McClary New Formations

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MOREPOMOTHANTHOU: THESTATUSOFCULTURAL

MEANINGSINMUSIC

Susan McClary

It happens. Overnight, you change from Young Turk to Old Fogy; the former avant-garde

becomes rear-guard action. In the mythologised Sixties, we used to view the 1930s Marxists,

with their class-based obsessions, as quaint; another thirty years pass, and members of the

Youth Generation who first lived and later theorised the Postmodern Condition get to see their

own ideals grow obsolete. In ones bleaker moments, one recalls how Boulez crowed in 1952

that SCHOENBERG IS DEAD, that he had not pushed his own insights far enough, that he

had unwittingly perpetuated elements held over from Romanticism.1For, the so-called NewMusicologists now face charges that our work bears the traces of (horror!) Modernism; that,

even if we first introduced concepts such as poststructuralism, deconstruction and Deleuzian

rhizomes into the discipline, we ourselves no longer qualify as postmodern. Move over: the

genuine standard-bearers have arrived!

Well, maybe we had it coming. Milton Babbitt must have felt this way, too, when he got

pushed aside.2As anyone who has studied history knows, such waves occur on a regular basis:

like clockwork, todays cutting edge becomes tomorrowsancien rgime. To be sure, the Sixties

generation has always believed it had some kind of trademark lock on the new, making it

necessary for those coming afterwards to set off bombs under us to clear space for themselves.

Since I dont want to be part of the revolution that eats its young, I suppose I should just

graciously step aside - and, believe me, Im very much looking forward to my retirement! In

the meantime, I have mostly retreated into writing about early music, albeit inflected to some

extent with my own antiquated version of postmodernism, leaving the battle over the present

moment to others.

And yet, I would like to leave something of a PoMo valediction behind. InEcclesiasteswe read

that there is nothing new under the sun, that all pretences to the contrary amount to nothing

more than vanity. OK, but things do change, even if only on the meagre basis of two steps

forward and one back. Womens movements may not have brought about all the permanent

transformations they have sought, but the very fact that I am presenting this paper testifies to

some modicum of progress along those fronts, even if my make-up argues that some of our more

radical causes have bitten the dust.3Similarly, Id like to think that my generations contributions

to composition and music studies - call them what you like - will have left some lasting traces.

In The Wild One, someone asks the Marlon Brando character: What are you rebellingagainst? To which he replies: Waddya got? Given that each generation feels compelled to

rebel against whatever the previous one upheld, the post of postmodern always hauls along

with it the particular vision of its predecessor - which actually makes this but one more version

of the modernist paradigm, whereby one gets a thrill by identifying with the Moderns against

DOI:10.3898/NEWF.66.01.2009


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the Ancients. Only, now, it is the Postmoderns against the Moderns. Or, more precisely, the

Neo-Postmoderns against Those-Formerly-Known-as-the-Postmoderns, in a pattern of infinite

regress. So, against what was my generation of postmodernists rebelling?

Forgive me if I begin to sound like the stereotypical curmudgeon railing on about what it

was like to walk to school in the snow before the advent of automobiles. But back in the days,

composers who wanted to gain any foothold in North American and European circles had to

- I repeat:HADto - submit to serialism. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, I saw the best minds ofmy generation destroyed by pitch-class sets. The same cultural imperative had put the kibosh

on discussing meanings within musicology: one could perform archival work, make editions or

analyse formal properties, but one could not suggest that a piece made any particular cultural

difference. In both arenas, music mattered precisely because it had managed to transcend mere

meaning. If, in the nineteenth century, all art aspired to the condition of music, mid-twentieth-

century music and musicology aspired to the condition of mathematics. In the matchless words

of Joseph Kerman: Articles on music composed after 1950, in particular, appear sometimes to

mimic scientific papers in the way that South American bugs and flies will mimic the dreadedcarpenter wasp.4

I first started writing on postmodernism in 1985 in the afterword to Jacques AttalisNoise, a

book that inspired many musicians to explore beyond the horizon toward which he gestured.5

No one, I think, has any clear idea what Attali actually meant by Compositionthe utopian

moment he so vaguely sketches in the last part of his book; but that very vagueness turned out

to be its greatest strength. Artists of all stripes who happened to be dissatisfied with the status

quo imagined that he was speaking directly to them. As a result of my Attali afterword, I was

invited to deliver an address specifically on postmodernism at the New Music America Festival

in 1987.6

But others had already blazed the path: I owed many of my ideas and my acquaintance with

new music to columns by Tom Johnson and Greg Sandow in The Village Voiceduring the 1980s.

These exuberant chroniclers of what at the time was called the Downtown Scene - the music of

Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk - played a role much like that of Robert Schumann,

who similarly broadcast to his contemporaries news of the composers and trends they needed to

notice. At the same time as this new music was emerging from Downtown Manhattan, a cluster ofmusicologists was attempting to reopen the forbidden terrain of musical interpretation. I have

always regarded these two phenomena - a renewed interest by composers in communicating

with audiences and the development of cultural readings in musicology - as aspects of the same

movement.

That both projects succeeded can be seen in their having been given the status of widely

circulating monikers. If the arbiters of good taste in music used to hop up and down in rage

at the uniformity of music by Terry Riley or Philip Glass, they now worry over how to draw

fine distinctions between the various kinds of music clumped together under the umbrella ofminimalism. No one bats an eyelash any more at references to Elvis or Roadrunner cartoons in

concert music, and no one ostracises composers who cheerfully embrace tonality. And a cluster

of music historians - connected only by the fact that they wanted to study music in its cultural

contexts - came to be labelled, for better or for worse, as New Musicologists.


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Perhaps the greatest sign of success, however, comes from the fact that time has continued

to unfold, and another generation of players has entered the field. What are you rebelling

against?, we ask them. Waddya got?, they reply. And, of course, what they got is - us! The old

postmodernists suddenly get unmasked as modernists against whom the revolution must move

to the next inevitable level. So here we are.

I mentioned earlier that the post of postmodernism can only be defined against the

particular modernism to which it declares itself to be post. At the same time that the meaning-seekers of my generation were trying to break through the prohibition against discussing readings

in music, many literary critics were trying to escape what they saw as the too-obvious content in

novels. A wave of European theorists worked to demonstrate the ways in which language always

defers the possibility of our ever really knowing definitively what something signifies. Roland

Barthes announced the death of the author; Jacques Derrida showed the vulnerability of intended

meanings to the shadow figure of the supplement that always destabilises utterances; Paul de

Man demonstrated the operations of hidden tropes that organise writing; Richard Schechner

shifted the focus from the textual to the performative. One of the consequences of the swervetoward theory was the emergence of a generation that boasted of never reading novels or poetry.

They still engaged in close readings, but of theoretical rather than literary texts.

This skepticism concerning the enterprise of discussing meanings now appears precisely

the posture needed to refute the New Musicology.7What meanings? You really still believe that

music has meanings?! Something like this been-there-done-that attitude has also infected the

reception of new music in many places as if poststructuralist novelty, in and of itself, suffices to

confer value upon a composer or composition.

To paraphrase St Pauls statement on circumcision in his letter to the Galatians, however,

neither postmodernism availeth anything nor non-postmodernism but a new creation. What

matters in both composition and scholarship is the contribution to culture of something that

invites human beings to understand their world in new terms. I might point out also that the

literary theorists to whom younger scholars refer in their resistance to discussions of meanings

themselves scrutinised Balzac, Proust and Rousseau in their writings, which advocated digging

beneath the manifest surface of texts to locate substrata of cultural ideologies. This was - let us

recall - the old Tel Quelgroup, and if they had repudiated the orthodoxies of their youth, it wasnot so much in order to profess meaninglessness as to advocate a Hermeneutics of Suspicion.

Whatever we choose to call the music of the recent past, it has continued to make use of the

precepts initially touted as postmodern: eclecticism, mixing of popular and elite styles, access

to sonorities identified with standard tonality, non-linear procedures. I hasten to add that any

criteria for musical postmodernism we might bring to the table already manifested themselves

in Gertrude Stein and Virgil ThomsonsFour Saints in Three Acts(in some ways still the mother

of us all), in Stravinskys neo-classicism, in the collaborations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill,

and in nearly everything penned by Leonard Bernstein. If we had grounded our conceptionsof modernism in these artists, we would scarcely have needed to go postal. Yet, in many parts

of Europe, North America and Australia, the stranglehold of serialism was such that composers

in the 1970s actually risked their careers in departing from that mandate.

To the extent that music theorists and musicologists had forged a historical narrative


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often conflicting reactions. Some artists still try to have it both ways: John Zorn festooned his

album covers with pictures of mutilated Asians, then wrapped himself in the flag of capital A

Autonomy when criticised by people who objected.9Welcome back to the social world!

To insist upon the social, however, is not toreducemusical expression to the merely social (as

if there is anything mere about the social!). The music itself still matters: the best of intentions

may produce inert results, and sometimes an ethically questionable enterprise bristles with

technical and rhetorical skill. Despite considerable misgivings, I have written on John Zornswork and have used my limited influence to help him secure awards.10I may not like everything

he does, but the guy knows how to shove notes around and he has a musical imagination second

to none. So, one is left weighing pros, on one hand, cons, on the other - just as one does with

any number of troubling but brilliant artists of the past.

If most of the music circulating today bears traces of the postmodernist moment, then we no

longer accomplish much by simply demonstrating a pieces postmodernity. Even twenty years

ago, I worried about the gentrification of postmodernisms more consequential challenges -

the sacrifice of a deconstructive edge for hellzapoppin eclecticism - and that gentrification hastranspired. Nearly everything travels under the banner of postmodernism: its the mainstream.

What matters, as always, is the cultural work it performs through the medium of sound. For

the remainder of this paper, I want to focus on a recent posterchild of postmodernist music:

Osvaldo GolijovsLa Pasin segn San Marcos, which premiered in Stuttgart in 2000.11

The son of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants to Argentina, Golijov studied in Israel

and also with those godfathers of eclecticism, George Crumb and Oliver Knussen. Several of

his previous compositions, such as Yiddishbbukand The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, had

traded on his Jewish identity: an identity he forged as an admittedly invented tradition from

memories his grandfather shared with him, his residency in Tel Aviv, his research into klezmer

and Hebrew chant, and chance encounters with other musicians.12He expresses no claim to

authenticity, even if the topics he chooses or his ways of fleshing them out often resonate with

some aspect of his multi-faceted background.

La Pasinwas one of four new renderings of that genre commissioned by the International

Bachakademie Stuttgart and Helmuth Rilling in honour of the 250th anniversary of Bachs

death (the others tapped were Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina and Tan Dun). Each of thecontributors brought a new slant to the tradition, whether through Asian or Eastern Orthodox

idioms or through the inclusion of poetry by Paul Celan. It was Golijovs version, however, that

took audiences by storm and made the composer the Great White Hope for the survival of

Classical Music.13Imagining the gospel narrative as a pageant presented by Latin-American

rather than Lutheran congregants, Golijov assembled a vast range of folkloric and popular

music, dance and poetry to produce a reading of the gospel not soon forgotten.

As with his Jewish pieces, Golijov freely acknowledges inLa Pasinhis reliance on research and

collaboration, though he simultaneously encourages listeners to perceive his Jewish-Argentineanbackground as lending some kind of grounding to a heritage more constructed than real. For

purposes of this project, he had to study the New Testament for the first time and also learn

something of the Bach settings so familiar to most European listeners.14But his very alienation

from these texts allowed him to make new connections, to read the script anew. What emerged


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setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, though the song itself also recalls Normas Casta diva

or Desdemonas Ave Maria, or those passages in Stravinskys Oedipusthat sound tantalisingly

just like name your favourite aria. In the composers words,

The song is at once a slow-motion ride on a cosmic horse, a homage to Couperins melismas

in hisLessons of Tenebrae, velvet bells coming from three different churches, heaven as seen

once by Yeats, a death lullaby, and ladder of Jacobs dream. But the strongest inspiration forLa Descoloridawas Dawn Upshaws rainbow of a voice, and I wanted to give her a piece so

quietly radiant that it would bring an echo of the single tear that Schubert brings without

warning in his voicing of a G major chord.15

Postmodern? Oh yeah!La Pasinis elaborately referential and ostentatiously eclectic. But that

does not imply that its meanings are exhausted in the identification of its parts. There still

remain rhetoric, theatrical effects, performance (in all senses of the word), occasions, audiences,

and the specific manipulation of sound that makes up music. Will it stand the test of time? Whoknows? Who would have imagined that Honky Tonk Woman would be a timeless classic or that

generations would keep playing air drum to the solo in In-a-gadda-da-vida?

La Pasinkicked the butts of classical-music critics who didnt even remember they had such

a component to their anatomy, and that is worthy of note. But is Golijovs piece opportunistic?

The musics gathered by ethnomusicologists came to be marketed commercially as World Beat,

and that legacy is now harvested by composers for the concert stage. Is Golijovs piece guilty of

exoticism? Richard Taruskin has explained how urban Russian composers in the early twentieth

century merrily orientalised themselves for the benefit of Parisian audiences eager for primitivist

treats,16and Carl Dahlhaus once described folk materials as an untapped reservoir of material

that virtually cried out for exploitation by Europeans who had exhausted their own materials.17

By virtue of what does the son of Russian immigrants to Argentina grab onto musics from all

over Latin America and channel them as his own? Does the aesthetic pay-off for those who like

the piece compensate for any of the ethical questions it may raise? I have been struggling with

that problem with respect to Georges Bizets Carmenfor twenty years, and Im not sure Im a lot

closer to solving it.

18

As Walter Benjamin said, There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time

a document of barbarism19(except maybe Honky Tonk Woman, of course). I confess that I like

Golijovs music - even as it raises, movement by movement, all the issues cultural theorists rightly

debate. If it provides musical pleasure and perhaps even spiritual insight for some, it also hits

many of the crucial faultlines connected with class privilege and race that remain so raw in our

time. Golijov envisioned a piece of concert music that foregrounded the voices of Latin Americans

and the Spanish language, which remains so marginalised in the European canon. But does he

thereby ventriloquise? Perhaps he does, but then the alternative is to self-censor to the point ofreturning to the old, purely formalist days, when the only safe position was that of furthering the

abstract cause of progress in someones notion of the purely musical. Which raises, once again,

the question of why humans need music, why evolution dedicated large portions of the brain

- and not only of those who have mastered pitch-class theory - to the processing of sound.


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Nobel laureate Toni Morrison once said in defence of her decision to write about slavery in

her novelBeloved: When I had problems, I thought: If they can live it, I can write about it. I

refuse to believe that that period, or that thing [slavery] is beyond art. Because the consequences

of practically everything we do, art alone can stand up to.20We may wish to believe that our

postmodernity has landed us in a more enlightened position, historically, but, alas, postmodernity

has not cured the wounds of racism, poverty, misogyny or religious warfare. If anything, the

twenty-first century has seen an intensification of these problems. We have not outgrown ourneeds for community, beauty, spiritual nourishment and mutual understanding; were not beyond

these, and we never will be.

And why must we chatter on about music, rather than just let the drastic experience conk us

over the head? No one has ever suggested that we replace the power of performance with verbiage.

But many of us are historians as well as listeners, and learning how music has operated in times

past and present is one of the musicologists tasks; indeed, if it is not, then we must concede

that music has had no real impact on culture as it has unfolded. Many of us are performers, and

engaging critically with scores or extant traditions allows us to break new paths - paths that may,in their own turn, deeply influence listeners in the future. Finally, many of us are composers who

sometimes find it useful to clear a space through verbal articulations in order to make it possible

for listeners to grasp why we need new music, why the repertoires left by Mozart and Beethoven

do not suffice. Which returns us not to the whims but to thedutiesof the critical musicologist.

Without question, undermining cultural conventions can be powerful, but it can also be self-

limiting. A few years ago, Gayatri Spivak realised that the language-games she displayed in her

gloriously gnarly prose made her work on political subalterns completely opaque to those she

hoped to help. As a consequence, even she - the woman whose introduction to Of Grammatology

managed to be more impenetrable than Derrida himself - decided to change her tune; sometimes,

she confessed later, one just needs to speak plainly and intelligibly.21To locate ones politics in the

rejection of communication -artistic or critical - is just to sign up again with modernist obscurity,

even if in the name of ever more post-postmodernism.

As I have already suggested, it is in the nature of cultural practices to spark debates. With the return

of cultural meaning to composition, performance and musicology, disagreements and squabbling

become inevitable. Some may long, I suppose, for the placid world of universal consensus, in whichnewspaper critics had no other job than to comment on whether or not the piccolo played sharp last

night. But I would prefer to hear people fight over Madonnas sacrilegious imagery, John Zorns

love of violence or Osvaldo Golijovs exploitation of the exotic. I have no quarrel with meanings

that differ from mine - indeed, I welcome them. All I ask is this: please dont drag me back to the

position whereby music didnt, cannot, and dont mean shit. Gimme that Old Time Postmodernism!

NOTES

1. Pierre Boulez, Schoenberg est mort,Notes of an Apprenticeship, Herbert Weinstock (trans), New York, AlfredA. Knopf, 1968, pp268-76.

2. See Susan McClary, Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition, Cultural Critique, 12,


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Spring (1989): 57-81.

3. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the Music and Postmodern Cultural Theoryconference held at the University of Melbourne on 5-6 December, 2006.

4. Joseph Kerman, How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out (1980); reprinted in Kerman, Write AllThese Down: Essays in Music Criticism, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994, p14.

5. Susan McClary, The Politics of Silence and Sound, afterword to Jacques Attali,Noise, Brian Massumi

(trans), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp149-58.

6. Susan McClary, The Gentrification of Postmodernism,New Music American Festival, Philadelphia, October1987.

7. The recent attack against hermeneutics in music is best represented by Carolyn Abbate, Music - Drastic orGnostic?, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004): 505-36. See the response by Michael James Puri in his review of BertholdHoecknersProgramming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment,Journalof the American Musicological Society, 59, 2, Summer (2006): 488-501.

8. See Janet Wolff, The Ideology of Autonomous Art, foreword toMusic and Society: The Politics of Composition,Performance and Reception, in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds), Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987, pp1-12. This collection stands as the opening salvo of the new musicology.

9. See Ellie Hisama, Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and JohnZorn,Popular Music, 12, 2 (1993): 91-104. A useful summary of the subsequent debate appears in DeniseHamilton, Zorns Garden Sprouts Discontent,Los Angeles Times, Calendar Section, August 15, 1994, p9.

10. See Susan McClary, Reveling in the Rubble: The Postmodern Condition, Conventional Wisdom: The Contentof Musical Form, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2000.

11. Osvaldo Golijov,La Pasin segn San Marcus, recording of the premiere available on Hnssler Classic, 2001.

12. See his statements in the liner notes to The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, Nonesuch Records, 1997.

13. See, for instance, the review by Alex Ross who wrote in response to a performance in Boston in 2001:Pasindrops like a bomb on the belief that classical music is an exclusively European art. It has a revolutionaryair, as if musical history were starting over, with new, sensuous materials and in a new, affirmative tone, AlexRoss,New Yorker, 15 March, 2001.

14. See his statements in the liner notes toLa Pasin, op. cit.

15. Comments in the published score ofLa Descolorida, Universal Edition, 2000.

16. Richard Taruskin, Entoiling the Falconet: Russian Musical Orientalism in Context, in Jonathan

Bellman, (ed), The Exotic in Western Music, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998, pp194-217.

17. Carl Dahlhaus,Nineteenth-Century Music, J. Bradford Robinson (trans), Berkeley and Los Angeles,University of California Press, 1989, p304.

18. See particularly Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

19. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History,Illuminations, Harry Zohn (trans), New York,Schocken Books, 1977, p256.

20. Gail Caldwell, Author Toni Morrison Discusses her Latest NovelBeloved [reprinted from theBoston Globe,6 October 1987], in Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (ed)Conversations with Toni Morrison, Jackson, University Press of

Mississippi, 1994, p245.

21. Comment in a talk given by Gayatri Spivak at the Center for Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College,1993.

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