Lawrence Kramer

Culture and musical hermeneutics: The Salome complex

From Flaubert to Richard Strauss, male artists in late nineteenth-century Europe were fascinated by the figure of Salome. This fascination, indeed, amounted to a genuine craze. One representation sparked another: J.-K. Huysmans fantasised about paintings by Gustave Moreau; Oscar Wilde expanded on Huysmans; Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Wilde. Fine editions of Wildes Salome with Beardsleys illustrations remained cult objects well into the twentieth century. In general, the Salome craze, like the science and medicine of its day, sought to legitimise new forms of control by men over the bodies and behaviour of women. The present paper revisits this well-known episode in cultural history with two distinct aims in mind, one interpretative, the other methodological. The interpretative aim is to offer a feminist approach to the fin-de-siecle compulsion to retell the Salome story with lavish attention to misogynist imagery - those quivering female bodies and gory male heads. The methodological aim is to find a meeting ground for literary criticism and musicology as both disciplines aspire to become vehicles of a more comprehensive criticism of culture.

Music, Historical Knowledge, and Critical Inquiry: Three Variations on The Ruins of Athens

This is an essay with a thesis or, to speak more plainly, with an axe to grind. The words in the main title give the gist. The thesis is that music, as music, is a source of historical knowledge and should therefore be aprimary resource of critical inquiry. It is not hard nowadays to get agreement to this claim in principle, but it is still quite rare to find it put into practice. Evidence of this, speaking of critical inquiry, is writ large in the special issue by whichCritical Inquiry celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2004. Of the thirty-four richly interdisciplinary essays in the issue, thirty-three have nothing to say about music, and certainly nothing to say through music. The odd essay out is not a real exception. A short statement by the music theorist Robert Morgan, it celebrates the journal’s longstanding openness to articles on musical topics and looks forward to more. No one would be likely to demur at the sentiments, but they do nothing to recognize or redress the marginal standing of music in the larger critical enterprise, which as a matter of fact if not of intent admits it only on sufferance. Music is at best a silent partner. The attitude underlying this silence is plain enough. It is the assumption thatmusic itself is silent onmatters ofhistoryandcriticism.Theassumption is one of themost familiar ofmusical doxa. It is also one of the least tenable, as I hope to show. But it has stubborn roots, roots that are both conceptual and ideological. The conceptual persistence is shown by a bias that even inflects the prominent recent trends in musicology that havemoved to embrace thickly described contextual relationships. With a few exceptions,

RECALLING THE SUBLIME: THE LOGIC OF CREATION IN HAYDN’S CREATION

In its opening representation of chaos and subsequent depiction of the creation of light, Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation famously begins with two forays into the musical sublime. But the work thereafter devotes itself to recalling the sublime, in the double sense of rescinding the sublime and of making it a matter of memory rather than of practice. This process is already under way in the depiction of light; its progressive advance may be measured in such ensuing episodes as the depictions of the first sun- and moonrise and Adam and Eve’s climactic hymn of praise, ‘Von deiner Gut’’. The withdrawal of the sublime gradually becomes coextensive with the creation itself and the place of humanity in the order of creation, reflecting (and refashioning) a historically specific understanding not only of the sublime but also, and more weightily, of the conditions of possibility for knowing the world and defining the human. Despite its forceful articulation in The Creation , however, this was an understanding already well on its way to becoming obsolete by the end of the eighteenth century.

Recognizing Schubert: Musical Subjectivity, Cultural Change, and Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady.

When classical music is used on a movie soundtrack, it is a safe bet that most members of the audience will neither be able to identify it nor, as they say, identify with it. Even at its most expressive or impassioned, classical music today carries a distinct charge of historical distance formost listeners. The cultural marginality responsible for this distance may be cause for regret, but the distance itself should not be. A sense of its positive value is one of the underpinnings of this paper. The question I want to ask is, What happens when a film made in the 1990s, based on a novel written in the 1870s, uses music composed in the 1820s to negotiate historically specific spaces of social, personal, and sexual desire? What does happen will prove not only to remap those spaces but also—in its own good time—to register recent cultural tendencies that go well beyond the immediate topics broached by the names of Campion, James, and Schubert. The role of music in this process is more prominent than usual, or at least than usually acknowledged, in Campion’s film. But that role is also indicative—not only of the semantic power of music in cinema, so often underestimated, but also of the logic by which this power operates. The operation involves far more than the mere appropriation of music in a cinematic context. It depends on the unfolding, within the film, of cultural meanings and resonances that—in an intelligible sense—have always already belonged to the music even if they have not previously been actualized.

Philosophizing Musically: Reconsidering Music and Ideas

SO: here we are in 2014 after almost a quarter of a century of intellectual ferment in thinking about music. Has anything been settled? What should we be asking these days? Much recent work both pro and con suggests that one thing we should be asking – still – is this: what does music have to do with ideas? The form of the question implies that the ideas at issue are not ideas about music, at least not primarily, but ideas about anything and everything else. More importantly, the question assumes that music and such ideas are capable of separation in the first place, that they begin from a condition of independence, indifference or antagonism. One way to describe that ferment of recent decades is to say that after around 1990 too many people to ignore had become unwilling to grant that assumption. Ideas from all over the compass seemed to invite, or even demand, not only a hearing with music, but also the recognition that music had never been heard, could never be heard, without ideas. (What music? Any music. Take your pick. What ideas? Any and all; the question is what to do with them.) One result of this push to ideation was a hermeneutic impulse that broke radically with the tradition of what, faute de mieux, I will call closed or weakly contextual hermeneutics – the essentially modernist practice of aesthetic paraphrase that Gary Tomlinson has traced in these pages from Donald Tovey through Charles Rosen to Richard Taruskin. The turn from closed to open hermeneutics has had too many forms for easy summary, but most of them have seemed premissed on the falsity of Kant’s claim that music pleases us acutely but does not leave us much to think about – that it is ‘more pleasure than culture’. Another result, probably inevitable, was a backlash that has tried to think of music in performance as a means of extinguishing thought – or, failing that, to preserve a precinct of difference in which music could find shelter from the ideas raging all around it. This is not the place to expose – yet again – the emptiness of such claims. Suffice it to say in passing just two things in lieu of the fuller arguments that have been made elsewhere. On performance: even if performance did put the mind to sleep (but does it? whose mind? and don’t vivid performances actually wake us up?), there is nothing to prevent us from reflecting