more to Schenkerian analysis and the New Criticism

When, Jeffrey Williams, interviewing Stanley Fish, offered the now commonplace view that, in the 1970s and 1980s especially, "[literary or critical] theory provided a kind of bridge or lingua franca for literary studies, so that somebody in Renaissance could talk to somebody in twentieth-century American literature," Fish responded with comments on the preceding generation:

New Criticism provided a vocabulary, with its notions of tension and paradox and verbal artifacts, that could be as much a part of Chaucerian criticism . . . as of criticism, let's say, of Joseph Conrad's novels. So there was always a way, I think, that the techniques in one field could be generalized. What surprises me, though, and heartens me, is the survival through all of these changes of some commitment to close reading. I know that there are many, many complaints and laments that close reading is a lost art, but I see many people who still perform it. It still remains, at least in my experience, the most powerful pedagogical tool which can really awaken students' interest when they begin to realize that they can perform analyses of texts that remove the texts from the category of the alien and the strange, and then begin to actually understand the mechanics of how prose and verse work. (22)

In music studies, Schenkerian analysis and classical pitch-class set theory did much the same during roughly the same period (allowing for an offset of a decade or so). The difference was that the "tools" and "mechanics" of particular ways of reading/auditing became naturalized: in literary studies, every device, notion, or rhetorical gambit was closely scrutinized and often contested. Something like this happened with classical pc-set theory through Robert Morris's more thorough and more sophisticated reformulation of it and, more radically of course, through Lewin's GMIT, which opened the door to a wide field of theoretical and interpretative possibilities. Despite some good critical and historical work beginning in the 1980s, Schenkerian studies advanced only so far as meeting New Musicologists in a conservative practice of hermeneutics. Thus, as he does in "Schoenberg's Hat," Schachter can say in 1999 that "Schenker's description in Part I of Free Composition reveals some of the fundamental characteristics of the tonal system" (10). And the mechanics of that "system" are the naturalized "three Ursatz forms, [which are] the simplest pieces of tonal music, so simple that they have no artistic value at all, but still fulfill some of the basic needs of a tonal piece."

Between Neo-Riemannian rewriting of the history of harmony, the Schenkerian hermeneutics that must, if carried out sensitively and thoroughly, eventually break down the notion of a common practice, and the powerful new view of musical rhetoric in the 18th century that is coming out of partimento studies, a view like Schachter's is no longer sustainable.

References:

Williams, Jeffery L. Critics at Work: Interviews, 1993-2003. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Morris, Robert D. Composition with Pitch Classes: A Theory of Compositional Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Lewin, David. Generalized Music Intervals and Transformations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Schachter, Carl. Joseph Straus, ed. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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).

Seven Types of Ambiguity

Early on, while thinking about ways to "rack up" numbers of readings, I naturally thought of William Empson 's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). A brilliant youthful effort by the idiosyncratic literary critic, Seven Types lays out and explores a variety of double meanings in poetry. (On the whole, "double meanings" is a better descriptor than "ambiguity.") Exaggerated claims have been made about the book's influence on the American school of New Criticism, possibly because Empson received long-standing support from I. A. Richards, who was indeed one of the important influences on Cleanth Brooks and other principal New Critics.

[Note added 1-09-10: S. E. Hyman, writing in 1952, does have a point in noting John Crowe Ransom's positive assessments of Empson (297-98), but he overstates things when he claims a substantial influence of Empson on the "Southern school." Hyman says, for example, that Understanding Poetry "makes frequent reference to Empson" (298), but that is certainly not true of the first edition (1938): the only critics mentioned there are F. W. Bateson, L. C. Knights, Chard Powers Smith, Ransom, and I. A. Richards. As Hyman notes, Empson's views on Thomas Gray's Elegy are given a page, but only in the context of a (critical) assignment (Brooks and Warren 1938, 514-515; Hyman, 299). Hyman is apparently referring to a later edition, but I find little if any change in the one I have in hand: the revised "Complete Edition," published in 1950. Most significantly, there is no mention of Empson at all in the newly added essay "Ambiguity, Added Dimension, and Submerged Metaphor" (1950, 571-591). The relationship of Brooks and Empson is probably best described as that of rival disciples of Richards. Hyman himself (who was obviously an Empson advocate) summarizes their jousting in rival reviews (298-99).]

Unfortunately, Empson's categories don't translate easily to music--the distinctions between them can be subtle, requiring the support of the capacities of language, the sorts of distinctions that are either far more difficult to grasp in music or may simply not be there. Sylvia Imeson's attempt at a one-on-one mapping of the seven types onto music fell short; one notes that her work has rarely been cited since in the burgeoning literature on irony, paradox, metaphor, and humor in music.

It may also be true that the highly ritualized manner by which historical European musics are heard (and have been heard for well over 100 years now) has obliterated the kinds of gestural and topical understandings that would be fine enough to enable reading/hearing by means of ambiguity on Empson's terms. Until those understandings are reconstructed (as in the ongoing project of Robert Hatten, for example), it may be impossible to chart them against one another in systems of double meaning.

References:

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930.

Imeson, Sylvia. "The time gives it proofe": Paradox in the Late Music of Beethoven. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Hatten, Robert. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Hatten, Robert. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students. New York: Henry Holt, 1938.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry. Complete Edition. Revised. New York: Henry Holt, 1950.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1952.