score, 21, passim. See also, for example, Carl Dahlhaus,
The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989; orig. pub. as Die Idee der absoluten Musik
[Kassel: Baerenreiter, 1978]); Janet Schmalfeldt, "Form as the Process
of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and 'Tempest' Sonata,"
Beethoven Forum 4 (1995): 37-71.
Return to text
5. McCreless, "Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory," 31-32.
Return to text
6. Joseph Kerman, "How We Got into Analysis, and How We Can Get Out,"
Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 311-31; Leo Treitler, "To Worship That
Celestial Sound: Motives for Analysis," Journal of Musicology 1
(1982): 153-70 (reprinted in his Music and the Historical
Imagination [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989] as
chap. 2). See also Kerman's Contemplating Music (Cambridge, M.A.:
Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 3: "Analysis, Theory, and New
Music."
Return to text
7. McCreless, "Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory," 16.
Return to text
8. Ibid.
Return to text
9. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Return to text
10. Milton Babbitt, Words about Music, ed. Stephen Dembski and
Joseph N. Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 121.
Return to text
11. Solomon, Beethoven (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977); Beethoven
Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); "Charles
Ives: Some Questions of Veracity," Journal of the American
Musicological Society 40 (1987): 466-69; Mozart: A Life (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995). See also note 1.
Return to text
12. Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and
After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1984); Music and Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, University of California Press, 1990); Classical Music and
Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1995).
Return to text
13. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the
Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Return to text
14. Jeffrey Kallberg, "The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G
Minor," 19th-Century Music 11.3 (1988): 238-61; Kallberg, "Small
Fairy Voices: Sex, History and Meaning in Chopin," in Chopin Studies
2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson, pp. 50-71 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Kristina Muxfeldt, "Political Crimes and
Liberty, or Why Would Schubert Eat a Peacock?," 19th-Century Music
17 (1993): 47-64; Muxfeldt, "Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of
Narcissus," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49.3
(1996): 480-527.
Return to text
15. Kofi Agawu, "Schubert's Sexuality: A Prescription for Analysis?";
McClary, "Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate"; James
Webster, "Music, Pathology, Sexuality, Beethoven, Schubert"; and
Robert S. Winter, "Whose Schubert?," in 19th-Century Music 17.1
(1993): Special Issue, ed. Lawrence Kramer, pp. 79-101.
Return to text
16. Fred Everett Maus, "Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,"
Perspectives of New Music 31.2 (1993): 264-93; Marion Guck,
"Analytical Fictions," Music Theory Spectrum 16.2 (1994): 217-30;
Joseph Dubiel, "On Getting Deconstructed," Music Theory Online 2.2
(1996).
Return to text
17. Ruth A. Solie, "Whose Life? The Gendered Self in Schumann's
Frauenliebe Songs," in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries,
ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
219-40; "What Do Feminists Want? A Reply to Pieter van den Toorn,"
Journal of Musicology 9 (1991): 399-410; Solie, ed., Musicology and
Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); "Defining
'Feminism': Conundrums, Context, Communities," Women and Music: A
Journal of Gender and Culture 1 (1997); Pieter van den Toorn,
"Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory," Journal of
Musicology 9 (1991): 275-99.
Return to text
18. van den Toorn, Music, Politics, and the Academy (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
Return to text
19. Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, "Invoking Motives and Immediacy: Foils
and Contexts for Pieter C. van den Toorn's Music, Politics, and the
Academy," 19th-Century Music 20.3 (1997): 253-78.
Return to text
20. Paul Higgins, "Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla
Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics," 19th-Century Music 17.2
(1993): 174-92.
Return to text
21. Janet Wolff, "Forward: The Ideology of Autonomous Art," in Music
and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception,
ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 1-12.
Return to text
22. Scott Burnham, "A. B. Marx and the Gendering of Sonata Form," in
Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163-86. See, for example, McClary,
Feminine Endings, p. 69 and pp. 13-17.
Return to text
23. Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
Return to text
24. See Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and
the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard
University Press, 1990); and Kevin Korsyn, "Towards a New Poetics of
Musical Influence," Music Analysis 10.1-2 (1991): 3-72.
Return to text
25. Straus, ed., Music by Women for Study and Analysis (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993); The Music of Ruth Crawford
Seeger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Return to text
26. Allen Forte, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era,
1924-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); The Atonal Music
of Anton Webern (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming,
Spring 1998).
Return to text
27. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, eds., Concert Music,
Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies (Rochester,
N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1995).
Return to text
28. Steven Block, "'Bemsha Swing': The Transformation of a Bebop
Classic to Free Jazz," Music Theory Spectrum 19.2 (1997): 206-231.
Return to text
[2] Any redistributed form of items published in MTO must include the following information in a form appropriate to the medium in which the items are to appear:
This item appeared in Music Theory Online in [VOLUME #, ISSUE #] on [DAY/MONTH/YEAR]. It was authored by [FULL NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS], with whose written permission it is reprinted here.[3] Libraries may archive issues of MTO in electronic or paper form for public access so long as each issue is stored in its entirety, and no access fee is charged. Exceptions to these requirements must be approved in writing by the editors of MTO, who will act in accordance with the decisions of the Society for Music Theory.
This document and all portions thereof are protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Material contained herein may be copied and/or distributed for research purposes only.