Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject

Michael L. Klein

Description

Departing from the traditional German school of music theorists, Michael Klein injects a unique French critical theory perspective into the framework of music and meaning. Using primarily Lacanian notions of the symptom, that unnamable jouissance located in the unconscious, and the registers of subjectivity (the Imaginary, the Symbolic Order, and the Real), Klein explores how we understand music as both an artistic form created by "the subject" and an artistic expression of a culture that imposes its history on this modern subject. By creatively navigating from critical theory to music, film, fiction, and back to music, Klein distills the kinds of meaning that we have been missing when we perform, listen to, think about, and write about music without the insights of Lacan and others into formulations of modern subjectivity.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Music and the Symptom
2. The Acoustic Mirror as Formative of Auditory Pleasure and Fantasy: Chopin's Berceuse, Brahms's Romanze, and Saariaho's "Parfum de l'instant"
3. Debussy and the Three Machines of the Proustian Narrative
4. Chopin Dreams: the Mazurka in C# Minor as Sinthome
Intermezzo: On Agency
5. Postmodern Quotation, the Signifying Chain, and the Erasure of History
6. Lutosławski, Molar and Molecular
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Technique musicale
• Technique musicale
• Critical Theory
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Criticism
• History of classical music traditions
• Theory
• Musicology
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253017222
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject
MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION
Robert S. Hatten, editor
A Theory of Musical Narrative
Byron Alm n
Approaches to Meaning in Music
Byron Alm n and Edward Pearsall
Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera
Naomi Andr
The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera
Nicholas Baragwanath
Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture
Matthew Brown
Music and the Politics of Negation
James R. Currie
Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini s Late Style
Andrew Davis
Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy
William Echard
Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert
Robert S. Hatten
Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation
Robert S. Hatten
Intertextuality in Western Art Music
Michael L. Klein
Music and Narrative since 1900
Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland
Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music
Steve Larson
Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification
David Lidov
Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony
Melanie Lowe
Breaking Time s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives
Matthew McDonald
Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in Time
Eric McKee
The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral
Raymond Monelle
Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber
Jairo Moreno
Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation
Alexandra Pierce
Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning
Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith
Expressive Forms in Brahms s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet
Peter H. Smith
Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven s Late Style
Michael Spitzer
Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert s Song Cycle
Lauri Suurp
Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina
Nina Treadwell
Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations
Leo Treitler
Debussy s Late Style
Marianne Wheeldon
MICHAEL L. KLEIN
Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Michael L. Klein All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences- Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klein, Michael Leslie, author.
Music and the crises of the modern subject / Michael L. Klein.
pages cm - (Musical meaning and interpretation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01720-8 (cloth : alkaline paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01722-2 (ebook) 1. Music-Psychological aspects. 2. Music-Philosophy and aesthetics. 3. Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981-Philosophy. 4. Musical analysis. I. Title. II. Series: Musical meaning and interpretation.
ML3845.K598 2015
781.1 7-dc23
2014047870
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For Michelle, who can read it to Tamae, who could use the sleep
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.
-Walt Whitman
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Music and the Symptom
2. The Acoustic Mirror as Formative of Auditory Pleasure and Fantasy: Chopin s Berceuse, Brahms s Romanze, and Saariaho s Parfum de l instant
3. Debussy and the Three Machines of the Proustian Narrative
4. Chopin Dreams: The Mazurka in C Minor as Sinthome
Intermezzo: On Agency
5. Postmodern Quotation, the Signifying Chain, and the Erasure of History
6. Lutos awski, Molar and Molecular
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
As always, I am indebted foremost to Robert Hatten, who has supported my research since I started giving lectures on musical meaning. He has guided me through a previous book and a collection of essays, and his guidance was invaluable in completing this book, as well. After I discussed the ideas in this book with him, his usual enthusiasm spurred me to complete it with renewed vigor. His suggestions, ideas, and insights about the manuscript led to a much stronger book than I could have written without his help. I cannot thank him enough for the support he has given me both with this book and throughout my career.
Once the manuscript came back from the outside readers, Patrick McCreless kindly revealed to me that he was one of them. He did this so that I could send him a final draft of the manuscript before I sent it to Indiana University Press. His care in pointing out errors, suggesting additional avenues for research, and encouraging me to clarify many passages went beyond the call of any colleague. He is one of the best-read scholars I know, which made his contribution to the completion of this book immeasurably important.
Raina Polivka, music, film, and humanities editor at Indiana University Press, has now guided two of my projects through the publication process. I would like to thank her for her continuing support of my work at IU Press. In addition, Jenna Whittaker, assistant sponsoring editor at IU Press, has been a valuable resource, managing this project in its later stages, for which she has my thanks. I would also like to thank David Miller, lead project manager and editor at IU Press, and Eric Schramm, who copyedited the text. I am certain that any problems or errors in this book are mine and mine alone.
I would like to thank Robert Stroker, Vice Provost for the Arts, and Dean of the Center for the Arts at Temple University, for supporting my research with a number of grants and reductions in my teaching load. Anne Harlow, Temple University s librarian for music, dance, and theater, made sure I had every score and book I needed to complete my work, for which she has my gratitude. Dr. Julia Alford-Fowler, a tremendous composer and graduate of Temple University, set all the musical examples with great care, for which I thank her. While I was writing this book, I taught several graduate seminars on topics related to subjectivity. After struggling through readings by Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, and others, my students posed questions that prompted me to reexamine my thoughts. They have my thanks.
Material from this book formed the topics of dozens of lectures at conferences and universities that I have given in the last several years. At every turn, questions from my colleagues forced me to reframe my work. In particular, I recall questions about postmodern irony from Matthew Shaftel at Florida State University. Michael Cherlin at the University of Minnesota challenged me to explain the difference between Freudian and Lacanian models of the unconscious. Sumanth Gopinath at the same university pointed out to me that Lacan s formulation of the Symbolic order owes a debt to Hegel s master-slave dialectic. At a conference at Cornell University, Zbigniew Skowron from the University of Warsaw asked me how I could claim that Deleuze s concepts of the molar and molecular failed to function dialectically. Michael Lee at the University of Oklahoma asked me to consider that John Zorn s collage music is also a form of simulacrum. Marianne Kielian-Gilbert at Indiana University reminded me not to ignore Carolyn Abbate s article on Ravel when considering Lacan and the uncanny. Martha Hyde at the University at Buffalo wondered if I should tone down the mapping between Proust and Debussy when considering the time problem in early modernism. So many people asked probing questions. I am only sorry that I cannot thank all of them.
If I follow convention and thank my family last, it does not mean that their support has been of the conventional kind. I don t know what people talk about at their dinner tables, but my poor family has to suffer through talk about Freud, and Lacan, and Marx, and on and on. I am astonished at my daughter, Michelle, and her ability to engage in this conversation and use what she learns from it. I discovered, for example, that during a discussion of the scene in The Catcher in the Rye (yes, they still teach that book in high school) involving Holden and his purchase of a record for his younger sister, Michelle s teacher asked each student to jot down an idea or two for discussion. My daughter scribbled on her notepad objet petit a . Discussion ensued. I m glad I won t have to teach Michelle in college. I doubt I could keep up. As for my wife, Tamae, her typical response to any attempt I make to explain my thoughts about music is That s all? You mean it took you all day to write that? Tamae is a practicing musician, a violinist who performs all the time. She has a wry sense of the silliness that musical scholarship can often be. I cherish my wife s responses, as I cherish my wife and my daughter. I do what I can to show them my love, though I realize that I often fall short of saying what I mean in its fullest way: a symptom of the Symbolic order, I suppose, but not a good excuse.

An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in the journal 19th-Century Music as Chopin Dreams: The Mazurka in C Minor, Op. 30, no. 4, 35/3 (2012): 238-60.
The poem Parfum de l in