My reply to James Buhler

After my paper in the Notre Dame conference in 1994 (see introduction), James Buhler read a response, which I reproduced in yesterday's post. He also notes in an email message that "as I recall, I was repurposing Roy Bhaskar's arguments (developed in Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation) against [Thomas S.] Kuhn's theory of scientific revolution (which Bhaskar understands as a form of what he calls 'super idealism')."

Here are my own comments:

The Littlefield & Neumeyer article came near the end of the era of deconstruction (in literary theory, anyway), and the radicalisms of which Buhler accuses us certainly inhered in the article's argument. Our claim that "value has 'everything to do with the expertise of the professional interpreter' and nothing to do with the work" is simply a reworking for music of the "empty page" notion of reader response theory, where there is no text until the reader constructs it.

Jim's objections to our position in the article are very similar to objections raised against reader-response theory in the 1980s and early 1990s, and in my view they are consistent with claims I make about self-conscious analytic practice in the MTS article (in that article, I back away a bit from the Littlefield & Neumeyer stance -- see fn10). Whether it's a distinction between "rationalist systems" and "values" (derived from Lewin) or between material and discursive dimensions, the goal is self-conscious practice.

The progress of literary analysis and interpretation across the twentieth century may be charted roughly as the move from author to text to reader to (what we hope is ) a comfortable pluralism of viewpoints and approaches. The nineteenth-century focus on the author, on biography, on history as the deeds of heroic individuals, was still strong in the 1920s. The modernist reaction against that view turned to the text as an organic entity (or, in a different metaphor, an efficient system) -- in effect, the text became independent of the author in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and the several American New Critics. This view seemed at first to merge nicely with the structuralist/semiotic program in the 1950s and early 1960s, but the latter (especially when it became linked with psychoanalytic theory, mainly through Julia Kristeva, in the late 1960s) turned more and more toward the reader's response rather than the text's effects. By the 1990s, this had played itself out, and approaches such as the New Historicism tried to resuscitate and rethink biographical/contextual studies in the form of an (anti-analytical) "thick description." Textual analysis was either reshaped as "hermeneutics" (analysis sensitive to context) or was linked ever more tightly to political ideologies. And reader response was either limited to contemporary forms of semiotic analysis or shunted off to the empirical sciences as an aspect of human cognition studies.

That's where we are -- or that seems to me to be the current consensus of where we think we are (!). For more on how thematic criticism and musical analytic practice fit into this, see the Conclusion section of the MTS article.

References:

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.

Neumeyer, David. "Thematic Reading, Proto-backgrounds, and Transformations." Music Theory Spectrum 31/2: 284-324.

Bhaskar, Roy. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso, 1987.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Earlier editions: 2d (1970), 1st (1962).

James Buhler's response

After my paper in the Notre Dame conference (see introduction), James Buhler read a response that was aimed specifically at Littlefield & Neumeyer, the article that broached the (now dated) idea of interpretation as activity essentially independent of a text and the practice of multiple analyses. I am posting the response text here, in the author's newly edited version:

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.

Readings with different priorities

The readings in this entry are based on some in the co-authored article "Rewriting Schenker," 60-63, where we construct a series of alternative linear analyses of a short Czerny exercise by employing for each one a markedly different set of priorities. All the readings in this group are consistent with the principle behind the proto-backgrounds and begin to move in a more determined way beyond traditional Schenkerian analysis.

The first (graphic below) gives priority to melodic shape and multiple structures, therefore resists imposing a simple or heavily reduced urlinie type a priori, and ignores most implicit or hidden melodic patterning, draping interpretation instead about the most obvious melodic shapes. This reading, thus, effectively thwarts reduction beyond the phrase by "democratizing" the structural levels - instead of one overarching melodic structure fanning out through a series of prolongations, this is a chain of melodic structures. Such priorities do not prevent the analyst from making summarizing observations, such as noting the parallelism of phrases 2 and 3 (E-A, G#-C#) or the fact that phrases 1-3 rise and only the last falls, or the fact that the rising figures encompasses an octave (C#4-C#5). We are just not allowed to make too much of such observations (by allowing the patterns of the first three phrases to disappear inside the octave, for instance). This "democratizing" highlights the degree to which the synchronic hierarchies of linear analysis can undermine the diachronic.

The motif of rising, whether through arpeggio or line, becomes more obvious in the reading that gives priority to structural "frame" (below), even as we return to a hierarchical bias even more insistent than the traditional Schenkerian ones. The figure we saw in the first strain of the first analysis expands over the entire waltz: overall, an arpeggio from C#5 through E5 to A5, with a line to fill in the fourth. This is an aurally efficient interpretation that does not require fabrication of implicit counterpoint or complex nestings.

Much the same can be said of the next three readings, which substitute for the "frame" metric placement,

a fixed tonal space of the octave (this was already reproduced and discussed in the proto-background ^1-^8 entry),

and registral shape).

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.