Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge
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Abstract
Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. By Lawrence Kramer. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.) (xvii, 297 p. ISBN 0-520-08820-4. $35.00.] In this, his third book on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music as "cultural practice," Lawrence Kramer takes on one of the thorniest problems facing musicology today: resistance to the idea that music means anything other than itself. He disagrees with those who believe that masterpieces are works which "transcend all social utility" and "into which the social as such disappears without a trace" (p. 235). Kramer wants to show the contrary. He is concerned about the future of "classical" music, which he finds "losing both its prestige and its appeal." In a country that has reduced it to endless repetition on the radio and entertainment for an aging population, ho hopes to put this music back at the center of public discourse, where it was at the end of the last century. To this end, Kramer posits what he calls a number of "postmodernist strategies of understanding." Not that this is a study about postmodernism in music: Jean-Francois Lyotard is cited as an authority only in passing and American postmodernist theorists like Frederic Jameson appear not at all. In his first chapter, Kramer questions the insistence on impartial rationality, the tendency to universalize and desire unity, the notion of subjectivity as alienated, and the communicative paradigms of modernist thought. But what really interests him is the "musical pertinence" (p. 13) of psychoanalysis, for it is the reception of music, rather than its composition or performance, that he sees as critical in determining its meaning. Lacanian psychoanalysis, he explains, is "a theory of how certain articulations of identification and alienation, desire and law, continually 'mark' the field of communicative action" (p. 12). Taking off from Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault and bringing Ins understanding of Jacques Lacan's "imaginary" and "symbolic," Julia Kristeva's "abject," and Jacques Derrida's "dissemination" to his inquiry about the listening process, Kramer argues that listeners continually interact with what they hear. They listen (as they act), he tells us, "not as a radiation from a central core of being, but as a circulation among positions to be taken in discourse and society." They respond in diverse ways contingent on their own situations. Their perspective is always "partial," like Donna Haraway's description of the "never finished, constituted" self who "does not seek partiality for its own sake, but for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings [its] situated knowledges make possible. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular" (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature [New York: Routledge, 1991], 196: quoted by Kramer on p. 7). Of course, this raises the problem of self and other: How does one interact with what is outside oneself? In other words, In the process of hearing music, what are the boundaries between the listener and the work? In the second chapter, Kramer points to the binary opposition, masculine/feminine, to explain how the self has come to be associated with "reason, activity, progression, unity, and the integrity of boundaries, the other with irrationality, passivity, stasis or regression, fragmentation, and the crossing or dissolution of boundaries" (p. 38). This, he argues, is a historical idea, "not just a conceptual phenomenon, the consequences of which have too often been inhumane or worse ... [it] always has a moral dimension" (p. 39). Kramer is particularly interested in "the rhetoric of abjection" in critical thinking about music, the attempt not to fuse with the other, but rather to reject it violently to preserve one's "intactness" (p. 58). To illustrate this, he examines Friedrich Nietzsche's rejection of Richard Wagner, the present-day dismissal of Felix Mendelssohn, and Carl Dahlhaus's categorization of Gioacchino Rossini. …