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This chapter examines the disciplinary objects of musical research from the side of context. This movement from two directions, however, questions rather than celebrates the text/context divide, by suggesting a certain Moebiusstrip logic through which inside and outside, content and frame, mutually determine each other. The books Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali and Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality by Susan McClary are analyzed. The correspondences noted between the patterns Attali and McClary find in history and the rhetorical models that pre-exist their work raise questions about the interplay between invention and discovery in the writing of history. By analyzing other works of musical scholarship in terms of their narrative and rhetorical strategies, readers can move toward answering these questions for themselves.

This chapter looks at Susan McClary's comparison of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a failed rape. The chapter recontextualizes McClary by linking her to a hermeneutic tradition of sublimating description that predates high-modernist formalism. The rape image presented by her, when read with full attention to its kinesthetic specificity, encodes the complex and postmodern relation to form with aphoristic brutality. The rape described by McClary is a failure where her antihero is unable to attain release and this argument is used as a key formal insight into Beethoven's aesthetics of failure. THe chapter also discusses how identifying the moment of recapitulation as a failed rape turns out to be powerful analytical key instead of a distraction from form or a deviation into dodgy politics.

Lawrence Kramer has recently offered a striking Freudian trope for discussing musical form and sexuality in Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian music. Analyzing Isolde's Transfiguration in particular, he observes that the passage conforms in every detail to the Freudian language of love. To the extent that the notion of Freudian regression is pertinent, it suggests a return on Isolde's part to a pregenital phase of sexuality. Susan McClary, in her recent book, views Salome and the person of Erwartung as exemplars within a line of pieces by male composers that feature madwomen as solo singers. This line includes Lucia and extends back to Monteverdi's lamenting Nymph. Isolde is brought into the group with a bit of effort. McClary's study essentially restricts itself to opera, but the transcendent woman's voice can be heard elsewhere as well. The sorts of observations made on the quartet amplify the sense in which the transcendent voice is assumed to be a female voice.

Two principal themes are engaged in this chapter: the recent history of Bach reception in which the composer’s autonomy is drastically reconfigured, and the nature of Bach’s pursuit of the musical subject as a primary signature of that autonomy nevertheless. The first of these themes, which takes its cue from Charles Burney’s reading of Bach in 1789, entails a reading of Susan McClary, Lydia Goehr, Richard Taruskin, and John Butt, in which Bach is (respectively) deconstructed in terms of contemporary political discourse, denied the autonomy of a work-based practice, construed as a dogmatic agent of anti-Enlightenment beliefs and identified as the fountainhead of an ultimately inhumane musical and cultural absolutism, and reconstructed as a composer of works that passionately mediate between his world and ours. This reading establishes a context for the second theme, in which Bach’s emancipation of the musical subject from “the very church composer against whose office his music rebelled” (Adorno) is identified by means of his late instrumental collections.