Despite my great admiration for this article, it seems to me that it stops at an especially awkward juncture: it exposes the tensions of Neo-Schenkerian orthodoxy, but it doesn’t resolve them, and all the authors can do--and it must be emphasized that this "all" is still quite a lot--is revel in the force-field of these tensions by unleashing stockpiled analytical technology on a seemingly innocuous little piece by Czerny.The choice of this particular piece supports the authors’ contention that "the so-called intrinsic value of a work of art has little, if anything, to do with its internal relationships, and everything to do with the expertise of the professional interpreter" (52). By choosing music written for a specific pedagogical purpose, analyzing it, and showing that it in fact possesses value that exceeds its pedagogical content, they emphasize the extent to which that value is a product of the analyst and analytical practice rather than the autonomous artwork as a thing-in-itself.But all this leaves the project vulnerable to charges of ontological relativism. For if value has "everything to do with the expertise of the professional interpreter" and nothing to do with the work, then we may raise two objections, both related to what I take to be an underlying idealism in their position: (1) Are we to take value as merely illusory, a product only of the interpreting subject and not the object? If this is so, how are we to adjudicate competing value claims? (2) Does the material object, the work of art, not form one of the conditions of possibility of its value? If so, are Littlefield and Neumeyer not repeating the mistake they identify in Neo-Schenkerian orthodoxy of neglecting the lesser term that makes the greater term possible?It is this residue of idealism, inherited from Schenker, that forces an apparently unseemly choice between an arbitrary order imposed dogmatically from on high, on the one hand, and the unbridled chaos of relativism, on the other. The choice that Littlefield and Neumeyer make leaves their virtuosic interpretative practice relatively empty, for if the quality of the material object has "little, if anything" to do with its value, if its use value is identical with its exchange value and nothing more, then what is the purpose of music analysis? Can music analysis mean and produce anything beyond self-revelation if music itself does not have a meaning that transcends what we say it is?These questions remain insoluble unless we can distinguish the material dimension of the work from our verbal and analytical formulas. On the one hand, the musical work is a material object: every musical work possesses a material dimension, the “stuff” of the object that does not change when our descriptions, interpretations and analyses of it do. On the other hand, the work, once released into the world, is a discursive object: it is not the same work after analysis as it was before -- we embed the object within the discourse of our analysis. What makes this distinction so hard to grasp, despite its seeming simplicity, is that we only have indirect access to the material dimension: we can only speak of music, its materiality, by placing it into discourse.This distinction between the material and the discursive dimension lies behind Neumeyer's provocative metaphor of the camera filter [in the Notre Dame paper, I compared analytic methods to camera filters]. We may choose a filter, but the image we produce is still dependent on the original object; and even the filters themselves come with material and discursive properties that we cannot ignore [blue filters, red filters, polarizing filters, etc.]. People make music mean, then, but not just the way they want. When we analyze a work, or more generally when we interpret it, what we do with it is not just of our individual choosing. We encounter analytical contraints of all kinds --institutional, technological, political, historical, social, and yes material -- and the analyses we produce are not indifferent to any of those constraints; certainly the analytical practice of Littlefield and Neumeyer is not indifferent to such constraints, which the virtuosity of their practice allows them to effectively expose and surmount. Once we are sensitive to the existence of the material dimension despite the constant displacement it undergoes, we no longer face a choice between absolute order or absolute chaos, epistemological fundamentalism or ontological relativism. We can have instead multiple analyses, an analytical pluralism, without fear of that epistemological relativism devolving into an ontological one.
I'll post my reply in tomorrow's entry.
Reference:
Littlefield, Richard, and David Neumeyer. "Rewriting Schenker–History, Ideology, Narrative." In Adam Krims, , ed. Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, 138-146. Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998. Originally published in Music Theory Spectrum 14/1 (1992): 38-65.
