Kevin Korsyn
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195104547
- eISBN:
- 9780199868988
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195104547.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Andrew Dell'Antonio
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520237575
- eISBN:
- 9780520937024
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520237575.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Kevin Korsyn
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195104547
- eISBN:
- 9780199868988
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195104547.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This book examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional ...
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This book examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional associations and universities, to complex historical changes such as globalization and the commodification of knowledge, this book undertakes a critique of musical scholarship as an institutional discourse, while contributing to a general theory of disciplinary structures that goes beyond the limits of any single field. In asking a number of fundamental questions about the models through which disciplinary objects in music are constructed, the book suggests unexpected relationships between works of musical scholarship and the cultural networks in which they participate. Thus, David Lewin's theory of musical perceptions is compared to Richard Rorty's concept of the “liberal ironist”, Susan McClary's feminist narrative of music history is juxtaposed with T.S. Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility”, and Steven Feld's work in recording the music of the Kaluli people is compared to the treatment of ambient sound in contemporary cinema. Developing a framework for interpretation in dialogue with a number of poststructuralist writers, the book goes far beyond applying their thought to the analysis of music; by showing the cultural dilemmas to which their work responds, it suggests how musical research already participates in these ideas.Less
This book examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional associations and universities, to complex historical changes such as globalization and the commodification of knowledge, this book undertakes a critique of musical scholarship as an institutional discourse, while contributing to a general theory of disciplinary structures that goes beyond the limits of any single field. In asking a number of fundamental questions about the models through which disciplinary objects in music are constructed, the book suggests unexpected relationships between works of musical scholarship and the cultural networks in which they participate. Thus, David Lewin's theory of musical perceptions is compared to Richard Rorty's concept of the “liberal ironist”, Susan McClary's feminist narrative of music history is juxtaposed with T.S. Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility”, and Steven Feld's work in recording the music of the Kaluli people is compared to the treatment of ambient sound in contemporary cinema. Developing a framework for interpretation in dialogue with a number of poststructuralist writers, the book goes far beyond applying their thought to the analysis of music; by showing the cultural dilemmas to which their work responds, it suggests how musical research already participates in these ideas.
David Lewin
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195182088
- eISBN:
- 9780199850594
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195182088.003.0014
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Harry White
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- October 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190903879
- eISBN:
- 9780190903909
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190903879.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.