‘Global musicologies: perspectives from music theory’
(Global Musicology virtual conference, January 2022)
Greetings everyone, I’m coming to you from unceded Turrbal and Yuggura country, where I’d like to spend a few minutes today thinking about possibilities: about perspectives on music-making and -apprehending and strategies for engaging them that stem from a range of partial, positioned perspectives that encapsulate relatively well how music theory, if pressed, would express its disciplinary purview, and to imagine some ways it could do that expressing better, as it were. That is, I’d like to weave together some conceptual ideas to imagine some ways music theory can move creatively back and forth between, on one hand, the radically local—as a complex constellation of temporally and spatially hyper-specific micro-practices—and on the other hand the global as an essentially multiple and relativist concept. There are dialectical implications in this local–global double movement, which ought to be key to understanding how the global gets constructed in the first place, as a motile and polyvocal multiplicity always overspilling its own boundaries. This isn’t a radical idea, challenging as it is to express. More problematic, for some, is what I would insist is an ontological relativism that pervades the entire relational nexus. Relativism is a dirty word in social-science circles, less so in continental-philosophical ones. But relativism is a crucial starting place for a global musicological commitment, since we must in the first place consider the possibility that different kinds of musical ‘truths’, in big scare quotes, operate within different music-syntactic practices. That is to say, there are distinctly different musical realities that any universalizing project will necessarily misrepresent, and some of them are incommensurable. We need, as researchers, to learn to be okay with that.
I’ve described my talk as ‘a view from music theory’, which needs some explication. Although I’m in Australia now, most of my professional life (and all of my academic training) has been in the United States, where the political and epistemological bifurcation between something we might loosely agree to call ‘musicology’ and something else we might call ‘music theory’ remains real, with a number of deletorious effects. Short of my commitment to still-needed reparative projects, I’m deeply uninterested in that bifurcation for the most part. But I am profoundly interested in one of its implications, which may or may not be ‘true’, but which does important work in terms of how we (in music studies writ large) stage our engagements with the objects and contexts of our research.
To over-simplify the distinction, we might say that music theory’s tactics are to work from within the structures and processes of musical utterances and build our way out into relevant social, cultural, political, etc. contexts. In this story, musicology then starts from contexts and works its way into the functionings of musical sounds and acts. This, to be clear, is a ridiculous, purely rhetorical distinction, but I think it’s useful as a thought experiment. It’s useful because it casts a light on a range of ways of engaging music that tend to get left out in discussions about progressive pedagogy. They get left out for good reasons that have very much to do with what Philip Ewell has forcefully (and correctly) described as music theory’s disciplinary deafness to its own ‘white racial frame’ that for many decades has put forth a specific constellation of aesthetic norms as the unmarked ideal against which other musicking practices are negatively measured. I would insist that we borrow from the late bell hooks to extend Ewell’s formulation into an even more politically valent space: music theory’s ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal’ frame, as an irreducible hyphenated conjunction. But either way, this has had a profound effect on the nature of the tools developed to do that inside-out work, as anyone who has taken a music theory class in, for example, the anglophone world can attest.
But it is important not to mistake part for whole: that there are even highly problematic, nearly endemic practices in music theory is no cause to dismiss wholesale the music-analytic project. The question remains: how to engage in robust music study that does indeed begin with musical structure and process and work its way out from there, while avoiding the oppressive modes in which music theory’s traditional practices have operated. This is the question many music theorists are asking in ever more emphatic ways.
I’m not only a music theorist by disciplinary proclivity, I’m a music theory teacher by trade. Everything I think about in terms of what I want music theory to do and be is stimulated by how I present to my students, and how I want our engagements to be framed. To this point, here is a guiding question that I pose to my students in week 1 of year 1, and repeat frequently for the entirety of our time together:
“What is it you want to do, and what are the tools you need to do it?”
This question is animated by a number of complexly interwoven concerns. One concern is purely pragmatic: the overwhelming majority of my students are there because they want to go on to have careers in music in one capacity or another, and I emphatically believe that the music theory classroom ought to be a space for developing some of those capacities. So the question becomes a radical-pedagogical one such Paulo Freire or bell hooks might pose: how can I meet students around the shared space of what Freire has dubbed ‘problems’: ongoing dialogic processes built around objects of inquiry, from which both theory and practice emerge? This concept of theory and practice as co-emergent phenomena is absolutely central to my thinking and teaching. A second, related concern brings back the local/global dialectic: thinking about how what a student wants to accomplish situates within one or more communities of practice, each with its own codifications of syntactic and semantic operations as well as ways of scrambling and redistributing them. The old ‘know the rules before you break them’ adage. A third concern: why does a particular musical expression go the way it goes, do what it does, and what cultural or microcultural implications are at work in those within-music unfoldings? A fourth ties some of these lines together: how does the individual student envision their practice in relation to this tangled nexus?
In other words, how can we tend a teaching and learning space that responds to the ambitions of diverse individual students, providing tools or frameworks for developing their own voices for their own projects? There are two theoretical perspectives that I find especially valuable for thinking through all this. The first comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the way they frame the concept of the minor. Two passages can get us started, first from the early pages of A Thousand Plateaus, then from the opening of their volume on Franz Kafka’s work. I quote,
‘…there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is … “an essentially heterogeneous reality.” There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.’
And then, from their Kafka volume:
‘We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged…. We will be trying only to discover what points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points, what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modified if one enters by another point. Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually open only to experimentation.’
Any attempt at formulating a method from Deleuze and Guattari’s work—which I must emphasize is antithetical to their thought!—would do well to begin with this second passage, where connecting lines take precedence over connected nodes, mapping is shown to be an active creative process, and any putative interpretive project gives way to a logic of experimentation.
The first quote, then, seems terribly important to keep in mind in any conversation about global musicology. One of the biggest dangers in musicological practice of any stripe is a looming conceptual slippage that either totalizes some music-cultural practice or through which certain characteristics selected from heterogeneous practices within a geographic distribution are made to stand in for a diverse whole. These are universalizing and tokenizing moves respectively, and they’re amazingly easy to fall into without even realizing. So this is Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian project: to continually recognize and, hopefully, keep at bay the political takeover that occurs when the ‘essentially heterogeneous reality’ of a musical multiplicity is even provisionally fixed as a circumscribable practice.
This leads to the second theoretical perspective I draw on, which comes from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conceptualization of the ‘undercommons’. Rather than starting from a place of radical multiplicity, Moten and Harney recognize the power distributions at work in the installation and reproduction of dominant languages, enemy Signifiers, and more, all the way up to the very installation of civilization itself. (Note that music theory’s ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal’ frame is built very securely around what would once have been called without irony ‘civilized’ music.) They describe ‘what the settler takes for and as the commons’ and build an activist program for its dis-ordering via the enactment and maintainance of what Jack Halberstam calls in their introduction to The Undercommons ‘a wild place that continuously produces its own unregulated wildness’. There’s an irony, even an aporia, to invoking Moten and Harney’s ideas in the context of university-sanctioned teaching and learning spaces, since the undercommons by definition is a fugitive ‘maroon community’, and the university is itself a producer of a form of non-metaphorical incarceration.
So what has all this to do with music theory? Contrary to how it may be caricatured as a discipline, music theory is especially well-placed—with a few careful tweaks—to draw out the singularity and contingency of a given musical expression, before or beneath cooption by a State apparatus or carceral procedure.
One of those tweaks involves what I call music theory’s taxonomy-drive, its impulse to always want to name things. This directly relates to a Platonic form-drive, where the particular unfoldings of individual cases are described in terms of how they deviate from archetypal norms. The deviations are usually said to be where the musical interest is found, which we tend not to find problematic when analyzing some sonata movement in terms of how it diverges from an abstract formal model, but takes on a distinctly colonialist tone when we describe the ontologically prior near-simultaneities of performed onsets in West African drum-dance musics as discrepancies against a fixed grid. The tweak is not so much to abandon taxonomy or types—after all, there is heuristic value in understanding some heard musical utterance within the terms of a known archetypal process, in order to hear what that kind of analytic orientation is capable of telling us. Rather, the tweak is first of all to recognize the type as an abstraction away from heterogeneous practice rather than the other way around, to hold on tightly to that recognition in order to resist its political-normalizing implications (that is, to recognize what such a disciplining move does in terms of steering our hearing this way or that), and then to imagine how we might hear otherwise.
I’m trying to do a lot of heavy lifting in just a few words, so let me bring in another term, endemic in music theory, to try to clarify. Much music theory is concerned with something called structure. For better or worse, musical structure has long been a primary focus of music-theoretical inquiry; indeed, a perceived over-focus on structure largely animated the New-Musicological critiques in the 90s. But what do music theorists mean when they invoke the word? Here I’m drawn to a complex polemic that began with an exchange between philosopher Nelson Goodman and music theorist Benjamin Boretz in the 1970s, reanimated by music theorist Joseph Dubiel in response to some claims by musicologist Rose Rosengard Subotnik on how the concept of musical structure needs to be ‘deconstructed’. Deconstruction is not, to be clear, a problematic aim in itself. But the story I’m about to describe shows how the terms of how structure is defined matter, and how music theory’s very emphasis on structure may turn out to be just the tool we need for a global musicological project.
First, the provocative quote from Subotnik that stimulated Dubiel’s response. Subotnik suggests, against a notion of ‘structural listening’, that ‘what the public hears in … music is what is always heard, not autonomous structure but the sensuous manifestation of particular cultural values’. Dubiel’s reaction is curiosity about the notion that ‘values can be heard’. He is skeptical, but also suggests that such a mode of hearing ought to be available to music theorists: ‘if there is such a kind of hearing, then it should be within our purview somehow…. Music theorists had better be people to whom nothing auditory is alien’.
But the crux of Dubiel’s response has to do with structure. Structure, according to Subotnik, is something ‘unchangeable’; ‘its internal components and relationships are presumed to have attained something like a status of necessity which disallows alternative versions’. Dubiel, no surprise, thinks Subotnik’s definition is far too narrow, perhaps even disingenuously so, framing a reactionary position in which structural autonomy entails ‘the total absence of external influence’, to which she contrasts what she calls ‘medium’, ‘a historical parameter … signifying the ongoing relationship of any composition to a public domain of sound and culture … defined by conventional or characteristic uses … as objects of a physical yet culturally conditioned perception.’ Dubiel’s flustered response: ‘Is there anything this leaves out?’
This reminds Dubiel of an earlier exchange, where Nelson Goodman suggested that for Ben Boretz ‘the actual structure of the work is all that matters’. Here’s what Dubiel describes as Boretz’s ‘cheeky rejoinder’: ‘since what I call “musical structure” is just the coherent juxtaposition of everything relevant to the identity of the musical work, I can’t see what an exclusive concern with structure excludes’. Dubiel follows:
That’s an exaggeration, of course […]; in my life, it happens to have been a more stimulating exaggeration than ones like Subotnik’s. What it has stimulated, above all, is a mistrust of the idea that attributing structure to a work means showing the work to manifest a self-contained logic of a predetermined kind; an inclination, instead, to try to think of anything that I hear in a work as open to audible interaction with anything else, in relationships that can affect its perceived identity, its meanings for me as sound.
Here, then, is the beginning of a recipe for thinking of what music theory’s role can be in the constitution of a global musicology. To return to my animating pedagogical question above—“What is it you want to do, and what are the tools you need to do it?”—how do we frame a music-theoretical project that is sensitive to the subtle nuances of the cultural and microcultural contexts within which a musicking practice unfolds, through the very act of engaging musical structure as a perhaps even wildly creative process?
There are two related ‘what I want to do’s implicated in the question, reflecting two competing desiderata of music theory. I want to understand the music I experience in ever richer ways (which might also mean I want to make more music like that, in ways that are culturally and microculturally appropriate). And I want to invent new musical expressions, even unimagined ones. I think of the former as the enactment of three interwoven tasks: practicing listening closely, contextually, and creatively. The first of these is the nominal purview of music theory: listening closely to musical sounds and developing an understanding of how they relate to one another, which might be framed according to some immanent or transcendental principle, but need not be. The second has to do with what those sounds mean to the communities (and individuals that comprise those communities) within which the music transpires, which involves knowledges of histories and use-values and semiotic codings and on and on. The third, then, orbits around the question ‘how else can I hear?’ It’s no secret that an individual can be deeply moved by a musical performance the cultural significance of which they are completely oblivious, and it would be shameful to suggest that their feelings about the experience don’t matter. The question of how else one might potentially hear a musical expression is also the purview of music theory: as Kofi Agawu elegantly put it,
‘The aim of the 50th analysis of the “Appassionata” is not to add incrementally to the previous 49 (although it can do that); it is rather to provide the analyst with an opportunity to make the “Appassionata” [their] own. Just as we do not ask of the 50th recording … what new knowledge it adds to the previous 49, so we should not expect of an analysis that it add to some existing body of positive knowledge. Of course, different analysts notice different things, and different methods … illuminate different aspects of a composition…. But I believe that the more fundamental motivation lies in the desire to inhabit temporarily a certain sonic world—and to enjoy the sensuous pleasure of doing so’.
I’ll close, then, by extending Agawu’s lovely words into a brief postscript on some music-theoretical contexts that can help us understand the creative stakes of its disciplinary practices. As music theorist Judy Lochhead has pointed out, much so-called ‘new music’ demands that we invent analytic models as we go along; that is, of course, if we’re in a stance of listening structurally. Very often that’s part of the point: the composer is quite literally asking us to hear in a way we haven’t heard before, and is attempting to create musical structures and processes that enable us to do so. Any taxonomy- or form-drive must necessarily proceed from within the musical relations, broadly conceived, since transcendental models quite simply have not yet been imagined. Similarly, perhaps more so, with certain strands of improvised music, which as philosopher Gary Peters suggests, can resist notions like continuation and development and closure in favor of an ontology of continuous re-novation. I suggest these extreme cases are heuristics and that we practice folding their implications back onto even very familiar music, again always asking the question ‘how else can I potentially hear these sounds?’, even while—especially while—we strive to do the inside-outside dialectical work of better understanding how different musics function in their natural habitats.
And that’s not the most satisfying ending, but I’m already overtime so I’ll stop there…