Carolyn Abbate

Music—Drastic or Gnostic?

What does it mean to write about performedmusic? About an opera live and unfolding in time and not an operatic work? Shouldn’t this be whatwe do, since we love music for its reality, for voices and sounds that linger long after they are no longer there? Love is not based on great works as unperformed abstractions or even as subtended by an imagined or hypothetical performance. But would considering actual performances simply involve concert or record reviews? And would musicology—which generally bypasses performance, seeking meanings or formal designs in the immortal musical work itself—find itself a wallflower at the ball? More than forty years ago, Vladimir Jankelevitch made what is still one of the most passionate philosophical arguments for performance, insisting that real music is music that exists in time, the material acoustic phenomenon. Metaphysical mania encourages us to retreat from real music to the abstraction of the work and, furthermore, always to see, as he put it, “something else,” something behind or beyond or next to this mental object. Yet, as he wrote, “composing music, playing it, and singing it; or even hearing it in recreating it—are these not three modes of doing, three attitudes that are drastic, not gnostic, not of the hermeneutic order of knowledge?”Musical sounds are made by labor. And it is in the irreversible experience of playing, singing, or listening that anymeanings summoned bymusic come into being. Retreating to the work displaces that experience, and dissecting the work’s technical features or saying what it represents reflects the wish

Wagner, ‘On Modulation’, and Tristan

So says Othello, confronting Iago for the last time in Shakespeares play. He looks down to seek for the cloven hoof of a demon, for only if lago is satanic can Othello understand what has come to pass. Looking down – the physical gesture – represents an impulse to interpret, to find clues, codes, signs there in the darkness. But Iago is no supernatural being: ‘thats a fable’. What remains is an enigmatic lago more frightening than any demon – the attempt to interpret undermined by the sign not given.

Mythische Stimmen, Sterbliche Körper

Wie stirbt man in den Opern Wagners? Besser gesagt: wie sterben Korper, wie sterben Stimmen dahin? So verbluffend die Frage erscheinen mag, so deutlich last sich dieser rote Faden durch ein Dickicht von Spekulationen verfolgen, in dem beispielsweise ein Spiegeleffekt zwischen Stimme und Orchester in der Form einer akustischen Metapher die Moglichkeit der Unsterblichkeit eroffnet, oder das Menschliche sich auf eine Art und Weise mit dem Mechanischen zu verbinden scheint, das die kuriose Mixtur eine traumatische Erfindung des fin-de-siecles vorwegnimmt: das Grammophon.