Music

HERMENEUTICS AND
MUSIC CRITICISM
Hermeneutics and
Music Criticism
Roger W. H. Savage
University of California, Los Angeles
First published 2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Savage, Roger W. H.
Hermeneutics and music criticism/Roger W. H. Savage.
p. cm.
1. Musical criticism. 2. Musicology.
3. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title.
ML3880.S296 2009
781.1′7—dc22 2008055614
ISBN 0-203-87515-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–99859–X (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–203–87515–X (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–99859–8 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–203–87515–5 (ebk)
F O R PAT, K R I S T E N A N D L A U R A
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xii
Acknowledgment of Permissions xiii
1 Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, Criticism 1

Musical Hermeneutics and the Hermeneutics of Music 2
A Performative Contradiction 6
Hermeneutics and Criticism 11
2 Social Werktreue and the Subjectivization of Aesthetics 16

Narrative Deconstruction 18
Social Werktreue 25
The Subjectivization of Aesthetics 27
3 From Musikē to Metaphysics 32

Mimesis, Musikē, and the Discourse of Absolute Music 33
Renaissance Magic 37
La querelle des anciens et des modernes 40
Romantic Reversals 44
The Positivist Compulsion 51
4 Formalist Aesthetics and Musical Hermeneutics 57

Tonal Form in Motion 58
An Aesthetics of Themes 62
A Critical Juncture 65
5 Deconstructing the Disciplinary Divide 69

The Music–Language Divide 71
Hermeneutic Windows 74
Jouissance 78
Music as Supplement? 80
vii
CONTENTS
6 The Question of Metaphor 85

The Language of Art 86
Music and Metaphor 91
Mood 93
Exemplification 95
Metaphorical Reference 98
7 Mimesis and the Hermeneutics of Music 103

Structure and Plot 106
Mimetic Redescription 108
Musical Worlds 111
Limit Experiences 118
8 Political Critique and the Politics of Music Criticism 124

Music as Social Violence 125
Criticism and Politics in Contrary Motion 128
Political Commitment 131
9 Toward a Hermeneutics of Music Criticism 137

Aesthetics and Ideology 138
Culture and Politics 142
Judgment and Imagination 145
Toward a Hermeneutics of Music Criticism 148
Notes 153
Index 195
viii
P R E FA C E
Looking back, my interest in aesthetics and philosophy began long before

I was especially aware of it. While studying composition at McGill
University, I attended a seminar on twentieth-century music with Bengt
Hambraeus in which I made a stammering attempt to grapple with the vis-
à-vis of music and time. Later, with David Osmond-Smith’s encourage-
ment at the University of Sussex, I began to explore the thought of
Theodor W. Adorno, a critic and philosopher whose work continues to
raise vital questions while posing formidable challenges. In the graduate
seminars I taught at UCLA over the past decade, I became increasingly
aware of the need for a rapprochement between hermeneutics and the
critical perspective Adorno advocated, which has become commonplace in
critical theory and cultural studies.
The more I tried to untangle the relation between a critical, theoretical
standpoint and the quality of musical experiences, the more I became
aware of the obstacles that stood in the way of retrieving music’s affective
power. Though I was sympathetic to critiques of romantic sensibilities, I
was also concerned that efforts to overturn the notion of a purely musical
experience too often overlooked the creative forces at work. The difficulty
of achieving a rapprochement between this critical vantage point and a
hermeneutical perspective on music’s productive value was compounded
by the fact that the term “hermeneutics” seemed to have different musico-
logical and philosophical resonances. These differences seemed to me to be
due in part to the fact that Hermann Kretzschmar adopted musical
hermeneutics in response to Eduard Hanslick’s claim that music’s content
consists of “tonally moving forms.” Furthermore, the discrepancy between
these different musicological and philosophical resonances appeared to be
exacerbated by the advent of postmodern musicology. In many ways, the
widely-held view that musical hermeneutics was a way of deciphering
music’s extra-musical meanings seemed to conflict with the insights of
philosophers who we identify with the remarkable achievements in
hermeneutical thought in the twentieth century. Consequently, one of my
principal aims in writing this book was to bring together two distinct but
ix
PREFACE
related phenomena: cultural musicology’s timely critique of the ideological

nature of the concept of music’s aesthetic autonomy, and the compelling
character of the living experience of music. The adventure on which I
embarked in writing this book is my attempt to forge a new perspective on
music’s expressive power—a perspective that would account for music’s
dynamic and imaginative force while acknowledging its sometimes
deleterious effects.
While I have not written a manual for music criticism, the issues that
concern me bear directly on the practice and politics of interpreting
music’s meaning and significance. However justifiable denouncing music’s
relegation to a sacrosanct cultural preserve continues to be, the danger of
succumbing to the effects of the long history that cultural musicologists
and social scientists have been struggling against served as a constant
caution against the temptation to simply reverse the practice of abstracting
music from its sustaining life-contexts. The irony that nineteenth-century
ideals of music’s transcendent autonomy and formal self-sufficiency might
in fact conform to historical precepts that remained largely hidden from
critical scrutiny provided a cogent theme around which I could reexamine
seminal constructs that have played major roles in the discourse in which
musicologists, ethnomusicologists, cultural theorists, critics, and philo-
sophers have all had a part.
Many readers will be familiar with some of the most influential ideas
with which this book engages. Deconstructions of absolute music’s claim
to aesthetic autonomy have drawn everyone’s attention to the meta-
physical and formalist conceits that are used to justify divorcing musical
works from social reality. My challenge, in writing this book, was to
examine the tactics and strategies employed in deconstructing music’s
aesthetic isolation from a different vantage point, in the hopes of recover-
ing the productively creative value that, with special regard to music, is
indispensable to the enrichment of our experiences of the world.
My attention to the hermeneutical and phenomenological aspects of the
power of music—a power that is most evident in those instances when
music redescribes our elective affinities with the world—highlights the
ontological vehemence of the moods and feelings that music expresses.
Hence my critique of the historical treatment of music’s imitative function
culminates in an examination of such diverse limited experiences as those
exemplified by ‚tarab ecstasy, the music of Malawi dancing prophets, and
some postmodern minimalist works. The subsequent consideration I give
to the politics of music criticism follows from the hermeneutical perspec-
tive I develop in my argument on the musical work’s power to speak. The
hermeneutics of music criticism I thus set out has one express aim: to
revitalize the role of criticism within the broader context of a thorough-
going understanding of music’s singular capacity to refigure a reality it also
surpasses and transcends.
x
PREFACE
It is impossible to adequately acknowledge all those who have had a

part in the intellectual journey that led to undertaking this project. I do,
however, recognize the debt of gratitude I owe to many individuals who
have contributed in different ways to its inception and completion. I was
extremely fortunate to meet Michael Poellet at an especially felicitous
moment in my life. Michael graciously invited me to attend seminars he
was giving at the time, and I will always be grateful to him for introducing
me to the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin
Heidegger. Wayne Turner has also been a remarkable conversation
partner over the years. I gained more than I can say from reading different
texts with Michael and Wayne in Saskatoon, and the influences of those
years of conversation are woven throughout this book.
I also benefited enormously from the comments, questions, and remarks
that George Taylor made after reading an earlier version of this
manuscript. The suggestions and recommendations George offered were
indispensable to clarifying crucial points regarding Ricoeur’s thought.
George’s considerable insight into Ricoeur’s use of the concept of
objectification proved particularly helpful in my nuancing more carefully
the role that this concept has in relation to Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis.
Any shortcomings in my discussion of Ricoeur’s work, or of the philo-
sophers, critics, and musicologists whose work I strive to engage are, of
course, my own.
I am also grateful to former and current graduate students with whom
I have had the opportunity to meet regularly to discuss different texts,
primarily those of Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt. I especially want to thank
Ben Harbert, who was my research assistant during the last phase of this
project and who prepared the musical examples for this publication.
I owe my sister, Joan, a special debt of gratitude. A professional
musician and author, she read and commented on numerous drafts of this
work. Without her discerning ear and eye, this book may never have seen
the light of day. Her support is testament to the power of close relations,
of which Ricoeur speaks so eloquently. My mother, Clementine, too,
offered sagacious advice. Over the years, I have benefited from the
company of family and friends during periods of trial and celebration. No
one has been more gracious, more patient, and more encouraging than my
wife Pat. I can only begin to express my gratitude to her, along with the
joy I have in our daughters Kristen and Laura. This book is dedicated to
them.
xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began to wrestle with some of the issues that this book addresses, in
previously published articles. I gratefully acknowledge the permission
granted to me by The Johns Hopkins University Press to reprint material
from “Imagination and the Subjectivization of Aesthetics” which appeared
in Philosophy and Literature. I am also grateful to the University of
California Regents for permission to reprint material from “Hermeneutics,
Adorno and the New Musicology,” which was published in Perspectives
in Systematic Musicology. Some of the arguments I develop in this book
first appeared in “Is Music Mimetic? Ricoeur and the Limits of Narrative,”
which was published in the Journal of French Philosophy. The examples
from Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung Op. 17 and Steve Reich’s Piano
Phase are used by permission of European American Music Distributors
LLC, U.S. and Canadian agent for Universal Edition A.G., Wien.
xii
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF PERMISSIONS
Savage, Roger W. H. “Criticism, Imagination and the Subjectivization of

Aesthetics,” Philosophy and Literature 29:1 (2005), 164–79. © The
Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Savage, Roger W. H. “Hermeneutics, Adorno, and the New Musicology,”
Perspectives in Systematic Musicology (2005), 229–41. © The Regents
of the University of California. Reprinted with permission.
xiii
1
AESTHETICS,
HERMENEUTICS, CRITICISM
The resurgence of musical hermeneutics in recent scholarship provides an

opportunity to reexamine critical practices that have been deployed to
overthrow traditional conceptions of music. Turning to interpretive
methods to decipher hidden social values, meanings, and political agendas
has proven to be one of the most effective means of dismantling the once-
privileged idea that music operated within its own autonomous sphere.
At the same time, the appeal to hermeneutics as a way to justify breaking
with metaphysical and formalist conceits too often eclipses philosophical
insights and arguments that run contrary to contemporary critical tactics
and strategies. Most striking of all, the tradition of thinking out of which
these insights and arguments arise is one that offers encouragement to
critics who maintain that all understanding entails interpretive acts.
The clash between strategies that exploit methods of interpretation to
deconstruct music’s institutional preservation, and the philosophical and
phenomenological investigations undertaken by thinkers such as Martin
Heidegger, Hans-George Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur therefore provides
a welcome occasion for reconsidering the history of criticism’s relation to
hermeneutics. At the same time, through reevaluating the history in which
musical hermeneutics came to be opposed to formalist ideals, the philo-
sophical undertaking for which this occasion calls leads to new insights
into criticism’s limits and its task in relation to music’s power to affect
ways in which the world is open to us.
At first glance, turning to musical hermeneutics to overturn the
traditional disciplinary ideas that concern music’s formal self-sufficiency
and its transcendent cultural value appears to suffice. And yet, reversing
the standpoint that traditionally justified musicology’s support for the
principle that music, and especially instrumental music of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, gives rise to a plethora of contradictions and
paradoxes that ensnare efforts to deconstruct absolute music’s sacrosanct
aesthetic autonomy. To be sure, the tactics and strategies adopted in
support of the objectives of a self-proclaimed postmodern musicology are
1
AESTHETICS, HERMENEUTICS, CRITICISM
some distance from the musical hermeneutics that Hermann Kretzschmar

opposed to Eduard Hanslick’s formalist aesthetics. At the same time,
Kretzschmar’s antipathy to Hanslick’s attempt to place musical aesthetics
on a scientific footing reverberates in conflicts that pit formalist apolo-
getics for music’s self-sufficiency against situated interpretations that
intend to place music’s meaning in real social, cultural, political, and
historical contexts. By following the itinerary set by the critical agenda of
uncovering music’s social and cultural relevance, the paradoxes, contra-
dictions, and impasses that come to light promote the kind of inquiry that
enables us to think more about music’s cultural value, its mimetic
significance, and its affective power.
The reflections, analyses, and critiques that arise in the course that
Hermeneutics and Music Criticism follows have several objectives. First,
by revisiting the discourse on music’s mimetic character—a discourse
too quickly assimilated to an outmoded concept of music’s imitative
function—they aim to draw out the concept of language that underlies
the cultural investment, in the nineteenth century, of the metaphysics
of music. Examining the role that language plays in the discourse of
absolute music not only sets the stage for interrogating the affinity
of Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics with Richard Wagner’s aesthetic-
historical program in his Gesamtkunstwerk, but it also lays out the ground
for reevaluating the music–language divide’s postmodern deconstruction.
The second objective complements the first. The fascination with
deconstructing the metaphysics of music draws music criticism toward a
theory of metaphor that renews the question of music’s truth. This
question, and the reflections it sets in motion, led to the development of a
hermeneutics of music. The problem—better, the impossibility—of
deriving music’s productive character from its relegation to an autono-
mous sphere motivates the recourse to a theory of mimesis in which the
suspension of reality is the negative condition for its creative redescrip-
tion. Music’s power to redescribe modalities of our inherence in the world
reaches a limit in those experiences in which time is surpassed by its other.
The third objective follows the radical critique of the pretense of a
subjective mastery toward which these limit experiences point. Thus,
beyond the Gotterdämmerung announced by the destruction of music’s
specter of autonomy, a renewed understanding of music’s expressive
vehemence leads to a hermeneutics of criticism attentive to the pleasure
afforded by music’s worlding power.
Musical Hermeneutics and the Hermeneutics of Music

Interpretive practices designed to unlock the secrets of music’s hidden
social meanings tend to block the development of a thematic under-
standing of music’s aesthetic vehemence. In fact, the effort to denounce the
2
idea that autonomous music rises above the conditions surrounding its
production, performance, and reception eclipses the more intractable
difficulty of extricating criticism from its reliance on prevailing concepts.
The impulse to deconstruct the network of principles and ideas that
invested music, and particularly instrumental music of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, with its aesthetic purity and metaphysical autonomy
is a case in point. Joseph Kerman’s call for a new musicology that would
surpass the myopic perspective of analyses devoted to music’s internal
structures and procedures presaged the rise of postmodern musicology’s
socially self-conscious critiques. In identifying analysis with a mode of
formalist criticism that served the cultural interest in preserving a
traditional canon of high art works, Kerman exposed the underlying
ideological premises of a form of criticism that supported and defended
Western art music’s sacrosanct value. Formalist criticism, Kerman argued,
flourished in the scientific climate in which it was calculated to thrive.
Great musical works displayed the principles of organic unity and
structural coherence that were characteristic features of their merit and
worth. As a mode of criticism, formal analysis preserved an aura of
scientific neutrality that cloaked its methodological, cultural and meta-
physical presuppositions in technical demonstrations of a musical
masterpiece’s formal integrity.1
By shoring up the idea that music belongs in a sphere separate from the
realities of everyday social life, formalist criticism widened the gulf that
contemporary criticism intended to close. From the vantage point of a
socially and politically conscious critique, the aesthetic integrity demon-
strated by means of scientifically technical descriptions of a work’s
structural features and processes was completely suspect. From this
perspective, music’s conscious differentiation as an object of aesthetic
enjoyment, contemplation, and analysis masked its value as a social
representation of gendered constructions of identity and sexuality.
Accordingly, the idea that a musical work was a purely self-sufficient entity
abstracted from its surrounding social, political, and historical milieu
concealed the real significance of enshrining autonomous high art works
within a purely aesthetic realm. Divorcing music from social reality
dissembled music’s true value as an instrument in the struggle to channel
the social subject’s interests and desires. Reversing the idea that music’s
aesthetic autonomy justified tearing works from their sustaining life-
contexts accordingly provided a foothold for identifying music’s meaning
with the contexts and conditions of its production and dissemination.
Critiques of the idea of a pure, instrumental music freed from the fetters
of the material world abounded.2 Some critiques took aim at the penchant
for identifying formal processes and procedures with hegemonic cultural
standards; others denounced music’s role as a weapon in the fight for
social position and power. The different forms these criticisms took
3
encompassed disciplinary stances as various as musicology’s proclivity

toward socially textual readings and ethnomusicology’s preference for
fieldwork. Despite the sometimes seemingly unbridgeable gap between
these disciplines, a common antipathy toward the principles and ideals of
music’s aesthetic autonomy united them through their shared front.
The distinction “the music itself” was, at root, the object of multiple dis-
ciplinary attacks. The heritage of this distinction, however, cannot be so
easily overcome. Musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and critics sometimes
forget their share in concepts forged by the history of Western art music’s
metaphysical elevation. In particular, vestiges of the act of differentiating
between music and its social, political, and cultural environs continue to
haunt the theoretical, analytic, and critical practices that identify music as
the object of social and cultural processes. Reversing the effects of isolat-
ing music aesthetically foreshortens the more arduous path of a critique of
the way that sundering judgments concerning art and music from the
knowledge of reality led to instituting a sphere of aesthetic freedom.
Accordingly, the destruction of this sphere of freedom raises the more
intractable difficulty: how to account for music’s capacity for effecting
change by surpassing an existing social order without transcending that
order metaphysically.
This difficulty is the watershed problem that separates interpretive
practices, collected under the rubric of musical hermeneutics, from a
properly hermeneutical understanding of music’s ontological vehemence.
Enlisting musical hermeneutics in the struggle against romantic and
formalist conceits armed criticism with a formidable weapon. In fact,
providing interpretations of an otherwise indefinable meaning proved to
be indispensable to the politics waged against the traditional disciplinary
function of music’s aesthetic autonomy. Drawing upon a tradition of
interpretive criticism dominated by the practice of supplementing formal
descriptions with referential allusions to emotions, affects, and narrative
programs, musicologists as philosophically diverse as Lawrence Kramer,
Daniel K. L. Chua, and Berthold Hoeckner credit musical hermeneutics
with the task of bridging between music and the more properly linguistic
character of musicological discourses.3 The advantages are undeniable;
by spanning the gap between a work’s self-referential or so-called
intramusical meaning and a meaning that by convention has been defined
as extramusical, musical hermeneutics provides its own justification as a
means of explicating music’s extra-referential value. Disaffection with
the idea of music’s aesthetic self-sufficiency leads to treating musical
hermeneutics as the platform for mounting the corollary counterclaim.
Accordingly, music’s worldliness is in danger of appearing to be the
obverse, or inverse, of its social institution as an autonomous entity.
My thesis—that a hermeneutics of music highlights music’s worlding
power—cuts across the claims and counterclaims that oppose music’s
4
worldliness to a romantic metaphysics. I have no intention of avoiding

the confrontation between claims regarding music’s formal purity and
its deconstruction. At the same time, nothing authorizes substituting
music’s worldliness for its metaphysical transcendence. In the chapters
that follow, I intend to oppose the worlding power of music both to
music’s methodological abstraction from its sustaining life-contexts, and
to contextualizing interpretations that reinsert works back into the real
life-worlds of composers, performers, and listeners. My plea for an
understanding of music’s ontological vehemence therefore not only runs
against the grain of critiques that unmask the construction of music as
aesthetically absolute, but it also interrupts the currents of suspicion
directed against music’s express force. In response to the charge that
music’s ineffability is the sign of metaphysical pretensions of a “language
beyond language,” I will offer a hermeneutical reevaluation of music’s
mimetic redescription of affective dimensions of our experience.
The new path I hope to forge benefits from earlier critiques. I am
therefore going to place the problem of music’s representational status at
the center of my own hermeneutical critique. The advantage of this critique
is that it foregrounds the decisive place of the concept of mimesis in music
within the discourse of absolute music. This concept of mimesis subtends
the controversies over music’s meaning, as the work of Daniel Chua, Gary
Tomlinson, and Lawrence Kramer, among others, forcibly attests. My re-
reading of the history of the discourse in which instrumental music was by
turn excoriated and celebrated draws out the vital role mimesis plays in
animating and even inflaming disputes, from the querelle des anciens et des
modernes through to postmodern refutations of modernist musicology’s
founding precepts. Language’s alleged complicity both with the meta-
physics of presence and with the metaphysics of absolute music lays the
ground for the destruction of these precepts. Re-reading this historical
discourse with an ear to its contemporary resonances will set the stage for
a philosophical hermeneutics in which the disciplinary difference between
music and language is subjected to a critique of the alleged complicity
between language and the metaphysics of presence.
The difference between music’s purported autonomy and language’s
value as a means of identifying the contents and referents of otherwise
seemingly ineffable expressions accordingly presents itself as the first
front in the struggle against the cultural and intellectual heritage of the
nineteenth century. Lawrence Kramer’s manifesto announces modernist
musicology’s Götzendämmerung in dismantling the myth of music’s
transcendent self-sufficiency. In Kramer’s “musicology of the future,”
criticism would responsibly seek “to situate musical experience within the
densely compacted, concretely situated worlds of those who compose,
perform, and listen.”4 (No one could miss the resonances between this call
to dismantle the conceits shielding the autonomous work from critical
5
scrutiny and Wagner’s music of the future.) For this “radically anti-
foundationalist, anti-essentialist, and anti-totalizing”5 musicology, all
knowledge is relative to the disciplinary practices that produce it and in
which it circulates. Strategically opposed to the alleged modernist
insistence on abstracting individual works from their social contexts,
Kramer’s cultural musicology stakes its moral and political legitimacy on
demythologizing modernist musicology’s romantic and formalist legacy.
Caught up in intellectual currents directed toward subverting music’s
apotheosis within the nineteenth-century cult of art-religion, Kramer is not
alone in deploying the methods of literary criticism and cultural studies to
expose the relations and connections between music’s formal processes
and features, and the contingent, constructed character of their extra-
musical significance. The hermeneutics of music for which I am arguing
cannot avoid the formidable claims made by self-identified postmodern
musicologists on behalf of music’s material reality. At the same time, this
hermeneutics of music cannot fail to confront the paradoxes in which the
struggle against the history of music’s social emancipation seems to be
ensnared.
One paradox, in particular, stands out. How, apart from its capacity to
introduce a sense of distance into the heart of reality, could a work have
any real force? In Chapters 6 and 7, I will defend the idea that music’s
retreat from reality is the indispensible condition of music’s imaginative
exploration of moods and feelings that redescribe affective dimensions of
our experience. Accordingly, the question of music’s power to refigure our
inherence in the world guides my response to the uses to which musical
hermeneutics has been put. The hermeneutics of music I intend to develop
offers no solace to the proponents of the aesthetic ideology of absolute
music, to which cultural critics are also virtually universally opposed. In
this respect, I am in good company in initially retracing the path of a
hermeneutics of suspicion turned against the aesthetics’ dissembling
function.6
A Performative Contradiction
The notion that music’s relegation to the aesthetics’ autonomous sphere
masks music’s real value and significance finds itself almost shipwrecked
on a seemingly unavoidable contradiction. On the one hand, denounc-
ing the idea that music is aesthetically autonomous tends to militate
against both a metaphysics that sets absolute music above the world
through its transcendent power, and the formalist penchant for abstracting
individual works from their sustaining life-contexts. On the other hand,
the tendency to identify a work’s value and meaning with the conditions
and circumstances surrounding its production, performance, and
reception effectively collapses the difference between them—a difference
6
that might provide a critical foothold for challenging an established order

within a different register. Deprived of any sense of distance from reality,
music is a mere cultural artifact that publicly documents values and
meanings constructed within the field in which it circulates. Conversely, if
it is isolated from reality by its absolute aesthetic difference, a work is
equally impotent with regard to any critical or productive vehemence.
A first intimation of the difficulties awaiting the critic who denounces
the aesthetics’ ideological character in the interest of demystifying
music’s—and especially Western high art music’s—culturally sacrosanct
value, comes not from musicology but from literary criticism. The welling
discontent with reductivist practices that treat literary texts as social
documents motivates George Levine’s plea for a rehabilitated view of the
aesthetic as a mode of conduct and expression that operates differently
from other modes of social practice. Levine’s unease with critics who are
unable or unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with
literary texts they expose as imperialist, sexist, homophobic, and racist
points toward a conflicted standpoint.7 By assuming that music and
literary works are politically complicit with the aesthetics’ strategic
mystification of the status quo, critics who deploy them as evidence of their
socio-historical substance overlook and even dissemble their power to
break through ideologically frozen representations. The post-structuralist
realization that literary texts are indeterminate and inexhaustible does not
license replacing the work of art with critical social commentaries on it. On
the contrary, criticism’s collective and determining role belongs to a shared
community of commentary whose history and thought is a record of the
changing interpretations and understandings of literary texts. While
works can reinforce prevailing ideological interests, the aesthetic, Levine
maintains, “has always served also as a potentially disruptive force, one
that opens up possibilities of value resistant to any dominant political
power.”8 For him, the danger posed by uncensored works to totalitarian
régimes bears witness to the potentially subversive nature inhering in
individual works. Hence the conscientious critic who continues to engage
with works she or he denounces as ideologically pernicious finds her/
himself face to face with the following dilemma: how to account for a
work’s productive significance in the light of the obviously ideological
effects of aesthetically emancipating literature, music, or art. In Levine’s
view, the critic is therefore compelled to search for the operative mode in
which the aesthetic “contributes in distinctive ways to the possibilities of
human fulfillment and connection”9 by creatively engaging moral and
political issues.
The question that immediately arises is whether the creative potential
that Levine hopes to recover can be retrieved from the aesthetic’s
ideological designation. In my view, debates over aesthetics and politics
suffer from a view of aesthetics that is still too closely tied to the history
7
of music’s, literature’s, and art’s emancipation from cultic rituals and

social functions. The fact that music was emancipated socially to become
an autonomous entity liberated from all material exigencies cannot of
itself serve as the condition of music’s critical. By the same token, an
inadequate theory of mimesis—indebted to a concept of representation
and denounced as a metaphysics of presence—cannot be redeployed in the
interest of interpretive fidelity to music’s social truth. Hence from the
outset, the paradox that the aesthetics’ ideologically deleterious function
might also be the condition of a work’s productive, emancipatory
significance places its stamp on the contradiction inherent in the effort of
valorizing the aesthetic.
Theodor W. Adorno’s critical hermeneutics exemplifies the contra-
diction in question. Although he was not expressly concerned with issues
of race and gender, his attempt to grapple with the dilemma of music’s
critical vehemence distinguishes his project from interpretive programs
that are more ready to simply dismiss music’s institution as an autono-
mous aesthetic entity. Adorno’s claim that music’s distance from reality is
the condition of music’s truth set the stage for seeking a middle ground.
Accordingly, he subscribes to a two-fold characterization of art, as “both
autonomous and fait social [where art’s double character] is incessantly
reproduced on the level of its autonomy.”10 From his theoretical
standpoint, neither formalist analyses nor vulgar sociological ones do
justice to the critical sociological demand to decipher music’s content from
a work’s aesthetic constitution. By subordinating art works to abstract
social correlations, the cheap sovereignty of sociological analyses, through
ignoring the work’s aesthetic constitution, dismiss a work’s “immanence
of form as a vain and naïve self-delusion.”11 Conversely he argues that, by
making itself absolute, formal analysis capitulates to the ideological
reification it struggles against when devoting itself “to the artworks
internally rather than deducing their worldviews [immanently].”12
Adorno’s insistence on deciphering a work’s social truth from its imma-
nent aesthetic constitution consequently compels him to identify music’s
essential relation to society with the distance corresponding to a work’s
autonomous standpoint. This distance from empirical reality is the
measure of a work’s social truth. To the extent that a work’s aesthetic
autonomy is the condition of its critical social force, aesthetic criticism and
social critique coincide.13 In the end, the distance attributable to a work’s
aesthetic autonomy is indispensable to music’s and art’s critical social
force.
Accordingly, the contention that art “is the social antithesis of society”14
reactivates the principle of autonomy that is rooted in the fact of music’s
and art’s social emancipation. In capitalizing on the sense of distance from
the real vested in individual works by virtue of their aesthetic autonomy,
Adorno’s aesthetic theory operates at the limit of a critique that militates
8
against art’s reduction to sociological or formalist terms. Ascribing a

critical value to a work’s aesthetic autonomy secures the distance from
reality that Adorno maintains is art’s first social characteristic.15 At the
same time, the principle on which this distance is based is complicit with
the aesthetic dissimulation of the material conditions from which music
ostensibly takes its leave. How, one might ask, could music’s or art’s
critical force spring from a mode of autonomy in which their ideological
function is also rooted? Adorno’s insistence that the distance necessary
for music’s and art’s critical vehemence was won through their social
emancipation only deepens the paradox in question. Adorno astutely
avoids the pretense of dismantling music’s transcendence of reality by
collapsing the distance between a musical work’s immanent constitution
and real social conditions. At the same time, it is not certain that, by
revaluing the distance instituted by music’s social emancipation, he escapes
circling within the paradox that his aesthetic theory apparently embraces.
Adorno’s recourse to music’s and art’s aesthetic autonomy highlights
this decisive paradox. In an effort to rescue art’s social truth from the
aesthetic’s dissimulating effects, he transvalues the sphere of freedom that,
from the standpoint of the bourgeois religion of art, distinguishes the
aesthetic realm from pedestrian realities. As the condition of its truth,
music’s aesthetic autonomy preserves the nonidentical relation with
empirical reality correlative with the distance Adorno regarded as essential
to all authentic art. Hence the negative dialectical requirement he
imposed—that art is nonidentical with the material conditions in which its
production is rooted—binds art’s truth to a schema according to which art
attains its autonomous standpoint.
Someone could object that Adorno remained too close to the Germanic
tradition in laying such stress on a principle that is also responsible for
treating music and art as a symbol of social and cultural prestige. Someone
else could object that the principle he espouses has no relevance for non-
Western musical traditions. (John Blacking’s appeal to the artistic in his
discussion of Venda music is a compelling counterexample.16) In my view,
the pertinence of these objections is no reason to overlook the real
dilemma. One of Adorno’s great strengths was his rigorous insistence that
some measure of autonomy was essential for a distancing relation in virtue
of which a work was more than a mere extension of social reality by other
means. Adorno’s critical stance is decidedly different from those in which
music reproduces dominant patriarchal systems of belief, for example.
Consequently, his effort to redeem the illusory nature of art’s and music’s
aesthetic constitution is still compelling. At the same time, in wrestling
with the paradox of art’s truth, he forces the aporetic impulse of his critical
hermeneutics into the open.
One instance in which this aporetic impulse is most visibly evident
concerns art’s utopian function. For Adorno, the constitutive difference
9
between a work and empirical reality prohibited art from offering any
positive prescription for change. In other words, art’s antithetical relation
to the empirical order of social existence preserved the required critical
stance at the price of a performative contradiction.17 This contradiction
inheres in Adorno’s theory concerning the relation between art’s
semblance character and its social truth. For Adorno, art’s nonartifactual
truth, which is not empirically deducible from reality, only shines forth in
the artifice of the work. The appearance of this nonartifactual truth is
accordingly a function of art’s constitutive difference from the existing
order that authentic art seemingly transcends. The innermost paradox—
that a truth, which cannot be made, appears in the work as the semblance
of truth—makes the aesthetic a hibernatory refuge. In turn, the aesthetic
refuge of truth in the work’s aesthetic semblance arrests the utopian
impulse that is music’s and art’s raison d’être. Ultimately, the constellation
of semblance and truth in art forestalls this impulse. Dialectically related
to social reality as its other, autonomous works of art inscribe their
enigmatic promise of an end to real antagonisms within their semblance
character. As the semblance of the true, truth in art accordingly takes
shape through the work’s determinate negation of calcified social
antagonisms. Since “what is true in art is something nonexistent,”18 the
semblance of the true testifies only to a condition of freedom that in reality
does not exist. Accordingly for art, “utopia—the yet-to-exist—is draped
in black.”19 Confined to “the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of
world history,” utopia is the refuge for a “freedom, which under the spell
of necessity did not—and may not ever—come to pass.”20 By recalling this
condition without betraying it to empirical conditions, the remembrance—
the anamnesis—of freedom binds art’s semblance of truth to the aporia of
authentic works that contest reality without being capable of prefiguring
alternatives to it.
The aporia brought to light by Adorno’s attempt to redeem music’s and
art’s semblance character reveals the limitations of investing in a principle
of autonomy rooted in a history that divorces music and art from the
knowledge of reality. As a mode of resistance that offers scarcely any hope
of transforming reality, music’s and art’s utopian vehemence hardly breaks
free of the rationally administered world’s instrumental purposiveness.
Despite his conviction that the productive forces in society take precedence
over the circumstances in which they function, Adorno’s confidence in
music’s and art’s enigmatic power to resist the carceral forces of dystopic
rationalization cannot rescue autonomous music and art from the paradox
of authentic art’s social emancipation. Locating the “mediation of music
and society . . . in the substructure of the labor process underlying both
realms”21 only exacerbates the contradiction of attributing music’s
constitutive nonidentity with society to social forces of production.
Ultimately, the mediation of art’s logic of progress by the social law
10
immanent in society’s productive forces confounds Adorno’s relentlessly

negative dialectical critique. The primacy of contradictions, which
preserves the “consistent sense of nonidentity22 in identity” as the
guarantor of truth, sustains this critique only by placing utopia at an
infinite distance. Adorno’s conviction that utopia consists “essentially in
the determined negation . . . of that which merely is”23 limits musical
works and works of art to opposing reality without refiguring it in any
way. In the end, Adorno’s hermeneutics of suspicion holds the work
hostage to the schema of music’s and art’s social emancipation. By
capitalizing on the distance separating works from the real as the sign of
their nonidentical truth, Adorno’s hermeneutics of art prolongs the ironic
circularity of a strategy indebted to the principle it hopes to redeem.24
Hermeneutics and Criticism

The question of music’s distance from the world to which it is also related
is fundamental to my larger investigation of the hermeneutics of music. In
the current intellectual climate, the notion that music enjoys even a relative
autonomy is usually suspect. Adorno’s effort to redeem music’s and art’s
semblance of truth underscores the difficulty, if not impossibility, of
vesting a work’s productive significance in the bourgeois institution of a
sphere of aesthetic freedom. At the same time, it is difficult to see how a
work could constitute a mode of resistance apart from its aesthetic
prefiguration of an alternative to calcified structures and systems of belief.
The performative contradiction that ensnares a strategy of relentless ad
hoc negation attests that deriving the condition of music’s, literature’s, or
art’s critical vehemence from the fact of their social emancipation offers
no way out. At the same time, the distance Adorno credits to music and
art as their first social characteristic is indispensable to the refractory
relation with social reality that he attempts to capture theoretically with
his twofold concept of art. The resurgence of interpretive strategies aimed
at demystifying musical representations of gender, sexuality, and identity
politics bypasses the more intractable problems that Adorno rigorously
confronts. Denouncing the concept of music’s aesthetic autonomy as
socially, politically, and morally fraudulent too quickly dismisses the
enigma of music’s power to contest the real. Similarly, locating music’s
meaning in a communicative economy of circulating signs skirts the
challenges that are posed. Turning to musical hermeneutics without
addressing the contradiction on which Adorno’s critical efforts founder
only forestalls the inevitable problem of accounting for the expressive
vehemence that motivates criticism in the first place. Adorno’s aesthetic
theory should therefore serve as a caution to deconstructive ripostes to the
aesthetic’s mystification, and to critical efforts aimed at recovering art’s
and music’s creative value through valorizing aesthetics.
11
The question of distance is decisive. The objection could certainly be

raised that any attribution of the distance essential to a work’s aesthetic
efficacy is a function of a constellation of practices and discourses in which
music’s aesthetic autonomy already figures. This objection, however, too
quickly accedes to the legacy of a history that seems now to leave no
productive alternative to the aesthetic’s valorization. More crucially still,
the investment in deconstructing the myth of music’s transcendental
aesthetic purity runs up against the fact that the belief in music’s sacrosanct
autonomy delimits the field in which criticism has a political stake. To the
extent that demystifications of music’s illusory autonomy conform to the
effects of the history to which the figure of music’s absolute autonomy also
belongs, the problems and difficulties ensuing both from the side of
polemical defenses of music’s aesthetic autonomy and from the side of
deconstructive ripostes cannot be resolved, or even adequately addressed,
at the level at which they are posed. Accordingly, the question concerning
the distance through which a work exerts its effect on the world provides
a privileged point of access to a sustained critique of the schema operating
in back of critical practices and strategies that take aim at music’s
abstraction from real circumstances and conditions.
This question sets out the horizon of the hermeneutical response to
which this book is devoted. Ultimately, the question of this distance leads
by degree to the more fundamental issue concerning music’s mimetic
relation to reality. In Chapter 7, I will argue that the distance music takes
from reality is only the negative condition for the mimetic redescription of
our inherence in the world. My hermeneutical critique therefore differs
from interpretive practices that appeal to musical hermeneutics to justify
ascribing a meaning to a work. Accordingly, my recourse to the philo-
sophical tradition for which the “art of interpretation” figures promi-
nently is in part a response to the shortcoming of musical hermeneutics.
Understanding what it means for us that we interpret acts, texts, cultural
works, and historical events runs deeper than any specific interest in
scriptural hermeneutics, jurisprudence, and philology, for example.
Interpreting texts and works culminates in the act of appropriating the
meaning they unfold. Accordingly, the properly hermeneutical question:
“What does a work say to me and how do I respond?” opens a field of
inquiry in which the philosophical engagement with questions concerning
music’s communicability and ontological vehemence takes precedence. In
this respect, the hermeneutical reflections that follow are equally
reflections on the conditions and limits of music criticism. Paul Ricoeur
reminds us that, by beginning with the experience of art, hermeneutic
philosophy “accentuates . . . the more ontological aspects of the
experience of play.”25 This experience of art evinces the “function of
exhibition or presentation (Darstellung)”26 in the expression of a work’s
meaning. Ricoeur cautions that in refusing to confront the problem raised
12
by a work’s intersection with the world, we paradoxically ratify the

positivist prejudice we struggle against. By regarding the question of
music’s, literature’s, and art’s impact on life as irrelevant, we confirm that
“the real is the given, such as it can be empirically observed and
scientifically described.”27 By withdrawing from the “objectifications and
explanations of historical science and sociology to the artistic, historical
and lingual experience which precedes and supports these objectifications
and explanations,”28 a hermeneutics of music too, addresses itself to the
communicability of the experience whose reservoirs of meaning make a
critical, explanatory attitude possible. Like Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin
Heidegger, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ricoeur stands
in a tradition in which the problem of interpretation led from an episte-
mological concern with methods of interpretation to a more properly
ontological consideration of the conditions of possibility for under-
standing ourselves and the world.
Within this tradition, the turn to language as the universal medium for
that being that exists only in the mode of understanding is especially
compelling.29 The challenges posed by music’s supposedly non-
representational character find a fitting rejoinder in a philosophical
hermeneutics of a work’s power to speak. Using musical hermeneutics as
an interpretive mechanism has contributed to contemporary criticism’s
occultation of the broader hermeneutical concern with music’s
communicability, its power of expression, and the role judgment plays in
aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the question of music’s relation to
reality opens the door to a hermeneutics of the experience of the work.
Any inquiry into music’s power to affect our understanding of ourselves
and the world in creative ways is therefore also an investigation into
criticism’s philosophical, historical, and methodological presuppositions.
Just as the post-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeter-
minate and inexhaustible prohibits replacing the work with critical
commentaries on it, criticism cannot be held to the struggle against
romantic and formalist conceits. Mario Valdés reminds us that criticism’s
collective and determining role belongs to a shared community of
commentary whose history and thought is a record of the changing
interpretations and understandings of the meanings of literary texts.
Moreover, he stresses that an indifference to criticism’s philosophical
presuppositions makes “critics and historians alike oblivious to a
fundamental paradox posed by the stated aims of academic literary
criticism and the presumed value of the literary work.”30 For Valdés, the
quest for definitive interpretations conflicts with the “claim that the
reading of the works of literature constitutes a valuable part of our
aesthetic and intellectual heritage.”31 The epistemological ambitions of a
variety of modes of criticism depend upon the experience of reading,
performing, and listening to individual works. Accordingly, criticism is
13
also faced with the task of returning the work to its proper field of play.
Singular aesthetic experiences, and the claim to universality of a meaning
that is in principle communicable to everyone, traverse the cultural and
historical distances separating authors, composers, and their original
audiences from contemporary readers and listeners. Ultimately, the
contradiction that, according to Levine, haunts critics’ engagement with
works they deplore as ideologically pernicious also highlights the dilemma
of denouncing the aesthetic. A systematic blindness to the legacy of the
divorce between aesthetic judgments and a practical knowledge of reality
in this respect leads to a compulsion to repeat the effects of the history
inaugurated by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental justification of judgments
of taste, albeit in a form that inverts the bourgeois ideal of freedom
through an education to art. The disappearance of music, literature, and
art into the recesses of cultural, political, and social analysis bears witness
to the ironic reversal of the aesthetics’ containment by the ideological
phenomenon’s dissembling function. Relegated to a desert of their own
making, critical practices and strategies that follow this course seem
condemned to struggle endlessly against the effect of the history in which
they circle.
Every plea for a self-consciously critical engagement with individual
works seeks a different path. Consequently, the aporias, paradoxes, and
contradictions brought to light in an effort to overcome the constraints of
music’s aesthetic autonomy invite us to think more about the experience
communicated by a work. By the same token, this invitation to the
hermeneutics of music also calls for a renewed reflection on the effects of
consciously differentiating between the aesthetic object and the knowledge
of reality. My critique of these effects, which I undertake in the next
chapter, leads back to the question I raised in connection with the
perplexing situation in which a work’s distance from reality appears to be
the condition of its truth.
At the same time, the shift in focus won through a critique of these
effects opens an avenue for attributing music’s ontological vehemence to
its power of expression. The difference between the critical social value
Adorno identifies with music’s distance from reality, and the productive
significance we will subsequently attribute to music’s mimetic character,
lies completely within the renewal of the question of music’s meaning
achieved through this shift in focus. In contrast to the attitude that Levine
critiques, it is the experience occasioned by a work that justifies the critic’s
continuing preoccupation with it. Insisting that a work does more than
reflect the conditions and circumstances of its production calls for
thematizing the vehemence of an experience that shatters reality through
redescribing the world anew. Music’s power to augment dimensions of
our experiences therefore justifies my strategy of placing my hermeneutical
critique of criticism under the title “Hermeneutics and Music Criticism.”
14
Our encounters with individual works are the point of access both for
interpretive critiques and for a hermeneutical reflection on the movement
of understanding set in motion by the worlding power of the work. In the
chapters that follow, the worlding power of the work is the touchstone for
criticism’s understanding of its task. Beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion
that militates against the specter of music’s insulation from the struggles
for social recognition and power, the capacity for renewing reality in
accordance with a work’s expression of its world calls criticism to unfold
a work’s meaning along different and diverging axes. And yet, the
inexhaustibility of a work’s power to speak remains the wellspring of the
surplus of meaning that makes competing and conflicting interpretations
possible. Only the prejudice that binds absolute music’s demystification to
the schema of music’s aesthetic autonomy blocks the way to a hermeneu-
tics of music criticism. For this hermeneutics, the experience communi-
cated by the work is both the condition and limit of music criticism.
15
2
SOCIAL WERKTREUE AND
T H E S U B J E C T I V I Z AT I O N
OF AESTHETICS
In protecting music against the intrusion of social and political critiques,

the idea that the musical work is an opus absolutum et perfectum sets the
stage for abandoning the concept of music’s aesthetic autonomy. Through
reversing music’s divorce from its surrounding social contexts, new
critical practices dislodged the principle on which music’s—and especially
Western art music’s—canonic value was based. In the face of mounting
suspicions in feminist criticism, post-structuralist thinking, and cultural
studies, the idea that music is aesthetically self-sufficient gave way to
interpretations of the political agendas behind seemingly purely musical
processes. The artifice of tonal music’s self-actualizing perfection parti-
cularly came under attack. The conviction that all great works adhered to
the ideal of organic development that Heinrich Schenker placed at the
center of his method of analysis elicited the kind of riposte that Joseph
Kerman provided in his critique of the ideological role played by theory
and analysis. Where Schenker took a lead in justifying tonal music’s high
art status by forging a link between aesthetic perfection and a popularized
Hegelian view of history, Kerman anticipated the ruin of the ideology of
organicism.32 The unifying principle of tonal closure accordingly assumed
the force of a rational construct that was comparable to that of reason
within the Hegelian system of thought. Within this system of thought,
reason manifested itself as rationally necessary to the movement through
which Spirit became conscious of itself as absolute. Consequently, the idea
that tonal music especially harbored a principle of reason that supported
absolutist political agendas breached nineteenth-century ramparts. The
metaphysics of absolute music offered a more readily accessible target than
did the hubris of the part of the subject in mastering history conceptually.
Hence, through upending the traditional cultural defenses of high art
music, critiques of music’s, and most notably absolute music’s, aesthetic
stature unmask social and political values that are concealed within
music’s formal characteristics and processes.
16
THE SUBJECTIVIZATION OF AESTHETICS
The question that arises is whether laying waste to the idea of music’s
self-perfecting form escapes the difficulties surrounding music’s critical
vehemence. In the previous chapter, I attributed these difficulties to the
challenges of recovering the aesthetic’s productive significance. The
aesthetic’s productive significance, I suggested, has its source in the
heuristic value of individual works. In breaking through congealed
representations, the worlding power of works prefigure imaginative
alternatives by exploring different dimensions of the affective field of our
experience. Adorno’s attempt to save the paradox of art’s semblance of
truth was in this respect a critical watershed for the concept of music’s
aesthetic autonomy. On the one hand, the constitutive difference between
art and reality was essential to art’s social truth. Conversely, attributing
the distance separating them to the bourgeois emancipation of music and
art led to a performative contradiction. By sheltering art’s and music’s
critical social truth, the aesthetic becomes the refuge of last resort for a
strategy that loses itself in its totalizing critique. That a critique that
proclaims the “whole is the false”33 consumes itself in its relentless pursuit
of ad hoc negations is symptomatic of a more intractable dilemma. The
question of music’s power to refigure reality by transcending reality from
within is emblematic of the more systematic problem of the practical
mediations effected by individual works. The question now is whether, in
disclaiming Adorno’s attempt to preserve the sense of distance he regarded
as critical to a work’s emancipatory value, strategies that denounce the
concept of music’s aesthetic autonomy beat a retreat from this decisive
problem.
My strategy in this chapter has but a single objective. In examining a
narratalogical approach to criticism, I want to ask: to what degree does
dislodging the concept of music’s aesthetic autonomy from its privileged
position hold criticism hostage to the schema Kant inaugurated when he
laid the cornerstone for modern aesthetics? No one doubts the validity of
dismantling the conceptual mainstay of music’s metaphysical elevation.
At the same time, dissolving the distance from reality instituted by the
claim of autonomy is in danger of reproducing the principle of interpretive
fidelity associated with the work’s aesthetic perfection. Starkly put, the
question is whether, in going beyond Adorno’s critical hermeneutics, the
impulse to identify tonal procedures with a patriarchal political agenda
suffers from a kind of loss of memory that affects the destruction of the
idea of absolute music. Put differently, I wonder to what extent the history
of music’s divorce from reality continues to affect critical practices that
react by denouncing music’s aesthetic autonomy without adequately
accounting for the possibility of a creative distance that would be the
condition for refiguring reality from within. In devoting this chapter to
this question, I intend to lay the ground for a hermeneutical response. To
that end, the critique of the effects of Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics
17
in the last section of this chapter justifies my concern, regarding trans-

posing the Werktreue ideal onto the social plane, by opening a door for a
hermeneutical understanding of music’s productive, mimetic character.
Narrative Deconstruction
At first glance, drawing a narrative meaning from sequences of musical
events resists the temptation to limit criticism to commenting on purely
aesthetic matters. By bridging between formal characteristics and their
extra-musical significance, narrative criticism refutes the ideal of music’s
aesthetic self-sufficiency. In contrast to the perceived representational
deficiencies of instrumental music, and in opposition to the romantic
revaluation of music’s once inferior aesthetic status, narrativizing inter-
pretations identify music’s (extra-)referential meaning with a definite
content. Narrative descriptions of a work’s internal progressions and
development provide a familiar point of contact with traditional musical
hermeneutics. In fact, it is by no means certain that narrative descriptions
differ in principle from the kind of programmatic ideals on which Herman
Kretzschmar based his aesthetics of themes. In Chapter 4, I will examine
more closely the impulse animating Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics.
At that point, the affinity of musical hermeneutics with Wagner’s and
Liszt’s agendas will clarify how the impulse for attributing definite
meanings recoils against Hanslick’s aesthetics. The more recent recourse
to narrativizing strategies goes beyond Kretzschmar’s interest in supple-
menting formal analysis with interpretations of the affective content of
motives and themes. At the same time, criticism that refuses the idea of
music’s self-perfected autonomy shares Kretzschmar’s concern regarding
music’s seeming inability to express or represent thoughts, ideas, and
feelings in a definite, concrete way. Accordingly, in completing formal
analyses of internal processes, interpretive explanations fill in the surplus
value of a work’s self-referential character through identifying or ascribing
referential meanings that lie beyond the work.
By drawing a narrative configuration from music’s episodic dimension,
narrative ascriptions relate sequences of musical events to the development
of a plot. Anthony Newcomb justifies a narratological approach to
criticism on the grounds that, for much of the Classical and Romantic
repertoire, the coherence and even intelligibility of individual works
depends upon the type of paradigmatic plots literary theorists abstract
from a body of works. For him, the analogy between “paradigmatic or
conventional narrative successions in literature and history . . . and formal
types [of progressions] in music”34 provides the basis for understanding
music’s intended referents. Accordingly, the parallels between “standard
series of functional events”35 drawn from a body of narratives and
conventional successions governing the structure of absolute music
18
justifies an interpretive method in which a succession of musical events is

understood as a “story” told against the backdrop of codified paradigms.
Anchoring narrative interpretation in conventions that govern narrative
progressions underscores the paradigmatic function of the “musical”
plot. Hence in Newcomb’s view, a series of events becomes a story “to
the extent that we interpret its events according to sets of relatively
conventional paradigms.”36 To the degree that one “see[s] musical events
as tracing, or implying at any given moment, a paradigmatic plot,”37 the
structure of the music emulates the narrative conventions that are key to
its interpretation. Newcomb accordingly appeals to Ricoeur’s poetics of
narrativity to strengthen his claim that the analogy between music and
narrative supports the argument for narrative criticism.
Newcomb’s identification of the “followability” of a story with
the paradigmatic function of the plot is at the same time in danger of
obscuring, if not reversing, the passage from the paradigmatic tableau to
the syntagmatic order, which Ricoeur attributes to the narrative
configuration. Drawing a configuration from a succession of events effects
the mediation that Ricoeur identifies with the activity of emplotment
within a narrative tradition.38 Correlatively, the configurational dimen-
sion, which is dialectically opposed to the episodic one, gives a figure to
the “thought” or “idea” (dianoia) that a work expresses as a temporal
whole. (This figure is an effect of the configurating operation that trans-
forms a succession of events into a temporal whole.) There is no doubt
that music’s configurational dimension is critical to its communicability,
as I will argue in Chapter 7. However, it is questionable whether music has
the same resources available to it as does the narrative art. In particular,
the semantics of action (in which terms such as actors, helpers, motives,
etc., operate together) seems to distinguish the narrative art’s anchorages
in the practical field of our experiences from music’s relation to experi-
ences in which our being-affected predominates. The appeal of narrative
interpretations relies to a large degree on the recourse to a semantics
according to which the drama of musical events could be attributed to the
actions and motives of characters in a story. In this respect, interpretive
strategies fill the referential void created by formalist abstractions through
identifying the “thought” (dianoia) that a work expresses as a temporal
whole with a narrative content.
Susan McClary’s reading of the social and political significance of
stylistic conventions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instrumental
music relies upon a comparable narrativizing operation. In her view, the
interlocking schemata of tonality and the traditional sonata form
constitute the ideological framework of a master narrative that enacts a
patriarchal, and even misogynistic, agenda. Absolute music, she maintains,
only appears “to make itself up without reference to the outside world
. . . [because] it adheres so thoroughly to the most common plot outline
19
and the most fundamental ideological tensions available within Western

culture.”39 Tonality accordingly “operates according to a standard
sequence of dynamic events, giving the music it organizes a distinctly
narrative cast.”40 Sonata form throws standardized tonal procedures into
relief. The tonic serves as a tonal anchor and harmonic goal in contrast to,
and in opposition with the dominant, which therefore functions as a large-
scale dissonance. By establishing a secondary harmonic area or plane in
opposition to that of the tonic, a modulation to the dominant creates the
tension that sets tonal processes and sonata form procedures to work. The
exposition typically consists of two themes or theme groups each of which
is presented in its own key area (tonic—dominant, for example). The
section that follows—the development—is often characterized by the
development of thematic material introduced in the exposition, as well as
by its relative harmonic instability. The third section—the recapitulation—
confirms and justifies the movement through which the initial antithesis
is overcome. In a manner strikingly reminiscent of the Hegelian dialectic,
the initial contradiction between the two themes and their respective
key areas is sublated when, during the recapitulation, both the first and
second themes are reprised in the tonic key. In this way, the sense of tonal
closure achieved through the return of the two themes in the tonic key
justifies the self-realization of the sonata form movement as a whole.
In order to demonstrate how gender, desire, and sexuality, for example,
are constructed musically, McClary identifies formal, syntactical con-
ventions with the representation of a master narrative’s paradigmatic
features. By conceiving cultural studies as an “ethnology of ourselves,”41
she directs the anthropological study of others’ cultural realities toward
the ways in which music, and especially absolute music, influences and
informs listeners’ constructions of their identities. Consequently, she
combats the penchant to idealize Western art music by treating music as a
cultural artifact that documents political agendas and their sites of
contestation. Accordingly in her reading, the recapitulation of the second
theme in the tonic key confirms the hegemony of the first theme and its
tonic key area. In identifying the first theme of the sonata form with the
paradigmatic position of the masculine protagonist and the second theme
with that of the feminine Other, McClary draws upon a semiotics of
gender to deconstruct the principle of tonal closure. Tonal closure, she
therefore concludes, is achieved at the expense of the feminine Other. The
demand for tonal closure therefore requires that tonality’s rational frame
contains “whatever is semiotically or structurally marked as ‘feminine’.”42
Depicting the implied protagonist’s assertion of his identity as a natural
imperative accordingly conceals the absolutist political narrative that
it enacts. The double gesture that confines differences by means of
the subjugating strategy of absolute music’s master narrative puts the
Other on display. Hence by marginalizing the Other, tonality’s discursive
20
force frames the contagion of the Other as an object of surveillance and

fascination.
McClary’s reading of the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto
(K.453) is, in this respect, a particularly compelling example of how her
narrative deconstructions work. By drawing a connection between
eighteenth-century musical procedures and the “premise that harmony
between social order and individual freedom is possible,”43 she extends a
critique rooted in a semiotics of gender to the Enlightenment’s social and
philosophical terrain. For her, the second movement of this concerto
documents the “unsolvable dilemmas and paradoxes within an ideology
that champions both social harmony and individual freedom.”44 As an
exemplar of the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with rational order, this
movement, McClary tells us, also details the authoritarian force of social
conventions that discipline the recalcitrant impulses threatening them.
Under the critical eye of the cultural historian, traces of the social violence
exerted by the reigning ideals of the time dissolve the metaphysical illusion
of this movement’s purely musical order. The sudden transition from C
minor to C major, effecting the return to the tonic recapitulation of the
movement’s opening motto, cuts through the Gordian knot of an
idiosyncratic modulation. McClary therefore attributes the recapitulation’s
abrupt, under-motivated appearance to the “sudden, irrational conver-
sion” of the soloist who, seeing the light, takes the “leap of faith necessary
to return from its C minor depression to C-major serenity.”45 In forcing the
remote key (C minor) back to the tonic (C major), this modulatory passage
delineates, as it were, the submission of the Enlightenment aspiration—
emancipation through reason—to the heterodoxy of religious belief.
Consequently, McClary concludes that invoking a transcendental
principle—“even, perhaps, the new secular-based metaphysics of the time
which prominently included art”46—in order to satisfy tonal, sonata form
procedures (representing secular, bourgeois principles of rational progress)
submits individual and social norms to a higher order. Identifying this
principle with a religious or secularized faith authorizes a reading in which
the force of the “prayer” motto’s return (mm. 90–94) (Example 2.1)
overrides the autonomous logic of normative tonal progressions.
McClary’s objective in exposing the coercive dimension of the soloist’s
conversion encounters its own limit in a reading that opposes all figures of
transcendence to the radical autonomy of the bourgeois subject’s self-
actualization. By identifying the sudden sublimation of the melancholic
mood that she attributes to the passage in C minor with Enlightenment
reason’s subversion, McClary’s reading confirms the force of the dialectical
reversal that Adorno and Horkheimer identified with reason’s transfor-
mation into the instrument of domination.47 Accordingly, her deconstruc-
tion of the bourgeois utopia represented—better enacted—by the second
movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto operates on the same register.
21
The claim that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instrumental music

operates in terms of conventions and codes more explicitly articulated in
vocal and program music effectively grounds the content uncovered by
this and similar narrative readings in these conventions’ and codes’ social
references. McClary in fact maintains that, as “in the case with any
semiotic discourse, meaning in music is produced in part through the use
of codes (specific repertoires of gestures, rhetorical devices, associations,
and so on) shared by both composers and presumably listeners.”48 The
ideological character of these codes, which McClary tells us are the
basis for a common knowledge shared by listeners and composers, is
accordingly attributable to the way they affirm and reinforce social bonds.
A second-order discourse concerning the nature of musical codes and signs
has the advantage of unmasking ideologically congealed representations
that operate behind the appearance of a purely musical order. At the same
time, we might wonder how, by operating within these codes and con-
ventions, individual works are capable of configuring a meaning for which
there is no prior referent in reality. The semiotics of gender (from which
Example 2.1 Mozart, 2nd Movement, Piano Concerto K. 453, mm. 81–94
22
Example 2.1 Continued
the designations masculine and feminine derive their critical, rhetorical

force) provides a model for a plethora of culturally sanctioned oppositions
between metaphysical transcendence, rationality, and control, and the
corporeal body, feminine hysteria, and subversive desire. From this
vantage point, the drama played out between the soloist, whose musical
conduct violates encoded social norms, and the orchestra, whose collective
order resists the menace of alterity posed by the soloist’s individualist
23
impulses, contains a coded message. Janet Wolff reminds us that “a

cultural form with narrative content can be more easily related to political
ideas than one . . . like music.”49 Confronted with the fact that “a
symphony, a quartet or any music without lyrics is hard to assimilate to
ideology of any sort,”50 a narrativizing interpretation seems to be crucial.
Despite McClary’s assurance that her interest in socially constructed
representations extends beyond the scope of musical hermeneutics, the
strategy she deploys is reminiscent of the use of narrativizing inter-
pretations for identifying a work’s meaning in terms of an extra-referential
content.
A final question remains. In the interest of deconstructing the rarified
aesthetic experience of the pure, musical work, decoding the significance
of a tonal composition’s formal, syntactical processes equates the
secondary key’s function as a large-scale dissonance with the difference
between the (male) protagonist and that which McClary insists is
semiotically marked as the “feminine” other. The “narrative construction
of identity and the threat of alterity”51 she sees enacted in sonata form
procedures, for example, reinforces the opposition between identity and
difference that is the mainstay of her critique. It is by no means certain,
however, that dissonance and difference are the same, or that they operate
on the same planes. In fact, the force of the difference McClary argues is
at the root of a cultural preoccupation with order and control depends
upon dissonance’s negative quality. This quality, however, in the first
instance springs from the dissonance’s power to negate that to which it is
antithetically—that is dialectically—opposed. Dissonance is accordingly a
temporal phenomenon, as is the movement through which discord is
overcome or resolved. Equating dissonance with difference introduces the
slippage by which the pairing of identity with difference eclipses the
properly configurational dimension of narrative identity. As the correlate
of difference, identity connotes the preservation of the same through
time. Conversely, narrative identity is an effect of the configurational
operation that draws together a succession of events as a temporal whole.
By distinguishing between identity as sameness, to which difference is
opposed, and ipseity, which Ricoeur maintains is constitutive of selfhood
in its self-constancy, Ricoeur argues that narrative identity mediates
between idem identity and ipse identity. In contrast, placing the threat to
identity posed by the dissonant “other” under the rubric of the other’s
assimilation, for the sake of preserving the self-same identity of the
male protagonist’s desire for order, unmasks absolute music’s complicity
with ruling cultural prescriptions and ideas at the expense of a sustained
reflection on the operative relation between music’s temporal con-
figuration and its power to speak.
24
Social Werktreue
The notion that the principle of music’s aesthetic autonomy masks music’s
actual complicity with the dominant social order effectively collapses
the distance between music and reality that Adorno struggled to redeem.
Carl Dahlhaus, whose defense of an aesthetics of “pure” music has elicited
a number of criticisms, argues that with the exception of those few
individuals who adhere to a rigorous aesthetic Platonism, no one would
deny the relative autonomy of an art form that also performs social and
socio-psychological functions. Accordingly, he maintains that while it is
possible to treat works as social documents, this sociological approach
eclipses the inherent “mode of existence”52 of the musical work of art.
Rather than permitting himself to be misled by the social origins of music’s
aesthetic autonomy, he regards the aesthetics of autonomy and its
correlate, musical analysis, to be of greater scholarly value. Nevertheless,
admitting that the “autonomy principle itself can be interpreted socio-
logically”53 paves the way to a seemingly intractable aporia. How, he asks,
might it be possible “to reconcile the autonomy aesthetic with a sense of
history, to do justice at one stroke to both the historical and the aesthetic
dimensions of musical works without sacrificing either coherence of
presentation or the strong concept of art”?54 Music history fails as history
when, treated as autonomous entities, individual works are isolated from
a larger historical matrix; music history fails as a history of works when
individual works are linked together according to the seemingly inevit-
able logic of some inexorable chain. The strong concept of art holds out
against reversing the fact of music’s aesthetic emancipation by means of
sociological analyses and critiques. All the same, so long as the concept
of art defended by Dahlhaus remains hostage to this fact, it is difficult to
see how the aporia Dahlhaus uncovers can be adequately addressed or
resolved.
To the extent that music’s conscious differentiation from the world of
practical experiences elicits a riposte aimed at identifying social values
embodied by formal features and processes, the justification for a strong
concept of art, and its denouncement, operate on the same plane. More
accurately, they both operate according to a schema in which music’s
abstraction from its sustaining life contexts justifies reversing the notion
that music’s internal order has a purely aesthetic significance. In contrast
to the way that a cultivated aesthetic consciousness takes flight in works
of art, a critical consciousness grounds itself in the work’s material
significance. Accordingly, the idea that the musical work is an opus
absolutum et perfectum is a barrier. Charges concerning the opportunistic
annexations of the intellectual terrain of literary theory, deconstruction,
and cultural studies do little to mitigate the temptation to replace music’s
sacrosanct aesthetic value with the notion that music is worldly through
25
and through.55 Music’s self-sufficiency has been fiercely contested, and the
resulting paradigmatic shift has contributed to the systemic occultation of
the underlying connection between the institution of music’s autonomy
and its criticism.56 Set against the backdrop of the aestheticizing stand-
point that makes art’s distance from reality absolute, socially conscious
criticism is in danger of maintaining its own interpretive standpoint at the
cost of inverting its corollary opposite.57
The idea that, as an opus absolutum et perfectum, a musical work is
perfectly self-contained paradoxically provides a justification for trans-
posing the related ideal of interpretive fidelity onto social terrain. By
turning to the history in which the concept of the work as a self-perfected
entity acquired its privileged status, Lydia Goehr’s analysis of the work-
concept relates this concept’s regulative function to nineteenth-century
interpretive practices. The work-concept’s institutional centrality, she
explains, operated in association with “concepts of composition, per-
formance, autonomy, repeatability, permanence, [and] perfect compli-
ance.”58 Through a system of related concepts of the score, perfect
compliance with the composer’s intentions (Werktreue), and “beliefs and
values about the status and nature”59 of music, the work-concept accord-
ingly dominated the set of social practices in which music was created,
publicly performed, and understood. The work-concept’s institutional
authority governed the principle of interpretive fidelity according to which
perfect compliance with the score was the hallmark of the Werktreue ideal:
slavish adherence to the composer’s original intentions. The requirement
that each performance conform to this ideal bound the principle of
interpretive fidelity to the romantic hermeneutical adage that genius in
creation called for genius in interpretation.60 The Werktreue ideal could
therefore scarcely be distinguished from that of aesthetic self-cultivation,
a life educated to art, and the consecration of an imaginary museum of
musical works.61 Through installing itself at the heart of the set of practices
regulated by the work-concept, the Werktreue principle accordingly
established itself as the determining criterion of the adequacy of a work’s
interpretation, and hence of the work’s truth.
In view of the Werktreue ideal’s filiations with the bourgeois institution
of music and its aesthetically transcendent stature, deconstructing the
concept of music’s autonomy, it would seem, should also dismantle the
Werktreue ideal’s governing concept. Instead, shifting the topos of music’s
or art’s imitative function onto the social plane reinscribes the criterion of
adequacy in the identification of a work’s social referents and contents.
Narrative deconstructions of representations of a purely musical order
raise the specter of a new doxa when, in contrast to the work-concept’s
regulative function, the Werktreue ideal takes hold in the once alien terrain
of socio-cultural analysis and critique. Where the work-concept author-
ized treating the score as the repository of the composer’s intentions, a
26
new principle of fidelity identified the site of music’s meaning with its
(con)textual reality. In place of an autonomous aesthetic entity, the critical
exigencies of uncovering social meanings encoded in formal processes and
features required a cultural object adequate to criticism’s demand for
truth. Textual readings accordingly complied with the expectation that
music’s formal procedures had a corollary counterpart in narrative
representations of ruling ideas that operated in the interest of dominant
social groups. The legitimacy of this expectation—better, suspicion—of
narrative’s strategic deployment to justify a ruling authority’s power
paradoxically contributes to the impulse to decipher absolute music’s real
meaning and value through narrative means.62 Placed in the service of
absolute music’s deconstruction, social Werktreue relocates the ideal of
interpretive fidelity within its own domain.
The Subjectivization of Aesthetics

The question that now arises is whether, in countering music’s chimerical
transcendence of the pedestrian world, socially incisive criticism, too,
falls under the spell of a history of thought extending from Immanuel
Kant’s radical subjectivization of aesthetics, through Friedrich Schiller’s
proclamation that “art is the practice of freedom,”63 to formalist ratifi-
cations of music’s absolute aesthetic autonomy. Both in this chapter and
in the preceding one, there have been several instances when the paradoxes
and aporias engendered through the effort to dismantle music’s venerated
autonomy have given rise to reservations concerning the conceptual
schema in which this effort was mounted. Adorno’s struggle to appro-
priate the distance instituted through music’s semblance of autonomy as
the condition of music’s truth emphatically highlighted the problem in
question. The performative contradiction engendered by attributing
music’s critical vehemence to the fact of its social emancipation accord-
ingly indicts the schema in which the contradiction operates. The apparent
retreat from the challenges raised by Adorno’s critical strategy confirms
this indictment. Whatever merit ideological critiques of narratives that
execrate already marginalized classes of individuals, communities, and
groups may have, narrative deconstructions of absolute music seem only
to reverse the effects of music’s aesthetic isolation, as though transposing
the principle of the imitation of nature onto the social plane was the
antidote. Social Werktreue is in this regard the lasting trace of a more
general failure to reckon with the framework in which the operative terms
of music’s aesthetic autonomy, social reality, and the condition of its
vehemence and truth figure. Hence rather than try to continue to work
within this framework, my suggestion is that we consider examining
this framework in terms of its history. Gadamer’s view of history as an
effective history that is at work (Wirkungsgeschichte) in understandings,
27
concepts, and ideas offers a hermeneutical guide. Accordingly, the wager

to be made is that a hermeneutical critique of the history of music’s
schematic divorce from reality will open a way for thinking about music’s
creatively productive vehemence in terms of its power to redescribe
affective dimensions of our experiences and hence of its power to refigure
our inherence in the world.
By discrediting theoretical knowledge that did not rely on the metho-
dology of the natural sciences, the transcendental function that Kant
ascribed to aesthetic judgment established the foundation for differentiat-
ing between art’s aesthetic constitution, and conceptual knowledge and
truth. Gadamer stresses that by reducing the “sensus communis to a
subjective principle,”64 Kant legitimated his critique of aesthetic judgments
by denying taste any importance as a mode of knowledge. Separated from
any moral or civic interest in the common good, aesthetic judgments void
themselves of any specific content. Gadamer explains that according
to Vico, “what gives the human will its direction is not the abstract
universality of reason but the concrete universality represented by the
community of a group, a people, a nation, or the whole human race.”65
When, in obviating the moral and political tradition behind the concept
of sensus communis, Kant discovered a subjective principle of aesthetic
pleasure, he contrasted the transcendental universality of pure aesthetic
judgments with taste’s specific contents. Although he retained a
connection between taste and sociability, Kant’s transcendental intention
excluded the specific contents of judgments that bear concretely on
the existence of particular historical communities. Consequently, the
transcendental principle Kant identified with pure judgments of taste laid
the philosophical cornerstone for art’s aesthetic isolation.
The concept of genius in Kant’s aesthetics provided the point of contact
that subsequently grounded the concept of the autonomous work of art as
the object of aesthetic experience. When Schiller transformed Kant’s
concept of taste into a moral demand,—“Live aesthetically!”66—“Schiller
took the radical subjectivization through which Kant had justified
transcendentally the judgment of taste and its claim to validity, and
changed it from a methodological presupposition to one of content.”67
Gadamer contends that by presenting this moral demand as an imperative,
Schiller invested Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics with an anthro-
pological significance. In proclaiming art to be the practice of freedom,
and aesthetic education to be the end of the play impulse, Schiller founded
art’s autonomous standpoint.68 Art’s “autonomous claim to supremacy”69
emanated from this standpoint; a standpoint that art now established for
itself in contrast to, and in competition with, practical reality. Schiller’s
reinterpretation of Kant consequently sealed the experience of art within
art’s own autonomous sphere. Accordingly, aesthetic consciousness and
its correlates, aesthetic education and the creation of a cultured society,
28
provided a bulwark against practical reality by giving flight to the freedom

of the human spirit in a purely aesthetic state. Gadamer emphasizes that
the idea of aesthetic cultivation we derive from Schiller “consists precisely
in precluding any criterion of content and in dissociating the work of
art from its world.”70 By sedimenting this distinction between art and
reality, the ideal of aesthetic cultivation—and the process of abstraction
on which aesthetic cultivation depended—alienated the subject from the
experience of the work of art that aesthetic consciousness now constructed
as its object.
The dissociation of musical works from the world therefore proved to
be the staging ground of the aesthetic’s dissembling function. Defined
essentially as art by art’s autonomous standpoint, the contrast between art
and reality effectively eclipsed the practical field. Accordingly, cultured
society reveled in art’s transfiguring sheen. An education to the art of
beautiful appearances led to an aesthetic state of freedom where, liberated
from the pedestrian world, the spirit was at home. Through a sovereign
exercise of aesthetic consciousness, the poetry of aesthetic reconciliation
consecrated “its own self-consciousness against the prose of alienated
reality.”71 The differentiation between art as appearance and reality,
Gadamer consequently maintains, had devastating consequences. Most
significantly, the cultivation of an aesthetic state of freedom completed
the disintegration of the process whereby one rises above one’s private
interests. The demand in the nineteenth century for a new mythology and
new symbols that would gather a public and create particular communities
by uniting cultured individuals charged art with achieving a measure of
redemption “for which an unsaved world hopes.”72 Elevating the artist’s
task consequently placed an impossible burden on art. To the extent that
“every artist finds his own community”73 in cultured society, aesthetic
culture only served to unite alienated individuals in the universal form of
the aesthetic. The process of cultivation (Bildung) responsible for taste’s
and the sensus communis’s moral and political import thus became the
handmaiden of aesthetic consciousness, as aesthetic culture turned art into
a weapon in the fight for social position and power.
By investing art’s symbolic quality with its own positivity, the
accompanying philosophy of art celebrated music’s and art’s aesthetic
autonomy as the greatest achievement of subjectivity. Influenced by
Goethe, the metaphysical idea—that the symbol emerges organically in the
unity of the work’s sensible appearance which expresses the life and mind
behind the work—became a universal aesthetic principle. As the “poetic
formation of experience (Erlebnis),”74 music and art were seen to embody
the essence of this experience in aesthetic form. (Social Werktreue might
with some justification be regarded as this universal aesthetic principle’s
ironic inversion.) The work of art, and the experience of it (Erlebniskunst),
therefore represented the highest standard of value. Gadamer reminds us
29
that in the nineteenth century, “the concept of genius rose to the status of
a universal concept of value and—together with the concept of the
creative—achieved a true apotheosis.”75 Moreover, by seizing upon Kant’s
statement that “Fine art is the art of genius,”76 German idealism erected a
philosophy of art based on this transcendental principle. Renouncing the
aesthetics of feeling could not rid Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetics of the
influence of this romantic sensibility. Even the return to Kant proved
incapable of dislodging the phenomenon of art and the concept of genius
from the center of aesthetics. Ultimately, aesthetic consciousness grounded
the bourgeois religion of art in the cultivation of the aesthetic life, which
demanded that the art work, and the experience of it, be dissociated from
all worldly contexts. The methodological abstraction that aesthetic
consciousness performed by disregarding the work’s rootedness in its
sustaining life context accordingly enabled the work to become visible as
a “pure” work of art. Once defined as appearance in contrast to reality,
music’s and art’s metaphysical elevation ratified their cultural supremacy
at the cost of their relation to the world.
The temptation to reverse course is so strong that it seems almost
impossible to resist reinserting works into contexts from which they have
been so violently torn. Aesthetic culture’s complicity with music’s
metaphysically heightened value seems to demand dismantling the
privileged stature accorded to music and the experience of it. Locating the
symbol-making activity of creative genius at the root of the experience of
art, which in turn forged the link with a bourgeois religion of art laid the
ground for denouncing the ideal of a pure musical work. Accordingly,
everything seems to rest on the work’s determination within the con-
ceptual framework that was instituted in accordance with the principle of
art’s autonomy. On the one hand, aesthetic distance—by virtue of which
the pure musical work appears as such—dissimulates the methodological
significance of consciously differentiating between the aesthetic object and
the knowledge of reality. On the other hand, deconstructing the difference
between music and reality without destructuring the methodological role
of aesthetic consciousness leads to the deepening occultation of the manner
in which we encounter, and hence experience, musical works. In
reminding us that every encounter with a work is unique, Gadamer
accentuates how reading “works of literature [only] in terms of their
biographical or historical sources”77 dissembles the character of the event
in which a work speaks. The enrichment we experience through the
broadening of our horizons corresponds to the movement of under-
standing effected by encounters with individual works. Gadamer therefore
maintains that a “work of art belongs so closely to what it is related to that
it enriches the being of that as if through a new event of being.”78 The
event—the advent—of meaning actualized in our encounters with a work
accordingly “belongs to the work’s own claim.”79 Hence in contrast to the
30
work’s documentary value, this claim manifests a living relation to tradi-

tions and histories whose meaning and significance we, too, can never fully
master.
When the experience of a work is relegated to the aesthetic’s contain-
ment through adhering to the distinction cultivated by a life educated to
art, criticism is drawn to the brink of an abyss. As a function of the
contrast between art and reality, a work’s transcendent aesthetic value
highlights the ideological nature of the work’s claim to aesthetic auto-
nomy. The distinction between the pure work of art and the world it leaves
behind is accordingly the source of the aesthetic’s ideological constriction.
By placing its mark on the aesthetic, narrowing a work’s value to the
sphere delimited by the ideals of aesthetic culture completes, as it were, the
schema of music’s dissociation from social reality. Identifying the role of
the aesthetic with the ideological phenomenon’s dissimulating function, it
seems, is the inevitable if not natural outcome of divorcing judgments of
taste from the knowledge of reality. Herein lies the dilemma: to unmask
aesthetic culture’s complicity with music’s metaphysical idolization
without simply inverting the terms of an already futile opposition. This
dilemma serves as a watchword to guard against a fascination with revers-
ing the schema inaugurated by Kant. In the following chapters, this
dilemma and the challenges it poses provide a guide to a hermeneutical
response that leads by degree from a critique of theories of music’s repre-
sentational value to a theory of music’s mimetic capacity for expressing
moods and feelings that have no prior referent in reality.
31
3
F R O M M U S I K Ē T O
M E TA P H Y S I C S
The attempt to dislodge music from the culturally privileged domain

accorded it through its social emancipation drives the converging
forces of both narrative deconstructions and social Werktreue toward a
critical precipice. In the aftermath of Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics
and the ensuing sense of autonomy that was won for music and art,
the impasse that sprang from attributing music’s creative vehemence
to the aesthetic’s conscious designation (as distinctly different from
practical activities) returned with a vengeance. Shifting the topos of
music’s imitative function onto the social plane repeats, as it were, music’s
metaphysical elevation by reversing music’s designated locus of meaning.
Aligning music’s mimetic function with the Werktreue principle’s social
transposition only reinscribes the distinction that justifies constricting
the aesthetic to a dissembling role. Consequently, the impossibility of
attributing music’s productive significance to conditions more receptive
to music’s complicity with hegemonic social and political agendas
reasserts itself just at the point where this transposition seems to leave
the difficulty in question behind.
In view of the impossibility uncovered, the question this conundrum
raises, namely, To what should we attribute music’s power to affect
reality? compels me to follow a route that traverses a series of reversals
that contribute to the occultation of music’s power to break a path into
the real. The paradox, that dismantling the illusion of music’s aesthetic
autonomy operates on the same terrain staked out by Kant’s epoch-
making justification of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic culture’s cele-
bration of a sphere of spiritual freedoms, calls for a different rejoinder.
Once ensnared by this paradox, even the effort to undo the effects of
music’s aesthetic isolation seems condemned to repeat the alienating force
of an aesthetic consciousness that privileges the idea of music’s absolute
autonomy at the expense of a genuine encounter with the work.
Consequently, the problem laid bare by the preceding analysis shows that
the reversals in question preserve a principle of the truth of a work whose
32
F R O M M U S I K Ē T O M E T A P H Y S I C S
legitimacy and validity are no longer assured by an ideal of interpretive

fidelity from which this principle is apparently derived.
To the extent that the difficulties encountered to this point indict the
imitative function assigned to music by the principle of social Werktreue,
some reconsideration of music’s mimetic character—a reconsideration
that ultimately will lead to renewing the question of the truth of a work—
is therefore crucial to the task at hand. The difficulties surrounding the
problem of music’s meaning, and hence its truth, necessitate postponing a
complete response. Nevertheless, the impasse uncovered by the above
analysis provides a first indication of the direction to be taken in reply to
the impossibility of extracting music’s power to redescribe reality from the
conditions contributing to its aesthetic isolation. Ultimately, the truth of
a work will prove to be inseparable from its power to refigure dimensions
of our experiences that have no prior referent in reality. The paradox—
that works transcend the real within the immanence of their own worlds—
provides the outline for a hermeneutical reinterpretation of the power of
thought and imagination at work in music’s mimetic representations.
Some consideration of the changing sensibilities concerning music’s
imitative character therefore offer a unique point of access for a her-
meneutics of music that intends to take up the question of music’s
imaginative significance within the context of a discourse on music’s
meaning and value.
Mimesis, Musikē, and the Discourse of Absolute Music

To a large extent, theories concerning music’s referential value have tended
to eclipse the more difficult challenges posed by the vis-à-vis of music’s
productive character and its mimetic truth. As we have seen, transplanting
the Werktreue ideal into ground familiar to cultural studies preserves a
notion of interpretive fidelity once more closely tied to the idea that, in
complying perfectly with the score, one put oneself in accord with the
composer’s original intentions. This idea, which is now widely discredited
as the intentionalist fallacy, not only eclipses the force of the experience
communicated by a work but it also sets in place the criterion governing
the relation between the ideal of interpretive fidelity and the work’s truth.
Extending the criterion of faithful adherence to the score to the socio-
political realm preserves the basic tenet that a true interpretation consists
in grasping and expressing the intended meaning behind the work. In this
respect, uncovering political agendas encoded, as it were, within a work’s
internal processes and features is not different in principal from divining
the composer’s intended meaning fixed—better, inscribed—in the score.
For both, the truth of the work and the meaning of the interpretation
coincide. Moreover, once displaced from the metaphysical realm of
music’s aesthetic purity to the social domain, correlations between
33
internal, intra-musical features and external, extra-musical references

assume a more positive character. Social Werktreue, it would therefore
seem, is in danger of conforming to a concept of truth whose legitimacy
and validity have been called into doubt. This concept, in which truth is
defined in terms of the adequation of an interior image with an exterior,
existing thing shores up a theory of imitation that is secretly complicit with
an ideal of truth that has rightly been denounced as a metaphysics of
presence. To be sure, the idea that music, and especially instrumental
music of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, transcends worldly
referents in its intimation of the infinite gives music a metaphysical dignity
that a transposed theory of music’s imitative function intends to dismantle.
Yet, to the degree that the means of identifying a work’s internal processes
with external referents governs the interpretation of the work’s meaning,
imitation and its corollary, representation, remain hostage to a meta-
physical conception of truth.
It is not surprising that music’s separation from language would be
the first, and arguably oldest, front in the struggle over music’s meaning.
More recently, the difference between music and language has been
identified as the source of the separation within musicology between
formalist practices and forms of criticism concerned with the construction
and representation in music of gender, sexuality, and modern and post-
modern subjectivities. Lawrence Kramer and Rose Rosengard Subotnik,
among others, have contested the disciplining function of the instituted
division between music and language. Kramer’s deconstruction of
the music–language divide, which I will examine more thoroughly in
Chapter 5, provides a formidable argument against the methodological
bulwark set up to protect the myth of absolute music against the intru-
sions of critical analyses and interpretations. In the discourse of absolute
music, the currency of the distinction between music and language is
attested by this distinction’s significance as the contested site of music’s
meaning. Where the doxa of absolute music’s sacrosanct value, enshrined
in the art-religion ideals of aesthetic cultivation, justifies absolute
music’s transcendent ineffability, strategically positioned critiques of the
poetic conceit of a “language beyond language” (feminist criticism, decon-
struction, and ideology critique, for example) join forces in contesting
the cultural authority conferred on autonomous music through its
emancipation from language. To the degree that the cultural authority of
absolute music capitalized on instrumental music’s emancipation from
language as the sign of music’s privileged cultural stature, deconstruct-
ing the disciplining function of music’s separation from language proved
to be an effective weapon in contesting the cultural legitimacy of the
Western canon of high-art works. At the same time, denouncing the
chimera of autonomy as a function of music’s metaphysical elevation
34
above language’s representational value drew criticism deeper into the

orbit of the discourse of absolute music’s defining moment.
In a sense, the conviction that language is the dominant force behind the
cultural production of meaning within Western communicative systems is
the driving force behind much of the current thinking about music’s
representational function and value. To the degree that the concep-
tualizing power of language has been regarded as a means of gaining a
subjective mastery over the world, the lack, in music, of obvious references
to existing things has placed music’s peculiar status at the center of the
discourse over music’s meaning and significance. Moreover, identifying
language (logos) with reason effectively placed music’s sense and meaning,
or at least an understanding of them, under the guidance of intelligible
thoughts and ideas. In contrast to language’s conceptualizing power,
music’s nonrepresentational character served as the site of a mode of
expression that Kant ranked lowest among the fine arts, the romantics
elevated to a metaphysical rank, and Kramer deconstructed as the
founding myth of modernist musicology. The place accorded musical
hermeneutics within the discourse of absolute music similarly attests to
the triadic arrangement of language, reason, and music. The supple-
mentary value of verbal descriptions of music’s meaning and significance
(which in Hermann Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics, for example,
provide a humanistic content to Eduard Hanslick’s scientific agenda)
completes this triadic chain. Kretzschmar’s indebtedness to Richard
Wagner extends to Wagner’s intent to anchor symphonic music in the
defining word. In this respect, Wagner’s use of the term “absolute music”
not only justified his own aesthetic-historical program but it also
circumscribed, as it were, the discourse concerning music’s opposition to
language. To be sure, Wagner’s appeal to an ideal founded on Greek
musikē served to promote the ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk. At the same
time, Wagner’s reference to absolute music codified the transformation
in the understanding of language redressed by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s
philosophical insights into the linguisticality of experience and the
language of art, which I will take up in Chapter 6. The concept of mimesis
with which I am concerned is intimately bound up with that of language.
Hence the brief review of the history of the discourse of absolute music
undertaken in the rest of this chapter serves to highlight the controversies
that not only established the terms of the ensuing conflict between
Hanslick’s aesthetics of form and Kretzschmar’s aesthetics of content, but
also set the stage for the confrontation between deconstructive agendas
and considerations of music’s communicability in the light of a con-
temporary hermeneutical understanding of the inescapable metaphoricity
of language.
The reversal of the long-standing prejudice that music without words is
the least intelligible of the arts signaled the advent of the poetic ideal with
35
which deconstruction and hermeneutics are equally at odds. As a

“language beyond language,” music’s ineffability was the emblematic sign
of absolute music’s metaphysical transcendence of the world. Mimetic
theories that attributed instrumental music’s significance to its imitative
function and theories that ascribed music’s meaning to its self-signifying
character were therefore caught up in the discourse through which musical
hermeneutics ultimately became opposed to romantic and formalist
sensibilities. The triumph of a romantic Pythagoreanism in the nineteenth
century consummated the reversal of a judgment that once privileged
mimetic theories over instrumental music’s lack of a definite content. The
transformation of artificial music’s representational deficiencies into the
symbol of absolute music’s sublime ineffability therefore bears witness to
a history in which music’s emancipation from language remained captive
to a theory of mimesis on which it paradoxically relied. The conviction
that “instrumental music purely and clearly expresses the true nature of
music by its very lack of concept, object, and purpose”80 marked a historic
break with the idea that instrumental music depended upon external
references for its intelligibility. Carl Dahlhaus consequently points out that
by setting music against language “as the expression of human reason,”81
the view of music against which the idea of absolute music ultimately
prevailed laid the cornerstone for mimetic theories.
In Greek antiquity, musikē constituted the original unity of music and
word. Accordingly, musikē’s imitation of the harmony of the spheres was
an activity that brought the essence of this harmony to appearance. This
mimetic activity, which originates with the Muses, placed the soul in
harmony with the universe.82 From this perspective, isolating the
constituent elements of harmony (harmonia) and rhythm (rhythmos) from
language (logos) stripped music of its reason. Divorcing music from
language constricted musikē into a mere shadow of its vital essence.83
Absolute music’s elevation above language transvalued this essence. By
investing music’s vital essence with the metaphysical dignity of the
sublime, this transvaluing reversal of instrumental music’s inferior status
outstripped the original unity of music and word by placing absolute
music’s intimation of the infinite beyond language and reason (logos).
Differentiating between music and language in this way profoundly
altered the understanding of the mimetic activity that, in antiquity,
brought the soul into harmony with itself. By affecting its listeners’
appetences in such a way as to alter their natural inclinations and
dispositions, musikē, according to Aristides Quintilianus, was the
“strongest force for paiedeia [education].”84 Once divided from the logos
by the reduction of the art of musikē to performance techniques (technē),
music seemingly lost its anchorages. Mimetic theories that arose in
response to instrumental music’s presumed representational deficiencies
intended to restore some measure of intelligibility. By bridging between
36
purely sonorous figurations and their significance as intelligible repre-

sentations of tonally inflected gestures of speech, mimetic theories that
identified sound figures with rhetorical ones prefigured musical her-
meneutics’ eventual recourse to language. It is as if, for both, the loss
incurred by the separation of music from language drove the demand for
decoding music’s sonorous sensuality.
The recourse to language, however, could not compensate for the
original wound inflicted on musikē. Rather, the history that pits mimetic
theories and musical hermeneutics against instrumental music’s self-giving
(auto-nomos) law testifies to the transformation that the understanding
of language underwent once language was stripped of its ontological
character. This change in the understanding of language is therefore as
crucial to the discourse of absolute music as is the opposition between
music and language. John Neubauer has suggested that with music’s
emancipation from language, “the struggle to legitimize instrumental
music became the first, decisive battle about nonrepresentational art.”85
This battle owes its virulence to representative thought’s concept of
language. To be sure, the Romantic revival of Pythagorean ideals con-
secrated absolute music’s break with the mimetic principals that ratified
instrumental music’s subservience to a concept of language accord-
ing to which language is the means by which the subject masters the
world. In this regard, the “mathematical metaphysics”86 that replaced
music’s dependence on language with the somnambulistic symbolism of
the sublime seemingly reignited the sense of speechless wonderment
(thaumazein) that for the Greeks was the beginning and end of the love
of wisdom.87 Yet the force of absolute music’s ineffability, which
originated with its self-giving law, transformed instrumental music’s
nonrepresentational character into the sign of its metaphysical trans-
cendence of the world. Once it became diametrically opposed to music’s
mimetic dependence upon speech, absolute music’s metaphysical trans-
cendence seemingly incarnated the Absolute in its unspeakable otherness.
Renaissance Magic
Greek thought concerning music’s imitation of the celestial harmony
took on an entirely different significance around the beginning of the
sixteenth century, when the more exalted status of occult thought
contributed to a reordering of fields of knowledge. Gary Tomlinson in his
Music in Renaissance Magic argues that, for this new type of occult
thought, magic “enclosed the whole of the world and all the kinds of
knowledge by which it might be known.”88 For the sixteenth-century
magus, occult knowledge held the secrets to the magical correspondences
linking the mundane world with the divine celestial order. In this occult
universe, the “magician’s power sprang from his duplication of the
37
complex forms of the supercelestial and (especially) celestial realms.”89

The occult power of the magus therefore depended upon his mastery of
magical practices that were themselves mimetic acts. Music had an
especially celestial influence. Accordingly, “song was the most compelling
of mimetic forces”90 in a world ruled by correspondences between astro-
logical and sublunar orders. Ramos de Pareia’s astrological correlations
gave music a vital place in a cosmos animated by the spirit of occult
thought; in passing effortlessly from “notes matched to planets to intervals
between planets, modes ruled by planets, [and] humors ruled by planets
on account of their modal associations,”91 the logic of Ramos’s occult
thought merges musica humana and musica instrumentalis with the
cosmic harmony of the spheres.
By seizing on the correlations and correspondences that bind form and
substance together, occult thought turned the power of imitation toward
magical ends. Accordingly, the “belief in the force of similitude”92
defines the magical episteme Tomlinson uncovers in his archeological
explorations. By excavating the episteme in which resemblances between
musica humana and musica mundane assume their magical force,
Tomlinson unearths an order of knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible
to authors, historical actors, and interpreters of documents and traces.
According to Tomlinson, this archeological level of meaning underlies
the hermeneutical level of interpretation. Where hermeneutics concerns
the interpretations of texts, the conscious and unconscious meanings o
f their authors, and intertextual relations within a tradition, archeological
history excavates this level of meaning to reveal the cultural grid that
conditions, constrains, and makes possible the discourses and prac-
tices of social actors.93 The difference between the hermeneutical and
the archeological rests on the epistemic difference between authors’
conscious and unconscious intentions and the underlying structures of
knowledge about which historical actors remain largely unaware. For the
sixteenth-century magus, the magical episteme Tomlinson unearths could
have only taken the form of real resemblances binding all things together.
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, whose De occulta philosophia libri tres,
Tomlinson explains, signaled the reorganization of occultist knowledge,
believed that music “derived its special powers from the numbers inherent
in the celestial realm.”94 And before him, Marsilio Ficino had held that
music had the power to affect body, spirit, soul, and mind, “in endowing
its air with warmth and complex, rational motions.”95 Tomlinson stresses
that the occult force of music’s complex mimetic motions operated
independently of verbal support; music’s rational nature derived entirely
from its airy similarity with spirit. In the world of Renaissance magic,
resemblances between music’s mimetic motions, immaterial forms, and
celestial figures are the source of music’s occult power. Harmony for
Ficino was “air seemingly brought to rational life by its motion.”96 By
38
linking music with spirit through the power of musical mimesis, Ficino
legitimated the occult belief in the force of similitude. In seizing upon
resemblances in order to discover the source and origin of all things,
mimesis was itself a magical practice. In this world of esoteric knowledge,
poetic furor overflowed the soul, enclosing the magic circle of similitude
in frenzied song’s imitation of the celestial harmony.
The shift from the order of knowledge in which musical mimesis had a
magical force to an order of knowledge in which mimesis constituted a
form of representation accentuated the modern question concerning the
reality of Renaissance magic. Following Michel Foucault, Tomlinson
argues that the scientific episteme dispelled the magical order (ruled by
resemblances) and replaced it with an analytic one. With the advent of
this new order, the magic of musical mimesis gave way to dramatic
representations. Within this new order, poetry now depicted real pheno-
mena by means of a representational language loosed from its magically
ontological connection with them. Poetry, in Tomlinson’s words, “was
becoming an independent medium for representing the world.”97 The
change in the status of language signaled a shift in the concept of imita-
tion: the imitation of nature by setting the world before the eyes in poetry.
The sixteenth-century understanding of Aristotle’s idea of mimesis
as “iconic representation”98 undoubtedly emphasized certain visualist
tendencies of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor.99 As the once magical topos
of poetic furor came to play a demystified role, metaphor became the
emblem of poetic ingeniousness. In his archeology of poetic furor,
Tomlinson points out that Emanuele Tesauro in his Il cannocchiale
aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope) (1654), offered a detailed account
of the new literary sensibility. For Tesauro, the adroitness of metaphor
(argutezza) was especially significant. Tomlinson remarks that rather than
reducing magic to argutezza, Tesauro identified a discursive realm that
represented an alternative to the real world “created from the medium of
language . . . according to the measure of argutezza.”100 Consequently,
metaphor created a world that was identifiable with the poetic reality
impressed on words through metaphor.101 The unreality of this poetic
world was a function of the new representational aim of philosophy and
language. Set against the magical episteme of Renaissance magus, the
unreality of the poetic word contrasted with the truth of representation.
Defining the unreality of the poetic word in terms of the truth of repre-
sentation highlights a problematic that extends far beyond Tomlinson’s
musicological archeology. At the same time, the shift from the epis-
teme of Renaissance magic to a representational order of knowledge
accentuates the question of metaphor’s power to remake reality. For
Renaissance writers, metaphors were not imaginary tropes of real relations
but were the instrument of creative discoveries of the structure of the
world. The Neoplatonic ontology that legitimated the Renaissance
39
magician’s occult knowledge of the harmony of all things bound this

process of discovery to the fixed order of the universe. Conversely,
ingeniousness in poetic creation was conceived in contrast to the emergent
ideal of the truth of representation. Accordingly, metaphor became a
device of poetic invention, and poetic discourse was identified with an
unreal world. Under Aristotle’s influence, mimesis or imitation tended to
be increasingly understood as the iconic representation of existing ethoses,
objects, and things. Language, for representative thought, was the means
of achieving a subjective mastery of the world. Correlatively, the poetic
dislocation effected by the metaphorical transfer of meaning was vested
with a tropological significance. The impact this perspective on metaphor
and representation has had on critical musicological discourses cannot be
emphasized enough. The difference between music and language rests in
large measure on a view of language rooted in the representational concept
of truth as the adequation of concept and thing. The question of the truth
of metaphorical resemblances will provide the occasion, in Chapter 6, for
reevaluating the power of metaphor to remake reality. This different
understanding of metaphorical truth will open the way to a contemporary
hermeneutical understanding of music’s mimetic character.
La querelle des anciens et des modernes

The advent of the seconda prattica in the early seventeenth century placed
the concept of imitation at the center of an emerging theory of musical
rhetoric. Secular attacks on polyphonic music’s obfuscation of its text
promoted a monodic, expressive style following the model of Greek
musikē. Through rejecting the idea that music is an imitation of the divine
logos, Vincenzo Galilei along with other members of the Camerata sought
to wrest music’s clarity of meaning from reason’s subjugation to purely
sensuous displays of sound. In advocating the return to a way of fitting
words with music, Galilei “suggested that musicians might learn from
orators or even actors—the zanni of the commedia dell’arte—better to
imitate in music the varied passions of their sounds.”102 Tomlinson
remarks that this “more sensitive mimesis of emotion and rendering of the
natural affective qualities of words”103 captured the humanistic intention
to place music under the logos of ordinary speech. The monodic-harmonic
style cultivated by proponents of the seconda prattica privileged textual
clarity in accordance with the Platonic precept that the “mode and rhythm
must fit the words.”104 In Greek antiquity the logos governed the right use
of harmony and rhythm. Following this ancient and hallowed model,
advocates of the then new stile rappresentativo believed that the meaning,
inflection, and accent of the word ruled the manner of representing feelings
such as grief, anguish, and joy. In contrast to the prima prattica, where the
modal ethos of a polyphonic composition reinforced that affective quality
40
of a text, a new sensibility demanded a then modern music in imitation of

Greek musikē.
The concept of mimesis that emerged from linking musical imitation
with the art of rhetoric placed musical rhetoric under the purview of
imitation’s representational function. In fact, imitating the manner of
intonation that in speech conveyed the affective sense of a word laid the
foundation for the theories of musical rhetoric that dominated the Baroque
doctrine of aesthetic affects.105 The mimetic function of rhetorical figures
such as those identified with expressions of grief (passus duriusculus),
doubt (dubitatio), exclamation (exclamatio) or elevated thoughts
(anabasis) codified the principle of imitation inaugurated by the seconda
prattica. Giulio del Bene’s transference of music from the quadrivium to
the trivium, which Daniel Chua argues set vocal practice against the
mathematical science of instrumental music, divided the nature of music
between humanistic values and scientific facts. On Chua’s analysis, the
resulting epistemological shift positioned instrumental music in such a way
that its “mechanics of composition (thorough-bass)”106 required a theory
of musical rhetoric to legitimize it. Standardized figures provided a means
for deciphering instrumental music’s imitation of vocal gestures and
rhetorical flourishes. The real problem, according to Chua, was not that
“instrumental music could just about ‘speak’,”107 but that, once severed
from the harmony of the spheres, music’s meanings could no longer be
stabilized as eternally valid. The stile rappresentativo advocated by the
Camerata, Chua concludes, was “really a style of styles, for this style
represents reality as stylized figures.”108 Not only does monody fuse “the
external figure with the internal passion,”109 but style itself also became a
matter of taste concerning the fittingness of a work’s rhetorical value.
The effort to codify the wordless representation in music of passions
and affects bears witness to the transformation of the concept of mimesis.
The poetic figuration of the pathos associated with “tears and weeping”
in the subject of Bach’s F minor fugue from the Well-Tempered Klavier,
for example, exploits the chromatic alternations introduced in ascending
to C and returning to the tonic (Example 3.1). The arousal of the affection
that this passage could be said to represent was accordingly an effect of the
use of the rhetorical figure of pathopoeia. In short, for this doctrine, the
representations of passions by means of musical-rhetorical figures secured
an intelligibility for instrumental music that was otherwise threatened
by the clamorous non-sense of its empty forms. Like Tomlinson, Chua
identifies the Baroque with an age of representation, in which the passions
could be rationally classified and hence placed under the will’s moral
control. To the extent that the voice, which as “the promise of language,
was the ‘transcendental signifier’”110 of the self-presencing subject, instru-
mental music was merely the simulacrum of linguistic representations.
Consequently, Chua’s analysis reinforces the connection between
41
Example 3.1 Bach, Fugue XIV (F minor) from The Well-Tempered Clavier
vol. 1, mm. 1–4
representative thought’s concept of language and mimesis as the simulated

reduplication of an already existing thing.
The theory of imitation exemplified by the Baroque doctrine of affects
therefore reinforced the filiations of language, representative thought,
reason, and truth, which are the hallmarks of music’s epistemological
differentiation from language. In this respect, Tomlinson’s commentary
on Monteverdi’s music similarly underscores the monumental significance
of the shift from Renaissance magic to representational thought’s concept
of language. Only now that music’s mimetic function consisted in the
simulated reduplication of the soul’s inner passions could music lie.
Accordingly, in a madrigal such as “Sfogava con le stelle,” whose musical
emblematics embody the magical order of knowledge, “Monteverdi spoke
eloquent truths. . . . But he lied—extravagantly, resonantly, and with
rarely matched force—in the Lament of the Nymph. . . . [, which] offers
the glorious untruth of dramatic representation.”111 Even Tomlinson’s
musicological archeology seems unable in the end to free itself from
representational thought’s concept of truth. Consequently, the gap
between the magical resemblances in “Sfogava con le stelle” of words and
musical gestures, and the Lament of the Nymph, whose descending
tetrachord ostinato is the emblem of lament representing a passion existing
in the nonmusical world, is one that for modern—or postmodern—
thought remains unbridgeable.
The querelle des anciens et des modernes highlighted the transformation
in the concept of mimesis that accompanied the advent of representational
thought. When, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, the praiseworthy
term “new” valorized the previously neutral comparison between the
modern and the ancient, the controversy over the status of instrumental
music’s imitative value took center stage.112 Dahlhaus points out the
terminological confusion surrounding this musical querelle, where the
“prima prattica is the cause of the moderni, and the seconda prattica that
of the antiqui.”113 The chain of antithesis, which he suggests was forged
through this querelle, extends through eighteenth-century musical
aesthetics to set the then modern theory of musical imitation against a
Platonic-Pythagorean ideal. Where the prima prattica stressed music’s
mimetic dependence upon language and stylized speech in representing the
passions, the seconda prattica emphasized the mathematical harmony of
pure musical relations. The opposition between the aesthetic ideal of a self-
42
perfecting form and the appeal to extramusical meanings crystallizes in

nuce in the antinomies animating the querelle des anciens et des modernes.
Under the rubric of representational thought, the theory that set music’s
imitative function against a Platonic-Pythagorean ideal separated music
from language. At the same time, equating the mathematical harmony of
music’s internal relations with the modern ideal of reason provided a
compelling alternative to a theory that made music’s rational significance
dependent upon that of language. In this respect, the querelle des anciens
et des modernes more than prefigured the coming debate between Rameau
and Rousseau. The even more modern controversy between adherents of
formalist ideals and advocates for musical hermeneutics, too, had an
antecedent in the antinomies founded on representative thought’s
watershed concepts.
The debate between Rousseau and Rameau effectively cemented the
opposition between a purely internal perspective on music’s rational
organization and one that stressed music’s essentially mimetic function.
Rousseau, who preferred the mimetic stylization of passionate speech over
the artifice of purely instrumental music, supported the idea that music’s
imitation of sentiments and images (musique imitative) constituted its
sense and meaning. For him, reason attested to the inferiority of the
nonimitative art that Rameau’s view of harmony promoted to the higher
aesthetic rank. Harmony, Rousseau explained, “furnishes no imitation by
which the music, forming images, or expressing sentiments, may be raised
to the dramatic or imitative genius, which is the most noble part of art, and
the only energetic one.”114 Accordingly, “all great effects of music have
ceased, and it has lost all its energy and force since the invention of
counterpoint.”115 Rousseau’s defense of musique imitative recalled the
mimetic power of melos in Greek antiquity at the same time that it
registered the conceptual shift wrought by representative thought.116 As
the organ of reason, language dominated melody’s power to express
human sentiments by painting images and imitating speech. Consequently
melody, for Rousseau, served as the source of music’s beauty and the
wellspring of its pleasurable stirrings of the soul.
By seeking music’s true nature in the natural condition of harmony,
Rameau conversely anticipated the reversal that transformed instrumental
music’s purely nonrepresentational character into the apogee of romantic
art. Directed by reason to discover the origin of music’s beauty in mathe-
matical principles established by nature, Rameau founded music’s har-
monic relations on the hierarchical order generated by the overtone series.
The progression from the dominant to the tonic constituted the archetypical
structure of the schema that reason uncovers; dissonant-consonant
progressions that derive from this schema constituted the laws of harmonic
progression. By attributing music’s affective meaning to harmonic intervals,
chords and keys, Rameau’s idea that the harmony that resounds in music
43
resonates in the soul recalled the original sense of mimesis, which Gadamer
reminds us derives from the “star-dance” of the heavens.117 Adapting the
ancient doctrine of mimesis, in which music manifests the order of the
cosmos in the soul to music’s natural harmonic context, prefigured the
triumph of a romantic Pythagoreanism over music’s subservience to
language. Rameau’s recourse to the natural order consequently anticipated
the intimation of infinite depths of feeling in a “language beyond language,”
according to which instrumental music’s unutterable expressions were
miraculously equated with the essence of the Absolute.
Romantic Reversals
Unlike mimetic theories that anchored instrumental music’s intelligibility
in concrete imitations of speech or representations of passions, the
romantic exuberance for the Absolute raised music’s sublime power of
expression to the highest aesthetic rank.118 In exceeding the capacity of
mere words to represent thoughts, ideas, and feelings, instrumental music
surpassed poetry and literature in its attainment of ineffable poetic heights.
Through a refractory reversal of Rousseau’s rejoinder to the question
attributed to Fontenelle—“Sonata, que me veux-tu?”—instrumental
music’s representational deficiencies became the sign of its wondrous
significance. The “poetic conceit of unspeakability,”119 the discovery of
which, Dahlhaus comments, occurred in literature, irrevocably altered the
concept of instrumental music. Freed from the limitations of texts, social
functions, and the representation of affects, music—specifically absolute
music—achieved its metaphysical dignity as an expression of the infinite.
The true romantic aesthetics of music, Dahlhaus concludes, “is a
metaphysics of instrumental music”120 that replaces religious exaltation
with its poetic expressions of the sublime. In this respect, the poetic conceit
of absolute music’s ineffability justified reinterpreting the vacuous
meaning of empty sonorous figurations as sublime intimations of the
infinite. In the effort to elevate instrumental music above the supposed
limitations of language, a romantic metaphysics inscribed absolute music’s
autonomy within the system of categories dominated by the poeticizing
conception of a language of the Absolute.
By investing music with metaphysical dignity, the romantic apotheosis
of absolute music reversed the judgment that relegated instrumental music
to its inferior aesthetic status. Paradoxically, this reversal laid the ground
for deconstructing music’s claim to autonomy by consecrating instru-
mental music’s transformation into the paradigmatic expression of sub-
lime transcendence. Filiations among instrumental music’s metaphysical
dignity and the sensibilities of bourgeois art-religion have elicited critical
ripostes that unmask the aesthetics’ ideological complicity with social
matters of taste. Ironically, the legitimacy of these critiques depends upon
44
the music’s historic elevation from its inferior aesthetic standing into the
paragon of poetic ineffability. Bound to this reversal by its investment in
subverting the judgment of absolute music’s transcendent value, such
critiques remain hostage to a mimetic principle that is itself deeply rooted
in the discourse in which musical hermeneutics re-emerged as a way of
redressing the violence of tearing works from their sustaining life-contexts.
When the time comes to confront the disciplinary distinction between
music and language, Gadamer’s hermeneutical insights into language as
the universal medium of experience will provide an important guide in
avoiding the dilemmas of deconstructing absolute music’s metaphysical
pretenses. The rehabilitation of musical hermeneutics and criticism that I
am undertaking depends in part upon the understanding of the language
of art that crystallizes in Gadamer’s view of the linguisticality of
experience. Just as crucially, the question of the metaphoricity of language
will play a critical role in my engagement with Lawrence Kramer’s
deconstruction of the metaphysics of absolute music. At that point, I will
attempt to show that this postmodern challenge to the cultural authority
of absolute music perpetuates the discourse of absolute music by means of
a new doxa, which prolongs the function of the difference between music
and language upon which the discourse of absolute music depends. In
anticipating this argument, I intend to stress how the view of language
Tomlinson identifies with the representative episteme, and Chua attributes
to the advent of the modernist subject, dominates the division between
a mimetic conception of music’s dependence upon language and a
scientific ideal ultimately committed to the principle of music’s formal
self-sufficiency. In this respect, replacing the “generally serviceable
epistemological means”121 that Rose Rosengard Subotnik ascribes to
natural languages with the scientific precision of a mathematical language
provides a further justification for altogether dispensing with interpretive
practices. The resulting isolation of the sense of a work’s internal
organization from external, extramusical references indicates the place for
musical hermeneutics. Musical hermeneutics, we will see, supplements
formal descriptions with referential interpretations. If, as Subotnik claims,
“language, once Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had revealed the
epistemological indispensability of natural language, became recognized
as the paradigmatic medium for the configuration of objectively acquired
knowledge,”122 instrumental music’s metaphysical elevation became the
emblematic expression of an order of experience that was inaccessible to
ordinary language. Once language was invested with the epistemological
function Subotnik describes, instrumental music assumed the status of the
other of reason. The felicitous conjunction of somnambulistic creation
with a romantic metaphysics of feeling therefore contrasted with the
epistemological serviceability of natural language. The schism between a
romantic Pythagoreanism whose meaning derived from its references
45
to a metaphysical order, and a musical hermeneutics that upheld the

principle of music’s imitative power through this identifying function of
language, concealed their common root. The romantic idea of absolute
music did not escape the irony that instrumental music’s metaphysical
significance hinges on representative thought’s conception of language;
the transvaluation of instrumental music’s inferior status into the paragon
of romantic art is the paradigmatic expression of the force exerted by this
conception of language over the discourse of absolute music.123
The difference between music’s mimetic dependence upon language and
its mathematical foundation in the natural order of the harmonic series—
a difference accentuated by the debate between Rousseau and Rameau—
signaled the advent of a seemingly intractable division between the
experience of language as the organ of reason, and scientific discourse.
Consequently, the reversal that founded instrumental music’s meta-
physical dignity on its emancipation from language cloaked instru-
mental music’s intimation of the infinite in the aura of a “science” of the
miraculous. The romantic Pythagoreanism that supplanted Rameau’s
theory of harmony bound absolute music’s metaphysical stature over to
the divinatory power of the human spirit. Following Schiller’s reinter-
pretation of Kant’s radical subjectivization of aesthetics, art achieved its
autonomous standpoint only in conjunction with the symbolizing power
of the creative spirit.124 According to the modern concept of the symbol,
Gadamer explains, “the world of the senses is not mere nothingness and
darkness but the outflowing and reflection”125 of a truth founded upon the
metaphysical connection between sensible reality and the divine. Hence
the gnostic function of this symbolizing power stood out against this
modern concept’s metaphysical background. The metaphor of organic
unity that served to legitimate the logic that ostensibly regulated tonal
relations inscribed this gnostic function within the movement governing
the progression of work. The inner dynamic of this autonomous move-
ment achieved its metaphysical significance as a symbol of the Whole.
Instrumental music’s apotheosis as an intimation of the Absolute
transfigured its once morally inferior status into the apogee of romantic
art. Accordingly, absolute music’s metaphysical ascension consecrated the
perfect coincidence of the “science” of its internal logic with the symbol-
making freedom celebrated by the aesthetics of genius.
E. T. A. Hoffman confirmed this felicitous coincidence when, in his
review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, he extolled Beethoven’s genius in
mastering the heights of musical expression. As the only truly romantic art,
music “reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from
the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves
behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the
inexpressible.”126 For Hoffman, “Beethoven’s music sets in motion the
machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens the infinite
46
yearning which is the essence of romanticism.”127 Accordingly, Beethoven

was a “purely romantic and therefore truly musical composer.”128 In
contrast, Beethoven’s vocal music was less successful, since it did not
permit vague yearnings but could only depict “from the realm of the
infinite those feelings capable of being described in words.”129 Through
surpassing the limits of vocal music, Beethoven’s symphonic work
unleashed the forces of imagination and creative unconsciousness that,
according to romantic sensibilities, evidenced the vitality of the composer’s
inner psychic life. Hoffman’s pronouncements confirmed the judgments by
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, and Jean Paul (J. P.
Friedrich Richter) that bound absolute music’s metaphysical stature to the
romantic idealization of somnambulistic production. Placing absolute
music’s spiritual essence above the power of mere words ratified the
romantic conception of instrumental music’s sublime ineffability.130 As the
product of genius, absolute music embodied the spirit of the creative mind
behind it in a form of expression that, since it was immediately accessible
only to feeling, called for poeticizing interpretations.
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony seemingly authorizes the kind of
poeticizing interpretation called for by romantic ideals of genius and
somnambulistic production. In the second movement, “Scene by the
Brook,” Beethoven’s indications of the calls of the nightingale, cuckoo,
and quail in particular seem to justify identifying musical figures with
extramusical referents (Example 3.2). Donald Francis Tovey remarks with
a tone of sarcasm that “[m]uch time has been wasted in identifying other
birds than those Beethoven has mentioned.”131 At the same time, Tovey’s
own interpretation is inclined toward a kind of programmatic analysis.
He suggests, for example, that the representation of the brook’s flow,
whose murmur becomes more insistent throughout the rest of the
movement, is aided by two muted solo cellos. Moreover, the fragmentary
character of the overlying melody in the opening measures, which later
congeals into an enthusiastically sustained line, is for him “a perfect
explanation of the poetic’s mood, as shown by the natural way in which
his thoughts and utterances gradually take shape”132 (Example 3.3).
Tovey’s philosophical translation of Beethoven’s dictum that his Sixth
Symphony was “‘the expression of feeling rather than painting’”133
captures the essence of the work’s poetic expression: “more the expression
of feelings than the illustration of things.”134 Despite Tovey’s insistence
that Beethoven’s remark was the first and last commonsensical word about
program music, the poetic feelings communicated by the Symphony are
not in the first or last instance representations of the sounds of natural
“wonders” of brooks, birds, thunder, and the like. Beethoven’s fondness
for the term “Tondicther” does not justify attributing to Beethoven’s
music the programmatic intent that Liszt, for example, later ascribed to his
own tone poems. On the contrary, the feelings expressed by the work
47
Example 3.2 Beethoven, 2nd Movement, Sixth Symphony, mm. 129–132
emanate from the work itself. So long as the expression of moods and
feelings were subordinated to romantic notions of somnambulistic
production and the creative genius, the temptation to follow the path from
a poeticizing interpretation to a programmatic one remained strong. As we
will see in Chapters 6 and 7, a consideration of feeling’s phenomenological
objectivity leads down a different path. Perhaps it is along this path, which
leads to recovering music’s ontological vehemence from the effects of its
romantic apotheosis, that the more hermeneutical aspects of Beethoven’s
assertion can be heard. In particular, the yearning for the infinite that, for
the Romantics, resounded in the sublime heights achieved by Beethoven’s
symphonic music is, from another vantage point, the sublimation in the
realm of feeling of reason’s supreme intention to think that which is
without condition.
The conviction that the spirit of great works of art embodied the minds
of the gifted individuals who created them underscored the divinatory
intent of romantic hermeneutics. Driven by the surety that the “mind is the
creative unconscious at work in gifted individuals,”135 an idea popularized
by Schopenhauer and the philosophy of the unconscious, romantic her-
meneutics aimed at an immediate grasp of, and an emotional identification
with, the author’s mental intentions and psychic life.136 Ricoeur argues
that Wilhelm Dilthey turned hermeneutics in a psychological direction by
subordinating the challenges of interpreting the “expressions of life”137
fixed in writing to the problem of acquiring a knowledge of the thoughts,
feelings, and mental intentions behind them. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s
dictum that the goal of hermeneutics is “to understand an author as well
as and even better than he understands himself,”138 attests to the divina-
tory thrust of romantic hermeneutics. The intentioned re-experiencing of
the thoughts and feelings objectified in cultural works bears out the
romantic veneration of the power of genius. Genius in understanding
corresponded to this power of genius in creation. Romantic hermeneutics
consequently ratified the cult of the creative individual who redeems the
world by means of art’s transfiguring sheen. Rooted in this view through
48
Example 3.3 Beethoven, 2nd Movement, Sixth Symphony, mm. 1–7
its adherence to these precepts, musical hermeneutics adhered to this

interpretive ideal whenever it took as its standard the meaning originally
intended by the author.
One further reversal that in a sense capped absolute music’s meta-
physical elevation bears mentioning. In the nineteenth century, the
symbolizing power of the creative genius accorded with the demand for a
new mythology that would unite cultured individuals in particular
49
communities (as indicted in Chapter 2). At the same time, the idea that
music and art might redeem the world aesthetically evinced the nineteenth-
century’s refractory relation with the Enlightenment. The “schema of
the conquest of mythos by logos”139 that Gadamer identifies with
Romanticism’s reversal of the Enlightenment presupposition of human-
ity’s progressive emancipation through reason bore out the romantic
illusion that the poetic act no longer had a share in the power of myth.
In the age of historicism to which this illusion belongs, poets only
“stimulate the imagination and vitality of their hearers or readers”140
through their own imaginative endeavors; what they say has merely an
aesthetic effect. Genuine mythical thought differs from pseudomythical
poetic activity, and hence the self-consciously romantic return to the
“mysterious darkness . . . [of] a mythic collective consciousness” that
embodies the superior wisdom of a primeval age consecrated reason’s
conquest of myth. Gadamer concludes that since “mythical consciousness
is still knowledge,”141 the Romantic restoration of the past’s absolute
authority perpetuated the abstract opposition between myth and reason.
Romanticism’s refractory reversal of the Enlightenment schema of logos
and mythos thus freed the creative act from the binding character of myth
by perfecting the mythic consciousness of a modern age. This reversal of
the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason’s perfectibility presaged the
return of an ideal that, beyond absolute music’s sublime ineffability,
50
incarnated myth’s primeval forces within the pseudomythical practices of

an age dominated by historicism’s positivist spirit. The Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk’s redemptive ambitions exemplified the intent to
perfect the mythic consciousness of the community it would create.
Perhaps only in an age dominated by the modern spirit of positivism could
absolute music have been identified as such in the light of the Wagnerian
music-drama’s aesthetic, cultural, and even political aims.
The Positivist Compulsion

Richard Wagner’s aesthetic-historical agenda manifested the restora-
tion of myth through its Romantic conquest. Inspired by Ludwig
Feuerbach’s view of “absolute philosophy,” Wagner legitimated the
51
music drama’s ascension within the Germanic symphonic tradition by

identifying absolute music with the separation of instrumental music from
poetry and dance. To Wagner’s way of thinking, the affinity of the
Gesamtkunstwerk with Greek tragedy set absolute music apart as a
negative but necessary step on the way to the total work of art. The
refractory reversal of the Enlightenment schema of mythos and logos,
together with a popularized Hegelian philosophy of history, qualified this
pseudomythic return to the past as the inevitable historical and aesthetic
consequence of Beethoven’s symphonic genius. Accordingly, Wagner
singled out Beethoven as anticipating the total work of art when, having
explored “unheard-of possibilities of absolute tone-speech,”142 Beethoven
seemingly anchored symphonic music in the defining word in the closing
movement of his Ninth Symphony.
The art-religion cultivated by Wagner’s justification of the “artwork of
the future” advanced its own aesthetic ends by vesting the superior
wisdom of Greek tragedy in the modern restoration of music’s original
unity with poetry and dance. Through forging a new union of Dionysian
and Apollinian impulses that purportedly surpassed the achievement of
the Immortal Beethoven, Wagner’s artwork of the future installed the
pseudomythic consciousness of a community devoted to the religion of
art within a culture dominated by art’s positivist ethos. The advent
of pseudomythical thought in the context of music drama’s intended
aesthetic redemption of a moribund German culture forcibly instituted the
refractory reversal of the Enlightenment’s conquest of myth. Despite the
apparent recovery of music’s rootedness in the language of poetic thought,
the mythologizing return to music’s origins in Greek tragedy was a
function of the rise of music’s and art’s claim to autonomy. This modern
conquest of reason by myth capitalized on the devotion to aesthetic culture
that sprang from music’s and art’s conscious differentiation from reality.
By redeeming the world aesthetically, Wagner’s total work of art sealed the
opposition between art and reality within the framework of this romantic
restoration of music’s primal unity with language.
By transvaluing Hoffman’s judgment that Beethoven’s music achieves its
sublime heights by leaving behind all definite feelings, Wagner consummated
the paradoxical thrust of a concrete metaphysics of feeling. Investing
instrumental music with language’s power to represent objects, ideas, and
emotions through the use of leitmotif technique overturned the Romantic
conviction that instrumental music transcended all definitive references to its
subject or content. Hilda Meldrum Brown stresses that Wagner’s theory of
Grundmotiv (primary motive) emphasized the way the leitmotiv’s value and
significance was “both promoted by dramatic events and fully integrated
into the dramatic action.”143 Accordingly, the development of a network of
musical themes associated with the key elements of the drama’s action was
essential to attaining the unity of a symphonic movement. Carolyn Abbate’s
52
reading of Wotan’s monologue in Die Walküre further underscores how, by

placing the unity of music and drama at the heart of his aesthetic-historical
program, Wagner supplanted symphonic music’s ineffable expressions. In
the passage in which Wotan begins to recite the tale of the time before the
Ring, his declamatory recitative is accompanied by pedal-point drones.
According to Abbate, “[o]nly two motivic gestures intrude . . . , the opening
descending theme (Wolzogen labeled it ‘Wotans Verzweiflung,’ [‘Wotan’s
despair’], which is repeated and spun out as a transition to the end of the
passage.”144 The passage, for Abbate, is striking for its absence of leitmotifs
(Example 3.4). In contrast, the music accompanying the story of the
Rheingold, the second tale, is marked by the “sudden invasion of quoted
motives from that opera.”145 By discarding the bias of a leitmotivic reading,
Abbate claims to uncover the characteristics of a recurring musical sequence
corresponding to “the repetition of the text’s ‘master trope’.”146 In this
respect, the uncanny quality of the first tale stands out against the second and
third (Erda story) cycles of Wotan’s narrative. More crucially, in initiating
this repetition of the “tale of power, love abandoned, the exchanges and
agreements, and the disaster,”147 the empty, primal quality of Wotan’s
recitation of the time before the Ring highlights the narrative function of
leitmotivic references.148 Consequently, the passage note-worthy for its lack
of leitmotifs underscores the exemplary value of the concretizing function
performed by leitmotivic references.
Dahlhaus’s contention that music drama is untimely in an era
dominated by the spirit of positive science eclipses the affinity of Wagner’s
aesthetic agenda for its own cultural ethos. The aura of metaphysical
transcendence—which springs from the phantasmagoric production of the
illusion of the absolute reality of music drama’s return to myth—bears
witness to how musical techniques disappear behind their calculated
effects.149 Nietzsche’s contempt for Wagner’s priestly deceptions strikes
at the heart of Wagner’s intention to anchor music’s metaphysical
substance in images founded by the poetic text; music drama’s meta-
physics of feeling derives its pseudomythic essence from the musical
technologies through which it produces its hallucinatory effects.150 These
effects conceal the positivist impulse hidden within Wagner’s intent to
reunite music with poetry. The reconquest of myth through a calculating
reason occludes the secret affinity between the total work of art’s trans-
figuring aura and the positivist compulsion of its age. Anchoring absolute
music’s ineffable expressions in the defining word ratified language’s
epistemological status as the instrument of knowledge. Ultimately, musical
dramatizations of characters, actions, and feelings by means of leitmotif
techniques captured the irony behind the Gesamtkunstwerk’s mythic
pretensions. Subordinated to the reversals at play in this return to myth,
Wagner’s aesthetic-historical program laid the cornerstone for a modern
musical hermeneutics.
53
Example 3.4 Wagner, Die Walküre Act II, Scene 2, mm. 110–116
54
In a way, the programmatic thrust of modern musical hermeneutics

conforms to the positivistic impulse carefully concealed within the
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk’s phantasmagoric production. By adhering
to the idea that absolute music stands in need of an interpreting word,
musical hermeneutics reinscribed the concertizing intent of this impulse
in its methods and techniques. Instrumental music’s ostensive lack of a
concrete content presents a difficulty and even a dilemma for musicology:
Hoeckner points out that “the link between music and logos is the lifeline
of musicology.”151 To the degree that the question of music’s meaning
remains the crux of modern and even postmodern musicology, the
difference between music and language dominates the discourse of
absolute music. And yet, to the extent that this difference is itself based on
a concept of language rooted in representative thought, the idea of
absolute music remains hostage to the history from which it has been
unable to free itself. The work of mourning that Hoeckner undertakes in
confronting the moment of German music that extends from Beethoven’s
star (taken from Leonore’s line “Come, hope, do not dim the last star of
the weary,”) to Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Adrian Leverkühn’s
Lamentations in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, is a compelling testa-
ment to the melancholic condition of modernity’s frustrated aspirations.
At the same time, modern musicology’s dependence on the difference
between music and language preserves the link between absolute music
and the programmatic impetus of musical hermeneutics. Program music is
55
in this respect one further antecedent of modern musical hermeneutics’

positivist overtones. Fixing the indefinite character of instrumental music,
whose essence was ineffable, by programmatic means presaged the
interpretive role musical hermeneutics was to play. Hoeckner indicates
that Liszt “explained the rise of program music as resulting partly from
hermeneutic interpretations of Beethoven’s non-programmatic composi-
tions.”152 For Liszt, Hoeckner concludes, “the listener’s act ultimately
depended upon the composer’s, who put down the rules of the her-
meneutic game.”153 Ultimately, the game itself conformed to romantic
hermeneutics’ divinatory intent: understanding the composer’s intended
meaning. Like Wagner, Liszt intended to sublate the symphonic tradition
inherited from Beethoven. At the same time, the positive dimension he
introduced by uniting music and poetry handed the interpretive task over
to the particularities of a programmatic understanding of a work.
The positive achievements of program music and music drama therefore
had a direct impact on the modern practice of musical hermeneutics. The
ensuing controversy (exemplified by Kretzschmar’s rejoinder to Hanslick,
which I examine in the next chapter) pitted musical hermeneutics against
formalist precepts. This controversy evinces the intellectual heritage of the
modern understanding of music’s mimetic relation to the world. The all
too brief review of the history of the discourse of absolute music in this
chapter serves only to deepen our understanding of the paradoxes in
question. The positivist tendencies in modern musical hermeneutics,
however, are not the defining problem. The music–language divide attests
to an even more intractable enigma that this divide’s postmodern decon-
struction will bring to light. Ultimately, the task of rethinking the notion
of the meaning and truth of a work will fall to a phenomenologically
hermeneutical consideration of music’s mimetic power. It will only be by
breaking with the notion of truth as adequation, itself inscribed in a
concept of language bound over to the illusion of representative thought,
that the way will be clear for thinking more about music’s power to
redescribe reality by transcending the real from within.
56
4
FORMALIST AESTHETICS
AND MUSICAL
HERMENEUTICS
Eduard Hanslick’s ambition to place aesthetics on a scientific footing

signaled a decisive break with romantic sensibilities. Hanslick’s deter-
mination to advance a theory of the beautiful in music, based on the ideal
of music’s self-perfecting form, turned against the idea that music’s chief
purpose was to represent emotions and feelings. By concentrating on
principles and systems of organization internal to a work, Hanslick laid
the ground for formalist aesthetics. At the same time, his effort to rid
aesthetics of its metaphysical underpinnings elicited a response that set
musical hermeneutics at the pinnacle of music theory. In order to combat
the scientific tenor of Hanslick’s aesthetics, Hermann Kretzschmar
advanced a theory and method of interpretation that would restore the
humanistic content stripped away by Hanslick’s abstractions.
My objectives in examining Kretzschmar’s appeal to the doctrine of
affects in the aftermath of Hanslick’s efforts are twofold. First, tracing the
outlines of a confrontation that arguably initiates the modern controversy
over music’s self-referential or extra-referential meaning has the advantage
of highlighting the conflict that came to dominate music criticism.
Through ascribing extra-musical meanings to processes and features
internal to a work, musical hermeneutics appears as the antidote to
formalist abstractions. Second, by examining Kretzschmar’s relation to
Hanslick in this chapter, I intend to further the critique of music’s mimetic
character that I initiated in the previous chapters.
I see several other advantages in pursuing this line of inquiry. Despite
Hanslick’s obvious leanings toward a formalist standpoint, the suggestion
of a phenomenological orientation lends itself to a more hermeneutical
reinterpretation. Stripped of its residual metaphysical connotations,
Hanslick’s aesthetics provides an unexpected and unexploited resource for
a phenomenological hermeneutics of music. Moreover, the affinity of
Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics with Wagner’s aesthetic-historical
57
program places this musical hermeneutics in close proximity to the

positivist tenor of Hanslick’s aesthetics. The recurrence, in Kretzschmar’s
hermeneutics, of romantic hermeneutics’ divinatory intent complicates the
connection between Hanslick’s denigration of romantic aesthetics and
Kretzschmar’s post-Wagnerian return. At the same time, the concretizing
explanations of the affective significance of a work’s motives and themes
that is the hallmark of Kretzschmar’s theory prefigure the recourse to
interpretive methods that combat formalist abstractions with contextual-
izing interpretations of music’s value and meaning.
There is another consideration that justifies my strategy. When
Kretzschmar vested musical hermeneutics with the role of identifying the
affective content of motives and themes, he justified the proclivity for
ascribing a programmatic content to music. The aesthetic-historical
revolution that transformed absolute music’s purely poetic essence into
the negative but necessary condition for music drama also captivated
Kretzschmar’s program. To the extent that Hanslick’s intention to seek
the principles of music’s beauty in its tonal relations and forms com-
pelled Kretzschmar to search for an alternative, the ensuing conflict
eclipsed the hidden affinity between their respective standpoints. Despite
his antipathy toward Hanslick, Kretzschmar’s indebtedness to Wagner
bears out the positive value invested in the role Kretzschmar’s musical
hermeneutics played in supplementing formal analysis with an exegesis of
a work’s spirit. Hanslick’s paradoxical formulation that the content of a
work consists in tonally moving forms has a similarly positive value.
Ultimately, the difference between Kretzschmar’s hermeneutical program
and Hanslick’s formalist one rests on the refractory relation between an
aesthetics of content and an aesthetics of form.154 Consequently, the
detour I propose to follow highlights some common terrain occluded by
musical hermeneutics’ conventional opposition to formalist aesthetics.
Tonal Form in Motion

Hanslick’s appropriation of the term “absolute music” marked a profound
shift within the discourse of absolute music. By placing musical aesthetics
on a footing comparable to that of the natural sciences of his time, his
treatise on the beautiful in music singled out instrumental music’s formal
characteristics as the proper object of investigation. In order to avoid
subjective impressions, which he regarded as the fundamental metho-
dological error of poeticizing excursions that take feelings as their starting
point, Hanslick based his aesthetics on the properties of the thing itself. By
pitting the objective knowledge of music’s qualities and features against a
degenerate metaphysics, his aesthetics set the stage for musicology’s
positivist, scientific stance. For Hanslick, “music is music purely and
absolutely.”155 Since instrumental music is incapable of representing
58
specific feelings, Hanslick concludes, music’s content consists of tonal

forms in motion.
Despite his attempt to rid the idea of the beautiful in music from the
dubious authority of the aesthetics of feeling, Hanslick could not free
himself entirely from the ethos of the Romantic standpoint on art.
Although he rejected “the servile dependence of . . . aesthetics upon a
supreme metaphysical principle,”156 Hanslick’s concept of form as the self-
perfected expression of the musical idea succumbed to the nineteenth-
century art-religion’s understanding of the symbol’s organic constitution.
The inner unity of sensible appearance and supersensible meaning, which
in its romantic context is a free creation of human subjectivity, manifests
the perfect coincidence of tonal relations and a work’s animating spirit. By
taking this expression of the musical idea as the essence of a work’s formal
beauty, Hanslick’s aesthetics echoed a romantic Pythagoreanism’s
transvaluation of the harmony of the spheres. Even though he excised the
offending passages—evidence of this metaphysical residue—in the first
edition of The Beautiful in Music (1854), his aesthetics preserves vestiges
of the Romantic tradition in which instrumental music incarnates the
composer’s creative spirit.157 Hanslick’s intention to bring aesthetics into
line with modern scientific principles did not prevent him from main-
taining the standpoint of a romantic aesthetic consciousness. By convert-
ing the gnostic function of the modern concept of the symbol into a
positive construct, which Gadamer attributes to this concept’s meta-
physical background, Hanslick transposed the sensible appearance of the
beautiful in music onto the empirical order of the natural sciences. Hence
by shifting the truth of this connection onto epistemological terrain,
Hanslick’s aesthetics identified the content of the beautiful in music with
music’s tonal play of forms.
The legacy of Hanslick’s engagement with the discourse of absolute
music occludes the phenomenological resonances of his claim that the
beautiful in music consists in a tonal play. Joseph Kerman points out that
the dogged and even dogmatic “concentration on internal relationships
within the single work”158 subverts a more complete view of music’s
aesthetic and historical significance by entrenching the positivist proclivity
for a form of knowledge that reduces the meaning of a work to its
structural principles. The ideology of organicism, which Kerman argues
music theory and analysis have tended to support, attests to the residue of
the gnostic ideal of autonomous music’s self-perfection.159 By grounding
music’s sense and logic in fundamental natural laws that govern both the
human organism and music’s harmonic development, Hanslick laid a
foundation for formalist abstractions by forging empirical connections
among music’s self-structuring movement, the idea of the beautiful in
music, and music’s demonstrable reasonableness. Through embracing the
59
stringency of an “ideal of an ‘exact’ science,”160 he stressed a work’s

formal constitution at the expense of its temporal characteristics.
Despite Hanslick’s assertion that music is a “resounding actuality,”161
his attempt to place the idea of absolute music’s self-perfecting form on
solid epistemological ground eclipsed his intimation, in his aesthetics, that
the beautiful in music achieves its ideality through the individual work’s
presentation. Hanslick recognized that apart from the play of “tonally
moving forms,”162 the score is an empty abstraction.163 At the same time,
the emphasis he placed on a self-perfecting form’s amenability to the tenets
of empirical science effectively obliterated the significance of the dynamic
features of a work’s temporal formation. Hanslick’s assertion that the
“mental satisfaction which the listener finds in continuously following and
anticipating the composer’s designs”164 bears witness to the mode in which
the sounding work has its being. As form in motion, “[m]usic is play.”165
Hanslick’s conviction that music’s content is its tonal form in motion
underscores the phenomenological presuppositions of his aesthetics.
Despite his view that beauty in music is a formal beauty, his claim that
beauty appears through the unity incarnate within a work evinces the
phenomenological underpinnings of formalist dicta that attribute music’s
ideal content to abstract tonal structures and relations.
The occultation of the temporal matrix from which a work’s formal
characteristics are derived obviates the stress that Hanslick laid on the
manifestation of musical ideas.166 The concept of form, to which the
notion of content is conventionally opposed, depends on form’s
abstractions from a configuration, according to which it becomes form in
the first place. Yet for Hanslick, the “content of a musical work can be
grasped only musically, never graphically: i.e., as that which is actually
sounding in each piece.”167 Hanslick rightly discerned that the singularity
of each work precedes generalizing abstractions that identify music’s
formal beauty with the laws of tonal progression. Accordingly, the idea
communicated by a work as it presents itself in sounding tones takes
precedence over the logic attributed to the development of its form.
Hanslick undoubtedly forged a link between the logic of a work and the
principle of its organic development by advocating a science of beauty
that would uncover these laws. Moreover, he anticipated these laws’
ideological justification by claiming that only music that rewards the
mental pursuit of following and anticipating a work’s organic flowering—
a pursuit that “could quite properly be called a musing [Nachdenken] of
the imagination”168—is worthy of aesthetic and even moral esteem.
Hanslick’s allusions to the principal theme as the bud of an organically
unfolding tonal structure invariably supported the idea that a work’s
development follows a rational course. Yet, the sense of fittingness he
attributed to the listener’s spontaneous grasp of the work’s unfolding
60
totality springs from the listener’s judgment that the theme’s consequences
and continuation accord with its initial impulse in a convincing way. “It
is as if,” Hanslick explains, the work’s structure “were a logical axiom, the
rightness of which we take in at a glance, but which needs to be challenged
and expounded by our intelligence in order for us to see what happens in
the musical development of it, analogously to a logical demonstration.”169
By contrasting this spontaneous grasp of the fit of the work as a whole
with the demonstration of its rightness, Hanslick drew a line between the
synthetic character of the work’s temporal formation and formal analysis.
Analytic practices that abstract a work’s formal logic from its temporal
configuration subsequently effaced an inchoate phenomenology of the
musical work by seizing on the demonstrable features of a work’s organic
development.
The assimilation of a work’s configurational dimension to the
demonstrable logic of its organic development is the inheritance of
Hanslick’s attempt to square romantic ideals of music’s perfectibility with
modern scientific precepts. Despite his staunchly anti-metaphysical
stance, music for him remained a “kind of language which we speak and
understand yet cannot translate.”170 Confronted with the extraordinary
challenge of describing music’s autonomous beauty without reducing the
beautiful in music to mere technical definitions or resorting to poeticizing
fictions, Hanslick acknowledged the fundamentally metaphorical char-
acter of any description of music. Accordingly, for him, any consideration
of the language of music must take account of its analogical relation to
ordinary speech. At the same time, his contention that “in speech the
sound is only a sign, that is, a means to an end . . . while in music the sound
is an object . . . [that] appears to us as an end in itself”171 ratified the idea
that the intramusical logic of specifically musical ideas consists in their
manifest expression in the play of tonal forms.
The connection Hanslick drew between the “rational coherence of a
group of tones”172 and a logical proposition identified the basic unit of
musical meaning with the semantic integrity of the sentence. Moreover, by
distinguishing between genuine thought and vacuous phrases, Hanslick
attributed a substantive quality to the spiritual activity (energeia) manifest
in a work’s tonal play. By designating music as a language without
resorting to a metaphysics of feeling, Hanslick vested his theory with an
empirical significance against the background of romantic metaphysics.173
In the end, the disappearance of the idea of a “language beyond language”
into the recesses of Hanslick’s scientific revision of music’s ideal content
set the stage for viewing music as a rationally constructed discourse in
sound. Abetted by the loss of Hanslick’s nascent insights into the
phenomenon of music, this theory thrust the question of music’s meaning
deeper into the epistemological soil of formalist aesthetics.
61
An Aesthetics of Themes
The looming threat of abstractions that would reduce music to a network
of tonal functions, relations, and progressions motivated Kretzschmar’s
rejoinder to Hanslick. Kretzschmar combated Hanslick’s claim that music
is incapable of representing definite feelings by attributing an affective
significance to music’s structural processes and features. By supplementing
formal analyses with humanistic interpretations of the composer’s
portrayal of emotions, Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics superseded
Hanslick’s dictum that music’s ideal content precludes the representation
or symbolization of feelings. By dampening the “belief in the unlimited
capacity of music”174 to express feelings and affects Hanslick, according
to Kretzschmar, obstructed musical hermeneutics from assuming its
proper task and place. In Kretzschmar’s view, neo-German music’s rise to
prominence fueled Hanslick’s antipathy toward new forms of expression
whose poetic content referred beyond the purely sonorous play of tonal
forms. The sublation of the symphony by program music and music drama
in Liszt’s, Hector Berlioz’s, and Wagner’s self-appointed succession to
Beethoven’s legacy consequently set a precedence for Kretzschmar’s appeal
to a method of understanding the images and references that disclose the
spirit of a piece. Accordingly for him, musical hermeneutics’ reach extends
beyond the certainty of form by discerning the concrete ideas and images
behind it.
Kretzschmar’s quarrel with Hanslick set into relief the interpretive
function of language as the means of grasping instrumental music’s
essential value. By identifying music’s “capacity for speech,”175—the
source, for Kretzschmar, of its chief value—with the reforms instantiated
by the seconda prattica and the neo-German school, Kretzschmar’s
program coupled the mimetic impulse of the first with the proclivity of
the second for definite representations of poetic ideas. Linking music’s
imitative and representative functions together within the prevailing
epistemological context sedimented the difference between musical her-
meneutics and an aesthetics of form. In a sense, this difference constituted
musical hermeneutics’ defining moment; in coming to the aid of musical
understanding, the interpretation of a work’s expressive value points
beyond the confines of a work’s form. To be sure, cultural musicologists’
interest in music’s cultural, social, and political value and significances
have drawn interpretive criticism in other directions. At the same time, a
common antipathy toward formalist abstractions provides a thread of
continuity, despite the shift in interpretive objectives. Kramer’s concept of
hermeneutic windows will provide a better opportunity to examine more
closely the extent to which this common antipathy impacts contemporary
musical hermeneutics.
Kretzschmar’s view of music’s representational deficiencies provides a
first indication of the standpoint adopted in opposition to formalist
62
precepts. According to him, the capacity of tones to refer concretely to

objects, characters, or feelings differed from that of words. However,
music’s power to express the inner life of the soul where words fail was
both the sign of music’s aesthetic superiority and the mark of its deficit
with respect to its representational power. In promoting musical
hermeneutics to the highest rank of music theory, Kretzschmar capitalized
on Wagner’s view that absolute music’s separation from poetry and dance
called for the defining word. As a “born auxiliary art,”176 music’s intended
meaning stood in need of a verbalizing discourse through which to
conceptualize its meaning and content. Accordingly, the fact that music
had “no organ for names and designations”177 compelled musical her-
meneutics to divine the composer’s intentions by recreating the thought
enclosed within a work’s form.
Music’s inability to refer directly to nature or to the world, which in
poetry and the plastic arts conventionally denoted their subject matter,
was therefore the requisite condition of an interpretive program that
aimed at discerning the spirit of a work by reconstructing the process
through which the whole of the piece is built up from its smallest details.
Kretzschmar’s recourse to hermeneutical principles turned against
Hanslick’s defense of absolute music on this point. Through revealing the
soul of a work’s form, which as a means to expression is the vehicle of the
spirit poured into it by its creator, musical hermeneutics, for Kretzschmar,
constituted the essential, indispensable aid to explaining and under-
standing instrumental music’s true ideational content.178 By drawing
encouragement from Wagner’s treatment of melos, Kretzschmar deve-
loped an interpretive method in which the knowledge of a work’s formal
construction was merely a preparatory stage for a “methodological
schooling of musical feeling.”179 Kretzschmar’s conviction that “singing
and early occupation with good vocal music are an excellent means of
learning to understand themes and melodies intelligently”180 reversed
Hoffman’s judgment that Beethoven’s instrumental music leaves all
definite feelings behind. Whereas Hoffman celebrated the sublime quality
of Beethoven’s instrumental music, Kretzschmar regarded the expression
of a work’s spiritual and mental substance as accessible to the concertizing
work of musical hermeneutics.
Hermann Kretzschmar’s aesthetics of themes therefore remedied the
perceived weaknesses of formal analysis by identifying music’s structural
features and procedures with a substantive expressive meaning. Hence by
attributing feelings and affects to the development of motives and themes,
Kretzschmar claimed to penetrate a musical work’s form in order to
illuminate its soul.181 Overcoming the formalist tenor of Hanslick’s
aesthetics necessitated attributing a definable content to the tonal pro-
gression of motives and themes. Hence for Kretzschmar, thematic
interpretation was the “alpha and omega of the clear and conscious
63
enjoyment of music.”182 By supplementing formal descriptions with

explanations of the express meaning intended by the composer, thematic
interpretation provided the means for redressing Hanslick’s anti-
humanistic program. In contrast to Hanslick’s concept of the beautiful in
music, Kretzschmar believed that feelings expressed by a composer and
re-created in the listener comprised music’s real meaning and effect. By
converting sensuous impressions into aesthetically meaningful repre-
sentations, feelings manifest music’s true spiritual essence. As an aid to
understanding, musical hermeneutics crowned music theory by explaining
and clarifying the feelings that animate the movement of tonal forms.
The task Kretzschmar therefore set musical hermeneutics consisted in
extracting the “affections from the tones and giv[ing] . . . the framework
of their development in words.”183 This task defined the role of musical
hermeneutics within the cultural climate to which Hanslick’s and
Wagner’s aesthetic agendas were also subject. Since for Kretzschmar,
feeling was the “translation of what is heard into the spiritual and
mental”184 content of music, musical hermeneutics completed the listener’s
musical understanding by rendering feelings conceptually intelligible.185
The drama that Kretzschmar traces in J. S. Bach’s C major fugue from
The Well-Tempered Clavier illustrates how, by treating motives and
themes as the “speech content of music,”186 and by reading rhythmically
animated falling and rising intervals as expressing different degrees of
mental appeasement and excitation, an aesthetics of themes sets out to
ascribe an affective significance to a work’s structural attributes and
thematic development. According to Kretzschmar’s interpretation, the
fugue’s subject is the kernel for a development that transfigures feelings of
resignation into joy. (The rise from tonic to dominant and the subsequent
descent from the submediant to the mediant traced by the fugue subject
shroud this subject’s central impulse to overcome a feeling of oppression
with a sense of melancholy.187) By consummating the prelude’s quiet
lament, the character of the fugue conveys a sense of sublime spiritual
ascent, as if the composer, raising his eyes, “says to himself piously and
resolutely: Let come what may!”188 The struggle between joyful flight,
represented by upward melodic inflection, and resignation, expressed by
the bass’s intoning of the subject at the close of the first exposition, reaches
its apex in the fugue’s closing measures when peace and joy resound
victoriously over the C sustained organ point. For Kretzschmar, the feeling
of inner peace that emerges from the struggle between sorrow and hope
illuminates the hidden soul of the fugue subject’s melancholic tone as the
fugue achieves its ultimate poetic goal. No independent logic drives the
fugue’s progress. Rather, the mental content that unfolds, as it were,
through the process of its development for Kretzschmar corresponds to
Bach’s intention to express the feeling of sublime peace. Kretzschmar’s
subordination, to his aesthetics of themes, of the fugue’s sublimation of
64
the mood of finitude—a mood that the feeling of melancholy makes

conscious—gave the drama played out by the prelude and fugue its
narrative cast. Accordingly, the fugue’s form appeared as the vessel for the
spirit placed there by the composer. Kretzschmar therefore identified this
spirit with the way Bach constructed the character of the fugue from
motives and themes, whose affective significance Kretzschmar identified
with specific features of their tonal configurations. By treating musical
form as a shell harboring the mental content of a work, Kretzschmar
vested the relation between the part and the whole that comprises the
hermeneutical circle with a programmatic significance. In coming to the
aid of the listener’s critical enjoyment, Kretzschmar’s aesthetics of themes
consequently supplemented a description of the fugue’s formal features
with an explanation of its intended spiritual essence.
Despite his antipathy towards Hanslick, Kretzschmar’s ambition to
recover music’s humanistic value did not escape the cultural ethos that
placed the standard of knowledge for the human and social sciences on the
natural sciences’ epistemological footing.189 In rejecting the romantic
notion of somnambulistic production, Kretzschmar promoted the
conceptual intelligibility of a work’s humanistic content at the same time
that he installed the romantic ideal of authorial intent at the heart of his
interpretive program. His musical hermeneutics therefore advanced the
connoisseur’s comprehension by providing a means for describing the
character of a work’s thematic-organic elements, while simultaneously
uniting the impulse to identify a work’s meaning with the composer’s
inner life with the positivist proclivities he abhorred in Hanslick’s
aesthetics. In a sense, Kretzschmar’s appeal to the aesthetic doctrine of
affects reanimated the mimetic principle enshrined in rhetorical theories of
music’s imitative significance. Yet, under the influence of Wagner and the
neo-German school, Kretzschmar also gave this principle a particular
twist; musical hermeneutics attained its insuperable theoretical rank as the
method for identifying the spiritual essence contained within a work’s
structural organization by means of its programmatic thrust. Ultimately,
the correspondence between form and content, and between intra-
musical processes and their extramusical referents, was a feature of the
epistemological function that musical hermeneutics came to play. This
correspondence defined the truth of music’s representations. As such, the
imitation or representation in music of extramusical phenomena fell under
the discursive explanation of the referent of intramusical processes.
A Critical Juncture
The decisive question that emerges from this confrontation between
Hanslick and Kretzschmar concerns the manner in which Kretzschmar’s
interpretive strategy overcame the reductivist tendencies of Hanslick’s
65
aesthetics. By capitalizing on the analogy Hanslick drew between the

treatment of the principal character in a novel and the way a composer
places a theme “into different situations and surroundings, in varying
occurrences and moods,”190 Kretzschmar set narrative interpretation
above the purely sonorous play of tonal forms. His declaration: “In the
sense of a solely musical content, there is no absolute music!”191 reversed
Hanslick’s pronouncement that music’s sole content consisted in its
resounding movement. Forced by Hanslick’s rejection of absolute music’s
dependence upon a metaphysical ideal to acknowledge the difference
between music and the other arts, Kretzschmar seized on music’s
representational deficiency in promoting his suggestion for a musical
hermeneutics. Faced with a “failure of language”192 on the part of music’s
native power for expressing definite feelings, ideas, and thoughts, musical
hermeneutics was to overcome music’s representational deficiencies by
supplementing formal descriptions with programmatic interpretations. In
repudiating the romantic claim that, as the product of somnambulistic
creation, music’s meaning is conceptually inaccessible, Kretzschmar
succeeded in placing musical hermeneutics on an epistemological footing.
Despite his opposition to Hanslick, Kretzschmar founded his aesthetics of
themes on the same terrain.
Conversely, Hanslick’s single-minded focus on the idea that music was
incapable of representing definite ideas or feelings contributed immensely
to the occultation of his rudimentary insights into music’s pheno-
menological character. No doubt, his concern to distance himself from the
metaphysics of feeling he abhorred, and his enthusiasm for the modern
scientific prospects of his day, forced his aesthetics onto empirical ground.
At the same time his assertions that music consists in the play of tonal
forms, which the listener grasps by following the movement through
which a work unfolds, have a fitting counterpart in Gadamer’s analysis
of the phenomenon of play. For Gadamer, the medial sense of play is
primary. Accordingly, “play is the occurrence of the movement as
such.”193 The autonomy that Gadamer identifies with play is therefore
radically distinct from the aesthetic autonomy vested in cultural works
through their conscious differentiation as aesthetic objects. The funda-
mental question concerning music’s power to speak turns on a pheno-
menological analysis of music’s capacity to communicate a meaning it
bears within itself. In wresting music’s mimetic character from the
prejudices of the representative function attributed to it in the querelle des
anciens et des modernes (and which Kretzschmar subsequently shifted
onto his musical hermeneutics’ narrativizing terrain), I will have occasion
to draw upon Gadamer’s phenomenology of the work of art. Hanslick’s
intention to place aesthetics on an empirical footing covered over those
insights that attest to the structure of the experience of music. In contrast,
Gadamer’s analysis of play opens a path to a consideration of the language
66
of art that breaks with the accepted notion of mimetic representation. This
break, in turn, signals the watershed difference between musical her-
meneutics’ epistemological function and a properly hermeneutical under-
standing of music’s mimetic capacity for redescribing affective dimensions
of our inherence in the world.
The difference between Kretzschmar’s and Hanslick’s aesthetics
therefore delineates a critical juncture. On the one hand, the metaphysics
of music that in the nineteenth century raised instrumental music’s sublime
ineffability to the level of the absolute gave way to a mode of thought
inclined toward positive knowledge. On the other hand, the representative
function that Kretzschmar recovered, as it were, from Hanslick’s attempt
to strip aesthetics of its romantic excesses remained secretly indebted to
this metaphysical standpoint. Kretzschmar’s admission that musical
hermeneutics’ justification lay with music’s innate inability to objectify
images or concepts in the exacting manner of language reprised the
romantic notion of music’s metaphysical dignity, albeit in a different
register. Consequently supplementing formal analyses with affective
descriptions filled the lacuna opened by instrumental music’s romantic
elevation. Kretzschmar’s aesthetics of themes paradoxically reinscribed
the concept of truth that authorizes music’s metaphysical elevation.
Music’s metaphysical elevation, it will be recalled, rested on a concept of
language that regarded language as the subject’s means of mastering the
world. Hence to the extent that Kretzschmar redresses the gap separating
music’s transcendent ineffability from a knowledge of reality, his musical
hermeneutics reinforced the illusion of the adequacy of a representation
that equates music’s expressions with the exteriorization of interior
thoughts, feelings, and images. The illusion of the adequacy of the
representation, which will later enable Lawrence Kramer to place music
in the metaphysical position occupied by language, already haunts
Kretzschmar’s aesthetics of themes. To the degree that a true under-
standing of instrumental music is seen to depend upon hermeneutical
methods such as Kretzschmar proposes, music’s representational
deficiencies can only legitimately be asserted within the confines of the
representative illusion in which this assertion circles. In contrast, the
question of the truth of the representation leads beyond a critique of
Kretzschmar’s understanding of music’s lack of independence.
Ultimately, the problem of music’s nonrepresentational character rests
in its entirety on the attempt to solve the difficulty of music’s repre-
sentational value within the conceptual framework of representative
thought. Whether music’s meaning is attributed to empirically observable
structures and processes, as it was for Hanslick, or whether this meaning
is a result of interpretive ascriptions, as it was for Kretzschmar, the truth
attributed to these meanings belongs to the same order of knowledge.
In the next chapter, I will take up the question that Kretzschmar’s riposte
67
to Hanslick leaves in abeyance: whether, in deconstructing music’s

institutional separation from language, criticism breaks with this order of
knowledge. Contemporary ripostes to formalist and metaphysical conceits
also have recourse to demystifying methods for unmasking absolute
music’s transcendent autonomy. However much music’s and language’s
positioning on opposite sides of a disciplinary divide justifies dismantling
this divide’s supporting intellectual, political, and ideological dogma,
every strategy for deciphering music’s meaning that follows in the path of
Kretzschmar’s quarrel with Hanslick remains suspect. Consequently, the
critique I develop in the next chapter initiates the turn to a hermeneutics
informed by some of the phenomenological insights that Kretzschmar’s
rejoinder to Hanslick covered over.
68
5
DECONSTRUCTING THE
D I S C I P L I N A RY D I V I D E
The idea that absolute music is a disciplinary construct that shields a

sacrosanct aesthetic object from both cultural analysis and social critique
marks a decisive turning point in the discourse concerning music’s
meaning, value and significance. In contrast to the romantic elevation of
art to its own autonomous standpoint, and in opposition to the formalist
practice of abstracting works from their sustaining life-contexts, a “new”
musicology turned to semiotics, narrative theory, and cultural studies to
liberate criticism from traditional musicology’s methodological, political,
and ideological constraints.194 A new orthodoxy replaced the formalist
and positivistic dogma of modern musicology. Under the banner of post-
modern musicology, or sometimes postmodern musicologies (in acknow-
ledgment of the multiple and polyvalent approaches and orientations
adopted in response to new interpretive challenges opened in breaching
modern musicology’s disciplinary walls), the idea of absolute music fell to
its demystifying critique; the chimera of absolute music was the last
ideological defense against cultural musicology’s critical interests in
music’s social and political meaning and value.
The claim that the aesthetic is the only domain where the human spirit
is truly at home clearly justifies the intent to demystify the feeling of
absolute music’s otherworldliness. After all, the sense that instrumental
music expresses moods and feelings that cannot be grasped conceptually
or even translated poetically owes its institutional efficacy to the romantic
metaphysics of absolute music. Set against cultural studies’ concern with
music’s and art’s ideological institution as an autonomous aesthetic
sphere, absolute music’s otherworldliness masks the real significance
of absolute music’s romantic consecration. When, with the rise of the
bourgeois cult of Bildung, culture became one of the weapons best suited
to advancing oneself socially, the claim that music opened a spiritual realm
free from material exigencies and want erected a formidable barrier
against socially self-conscious critique. For a politics of music criticism
rooted in the struggle against romantic and formalist conceits, the pretense
69
DECONSTRUCTING THE DISCIPLINARY DIVIDE
that music transcends its worldly contexts and conditions condemns the
idea of absolute music and its aesthetic autonomy as disciplinary myth.
There is no need to question the commitment of musicologists and critics
to dismantling this myth. The growing body of musicological and
ethnomusicological works devoted to music’s cultural, social, political,
and historical significance attests to myriad new insights and under-
standings drawn from multiple vantage points and perspectives. The
impact of positioning criticism through the vis-à-vis of absolute music’s
aesthetic autonomy will constitute the focus of a more sustained
investigation into the inimitable connection between the hermeneutics and
the politics of music criticism in Chapters 8 and 9. This investigation will
provide the occasion to reconsider the relation between aesthetics and
politics, approached asymptotically by my earlier reflections on the
impossibility of deriving music’s critical vehemence from the fact of its
social emancipation.
The critique of the transposition of the principle of interpretive fidelity
onto the social plane in Chapter 2 anticipated my present interest in
the deconstruction of absolute music’s institutional value. The con-
frontation reconstructed between Hanslick and Kretzschmar had the
singular advantage of bringing to the fore the seeming dependence of
musical hermeneutics on a view of language that was itself instrumental
in elevating absolute music to its metaphysical place. In a sense,
Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics reprised the concept of mimesis that
Chapter 3, which was devoted to the history of the rise of absolute music,
showed to be a function of representative thought. The concept of
language that Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics tacitly employs is one
that, Ricoeur reminds us, representative thought espouses “when it treats
language as Ausdruck, ‘expression’—that is, as the exteriorization of the
interior, and hence as the domination of the outside by the inside.”195 This
concept of language upholds the illusion of “instrumental mastery attained
by a subjectivity”196 that claims to be transparent to itself. In passing over
this concept in silence, Kretzschmar ratified the notion of imitation that
took shape with the advent of the episteme Tomlinson identified with the
rise of representative thought. Critical musicologists concerned with the
representations of subjectivity in music could not ignore the institutional
function of the difference between music and language.197 Denuncia-
tions of the pretense on the part of the subject to posit itself as master of
meaning, condemnations of the idea that the subject is transparent to itself,
and the suspicion that language erases the traces of representative
thought’s metaphysical illusion, all conspire to subvert the chimera of
instrumental music’s sublime ineffability. Consequently, the struggle
against music’s institutional separation from language became the first
front in the fight over music’s meaning.
70
The Music–Language Divide

The conviction that language is the dominant force behind the cultural
production of meaning within Western communicative systems led to a
radical reevaluation of romantic ideals and formalist practices predicated
on the principle of music’s aesthetic autonomy. Where music’s eman-
cipation from language invested absolute music with metaphysical dignity,
the distinction between music and language provided a methodological
bulwark against critical interpretations of music’s social and cultural
relevance. Ultimately, the difference between music and language took on
a political tenor. Where Adorno’s critical project and debates over
aesthetics and politics concerned music’s critical relation to social reality,
postmodern challenges to modern musicology’s defenses of high art
music’s cultural value placed the distinction between music’s aesthetic
autonomy and critical discourses on music’s social significance and value
at the forefront. Music’s emancipation from language consequently
constituted the strategic staging ground for deconstructing music’s
otherworldliness in at least one crucial respect: by reinforcing the ideal of
music’s separation from reality, the music–language divide drew critical
strategies aimed at identifying music’s social, cultural, and political
meanings back onto the terrain vacated, so to speak, by music’s meta-
physical elevation.
The turn to musical hermeneutics in the context of postmodern
challenges comes at a critical moment. Through supplementing formal
analyses with extramusical ascriptions, interpretive strategies collected
under the rubric of musical hermeneutics redress, as it were, the supposed
representational deficiencies rooted in formalist and metaphysical
precepts. Music’s emancipation from language therefore marks the
contested site of a disciplinary divide that separates the once privileged
poetic conceit of sublime ineffability from critical discourses armed with
cultural studies, feminist criticism, and poststructuralist critique. Once
bourgeois aesthetic culture had seized upon the romantic devotion to
music, absolute music’s transcendent ineffability became the sign of a
domain that demanded to be dismantled. In flooding the interior world of
the subject with inward emotions and feelings, absolute music rose above
all representational standards of verisimilitude and truth. Placing music
above language as the innermost expression of the spirit of human longing
removed absolute music from the world. Absolute music’s ineffability was
therefore already more than the sign of its metaphysical transcendence of
the real; consigned to a privileged cultural sphere by the aesthetics’ social
institution, the conceit of a “language beyond language” bore the mark of
the complicity between the idea of absolute music and the cult of art
religion’s bourgeois foundations. The deconstruction of the music–
language divide consequently intended to demolish the ground on which
71
subjective reason was erected. Mounting a critical assault on the myth of

absolute music therefore had the larger ambition of reversing the effects of
divorcing music from reality. Accordingly, music’s worldliness was to be
the index of its real meaning in contrast to, and in contradistinction with,
the putative truth of its gnostic otherworldliness.
Lawrence Kramer’s contention that music, as traditional musicology
conceived it, does not exist, takes aim at the intuitional authority vested
in music. He therefore intends to subvert music’s claim to autonomy by
attributing music’s freedom from the constraints of language to its
institution as the sacrosanct object of a discipline devoted to defending
and justifying its own aesthetic stature. For him, music’s aesthetic
differentiation conceals the inexorable reality of the material conditions
and circumstances surrounding its creation, performance, and reception;
the supposed immediacy of a pure musical experience inaccessible to
language or thought proscribes any critical understanding of the com-
municative economies in which music is caught up. Music’s sacrosanct
autonomy is traditional musicology’s first and last line of defense.
Correlatively, through forcing musicologists to either: “use language to
present positive knowledge about the contexts”198 of music’s provenance,
performance practices, and notation; or develop a technical vocabulary
that “asymptotically draws language so close to the axis of ‘musical
knowledge’”199 as to minimize its misrepresentation, the difference
between music’s nonlinguistic immediacy and musicological knowledge
precludes criticism as a form of knowledge. The difference between music
as a figure of immediate presence and as the object of musicological
knowledge places music in the metaphysical position otherwise reserved
for speech. Kramer concludes that the consequences for criticism are
disastrous: by setting epistemological limits that deny language access to
the immediate reality of music, the resulting schema stigmatizes any
attempt to “speak about or like or in some sense with music”200 as
rhetorically and subjectively rather than in a scientifically descriptive way.
Predicating music’s metaphysical stature on language’s status as the
instrument of a subjective mastery—a characterization that I previously
attributed to a modern conception of music’s mimetic character—proved
to be decisive. Grounding music’s purported unworldliness in its gnostic
immediacy reproduces the distinction that founds the difference between
music and language in the first place. Moreover, the delegitimation of
criticism in contrast to historiographical or technical-scientific methods is
itself a function of the distinction that privileges music’s ineffable imme-
diacy. Music’s aesthetic autonomy, too, is a function of the distinction
wrought by music’s metaphysical elevation above representative thought’s
conception of language. From this vantage point, which I share in part,
music’s unworldliness is the sign of its illusory transcendence of the real.
Kramer consequently maintains that from a postmodern perspective,
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“[n]either music nor anything else can be other than worldly through and
through.”201 Yet, under the sign of the music–language divide, music’s
social alterity, which for Adorno is the condition of its aesthetic truth,
becomes the emblem of language’s authorization of music’s metaphysical
essence.
Authorizing absolute music’s metaphysical character on this basis
effectively divorced musical experiences from musicology’s episte-
mological field. Where music’s expressions were regarded as imme-
diately accessible to feeling, the recourse to musicological discourse
constituted a form of objective knowledge that alienated the subject from
her experiences. For Kramer, the linguocentric predicament that Charles
Seeger attributed to the difference between music’s and language’s
communicative systems exemplified the paralyzing dilemma that ensued.
According to Seeger, the distinction between a knowledge of music
objectified in language, and musical knowledge acquired through
performing and listening, posed the challenge of integrating knowledge
acquired by speaking about music with “musical knowledge of music.”202
Confronted with the different systems of linguistic and musical
communication, musicologists made recourse to the rhetorical figure of
synecdoche. Seeger concluded that using “the less comprehensive terms
of speech”203 to communicate music’s more comprehensive terms of
communication is an instance of “synecdoche gone wild.”204 The use
of this rhetorical figure enabled musicological discourse—that is, the
discourse about music that produces musicological knowledge—to
operate upon its object by bridging the difference between a practical
knowledge of music and a disciplinary one. Seeger ratified the disciplinary
distinction between these two forms of knowledge by identifying them
with two different communicative systems. From a methodological
standpoint, his formulation of the linguocentric predicament para-
doxically reaffirmed the poetic conceit of an ineffable musical experience
inaccessible to language and hence beyond musicology’s critical reach.
And yet, in recognizing the predicament of representing music’s
significance and value in a medium of expression foreign to it, Seeger’s
tacit acknowledgment of music’s capacity to communicate an experience
whose meaning proves to be inexhaustible opens an avenue of inquiry into
music’s power of expression that is overlooked by the epistemological aims
of postmodern knowledge.
Kramer’s critique of Seeger sets the stage for Kramer’s strategic
adaptation of musical hermeneutics. For him, Seeger’s notion of a “music
knowledge of music” fuses the means and object of knowledge within the
circle of reflection: “The first ‘music,’ designating a means of knowledge,
folds over on the second ‘music,’ designating the object of knowledge.
Knowledge itself, both conceptually and rhetorically, is enveloped by the
identity of, fill the (non-)interval between, the one music and the other.”205
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Moreover, Kramer’s deconstruction capitalizes on the displacement of

speech by music as the “privileged figure of presence.”206 Accordingly, the
“nonidentity between speech as the means and music as the object of
knowledge,”207 which Kramer argues abrades knowledge, becomes the
focal point of his critique. From his vantage point, the epistemological
limits placed upon language by representative thought’s conception of it
attend the wearing away of music’s worldliness. Authorized by the idea
that expression consists in the exteriorization of an interior thought, idea,
or feeling, music withdraws into the interior recesses of subjectivity by
virtue of its metaphysical elevation. The difference between speech and
music therefore positions Kramer’s deconstruction of music’s fictitious
autonomy within the schema that authorizes this difference. Kramer’s
deconstruction of music’s erasure of its worldly significance attacks the
linguocentric predicament on its own epistemological terrain. The
difficulty for Kramer, consequently, is to subvert music’s culturally
sacrosanct value while avoiding the sense of transparency and subjective
mastery that he condemns in modernist musicology.
Hermeneutic Windows
Kramer’s deconstruction of the music–language divide safeguards music’s
semantic potential by authorizing the ascription of extramusical meanings
associated with narratives, images, and texts. According to him, “there is
and can be no fundamental difference between interpreting a written
text and interpreting a work of music—or any other product or practice
of culture.”208 For Kramer, the ekphrastic fear “of muting music with
words”209 only inhibits music criticism from drawing connections between
music’s formal processes and features, and extramusical meanings.
Accordingly, the analogies and correlations between musical processes and
figures, and constructions of gender, sexuality, and the like, constitute the
sites of music’s discursive content. The lack in music of “a word- and
sentence-level semantics”210 in no way proscribes a meaning that Kramer
attributes to the higher-level organization of a work. On the contrary,
meaning at the higher level of the work’s organization as a whole, Kramer
insists, is dependent on the dynamic interrelationship of elements, an
interrelationship that is intrinsic to verbal as well as musical compositions.
By drawing a distinction between medium and message, Kramer appeals
to ekphrastic interpretation as justifying linguistic representations of
meanings configured by the particular arrangement of a work’s materials.
(Ekphrasis, Kramer explains, “is the literary representation of a pictorial
representation. . . . Ekphrasis is accordingly a technique of visualization,
a means of training the eye. But it is also a hermeneutic technique, a means
of commenting on what is visualized and therefore of training the eye to
see meaningfully.”211) As such, ekphrasis justifies paraphrasing meanings
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that are conveyed through musical devices. Since for Kramer, the meaning
of a work is caught up in the communicative processes through which
this meaning is produced, “[w]hat this means in practice is the con-
struction of paraphrases and parables that take some part of the work’s
cultural framework as their own context and condition of possibility.
Interpretations so formed suggest, by exemplifying, the kind of sense that
the work could have made in that context, under those conditions.”212 In
place of an interpretation aimed at divining the composer’s intentions,
ekphrastic speculation locates the work’s meaning in a general com-
municative economy of circulating signs.
Two questions immediately come to mind: (1) “Does this appeal
to ekphrasis escape the schema of representation that gives rise to a
metaphysics of presence?” and (2) “Does the epistemic break between
the critic’s explanations and the ontological vehemence of the work
presuppose the configurating operation at work in schematizing a
composition, or a passage of it, as a temporal whole?”213 Kramer, it would
seem, privileges the working of “medium-specific elements into compre-
hensible patterns”214 to convey a work’s higher-level message at the
expense of the work’s power to communicate the meaning it expresses
through unfolding its temporal course. This theme, which will be the
subject of the following two chapters, stands out against the horizon of
Kramer’s musical hermeneutics. In this respect, his embrace of the problem
of music’s representational significance brings music criticism to the cusp
of a properly hermeneutical treatment of the theory of metaphor.
As Kramer sees it, meeting the critical responsibility of siting musical
experiences in the worlds of composers, performers, and listeners requires
that music’s discursive meanings are “definite enough to support critical
interpretations comparable in depth, exactness, and density of connection
to interpretations of literary texts and cultural practices.”215 Accordingly,
he sets out three types of hermeneutic windows that are also strategic
interpretive methods. The inclusion of a text, title, program notes, or even
expressive markings opens a window onto meanings suggested by the
interplay between textual and musical forms of expression. Inclusions of
citations that refer or allude to literary works, visual images, or historical
moments or styles constitute a second type of window. Structural tropes
provide yet another opportunity for registering music’s meaning.
According to Kramer, this third hermeneutic window is the most implicit
and most powerful of the three. Defined as a “structural procedure,
capable of various practical realizations, that also functions as a typical
expressive act within a certain cultural/historical framework,”216 a
structural trope assumes an expressive function within the general
economy of the communicative acts in which it operates. By implanting the
“hermeneutical attitude within the object of interpretation,”217 structural
tropes serve as interpretive windows onto myriad discursive affiliations of
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a work’s formal features and processes with socially constructed

representations of gender, sexuality, etc. Accordingly, formal procedures
become an expressive act by virtue of the way that these tropes operate
within the field of their production.
Kramer’s reading of Haydn’s The Creation illustrates his hermeneutic
method. To account for the “movement from chaos to creation”218 that,
he argues, represents Enlightenment aspirations, Kramer turns to religious
and mythical discourses and narratives to interpret the significance of
musical figures. Following Tovey’s lead, Kramer identifies the sullen,
opening orchestral thrust on an unharmonized C as the most chaotic
element of the first movement. For him, this introductory movement, Die
Vorstellung des Chaos (“The Representation of Chaos”), together with
the following recitative and chorus on the first lines of Genesis, play out
the Christian creation myth. In the aftermath of the opening forte attack
and the fading of this Urklang into silence, Haydn begins to assemble the
“raw materials of harmony”219 by successively adding tones to build the
“chaos” chord (C—E—A) (Example 5.1). From this unstable harmony,
the music prefigures a semblance of consonance and stability before a
second orchestral thrust irrupts only to fade back to the chaos chord. This
cycle is the first of three cycles that expand the music’s delineation of the
progression from the chaos chord through dissonances leading to the
dominant of C minor. On Kramer’s reading, the cumulative effect of the
ascending scales and arpeggios gives Haydn’s representation of chaos a
sense of urgency that bespeaks “a desire to be lifted into cosmos.”220 Not
only do the ascending musical figures resemble an ascending scale of being
in accordance with the “traditional visualization of the cosmos as
spatial/spiritual hierarchy,”221 but the frustrated musical expectations of
the representation of chaos’s cadential resolution “betoken a plea for the
voicing of the Word as the lux fiat.”222 On this reading, the staging of the
primal consonance representing the penetrating light of creation—the
C major triad “creation cadence”223—has the metaphorical value of
invoking a dawning harmonia mundi while praising the Creator who calls
the world into existence (Example 5.2).
Example 5.1 Haydn, The Creation, mm. 1–5
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Example 5.2 Haydn, The Creation, mm. 25–28
The political force of the image of Enlightenment Kramer draws from

Haydn’s “The Representation of Chaos” ratifies his claim concerning the
tropological nature of music’s representational value. Consequently, for
him, the resemblances between the image of creation’s emergence from
chaos, and humanity’s emancipation from the darkness of myth and
superstition, harbor the specter of authoritarian reason. As a utopian
ritual celebrating the Enlightenment promise of harmony and human
perfectibility, the portrayal in The Creation of the ordering of creation
from chaos applies equally to the “policing of society.”224 Hence The
Creation’s ideological power emerges from its voicing of a principle of
order shrouded in the divine mystery of reason’s primal alliance with
transcendent truth. Once illuminated by the demystifying logic of
Kramer’s hermeneutic methods, The Creation’s simulation of reason and
truth falls prey to postmodern suspicions of the Enlightenment project.
On this reading, the representation of the Word (Logos) puts an end to
chaos by appropriating the disconcerting musical logic behind the chaos
chord’s cyclic return without fully mastering it. (One might reasonably ask
whether the sublimation of the sense of chaos to which the Die Vorstellung
des Chaos gives voice expresses a feeling of joy that attests to the
existential deepening of a feeling of dependence at the heart of existence.)
Kramer’s account reiterates the postmodern orthodoxy that inverts
Kant’s concept of the sublime.225 As the personification of chaos, the
monstrosity of the disconcerting logic behind the return of the chaos chord
destabilizes Haydn’s representation of the Logos as the ordering power of
creation. The jouissance of this disconcerting logic escapes Haydn’s
representation of the Logos as this ordering power. Against reason’s divine
word and the cosmic reformation it institutes, Kramer holds up the
sense of deformation he identifies with the representation of chaos. The
jouissance that escapes representation is accordingly the site of the excess
and lack that signifies the impossibility of mastering the world that
language calls into being. Hence this excess and lack is the sign of a musical
remainder. As the supplement to Haydn’s representation of Enlightenment
reason’s emergent order, this musical remainder serves as the trace of the
impossibility of language to master the world it calls into existence within
77
the interpretative framework imposed by the doxa that pits music’s tran-
scendent autonomy against the world’s linguistic domination.
Jouissance
The appeal of a tactic that attributes the sense of immediacy once reserved
for absolute music’s sublime ineffability to a play of excess and lack is
difficult to resist. After all, this tactic challenges romantic sensibilities that
privilege the expression of feelings as representations of the composer’s
inward spirit. As such, it dislodges music—and especially instrumental
music—from its metaphysical position as an intimation of the absolute.
The impossibility of mastering the world conceptually by means of
language accordingly becomes a recurring theme. However, it is difficult
to shake the notion that the tenacity with which Kramer pursues the
destruction of music’s metaphysical aura is in proportion to this theme’s
indebtedness to representative thought. This is the place to recall that in
treating language as expression (Ausdruck), representative thought defines
the truth of the representation as the adequation of an exterior mental
image with the exteriority of a real thing. The metaphysical character of
the truth of the representation, Ricoeur reminds us, stems from the claim
that the “interior presence [the mental image] and the exterior presence
[something real] can be made present to each other through some process
of adequation.”226 Representation, it would therefore seem, “should be
denounced as the reduplication of presence, as the re-presenting of
presence.”227 Guided by postmodern suspicions of modernist subjectivity
and its hubris with respect to its self-transparency and instrumental
mastery of the world, the destruction of the metaphysics of presence could
not fail to impact critiques of romantic and formalist conceptions of
music’s aesthetic autonomy. Kramer’s strategy is in this respect exemplary.
For him, “the interplay between a symbolic object and its context . . .
cannot be made explicitly apparent otherwise than through acts of
interpretation”228 licensed, as it were, by deconstructing the music–
language divide. At the same time, the sense of immediacy once vested in
absolute music’s transcendent ineffability stubbornly resists assimilation
to ekphrastic paraphrase. This resistance is the index of the musical
experience’s inexhaustibility. As such, it marks the site of a difference that
escapes the subject’s will to mastery. Converting the sense of ineffability,
once reserved for music’s sublime expressions, into the mark of this
difference completes the destruction of the metaphysics of absolute music.
Consequently, the difference between music’s ineffability and language’s
conceptualizing role finds a new meaning as the sign of a remainder.
The conversion of music’s semblance of immediacy into the site of an
immediate pleasure crowns Kramer’s strategy. Displaced from its privi-
leged position as a venue for transcendence, music becomes the site of the
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kind of excess and lack that signifies its disseminating force. Accordingly,
the play between a work’s autonomy and the contingencies of its creation,
performance, and reception is the locus of pure jouissance that, under the
sign of absolute music’s erasure, escapes representation.229 Capitalizing on
Derrida’s notion that “metaphor . . . opens the wandering of the
semantic,”230 Kramer legitimizes both music’s excess and lack, and his
strategy in a single stroke. Not only is “musical representation . . . a mode
of metaphor,”231 but its tropological aspect is also the “immediate source
of its meaning, its hermeneutic window.”232 Treating metaphor as a trope
sanctions discursive affiliations with a variety of discourses whose socio-
historical, psychical, and rhetorical forces infiltrate music’s formal
procedures and characteristics. The unlimited potential for music to
register shared experiences that are grounded in a common social milieu
therefore charges musical hermeneutics with ascribing meanings embodied
by medium-specific patterns internal to a work’s organization. Set within
a general communicative economy of circulating signs, the dissemination
of music’s meaning destabilizes the symbolic order of verbal utterances
and written discourses. The aim of all this openness, Kramer explains,
“is to achieve a vital connection with the remainder, something best
approached on the ground of the figurative practice,”233 which he
described as ekphrasis.
The objectives of postmodern knowledge therefore had a doubly
strategic advantage. First, locating music’s meaning in a system of
circulating signs distanced postmodern knowledge’s epistemological tenets
from the accusation leveled against the metaphysics of presence. The
tropological aspect of the musical representation in this respect guarded
against any single adequation between intramusical and extramusical
referents. Second, the sempiternal play of differences and deferrals of
meanings opened by the endless, and infinitely contingent, corre-
spondences stemming from musical representation’s tropological aspect,
warranted identifying the performative character of the communicative
act with music’s immediacy effects. Since according to Kramer, language
“always alienates what it makes accessible,”234 any attempt to capture an
experience, including the experience of a musical work, finds itself
confronted by the dissemination of a meaning that exceeds its signification
within the communicative act. Following A. J. Austin’s speech-act theory,
Kramer identifies music’s performative value with the illocutionary force
of an utterance. Where the constative dimension of an utterance has a
locutionary meaning, the “performative dimension manifests itself in
[its] illocutionary force, [that is, in] the pressure or power that a speech
act exerts on a situation.”235 Kramer’s characterization of the speech
act’s illocutionary force lends itself to its tactical alignment with the
pure jouissance of an act that exceeds its representation. Placed in the
thick of the communicative economy in which it operates, the musical
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representation is itself a performative act. Accordingly, jouissance is both

the figure and sign of “unrepresentable bliss,236 which as a function of the
tropological aspect of the musical representation’s meanings, has as its
source the interminable differences that the communicative act’s recurring
iterations continually set into play.
Music as Supplement?
Everything that postmodernity has emptied of substance is still
there, only with a difference, a différance, the trace of the impos-
sible but improbably successful effort to reanimate the sense of
substance without its essence, to defer the endless irony of post-
modern postconsciousness in an interval of pleasure, of reflection,
of absorption.
Lawrence Kramer237
The destruction of the metaphysics of absolute music opens a critical

interval that is seemingly circumscribed by the circularity of the critique.
On the one hand, voiding the essence of absolute music’s metaphysical
dignity frees the pleasure of music from the culture that celebrated the
aesthetic. Deposing the metaphysics of absolute music liberated the
hermeneutic attitude from the confines of formalist and positivist
dogma. On the other hand, the tropological impetus sanctioned by the
correspondences and discursive filiations between music’s internal
characteristics and its surrounding socio-historical, cultural, and rhetorical
structures and forces appears to be the source of music’s jouissance. The
difference—the différance—that escapes representation is the sign of a
remainder that occupies the fold in this deconstructive process. In doubling
the metaphysics of absolute music’s ineffability, the sense of inviolate
autonomy vested in this musical remainder vacates the conceit of
unspeakability while preserving the trace of the autonomous work’s pure
presence.
To be sure, the play of surplus and lack that Kramer opposes to the
aesthetic autonomy of a supposedly self-sufficient work displaces the locus
of the work’s meaning. Consequently, in repudiating the idea that
“musical autonomy equals the absence of meaning,”238 he redoubles
music’s limitless potential for bearing the meaning ascribed to it. Just
as the musical “remainder appears only in relation to the context it
exceeds and by which it is in that sense produced,”239 the autonomy of the
musical remainder is bound over to the ever-fluid contingencies of
the communicative economy in which the performative act as such is
situated. The condition for the musical remainder’s autonomy seems at
root to be an effect of the play of surplus and lack. In a surprising reversal,
the autonomy accorded to the self’s or music’s pure self-presence becomes
80
the figure of this play’s alterity. (In his book Musical Meaning, Kramer
hopes “to show [that] when ascribed meaning gives musical subjectivity a
specific content, the musical remainder beyond that content becomes at the
same time its support.”240) Hence for Kramer, “[b]ecause it forms the
remainder of every experience it engages, music may act as a cultural trope
for the self, the subject as self-moved agency that remains when all of its
attributes and experiences have been subtracted.”241 Set in opposition to
traditional musicology’s ideological mainstay, the demythologization
of the “pure” music experience, it would seem, preserves the abstract
opposition between the communicability of the aesthetic experience of a
work and conceptual knowledge and truth. Where the putative immediacy
of an interior experiential realm paradoxically shores up musicology’s
scientifically mandated discourses, the locus of music’s pure jouissance
becomes the condition of a work’s meaning. This deconstructive agenda
finds a secret resource in music’s representational deficiencies, which for
this tactical rejoinder is also the source of music’s excesses and lack. Hence
contrary to all appearances, the hermeneutic program built on the
ruination of the metaphysics of absolute music founds itself on a concept
of truth that, in its pursuit of postmodern knowledge, it intends to
discredit.
Ultimately, music’s definition as the supplement to language’s
“demiurgical claim”242 dominates this deconstructive program. In sub-
scribing to the idea that, as the instrument of subjective mastery, language
“is forever failing to grasp the world it creates,” Kramer concludes that
language “cannot do without supplements.”243 This supplement, he
explains, is an excess corresponding to an “unacknowledged lack that the
supplement is needed to counter.”244 The dissimulation of the constitutive
role played by the tropological aspect of the musical representation
accordingly operates under the sign of this pure excess. In spite of his
account of the “logic of alterity”245 (which as a form of binary thinking
inverts privileged hierarchies without necessarily dismantling their
cultural, institutional, political, or theoretical frameworks), Kramer’s
deconstruction of traditional musicology’s justificatory schema preserves
at least one of musicology’s fundamental epistemological tenets. In place
of the myth of an “epistemologically self-contained experience,”246 he
substitutes the endless concatenation of elliptical comparisons that are
licensed by his tropological theory of metaphor. Authorized by the
“diversity of cultural affiliations”247 among social practices and music’s
formal structural processes, these comparisons produce the differences
otherwise attributed to the play of surplus and lack.
Faced with the claim that the musical supplement is both the ground
and effect of language’s demiurgical pretensions, it is perhaps impossible
to escape the circularity of a critique whose result is also its condition of
possibility. In any case, it is difficult to see how replacing representative
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thought’s concept of truth with a tropological theory of metaphor escapes

the more fundamental problem of the representative illusion. Transvaluing
music’s inability to make propositions undoubtedly deepens the paradox
of music’s representational deficiency. Moreover, reversing music’s
metaphysical immediacy into the sign of a remainder that displaces and
defers music’s meaning crowns the discourse of absolute music. Yet
displacing the meaning of a work from its otherworldly to its worldly
plane does not fundamentally alter the principle that correlating a work’s
internal features with its ascribed content constitutes the truth of the
representation. Defined as such by the limitless possibilities for identifying
discursive affiliations, the musical supplement is the epistemological
double of the tropological aspect of the musical representation. Even if the
“trick is to align the interpreter’s art of presupposition with the work of
culture, which above all is the practice of presupposition as an art,”248 this
hermeneutic art does not escape the endless play it inculcates. Through
surpassing purely technical descriptions with paraphrasing interpretations
that “take some part of the work’s cultural framework as their own
context and condition of possibility,”249 the critic’s ekphrastic specu-
lations consecrate music’s supplementary value as the site of an immediate
pleasure. It is as if, under the sign of absolute music’s erasure, traditional
musical hermeneutics’ supplementary role becomes the vehicle for
unleashing this hermeneutical art’s own excesses.
In the end, this deconstructive enterprise’s advance against traditional
musicology’s justificatory schema also highlights the limits of its critical
strategy. And yet, the effort to subvert the idea of absolute music’s self-
sufficiency by means of the tropological aspect of a musical representation
opens more generally the question of the metaphoricity of music’s
meaning. This question stands at the threshold of the hermeneutics of
music. Treating musical representation as a mode of metaphor that
consists in conjoining disparate terms that can be interpreted as elliptical
comparisons draws back from an understanding of metaphor that
illuminates a work’s power to shatter reality by redescribing it in
accordance with the world that the work expresses. By identifying music
as the site of what, in the conceptual order of representative thought,
remains unsaid, Kramer’s strategy remains hostage to the schema of
representative thought. Paradoxically, by confronting music’s isolation
from discursive formations on the epistemological level, Kramer ratifies
Seeger’s occultation of the hermeneutical experience of language, where
the events that house living exchanges take precedence over the
communicative systems predicated on them. Framed by the history of
reversals that shift the locus of absolute music’s poetic conceit onto the
social plane, the event in which the work speaks is subordinated to
the role of a supplement that exceeds language’s failure to master the
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metaphorical fields in which it operates. The elliptical comparisons and

substitutions that captivate this interpretive strategy ultimately succumb
to the peculiar productivity of the tactic of subverting the essential
oppositions that found metaphysics. Since there is no non-metaphorical
standpoint from which to determine and delimit the proper meaning of the
concepts we use, every attempt to master metaphorical figures is self-
defeating.250 The allure of unmasking the traces of the worn-out meta-
phors’ collusion with metaphysics by reducing metaphysical discourse to
aporias places its stamp on music’s deconstructive role. By the same token,
treating metaphor as a structural trope occludes metaphor’s productive
character. Paul Ricoeur cautions that by overlooking the problem of
metaphoricity, which he identifies with the play of semantic impertinence
and pertinence that leads to a new predicative assimilation as the creation
of meaning, deconstructions of the metaphysics of presence are more
seductive than earth-shattering. The fascination with the “disturbing
fecundity of the oblivion”251 that a reflection on the wearing-away of
metaphor seems to express eclipses the tension that inheres between literal
and metaphorical meanings. By explicating this tension the more precise
semantics, which Ricoeur opposes to the illusion that words possess
proper meanings, brings to the fore the question of metaphorical truth.
Ultimately, the demystification of absolute music’s chimerical autonomy
attests to the fact that the question of music’s meaning devolves around the
challenges of its metaphoricity. In this regard, how Kramer’s strategic
response to musicology’s investment in absolute music’s otherworldliness
reveals the impossibility of mastering the metaphorical field in which
language operates is unsurpassed. (In its own way, Seeger’s formulation of
the linguocentric predicament, too, bears out the fact that the experience
communicated by a musical work exceeds language’s conceptualizing
power.) Identifying music’s absolute self-presence with the unspoken
presupposition of all discourses in which their fundamentally meta-
phorical figures are forgotten invariably leads to identifying music’s
dynamism as “primarily a manifestation of the musical remainder.”252
Accordingly music, as such, is the (non)figure of what remains unsaid in
what is said. In the end analysis, this occultation of the phenomenological
structure of the occasion in which a work speaks eclipses the linguisticality
of the experience of the work. By suffusing textual and visual repre-
sentations with a body of sound, the simulacrum of music’s immediacy
lays the foundation for a theory of semantic loops that authorizes the
ascription of meaning to music by returning the meanings of verbal,
textual, pictorial and narrative representations to their field of play. The
ensuing schema of music and imagetext, which unites diegetic and mimetic
impulses in their interplay, replaces music’s lack of a referential system
with this interpretive program’s ascriptive power.253 As the cornerstone of
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a supplement that supplants the poetic conceit of a “language beyond

language,” this schema formalizes musical hermeneutics’ subreption of a
work’s power to speak.
The occultation, by this deconstructive strategy, of music’s capacity to
communicate an experience that resists conceptual mastery brings the
discourse of absolute music to a critical threshold. Conditioned by the
history of music’s separation from language, judgments that by turn
elevate or devalue instrumental music’s nonrepresentational character
delineate the history of a discourse that binds theories of interpretation to
language as the instrument of knowledge. In contrast, music’s deficiency
by turn appears to be both the condition of its metaphysical promotion
and the impetus for musical hermeneutics. Authorizing music’s value as
the site of a pure excess preserves the structure of this opposition between
music’s representational deficiency and language’s epistemological role.
The conviction that language is the dominant force behind the cultural
production of meaning within Western communicative systems stops short
of a hermeneutics of music, in this respect. For this hermeneutics, the
metaphoricity of language and the linguisticality of experience open a
path to understanding music’s power to redescribe dimensions of our
experiences through music’s own unique mode of communicability. The
history of the discourse of music’s emancipation from language calls for
this hermeneutical riposte. Confronted with this discourse, a hermeneutics
of music takes up the problem of music’s mimetic capacity in the light of
the philosophical turn to language as a hermeneutical phenomenon. So
long as music’s separation from language dominates, the discourse
concerning music’s meaning will continually fail to keep pace with the
question of music’s ontological vehemence. The secret acknowledgment
within the linguocentric predicament of music’s capacity to unfold worlds
of meaning bears witness to this question’s pertinence. Tellingly, the
deconstruction of this predicament places metaphor at the center of a
reflection on music’s affective power. Suspended at the cusp of a
hermeneutics of music, the quest for meaning draws back from the brink
of music’s expression of its metaphorical truth.
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6
THE QUESTION
O F M E TA P H O R
Music’s capacity to express moods and feelings that augment affective

dimensions of our experiences draws an investigation into music’s power
of expression across the threshold of deconstructive critiques. Hence, far
from signaling a return to metaphysical pretensions, a hermeneutical
inquiry into music’s expressive significance aims at uncovering music’s
capacity to affect our understanding of ourselves and our world. Every
meaningful encounter with a work occasions an experience that is properly
aesthetic; moreover, this experience is one in which the work speaks. In this
respect, the metaphorical character of the language of a work is decisive.
To be sure, the idea that a musical work speaks a language can itself be
interpreted metaphorically. The metaphor in this case effects the transfer of
the properly linguistic nature of language into a nonlinguistic domain.
However, the question immediately arises as to whether this metaphorical
reference to the language of music exhausts the problem of music’s mode
of communicability. In pursuing a hermeneutical inquiry into music’s
power to speak, I cannot avoid Gadamer’s claim that language is the
universal medium of our understanding of the world. At the same time,
the sense of metaphoricity at work in language authorizes extending
metaphor’s power to redescribe the real to encompass the musical work’s
expression of its world. The expression of a world is therefore critical to the
hermeneutics of music that I am undertaking to develop in this and
the following chapter. To the extent that this hermeneutics concerns the
experience that a work communicates, the question of the metaphorical
character of a work’s power of expression is the starting point for a
more sustained reflection on music’s mimetic relation to the world.
My proposal for a hermeneutics of music therefore differs, in this one
crucial respect, from other critiques that take aim at music’s aesthetic
differentiation. Ignited by the struggle against formalist and romantic
conceits, demystifications of the idea of absolute music redress the practice
of tearing works from their sustaining life contexts by locating the work’s
meaning in socially contextualized fields of play. For these critiques,
music’s ineffability is the sign of its fictitious transcendence. Music’s social
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THE QUESTION OF METAPHOR
institution as a separate aesthetic sphere justifies criticisms of disciplinary

practices whose ideological defense of Western art-music’s canonic status
has come under attack. At the same time, it is difficult to understand how,
apart from some explanation of a work’s capacity to surpass the given
order of reality, such critiques remedy the aporias that they engender.
One critique in particular stands out. The impasse into which Adorno’s
attempt to save the paradox of a work’s truth led, highlighted the
impossibility of deriving a work’s critical purchase on the real from the fact
of its social emancipation. In seeking a middle ground between vulgar
sociological analyses and absolute formalist ones, he therefore singled out
music’s distance from reality as the condition of its truth by arguing that
this distance constituted its first social characteristic. Yet, attributing a
productive value to a work’s conscious differentiation from reality seems
only to confound the attempt to rehabilitate the aesthetic. I previously
argued that deriving a critical impetus from the aesthetics’ ideological
constitution leads to an intractable aporia. In this respect, treating a
work’s conscious differentiation from reality as the ground of its truth
places the seal of this differentiation upon the impasse prefigured, as it
were, by Kant’s radical subjectivization of aesthetics. Caught in the grip
of the schema of the aesthetic’s isolation, the disciplining function of the
music–language divide elicits a deconstructive riposte that calls for a
renewed reflection on the relation between metaphor’s significance as a
heuristic fiction and music’s ontological vehemence. Music’s exemplifi-
cation of the mood or feeling it expresses attests to the limitations of a
tropological theory of metaphor. Accordingly, the paradox that a work’s
distance from reality is the condition for reality’s redescription will prove
to be indispensable to an understanding of the work’s power to speak.
The Language of Art

Music’s expression of experiences that demand to be understood stands in
stark contrast to the romantic apogee of absolute music. Notwithstanding
the notion that music’s transcendent expression of feelings leaves
the world behind, the force with which music affects our moods and
dispositions attests to music’s deeper affinity with the human condition. In
contrast to the modern hubris of the radically autonomous subject, music’s
figuration of limit experiences, for example, attests to an ineradicable
element of passivity. At the limit, the deepening of the experience of time
runs up against the aporia of time’s ultimate inscrutability. Trance,
ecstasy, and the representation in music of a “time beyond time” reply in
their own ways to this aporia. As such, they attest to a sense of radical
alterity at the heart of existence. (I will return to this theme in the
next chapter, when I take up the issue of music’s worlding power.) In his
“little ethics”, Ricoeur identifies this sense of alterity, or otherness, with
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experiences of being-affected. Accordingly, he maintains that “the pheno-

menological respondent to the metacategory of otherness is the variety of
experiences of passivity, intertwined in multiple ways in human action.”254
In this way, the term “otherness” is “reserved for speculative discourse,
while passivity becomes the attestation of otherness.”255 For Ricoeur, the
“main virtue of such a dialectic is that it keeps the self from occupying the
place of foundation.”256 My thesis, which I hope the arguments in this and
the following chapter will justify, is that, at the limit, music’s power to
redescribe affective dimensions of our experiences is one, if not the,
privileged mode of creative activity that evinces this attestation of
otherness in replying to the aporia of time and the other of time. Music’s
ontological vehemence, and its power to speak, are in this sense insepar-
able from music’s affective redescription of our feelings, moods, and
dispositions. Consequently, the language a work speaks is in the first
instance the source of the work’s worlding power.
The idea that the language of art is the one the work speaks (which, as
we will soon see, Gadamer espouses), runs contrary to the concept of
language that seems to dominate the discourse of absolute music. The
ruinous opposition between formalist abstractions and musical her-
meneutics not only owed its credibility to the concept of language that
authorized absolute music’s metaphysical elevation, but it also served to
justify shifting the principle of interpretive fidelity onto the social plane.
In the aftermath of German idealism’s appropriation of Kant’s idea
regarding fine art as the art of genius, the legitimacy of differentiating
between music’s aesthetic autonomy and its worldliness depended on
a conception of language that set music’s ineffable realm apart.
Diametrically opposed to the ideals enshrined in the bourgeois cult of art-
religion, contextualizing interpretations reversed the principle of music’s
transcendent ineffability without reversing the effects of consciously
differentiating between the work and the world. The irony that demysti-
fying the idea of absolute music occludes the work’s power to speak is
inescapable. To the extent that musical hermeneutics’ strategic place in the
discourse of absolute music eclipses the sense of metaphoricity at work, the
properly hermeneutical question concerning music’s mode of expression
springs from the deconstructive ruins of absolute music’s poetic conceits.
Resistance to the conviction that “instrumental music purely and clearly
expresses the true nature of music by its very lack of concept, object, and
purpose”257 need not follow this conviction’s heterodoxic reversal. In this
respect, Gadamer’s turn to language as the event in which the meaning
intended by the work crystallizes through coming to a stand sets the
challenge of understanding music’s meaning and power of expression on
its philosophically hermeneutical footing.
By withdrawing from the “objectifications and explanations of
historical science and sociology to the artistic, historical and lingual
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experience which precedes and supports these objectifications and

explanations,”258 a hermeneutical aesthetics takes up the challenges of
seeking, in the experience of the work, the reservoirs of meaning that make
a critical attitude possible. Ricoeur explains that, by beginning with the
experience of art, hermeneutic philosophy “accentuates, in this experience,
the more ontological aspects of the experience of play.”259 He reminds us:
“Aristotle’s hermenetia, in contrast to the hermeneutical techniques of
seers and oracles, is the very action of language on things. Interpretation,
for Aristotle, is not what one does in a second language with regard to a
first; rather, it is what the first language already does, by mediating
through signs our relation to things.”260 Accordingly, language is the
medium of our understanding of the world. Interpreting a work or text
presupposes this lingual mediation. Consequently, the work of inter-
pretation is inseparable from the event of meaning in which the world
unfolded by a work or text refigures the horizons of its listener or readers.
Language’s mediation of our understanding of others, ourselves, and
the world manifests the lingual character of our experiences. Gadamer,
whose hermeneutics highlights the universality of the experience of
language, accordingly argues that language is the medium through which
we encounter the world. (Kramer’s deconstruction of absolute music
accentuated the difficulties spawned by opposing language’s supposed
demiurgic pretensions to music’s transcendent ineffability.) Far from being
the instrument for acquiring a subjective mastery, language is the event
through which our view of the world and the things in it takes shape.
Language “is not just one of man’s possessions in the world, but on it
depends the fact that man has a world at all.”261 The fact that language has
its true being in dialogue underscores the lingual character of this event:
coming to an understanding is language’s mediation of our experiences of
the world. Language, in other words, houses the living exchanges among
individuals and their traditions and cultural heritages by bringing the
meaning disclosed in these exchanges to a stand.262
The linguisticality of experience constitutes the hermeneutical
Urphänomen. As “the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the
world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world,”263
language is the medium of understanding. As such, the “building up of our
world in language [, which] . . . persists whenever we want to say
something to each other”264 attests to the universality of the hermeneutical
experience. Crucially, the lingual character of our experiences encompasses
the language of a musical work or a work of art. By asking whether a
work’s “aesthetic quality of formation [is] only the condition for the fact
that the work bears its meaning within itself and has something to say to
us,”265 Gadamer confronts the leveling down of language with the
plenitude of the work’s sensual abundance. The way in which a meaning
crystallizes with the expression of the work of art corresponds to the
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speculative structure of language in this respect. In Gadamer’s view, “in

language, the order and structure of our experience itself is originally
formed and constantly changed.”266 For Greek thought, this “coming into
language is . . . nothing other than the presencing of the being itself, its
aletheia.”267 Gadamer therefore reminds us that a word is not the
perfected reflection of some pre-given order. Neither is the word an
instrument for constructing an objectified universe that can then be placed
at our calculative disposal. Rather, the speculative structure of language
consists in the expression of a meaning that takes shape in the language
that gives a figure to this meaning. Similarly, the speculative structure of
the language of art, in which the fit between the expression of the work and
what is expressed crystallizes, brings the meaning intended by the work
to a stand. This fit is the condition of a work’s communicability. By
exemplifying this fit, the work in its singularity expresses the feeling or
mood that emanates from its world. Consequently, we cannot “recuperate
within the concept the meaningful content that addresses us in art.”268
Rather, this meaning crystallizes with the event occasioned by the work.
The lingual character of this event is the radical antithesis of the poetic
conceit of a “language beyond language.” By addressing us in the medium
through which it achieves its real being, a work expands our, and the
world’s, horizons. The work’s resistance to its conceptual recuperation is
therefore also the condition of its impact on the real. This impact is the true
measure of a work’s ontological vehemence. As such, it is the mark of a
work’s power to speak.
The fact that a musical work, work of art, or literary text is “only
encountered in a form that resists pure conceptualization”269 supports my
thesis that, in placing the real at a distance, music redescribes affective
dimensions of experience. By addressing us in the medium through which
it achieves its real being, the work occasions the event that constitutes our
encounter with it. Consequently, the vehemence of a work is indis-
tinguishable from the mode of being through which the work addresses us.
Through speaking to the self-understanding of every person who is open
to the experience that a work proffers, the work achieves its real being in
“what it is able to say.”270 As stated above, the “building up of our world
in language persists whenever we want to say something to each other.”271
Accordingly, interpreting music “by performing it is not basically different
from understanding a text by reading it.”272 Just as language builds up a
“definite articulation of the world,”273 so that in the course of speaking
about something and finding the right expression, an idea, a thought, or a
feeling takes shape, the meaning of the work crystallizes with the work’s
expression of its world. This expression achieves its realization in the event
occasioned by the work’s presentation [Darstellung]. Ultimately, the
prejudice that language is the instrument of the subject’s mastery of the
world eclipses the reality of the work. Every conscious differentiation of a
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work as an aesthetically autonomous entity or as the bearer of social,

cultural, or political messages appeals to the fact that the work occasions
every meaningful encounter with it. Moreover, every genuine encounter
with a work of art is also an encounter with ourselves when, surprised “at
the meaning of what is said,”274 we integrate the work’s world into our
own. In sum, the reality of the work makes itself felt through the event in
which the work addresses us.
I cannot emphasize the significance of Gadamer’s insights strongly
enough. Unlike the concept of language behind absolute music’s romantic
elevation, Gadamer’s phenomenological understanding of the language of
art highlights the force of music’s ontological vehemence as the true
measure of a musical work’s meaning and power. According to a view that
originated in Greek antiquity and that animated the querelle des ancienes
et des modernes (which I discussed in Chapter 3), the separation of
harmony and rhythm from language (logos) stripped music of its reason.
Subordinating the logos to the view of language that dominates the
discourse of absolute music conceals language’s disclosive power as the
event, the advent, of meaning. The vexing problem of music’s ostensibly
nonrepresentational character that ensued motivated the turn to mimetic
and rhetorical theories predicated on representative thought’s concept of
language. The idea that music’s logos consists in the logic of a sound-
ing discourse that is amenable to this logic’s rational demonstration
confirmed this view.275 Instrumental music consequently assumed the
status of a representationally deficient art. Faced with instrumental
music’s seeming unintelligibility, mimetic theories filled the lacuna created
by music’s separation from language. The recourse to interpretive
strategies reinforced the principle of music’s representational deficiency by
supplementing formal analyses with programmatic descriptions and
interpretations of music’s substantive content. Despite their stated
objectives, deconstructions of music’s insular aesthetic value reinscribed
this principle in identifying the site of music’s pure jouissance. Charles
Seeger’s inchoate insight into music’s expressive power, on the other hand,
underscores the communicability of the experience occasioned by a work.
Despite his predilection for viewing music and language as different
systems of communication, his formulation of the linguocentric predica-
ment attests to the fact that the possibility of conceptually recuperating the
meaning of a work already presupposes that the work communicates its
intended meaning in the experience it occasions.276 The fact is that the
predicament itself only arises because no conceptualizing interpretation
does justice to, or exhausts, the experience in which the work
communicates its meaning. Moreover, the surplus of meaning, which
Gadamer attributes in part to a work’s sensuous abundance, originates
with the experience of the work itself.277 Seeger’s linguocentric
predicament consequently bears out the hermeneutical claim that the
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mode of music’s communicability consists in the work’s expression of the

meaning it bears within itself. The bite exerted on reality by works of art
and music (which in their own way, critical stances on music’s and art’s
creative or subversive force secretly if not openly acknowledge), is a
testament to the lingual character of the work of art. In the end, the
language of art is language only insofar as the work addresses the self-
understanding of everyone who sees, reads, or hears it. The world that the
work expresses, too, takes shape in the manner in which the work
configures its unfolding course. This worlding of the work is indis-
tinguishable from its mode of being. The quality of a work’s aesthetic
formation is therefore the corollary of the fact that this mode of being is
the medium in which the work speaks. By communicating itself, the work
expresses a meaning that, in its sensuous abundance, exceeds the alienating
power of conceptual thought. This language is the truth of art. In it, the
meaning of the being of a work illuminates the world that the work
reveals.
Music and Metaphor

The preceding consideration of the language of art immediately raises
a question concerning the validity of deconstructing the music–language
divide. On the one hand, the destruction of the metaphysics of absolute
music brings out the role played by representative thought’s conception
of language in instituting the division between music and language.
Music’s disciplining function, as Kramer rightly argued, preserves the ideal
of music’s sacrosanct ineffability initially inscribed in a bourgeois art-
religion’s celebration of a sphere of aesthetic freedom and subsequently
reinscribed in the practice of abstracting works from their surrounding
life-contexts. On the other hand, demystifying the concept of music, for
which the metaphysics of absolute music is the key, paradoxically rein-
forces the tendency to recuperate music’s meaning tactically. There can be
no question but that the critical enterprise, in which a work is subject to
analysis, reflection, and judgments of argumentation, is in some way
intended to explain, clarify, and hence deepen our understanding of the
work’s meaning and significance. At the same time, the epistemic break
separating criticism from the aesthetic experience that extends the world’s,
and our, horizons attests to an order of priority that no effort on the part
of the critic can reverse.278 The temptation to replace singular aesthetic
experiences with critical commentary, too, evinces the hermeneutical
priority of the work. The communicability of the work is in this respect the
inimitable condition of criticism. So long as criticism remains hostage to
the epistemological ambitions and ideological agendas governing its
strategic deployment, the challenges of locating a work’s meaning in the
field of its social production take precedence. The occultation of the
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work’s power to express a world that, in intersecting the world of its

listeners, augments the real, leads back to the impasse of deriving a work’s
productive value from the aesthetic’s complicity with hegemonic repre-
sentations of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. Forced to locate music’s
excess and lack beyond the limits of the subject’s will to mastery, the
destruction of absolute music’s metaphysical pretensions paradoxically
ratifies a concept of language for which music’s affective relation to the
world is beyond, or beneath, the world’s epistemic objectification.279
The filiations of absolute music’s deconstruction with the destruction
of Western metaphysics calls attention to the central question of the
metaphoricity of language. The wearing away in philosophical discourse
of metaphorical analogies between the sensible (the visible) and the
intelligible (the invisible or non-sensible) gives rise to the illusion of a
representation whose truth is defined by the adequation of the sensible and
non-sensible. This illusion, in which the truth of this representation erases
the trace of its metaphorical production, unites an interior image (present
to the mind) with the exterior presence of a real thing. Ricoeur reminds us
that the “concept of language formed by representative thought, when it
treats language . . . as the exteriorization of the interior, and hence as
the . . . instrumental mastery attained by a subjectivity”280 eclipses the
inescapable metaphoricity of language. He cautions that, “despite the
referential twist of a philosophical semantics, . . . the implicit axiom that
‘everything is language’ has often led to a closed semanticism, incapable
of actually accounting for human action as actually happening in the
world, as though linguistic analysis condemned us to jumping from one
language game to another.”281 Conversely the linguistic turn, far from
signifying the refusal to go outside language, heightens the enigma of
metaphor’s power to redescribe the real. Accordingly, the fascination with
the paradox of a discourse on metaphor caught up in its own meta-
phoricity too readily falls prey to a seductive reflection on this paradox’s
metaphysical erasure. Following his semantic analysis of the metaphorical
operation through which new meanings arise from the ruins of literal
impertinences, the “effectiveness of dead metaphor can be inflated . . . only
in semiotic conceptions that impose the primacy of denomination, and
hence of substitution of meaning.”282 By passing over the real problem of
metaphoricity, which on Ricoeur’s analysis concerns the play of a
predicative impertinence and a new semantic pertinence, such conceptions
eliminate the productive tension that inheres in metaphor’s poetic
redescription of the real.
Ironically, the recourse to a tropological theory of metaphor ratifies the
idea that the truth of a representation consists in the adequation of an
interior image with a “real” exterior thing. Allegorizing interpretations,
which Ricoeur points out can “go hand in hand with the ‘metaphysical’
distinction between the sensible and the non-sensible”283 adhere to this
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concept of truth. This concept, discredited by the destruction of Western

metaphysics, determines the site of music’s lack and excess. Wresting
music’s sensuous abundance from the clutches of metaphysics in this way
shipwrecks this critique’s larger ambitions. Through erasing the traces of
its own phantasmagoric creation, the musical remainder returns the
production of a work’s meaning to the tropological field of elliptical
comparisons and resemblances. The impossibility of mastering this
tropological field delimits the locus of music’s lack and excess. And yet, it
is doubtful whether this impossibility rises to the level of the aporias
unleashed by the metaphoricity of a discourse on metaphor. As place-
holder for the unspoken ground of the adequation in language of concept
and thing, the immediacy of music’s pure excess is prisoner to the
representative illusion; the musical remainder is the (non)figure of what
remains unsaid in what is said, only by virtue of a concept of truth that the
destruction of the metaphysics of absolute music displaces but fails to
overthrow. Despite its affinity with “felt” qualities beyond or beneath the
world’s objectification, music’s sensuous abundance here serves only as
the site of a pure, libidinal pleasure.
Mood
The appearance of a (non)figure whose liminal status evokes the chthonic
immediacy of a force that is more felt than grasped conceptually provokes
the thought that music’s affective power stems from music’s expression of
dimensions of experience that, phenomenologically speaking, root us
more deeply in the world. The failure of the discourse of absolute music
to confront the question of music’s ontological vehemence therefore calls
for a renewed reflection on the metaphoricity of music’s expression of
feelings and moods. The idea that music is the language of emotion too
quickly relegates the poetic expression of feelings to the recesses of the
subject’s interior life. In turning to Ricoeur’s tensive theory of metaphor,
which he opposes to the tradition that treats the metaphorical term as the
substitution for a proper one, I intend to extend my reading of Gadamer’s
understanding of the language of art to music’s redescription of affective
dimensions of our experiences. The question of music’s ontological
vehemence is intimately bound up with the problem of metaphorical
reference. The fact that the suspension of ordinary references is the
condition for a work’s power to redescribe reality initially links the
question of music’s affective power to the metaphorical operation.
Ultimately, the solution to this paradox replies to persistent difficulties
raised by claims regarding music’s nonrepresentational character. This
paradox consequently gives rise to the thought that music’s supposed
representational deficiencies are in reality the condition of its capacity to
express moods and feelings that renew our elective affinities with the
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world. My wager at this point therefore seems justified. In turning to

Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor, I hope to account for music’s power to
experiment with elective affinities that can insert us in the world anew.
Moods and feelings, Martin Heidegger tells us, anchor our sense of
participating in the world to which we belong in the manner in which we
are attuned to it. In fact, Heidegger argues that, as a “state-of-mind” that
precedes the objectification of objects and things, mood delivers the fact
of our being over to the manner in which we inhabit the world. For human
beings, mood is primordial in that it discloses this manner of being “prior
to all cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure.”284 By
bringing the fact of one’s existing in the world before oneself, a state-of-
mind reveals how our attunement to the world is a condition for our
engagement with it. We only “encounter something that matters to us”285
in the state-of-mind in which the world is open to us and we to it. This
state-of–mind, which “implies a disclosive submission to the world,”286
constitutes the mode of our attunement to the world. By assailing us, the
mood in which we find ourselves disposed toward the world and others
makes it possible to direct ourselves toward it and them.
By identifying mood with states-of-mind that attune us to a world we
inhabit with others and a world filled with objects and things, Heidegger’s
existential-ontological analysis frees the fact of mood from the substantive
constraints of theories of musical expression in which expression is the
representation of emotions embodied in music. By limiting the question of
music’s expressivity to the representation of emotions, cognitive and
dispositional theories subordinate music’s expression of feelings and
moods to their own theoretical requirements. Cognitive theories, in which
“expressive” music is said to resemble the expression of ordinary emotions
by representing them in appearance or behavior, attribute music’s power
to affect its listeners to the expressive properties embodied in it.
Dispositional accounts that treat expression as a product of the way one
listens to music attribute musical expression to non-cognitive properties
that resemble “real” emotions.287 For both, the resemblance between
music’s properties and emotions comprises the reality of music’s expres-
sion of them. Consequently, the corollary relations between music’s
cognitive properties and the emotions occasioned by them, or between
music’s non-cognitive properties and emotions felt in non-aesthetic
contexts, are a function of the truth that constitutes the adequacy of the
representation as such.
By limiting expression to the resemblance between music’s properties
and emotions, cognitive and dispositional theories refer music’s affective
significance to music’s embodiment or representation of emotive qualities.
Heidegger’s analysis of mood, on the other hand, renews the question of
music’s affective power through freeing mood from common sense ideas
by interrogating the manner of our being-affected. The ways that moods
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assail us precedes the cognitive act, which “has its existential-ontological

Constitution in the state-of-mind of Being-in-the-world.”288 By attuning us
to things that matter, our states-of-mind dispose us in ways that open the
world to us, and us to the world. Accordingly, “only because the ‘senses’
[die ‘Sinne’] belong ontologically to an entity whose kind of Being is Being-
in-the-world with a state-of-mind, can they be ‘touched’ by anything or
‘have a sense for’ [Sinn haben für] something in such a way that what
touches them shows itself in an affect.”289 Having a state-of-mind is the
condition for the possibility of encountering the world; correlatively, the
possibility of having a world depends on that fact that we first encounter
it in a mood that besets us.
The seemingly seductive power music has in assailing us would be
unremarkable apart from the phenomenological objectivity of feelings and
moods. The feeling of belonging that music cultivates carries the force of
a conviction that, despite its fictive quality, has the weight of a form of
attestation to our inherence in the world. In defining the “idea of belonging
(Zugehörigkeit) as accurately as possible,” Gadamer argues for the
primacy of hearing over seeing. According to him, the unique dialectic
implied in hearing takes account of the fact that “he who is addressed must
hear whether he wants to or not.”290 Feelings of belonging are a response
to this hermeneutical form of address. (Limit experiences, I will argue in
the next chapter, exemplify this mode of address.) Heidegger’s remark that
in “‘poetical’ discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities
of one’s state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to
a disclosing of existence”291 is rich with implications. The idea that poetic
discourse aims at manifesting states-of-mind that have no prior referent
in existing reality holds out the prospect that music’s nonrepresenta-
tional status has a positive significance in relation to music’s ontological
vehemence. The suspension (epoché) of ordinary references, which
following Ricoeur is an effect of, and hence is attributable to, the meta-
phorical process, is the condition of this positive, productive significance.
Music’s apparent immediacy then appears as a form of eidetic bracketing
in which the mood that assails us is the one that emanates from the work
itself. By inserting us in the world in a non-objectifying manner, feelings
and moods interiorize our sense of being affected in some way. As a mode
of poetic expression, music intercepts ordinary references to emotions
through the metaphorical exemplifications of moods and feelings that
prefigure ways in which we could possibly be disposed toward the world.
Exemplification
Anchoring music’s purchase on the real in the phenomenological objec-
tivity of feelings and moods reorients the question of music’s non-
representational character. In view of Heidegger’s analysis of the manner
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in which the world opens to us, the problem of music’s referential status
becomes one that concerns the affective field of our experience. The shift
from the epistemological field of traditional musical hermeneutics, and
later of postmodern knowledge, to this problem’s more properly
ontological terrain finds its further justification in metaphor’s cognitive
and affective significance. The objection that music’s expression of moods
and feelings is an outmoded vestige of romantic aesthetics falls short of
metaphor’s power to create new meanings for which no prior referent in
the real exists. In this respect, a work’s capacity to renew reality in
accordance with the world it unfolds attests to the sense of thought and
imagination at work in the metaphorical operation. The work’s expression
of its meaning is, in this regard, the singular counterpart of the signifying
matrix schematized through a predicative attribution. At the level of the
work as a signifying whole, the creative imitation (mimesis) in a work of
the mood or feeling emanating from the work augments the affective field
of our experiences. The work’s exemplification of the mood or feeling it
possesses is therefore critical to the work’s communicability. Even more
crucially, the singular claim to universality that each work makes by way
of its exemplary expression is the mode through which the work speaks.
By relating the problem of music’s expressive value to the question of its
referential significance, Anthony Newcomb highlights the challenge of
attributing music’s exemplification of feelings to a metaphorical process.
He begins by situating the question: “What, if anything, can music refer
to?”292 midway between the philosopher’s quest for meaning and sense
and the musician’s search for content. For the philosopher who seeks
the “source of sense behind music’s sensual surfaces,”293 the sounding
structure is the vehicle for an expressive meaning that constitutes the
referent of a work’s syntactical features. For the musician who discovers
a “communicative content latent in the structural idea”294 of a work,
musical expression refers to a meaning beyond that of the syntactical
organization internal to a work. Newcomb accordingly attributes the
process of making metaphors to the critic’s interpretive role. By treating
this process as the mechanism for transmitting an expressive content,
Newcomb identifies the metaphorical operation with analogies that the
critic draws between music’s expressive and its formal content, based on
coded conventions of various paradigmatic plots.
In assigning the critic the task of completing the metaphorical reference
implied by a work, Newcomb places the question of the work’s meta-
phorical character within the traditional field of musical hermeneutics. In
order to ground the interpretation of a work’s expressive meaning in
analyses of its formal structures and processes, he distinguishes between
two modalities of meaning, each of which has its corresponding mode of
interpretation. Formal interpretation aims at discovering the sense and
significance of a work’s structural features through an analysis of the
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processes internal to a work. Expressive interpretation aims at explicating

the meaning a work has for a perceptive listener. In Newcomb’s view,
these two modes of interpretation complement one another. Newcomb
justifiably claims that the work of analysis is dependent on cultural
conventions and experiences that condition expressive interpretation. At
the same time, for him, expressive interpretation surpasses structural
considerations by identifying metaphorical relations between a work’s
structural properties and those of aspects of non-aesthetic experiences. By
insisting that the verbal metaphors used to interpret music’s referential
meaning are secondary to the range of potential meanings of a work,
Newcomb frees the critic from dogmatic constraints. However, the real
advantage gained by attributing music’s expressiveness to the meta-
phorical resonances the listener discovers between properties a work
possesses and “properties of experience outside the object itself”295 is to
identify these resonances with the metaphorical operation as such. From
his vantage point, the way in which properties of a work resonate with
other aspects of experience through the “creative-metaphor-making”296
of a particular class of listeners justifies expressive interpretations of a
work’s referential meanings. Accordingly for Newcomb, this “creative-
metaphor-making” for a class of listeners familiar with the language of a
work justifies seeking a “conceptual mechanism for moving from the
work’s intrinsic syntactic relations to those relations with other aspects of
experience,”297 which he asserts are at the basis of musical expression.
Newcomb consequently stresses the importance that the relation between
the work and the listener has for a theory of musical expression. Yet, by
insisting that music’s referential meaning is secondary to the primary
meaning of structural properties on which it is predicated, the mechanism
through which Newcomb seeks to explain these resonances subordinates
music’s exemplification of moods and feelings to the conceptual field of
expressive and affective attributes.
In view of the lack of intersubjective agreement and empirical uni-
versality concerning the object and content of music’s expression, such a
mechanism, which seeks to explain the metaphorical character of a work’s
resonance with the listener’s experience, would seem to overcome the
lacuna created by the absence of rules of reference. Since there is no rule
that would govern the referential significance of a work, the ground of this
mechanism cannot be sought in a subsumptive principle of judgment in
which the expression of a particular work could be objectively deter-
mined. Newcomb’s appeal to Nelson Goodman’s theory of metaphorical
exemplification skirts the difficulties raised by the lack of rule-governed
attributions that are predicated on the formal properties of a work. By
contrasting the act of denotation with the process of metaphorical
exemplification, Newcomb identifies music’s expressive referents with the
transfer of properties and attributes from realms of discourse that are
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initially foreign to the work. For him, properties exemplified by a work

refer to aspects of experience by means of this transfer. Reversing the flow
of denotative reference from label to thing consequently authorizes the
critic’s creative metaphor-making. (Newcomb cites Goodman’s example
of a swatch of green cloth. The label “green” denotes the color of the
swatch. The swatch exemplifies the label by expressing “greenness.”298)
Accordingly, resemblances the critic discovers, uncovers, or invents,
between music’s properties and those drawn from other realms of
experience, justify the critic’s attribution of referential meanings to the
resonances between music and dimensions of experience rooted in the
practical field of everyday life.
Metaphorical Reference
By locating music’s expressive value in the metaphors the critic employs,
Newcomb’s theory of expressive interpretation sidesteps the enigma of a
creative metaphor’s referential twist. Ironically, attributing a work’s
expressive referent to analogies forged between a work’s structural
features and external references licenses the critic’s activities at the cost of
the work’s poetic aim. In this respect, the interpretive promiscuity and
even violence of interpretation unleashed by reversing the process of
denotation preserves a distinction between music’s extra-semantic value
and the cognitive force of real referents.299 The predicative attribution of
a secondary meaning (referential meaning) to a primary one (the sense or
meaning of a work’s formal, syntactical organization) binds a work’s
expression to the representation of specific emotions, political agendas, or
socially constructed depictions of sexuality and gender. In sum, through
combining two modes of discourse, the practice of criticism as Newcomb
understands it links the “inside” of a work with real-world referents
through identifying a work’s expressive referent. Accordingly, expression
and reference are bound together by means of the analogies drawn
between a work’s internal syntactical features and the narrative quality of
motives, feelings, actions, events, and characters that are external to it.
The question overlooked by Newcomb’s account of expressive inter-
pretation (Is the work’s relation to the real an effect of the work?) leads to
the heart of the paradox of metaphorical reference. Like Newcomb,
Ricoeur notes that by refusing to distinguish between the cognitive and
the emotive, Goodman seeks a rapprochement between descriptive verbal
symbols and representation by exemplification of non-verbal ones.300
On Ricoeur’s analysis, the steps Goodman takes toward developing a
“systematic study of symbols and symbol systems and the ways they
function in our perceptions and actions and arts and sciences, and thus in
the creation and comprehension of our worlds”301 designates the place of
a denotative theory of metaphorical reference. Within the framework of
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this theory, the “metaphorization of reference and the metaphorization

of meaning”302 overcome the opposition between denotation and conno-
tation. While reference and denotation appear at first to coincide,
Goodman nuances the act of denotation by introducing a distinction
between two ways of referring. Defining denotation fairly widely, “so as
to subsume what art does—represent something—and what language
does—describe”303 establishes a framework for reversing the direction of
reference. By introducing a distinction “concerning the orientation of the
concept of reference, according to which its direction is from symbol to
thing or from thing to symbol,”304 Goodman treats exemplification as the
obverse of denotation. Exemplification reverses the direction of denotation
by depicting a property or meaning that something possesses, as Newcomb
also realized. The metaphorical transfer of properties combined with this
reversal of reference from thing to symbol identifies exemplification with
a work’s expression. As the “metaphorical possession of non-verbal
predicates,”305 expression consists in the exemplification of properties,
meanings and feelings portrayed by singular instances and works. The
symmetry of exemplification and denotation by inversion here surmounts
the “ruinous distinction of the cognitive and the emotive . . . from which
that of denotation and connotation is derived.”306 Hence expression,
which is the exemplification of this metaphorical possession in a work,
belongs to the order of a representation that discloses its meaning in the
manner in which it presents it.
The conclusions that Ricoeur draws for the theory of metaphor radically
affect the concept of reference. First, the eclipse of the referential mode of
ordinary denotation, toward which the theory of connation aims, is only
the condition for another mode of reference through which heuristic
fictions redescribe reality. By holding back from the consequences that a
non-existent thing—such as a unicorn—depicted by a representation “also
helps to fashion the world,”307 Goodman, according to Ricoeur, does not
account for the strategy proper to poetic discourse’s suspension, or epoché,
of descriptive reference. In fact on his analysis, Goodman’s nominalist
conception of language cannot account for the “air of rightness that
certain . . . fortunate instances of language and art seem to exude.”308
Conversely, the fittingness and appropriateness of verbal and non-
verbal predicates that express the sounds, images, and feelings (that is,
sensa) that adhere to the sense of a work evince the creation of emergent
meanings in poetical discourse. As transferred possessions that retain no
primordial right, these sensa are qualities that are no less real than the
descriptive traits articulated by scientific discourse.309 Moreover, as
representations of the poetic qualities they exemplify, they manifest
properties that are the possession of the work. The world the work
expresses therefore eclipses ordinary references to reality. With the
suspension of descriptive references that bind the work’s meaning to an
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already existing order, the world of the work emerges as the second-order
referent of a heuristic fiction that remakes reality in accordance with itself.
That theories of expressive interpretation, musical hermeneutics, and
deconstructive strategies fail to account for this second-order referent calls
for the riposte of a theory of metaphor in which the suspension of ordinary
reference is the condition for reality’s redescription. According to Ricoeur,
the suspension of ostensive references stems from the play of semantic
impertinence and pertinence that constitutes the work of metaphor. In
attributing the creation of meaning to the synthetic operation in which a
new predicative pertinence emerges from the ruins of a literal meaning, he
links the referential power of metaphorical discourse to the creation of a
heuristic fiction that unites manifestation and creation by bringing reality
to language. The referential twist, which is wrought by the semantic
innovation that arises from the strategic use of semantic impertinences,
opens up new references in accordance with the metaphor’s emergent
meaning. By schematizing the predicative assimilation of non-literal
attributes, in other words, the metaphorical operation creates the icon
of the image on which the metaphorical meaning is read. (The meta-
phorical statement, “The peace process is on the ropes,” resolves a literal
impertinence by inventing or discovering through revealing the resem-
blance between diplomatic negotiations and combative boxers.) The
“enigma of iconic presentation”310 consists in the way that the predicative
assimilation is depicted by displaying the relations through which the new
meaning presents itself “each time the new intended connection is grasped
as what the icon describes or depicts.”311 By drawing on “Kant’s concept
of productive imagination as schematizing a synthetic operation,”312
Ricoeur therefore joins the cognitive dimension of the metaphor’s
semantic character to the thickness of the imaging scene. Seeing resem-
blances that metaphors create is the concrete milieu in which the meaning
schematized by the predicative assimilation lets itself be heard, felt, and
read.
Ricoeur’s analysis of the metaphorical operation’s affective dimen-
sion takes the full measure of metaphor’s semantic character by taking
account of the place of feeling in the metaphorical process. Like the insight
pictured by the meaning displayed by a metaphorical image, the feeling
that accompanies and completes this work of imagination shares in
the semantic bearing of metaphor’s claim to truth as attested by its
redescription of the real in light of the heuristic fiction it invents. Insofar
as the “instantaneous grasping of the new congruence [intended by the
metaphor] is ‘felt’ as well as ‘seen’,”313 the metaphor generates the mood
or feeling it exemplifies in the thickness of the imaging scene. Metaphor
structures the mood or feeling it possesses in the same way as does a poem,
whose mood is coextensive with its verbal structure.314 Schematizing the
predicative assimilation that resolves the paradox of metaphor’s semantic
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incongruence manifests the metaphorical statement’s illocutionary force in

the commitment proper to the phenomenological objectivity of the
expressed mood. Ricoeur suggests that “a poem is like a work of music in
that its mood is exactly coextensive with the internal order of symbols
articulated by its language.”315 (Martha Nussbaum similarly argues that
music “is more akin to poetry than it is to daily gesture and movement; its
emotional power is inseparable from a compressed and formally intricate
use of the media of expression. . . . We readily grant that poetry has
specifically poetic ways of expressing emotion, and that these ways are
internal to a given poetic tradition.”316) In the same way that the language
of a poem is directed toward “an interior [order], which is nothing other
than the mood structured and expressed by a poem,”317 the suspension of
ordinary references by a musical work heightens the force of the conviction
that, with the return to the real, adheres to the work’s exemplification of
the feelings that attest to our inherence in the world.
The solution to the problem of music’s nonrepresentational character
rests entirely on the paradox that the suspension (epoché) of ordinary
references is only the negative condition of music’s redescription of
affective dimensions of our experiences. Through cultivating a feeling of
belonging, the appropriation of the emergent meaning of a metaphor or
work evinces how the commitment proper to metaphor’s, poetry’s, or
music’s illocutionary force abolishes the distance that alienates us from
the experience of the work. Unlike the act of knowing, which gives rise to
the subject-object duality, feeling manifests “a relation to the world that
constantly restores our complicity with it.”318 By uniting an “intention
toward the world and an affection of the self,”319 feeling fulfills its general
function through interiorizing the reality that we objectify over against
ourselves in order to gain some knowledgeable mastery of objects
and things. Moreover, by suspending ordinary feelings and emotions,
poetic feelings augment the affective dimension of our experiences by
assimilating us to the meaning displayed by a metaphor, poem, musical
work, or work of art. Through this epoché of bodily emotions where,
according to Ricoeur, it is as though we “live” our bodies in a more intense
way under their spell, poetic feelings accompany and complete the work
of imagination by making the thought (dianoia) schematized by a work
our own.320 By raising our ordinary emotions above themselves, the mood
structured by a poem or musical work effects a poetic transposition. The
redescription of our attunement to the world, in accordance with the mood
manifest by a work, attests to the depth of the power exercised by the
language that a work speaks. Accordingly, the vehemence of feeling’s
poetic transposition acquires its fullest force in our re-attunement to the
world.
Recovering feelings and moods from the ruinous opposition that
separates music’s, poetry’s, and art’s connotative value from language’s
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denotative power relieves a hermeneutics of music of the burden of a

theory of meaning mired in the seemingly endless reversals that haunt the
discourse of absolute music. By suspending our attachment to bodily
emotions, a work’s exemplification of the mood or feeling achieves its full
weight through opening the world to us in new ways. Music’s anchorages
in dimensions of experience that precede the objectification of reality open
the possibility of music’s redescription of the manner in which we find
ourselves already disposed toward the world. Perhaps no stronger
claim can be made regarding the transcultural necessity of a cultural
phenomenon that is as pervasive world-wide as is narrative and myth.
Ultimately, music’s power to refigure our relation to the world in the realm
of feeling attests to the fact that our attunement to the world is also the
condition for, and the effect of, our meaningful engagement with it.
This refiguration of the real, in the order of feeling, is the hermeneutical
response to the enigma of music’s nonrepresentational character. Accord-
ingly, the bite that music exercises over reality, which is proportional to
music’s suspension of everyday references and representations, touches
the fundamental element of our mortal dwelling by redescribing our
inherence in the world into which we are thrown.
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7
MIMESIS AND THE
HERMENEUTICS OF MUSIC
“Il y a certainement un art qui n’est pas mimétique, c’est la

musique. Quoique, à la limite, ne pourrait-on pas dire qu’à
chaque pièce d’art correspond un mood?”
(“There is certainly an art which is not mimetic, this is music.

Although, at the limit, could not one say that to each piece of art
there corresponds a mood?”)
Paul Ricoeur321
The contention that, of all the arts, music is the one that is not mimetic,
finds its initial justification in the claim that mimesis is an action about
action. Following Aristotle, Ricoeur maintains that mimesis is an activity
that raises human action above itself. For him, “time becomes human to
the extent that is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative
attains meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.”322
Even more, the correlation between narrative activity and the temporal
character of human experience “presents a transcultural form of
necessity.”323 Exploring the meaning of human action in the realm of
fiction transvalues ethical understandings of actions, characters, and
events. Ultimately, “narratives have acting and suffering as their
theme.”324 The fictive transformation of action and suffering, through the
invention of stories that place everyday reality in suspense, effects the
mimetic displacement of ethics to poetics. Correlatively, this mimetic
displacement of praxis from the ethical to the poetic realm finds its
completion in fiction’s refiguration of the practical field of our experiences.
My thesis that music is one, if not the, privileged mode of invention that
we as human beings employ to refigure the meaning of time in the face of
time’s inscrutability stands out against the limits of the narrative art. In
fact, the notion that music refigures affective dimensions of our experi-
ences marks out the horizon in which the question of music’s mimetic
character appears in all its originality. Set against the backdrop of
metaphor’s heuristic power, music’s exemplification of feelings and moods
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MIMESIS AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF MUSIC
modulates the modalities of our inherence in the world. Feeling’s

phenomenological objectivity anchors music’s creative imitations in its
modulation of “states-of-mind” that open us to the world anew. That is,
because feeling is phenomenologically objective, music’s imitation of
moods is not simply subjective or emotive but is anchored in the fact that
moods and feelings dispose us, as it were, to the world by attuning us to
it. To the extent that the expression of a mood can become a poetic aim
in itself, as Heidegger suggests, music’s capacity to affect us touches
a fundamental element of our mortal dwelling. Hence in contrast to
traditional mimetic theories of music, which take the problem of the truth
of the representation as their key, I intend to follow Ricoeur’s theory of
mimesis through to the point where the confession of narrative limits leads
to the acknowledgment of other modes of discourse that in their own ways
speak of time and the other of time.
The mediating role that plot plays in Ricoeur’s theory delineates
narrative’s privileged relation to the time of action. This mediating role is
decisive for the configuring activity that Ricoeur identifies with the poetic
activity of emplotment. By mediating between individual incidents and a
story as a whole, the act of emplotting events “draws a configuration out
of a simple succession.”325 Second, by bringing such factors together as
“agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, [and] unexpected
results,”326 the work of configuring actions and events effects the
transition between the paradigmatic order of the semantics of action and
the syntagmatic order of the plot. Third, by configuring the story’s episodic
dimension so that the succession of events is grasped as a meaningful
whole, the act of emplotting actions and events mediates the narrative’s
temporal characteristics. This “synthesis of the heterogeneous”327 is the
plot. In the final analysis, this synthesis manifests the “concordant
discordance” that for Ricoeur constitutes the mediating function of the
plot.
Narrative’s anchorages in the practical field of experience ground the
mimetic activity of emplotting events in a semantics of action, reality’s
symbolic mediation, and action’s temporal characteristics. The narrative
intelligibility engendered by the activity of emplotting events finds its first
anchorage in the practical competence we have with respect to the
semantics of action. Narrative understanding, which presupposes both a
familiarity with the semantics of action and with the cultural rules that
govern the composition of plots, transforms the virtual signification of
action-terms, which in the paradigmatic order of the semantics of action
only have a potential meaning, into an actual signification by means of the
plot. A story’s intelligibility stems from the way that heterogeneous terms
of the semantics of action work together in temporally integrated
wholes.328 The symbolic mediation of reality provides a second anchorage.
With Clifford Geertz, Ricoeur argues that sociological diagnoses of social
104
ills do not in themselves explain how the illness works. Despite the critical
value diagnostic critiques might have, they leave open the question as to
how ideas arise from praxis by overlooking the immediately symbolic
dimension of the practical field of experiences. Accordingly, Ricoeur
identifies this second anchorage with ideology’s fundamentally integrative
function, which he attributes to the “necessity for a social group to give
itself an image of itself, to represent and to realise itself, in the theatrical
sense of the word”329—a necessity that arises in response to a quest
or demand for identity. The temporal structure of action constitutes a
third feature of a preunderstanding of action that calls for narration.
Accordingly for Ricoeur, the operation he identifies with the act of
emplotting events both reflects the aporia of time first brought to light by
Augustine’s meditations, and resolves the aporia in a poetic mode.
The semantics of action offers the most immediate point of contact with
narrativizing strategies. By distinguishing action from physical movement,
the semantics of action provides a means for identifying motives, gestures,
figures, themes, and tonal progressions with intersignifying terms such as
actions, agents, motives, means, circumstances, goals, conflict, success,
failure, etc., which operate together within a single, conceptual network.
Narrativizing interpretations ascribe a meaning and content to formal
processes and features by describing how motives, themes, and the like,
contribute to the development of a “plot.” Jean-Jacques Nattiez rightly
suggests that music’s linearity is “an incitement to a narrative thread
which narrativizes music.”330 By identifying music’s linear quality with
narrative’s episodic dimension, narrativizing interpretations draw a
configuration from sequences of actions. Ultimately, the narrative
intelligibility of a work springs from the configuration corresponding to
this act of emplotment. Consequently, Nattiez points out, the narrative
attributed to music consists in the “plot imagined and constructed by
the listeners from functional objects.”331 Accordingly, by drawing a
configuration from a succession of events, narrativizing interpretations
transform linear sequences of events into a conceptually concrete
representation of a work’s social, political, or affective content.
Despite its obvious appeal, the temptation to ascribe a narrative content
to linear progressions of musical events is doubly misleading. First, the
“thought” or “idea” (dianoia) expressed by the transformation of
sequences of events into a meaningful temporal whole is irreducible to
the paradigmatic structure of a plot. The temptation to reduce, to an
atemporal system, the temporal matrix in which the configuration of
actions, agents, circumstances, etc. function together as a signifying
whole eclipses the specifically temporal features of the plot. Moreover,
narrativizing interpretations not only subordinate music’s specific mode of
communicability to the logic of a semantics of action but, in the interest
of identifying conceptually concrete references, they also occlude the
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suspension of the real that is the negative condition of reality’s mimetic

refiguration by a heuristic fiction. Ultimately, the incitement to draw a
narrative configuration from a musical work’s sequential dimension
initially strengthens the argument against music as a mimetic art. If
mimesis is the imitation of action, and if the plot (muthos) consists in the
composition or arrangement (poiēsis) of incidents that contribute to the
plot’s development, music appears to be mimetic only by virtue of a
parasitic relation to narrative’s semantic, symbolic, and temporal
resources. The characters in the “story” that a musical work is said to
enact only appear as agents to whom actions, motives, beliefs, and feelings
are ascribed by means of a narrative configuration. Whether virtual, quasi-,
or imagined, these “characters” are, and remain, a function of the “plot.”
The narrative identity of these quasi- or imagined characters is equally a
function of the configuration that discloses who acts and who suffers
within the story as a whole. Populating a musical work with agents, events,
circumstances, and reasons for acting rescues purely formal characteristics
from their self-referential designation as structural attributes. Ironically,
this narrative recourse to agents, motives, actions, circumstances, and
events eclipses music’s properly mimetic quality by circumscribing music’s
exemplary possibilities through privileging narrative’s anchorages in the
field of our everyday actions.
Structure and Plot

In his reading of the opening passage of Beethoven’s String Quartet opus
95, Fred Maus illustrates how analytic description can be combined with
critical commentary to impute thoughts, moods, and motives to an
“imaginary agent.”332 On the one hand, in employing a language that
evokes a world dramatized through the actions, characters, and events
portrayed, analytic descriptions presuppose a prior familiarity with these
terms in the everyday world. On the other hand, the critical commentary
he provides makes the sense of this drama “concrete by narrating a
succession of dramatic actions.”333 Accordingly, technically analytic and
“anthropomorphically evocative”334 descriptions are two correlatively
interdependent modes of explanation. Since for Maus listeners follow the
music by “drawing on the skills that allow understanding of commonplace
human action in everyday life,”335 accounting for the musical “actions” in
question is indispensable to understanding the passage. Listeners’ practical
competence with respect to our understanding of action provides the basis
for ascribing psychological states to an “agent” who, in this explanatory-
interpretive scheme, is the intelligible cause behind the movement’s
unfolding drama. Identifying musical events with actions authored by an
“imaginary agent” founds the resemblance between the dramatic structure
of the Beethoven passage and human behavior on an anthropomorphizing
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account of musical “events.” Constrained by the need of a musical “agent”

to explain the passage’s dramatic course, this anthropomorphizing
explanation privileges the narrative emplotment of musical events.
Despite the deference shown to the semantics of action, the effort to
explain music’s dynamic character in terms of agents, actions, motives,
and psychological states casts into relief the configurating operation
that transforms a sequential order of events into a synthetically tem-
poral whole. The rhythmic confusion and harmonic uncertainty that
Maus identifies in the opening figure (mm. 1–3) elicits the “reasoned
response”336 of the second (mm. 3–5). Maus is quick to point out that the
reasoned nature of this response is a result of the analysis that treats it as
such. His continuing analysis of the passage to m. 18 (where the return of
the opening material groups mm. 1–17 as a distinct stage of the dramatic
action) leads him to conclude that the analogy with drama “suggests that
the structure of the music is its plot.”337 Treating the structure of the
passage as analogous to a plot provides a way of unifying structural and
emotional aspects of a work “within a single, coherent experience.”338
The attention Maus pays to combining analytic and dramatic explana-
tions as two modes of explanation directed toward the same phenomenon
eclipses his more fundamental insight that the composition of the passage
in question unifies the sequential order of its constitutive events. Maus
acknowledges that the notion of dramatic structure at which he arrives
differs from the received concept of structure with which he began. Most
notably, the concept of structure evidenced by the analogy with drama is
one that consists in the dynamic configuration of an unfolding temporal
whole. In this respect, Maus’s concept of structure approximates
Gadamer’s phenomenological insight into the mode of being of the work
of art. For Gadamer, play’s transformation into structure (Gebilde) in a
work of art gives play a kind of permanence by fixing it and hence making
it repeatable. At the same time, this structure has the “character of a work,
of an ergon, and not only of energeia”339 by virtue of the fact that the mode
of presentation in which the work has its being is that of play. Since the
“being of all play is always self-realization, sheer fulfillment, energeia,
which has its telos within itself . . . [in the] world of the work of art, . . .
play expresses itself fully in the unity of its course.”340 The parallel
between Maus’s conclusion and Gadamer’s analysis is striking: music’s
dramatic structure is an effect of the dynamic configuration of a passage’s,
or a work’s, unfolding course as a temporal whole. Since play exists
only in the movement through which it actualizes itself, music’s drama-
tic structure consists in the self-presenting activity in which the work has
its mode of being. The temptation to draw together successive moments
in a dramatic structure bears out the fact that this structure is already
a configuration and not merely a sequence of irruptions and continua-
tions. Formal analyses and dramatizing descriptions are, in this respect,
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second-order explanations predicated on the structuring activity that

configures a work. The “imaginative activity” that Maus attributes to
listeners as they follow the music’s “actions” is accordingly one that
should be attributed to the synthetic operation involved in configuring a
sequence of events. Ultimately, the analogy between the structure of the
Beethoven passage and a plot attests to the role of imagination. Just as the
plot mediates between the story’s configurational and episodic dimensions
(the latter draws the telling of the story in the direction of time’s linear
representation), schematizing a musical work’s temporal matrix entails
forming a meaningful temporal whole from the progressions of sequen-
tially ordered notes, motives, themes, developments, reprises, repetitions,
etc.341 Hence far from authorizing the narrative recourse to a semantics
of action, combining analytic descriptions and expressive interpreta-
tions highlights the need for a more adequate understanding of the way
in which the communicability of the experience afforded by a work
relates to the configurating expression of a world of singular moods and
feelings.
Mimetic Redescription
The preceding discussion is rich with implications. In contrast to Ricoeur’s
contention that music is not mimetic, the intention to unite music’s
structural attributes and its expressive value in a single experience
approximates the manner in which a work expresses the mood or feeling
it possesses. Just as every game discloses its spirit in ordering the movement
that structures it, each individual work reveals the mood it possesses in the
language the work speaks. Moreover, Ricoeur’s suggestion that, at the
limit, music has its moods, illuminates the persistent difficulty of
identifying music’s referential significance. Ricoeur’s hesitation in the face
of the limits of the narrative art places his speculation—that music goes
further than even nonfigurative painting in breaking open a path to the
real—in context. In acknowledging that he is “not far from thinking that
it is in music that the exploration occurs, in a pure state, of our being-
affected,”342 Ricoeur highlights music’s mimetic relation to a variety of
experiences of passivity that he maintains are the phenomenological
respondent to the metacategory of otherness. Later, I will test my thesis
that, at the limit, music gives the measure of the meaning of time in
refiguring the aporia of time and the other of time. The three examples to
which I will turn—t‚arab ecstasy, the music of Malawi dancing prophets,
and Steve Reich’s Piano Phase—by no means exhaust the possibilities of
“eternity” experiences that transcend ordinary experiences of time. All
the same, these examples will provide an exemplary opportunity to justify
my thesis, now deepened, that music’s power to redescribe affective
dimensions of our experiences is one, if not the, privileged mode of creative
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activity attesting to a feeling of dependence in the face of time’s ultimate

inscrutability.
The idea that music’s nonrepresentational character licenses by turn
romanticizing metaphysics, musical hermeneutics, and deconstructive
strategies, consequently proves to be the first and most enduring obstacle.
Conversely, the fact that a work’s distance from the real is the condition
for its mimetic refiguration (in accordance with the world the work
expresses) means that the source of this distance—the work’s imaginative
explorations—resists being assimilated to the schema founded, as it were,
on Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics. That the epoché of the real is the
negative condition for reality’s redescription in the light of a heuristic
fiction highlights the paradox in question: closure at the level of the work’s
immanent configuration is the condition for the fact that, in retreating to
the realm of the as if, the work opens us to the world anew. Music’s
distance from the real exemplifies the paradox that the further the retreat,
the more forceful the return and the deeper the bite. In transcending the
real within the immanence of the world that the work expresses, the power
of thought and imagination at work in placing reality at a distance opens
a space for experience, within the realm of the fictive, to redescribe our
elective affinities with, and inherence in, the world.
The force of the return, as attested by the way a piece of music can affect
our moods and dispositions, is the real measure of a work’s ontological
vehemence. Music is, in this regard, singularly unique. Whereas narrative
is an imitation of action, music raises the tonality of being-affected above
itself. Aristotle tells us that the different manners and means of imitation
distinguish among the arts. Accordingly for him, rhythms and melodies
provide us with “images of states of character, which come closer to their
actual nature than anything else can do.”343 Listening “to these images is
to undergo a real change of the soul.”344 Whereas visual representations
are merely indications of these states of character, musical compositions
represent states of character themselves—anger, calm, temperance, and
courage, for example, or their opposites. Music, which produces its effect
on the listener according to a composition’s mode and rhythm, affects
the character of the soul by cultivating the soul’s disposition. Music’s
imaginative refiguration of the manner in which we are disposed to the
world—this modulation of the soul—is the culminating moment of the
mimetic operation in question. Accordingly, the exemplification of
the singular feelings that a work possesses refigures our inherence in the
world by uniting the interiorization of an affection of the self with an
intention toward the world. In accounting for the complex intentionality
of feeling, Ricoeur explains that the felt qualities projected on things are
“not objects facing a subject but the intentional expression of an undivided
bond with the world.”345 As such, “feelings appear at the same time as a
coloring of the soul, as an affection.”346 As the paradoxical unity of an
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intention and an affection, feeling manifests our inherence in the world.

From this vantage point, music’s apparent representational deficiencies—
its seeming lack of means to represent objects, characters, agents,
circumstances, and motives for acting—is only the negative correlate of the
fact that, in exploring the affective dimension of our experiences, music
touches the fundamental element of our mortal dwelling.
This fundamental element is nowhere attested to more eloquently than
in the avowal of an order of time that escapes our will to master it.
Ricoeur’s qualification of his claim that music is not mimetic suggests
that, at the limit of the narrative art’s power to refigure time, music’s
explorations in the realm of feelings take the measure of the disproportion
between the span of our mortal existence and the relentless passage of
time. His acknowledgment of the limit in which the “narrative genre itself
overflows into other genres of discourse that, in their own ways, undertake
to speak of time,”347 attests to the multiplicity of the possible experiences
in which time is surpassed by its other. For Ricoeur, the multiplication of
limit experiences through which narrative approaches an internal limit is
a result of the fact that “it is in a different possible world [unfolded by a
singular work] that time allows itself to be surpassed by eternity.”348
The disproportion between time and the other of time engenders the
excess that overflows the narrative genre from within. When “time,
escaping our will to mastery, surges forth on the side of what, in one way
or another, is the true master of meaning,”349 this excess returns thought
about time to the enigma of time’s ultimate unrepresentability. A long
tradition of wisdom concerning the “grief that is ceaselessly reborn from
the contrast between the fragility of life and the power of time that
destroys,”350 springs from the seeming collusion between the nonmastery
inherent in our being-affected by the world and by the histories to which
we belong, and the nonmastery inherent in our inability to master time.
Without passing through the art of narration, lyric poetry, too, “gives a
voice, which is also a song, to this fundamental element”351 in taking the
measure of time’s inscrutable character. At its limit, this song is an elegy
to our part in being in the face of time’s ultimate inscrutability. By joining
the lyric muthos that he attributes to the mood created by a poem with a
lyric mimesis, in which the “mood created in this fashion is a sort of model
for ‘seeing as’ and ‘feeling as’,”352 Ricoeur extends the role mimesis plays
in refiguring reality beyond the narrative art’s capacity to speak of time.
For him, music goes further even than non-figurative painting in deploying
a work’s expressive function: to unfold a world that competes with the
real in a realm that lies beyond existing reality. By constructing worlds of
“singular essences in the realm of feeling,”353 individual works exceed the
narrative genre’s capacity to speak of time. At the limit, music’s affective
tonalities modulate our inherence in the world by extending the region
of our being-affected in the face of time’s aporetic deepening. By refiguring
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moods and feelings that precede the objectification of reality, these

affective tonalities reinsert us in the world in a non-objectifying manner.
In the end, the fact that the “elevation of feeling to fiction is the condition
of its mimetic use”354 conjoins a reflection on the limits of narrative to a
reflection on music’s significance with respect to the difference between the
experience of human finitude and that which escapes our will to mastery.
This difference, which Ricoeur argues lies at the root of time’s most
intractable enigma, marks the furthest limit of music’s mimetic relation to
the being and non-being of time. Beyond the narrative art’s limits to refigure
time and the other of time, music’s redescriptions of our elective affinities
with the world touch the fundamental element of human finitude. As a
“modality of the soul,”355 music’s affection of the self transfigures the
avowal of being in the face of time’s inscrutability. In music, the height of
feeling that replies to reason’s demand for the “Unconditional” manifests
the meaning of the difference between Being and beings.
‘Moods’ alone can manifest the coincidence of the transcendent,

in accordance with intellectual determinations, and the inward, in
accordance with the order of existential movement. . . . If being is
that which beings are not, anguish is the feeling par excellence of
ontological difference. . . . Joy attests that we have a part of us
linked to this very lack of being in beings. That is why Spiritual
Joy . . . designate[s] . . . the only affective ‘mood’ worthy of being
called ontological. Anguish is only its underside of absence and
distance. If man is capable . . . of Joy in and through anguish, that
is the radical principle of all ‘disproportion’ in the dimension of
feeling and the source of man’s affective fragility.356
This principle authorizes the mimesis in music of the affective tonalities of

existence. Through refiguring the disproportion in the dimension of feeling
between our part in being and the lack we experience in the face of our
nonmastery of time, music renews the pathos and joy of our mortal
dwelling.
Musical Worlds
In reanimating the question of music’s mimetic significance, the paradox
that music’s affective power is proportional to its withdrawal from
obvious references to real, existing structures and processes sets out
the stakes of a hermeneutics of music. By dispelling the long-standing
prejudice that music’s representation of feelings and moods rests on
principles of musical rhetoric established in conjunction with language’s
preeminent role as the instrument of the subject’s knowledgeable
mastery of the world, a phenomenological hermeneutics of the experience
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of music opens a space for reflecting on music’s expression of its world.

One major challenge remains. In describing music’s mimetic relation to
the depths of our human finitude, I have not yet accounted for the com-
municability of the experience that works afford. The communicability
of this experience is critical to the worlding power of the work. Hence the
one task left is to explain how, in retreating to the interior recesses that
formal analysis takes as its object, the work’s self-referentiality is the
condition for its mimetic redescription.
Aristotle’s account of how music’s educative function is entangled with
its representation of states of character provides an entry point to this task
by highlighting how “forming right judgments on, and feeling delight in,
fine characters and good actions”357 are mutually implicated in cultivating
worthy moral habits. For him, the flute is unsuitable as an instrument for
educating children to become citizens of the polis because it requires a
professional turn of mind that detracts from cultivating the citizen’s powers
of judgment. Moreover, since the flute “does not express a state of
character, but rather a mood of religious excitement [,] . . . it should . . . be
used on those occasions when the effect to be produced on the audience is
the release of emotion [katharsis], and not instruction.”358 The fact that
“flute-playing prevents the flute-player from using words”359 underscores
the distinction Aristotle draws between the expression of a state of
character and a mood of religious excitement; according to the myth of the
ancients, Athene threw the flute away in disgust after having invented it
because playing it distorted the face. Yet because Athene is the goddess to
whom the gift of knowledge was ascribed, for Aristotle it “seems more
likely that she threw it away because the study of flute-playing has nothing
to do with the mind.”360 Hence Aristotle’s proscription of flute playing as
proper to the citizen’s education has its foundation in the difference
between lyric representations of states of character and the cathartic release
of ecstatic emotions. Music, which in Aristotle’s words produces its effect
on the “character of the soul,”361 instructs its listeners in the manner in
which they find themselves disposed to the world. Plato’s concern with
music’s capacity to “permeate the inner[most] part of the soul”362 similarly
aims at placing music’s cathartic effects within a proper education’s ethical
and political constitution. As with Aristotle, his interest in channeling these
effects calls for determining modes and rhythms appropriate to the
cultivation of good judgments, actions, and characters. According to Plato,
education (paiedera) in music and poetry, which “ought to end in the love
of the fine and the beautiful,”363 is important in learning to care for one’s
character and disposition (ethos). For these ancient Greek thinkers, music’s
imitation of dispositions appropriate to good judgment, character, and
action is the measure of music’s cathartic power.
The appropriateness of modes and rhythms to the education of moral
habits attests in its own way to the communicability of the feeling or mood
112
that reverberates with the worlding of the work. (It is worth noting that
other world music traditions make similar recourse to the intimate relation
between modes and feelings. Indian rags, for example, are scalar modes
associated with particular moods. Middle Eastern maqams, too, are modes
which have their appropriate feelings or moods. Mode and mood are
closely aligned in this respect.364) Previously I argued that the feeling or
mood expressed by a work is one that the work possesses. Moreover, this
feeling is an effect of the work’s temporal configuration, in much the same
way that the mood created by a poem is coextensive with the poem’s verbal
structure. As one aspect of the art of rhetoric, a work’s disposition
(dispositio) is a function of the arrangements of its parts. Thus, the com-
position of a work always consists in more than the formal organization of
its constitutive elements. As the arrangement of the parts, the composition
consists in the configuration of a sequential ordering of events now trans-
formed into a temporally synthetic whole. Accordingly, the ethos emanat-
ing from this arrangement accompanies and completes the transformation
of the arrangement of the parts into the meaningful expression intended by
the work. By incarnating the mood or feeling that it possesses, the world
formed in accordance with the work’s “pledge of order”365 manifests the
work’s disposition. Accordingly, the work’s sensuous abundance, which
overflows the bounds of conceptual thought, crystallizes with the formation
of this world. The superabundance of meaning that a work possesses is
there for us only in the manner in which the work expresses its world.
Through the worlding of the work, the language the work speaks brings the
feeling or mood inhering in it to a stand.
The dialectic of mood and mastery that Ernst Bloch identifies with the
hermeneutics of feeling sheds some further light on the work’s worlding
power. This dialectic, according to Bloch, has its root in the enigma that
while “music as mood remains in the shaft of the soul, indeed seems the
most chthonic of all arts, so-called musica mathematica becomes com-
pletely Uranian, lands in heaven.”366 On the one hand, the expression in
music of feelings and moods depends upon a technical mastery of
compositional means. (Attributing the inner logic of a work to the formal
arrangement of its parts without regard for the work’s composition-
configuration privileges this technical mastery.) Conversely, the “idea” a
work expresses is one that has its root in the work’s temporal formation.
In this respect, the “musical logic” that Dahlhaus identifies with music’s
inner dynamic provides a better approximation of the temporal quality of
the spirit or ethos of this world than do formalist abstractions. In contrast
to Roman Ingarden’s assertion that the musical work has only one level,
Dahlhaus maintains that the logic of music’s inner dynamic constitutes a
middle ground between music’s syntactical and semantic elements.367
To the extent that this inner dynamic could be said to realize the work’s self-
expression, this inner dynamic is the correlate of the self-presencing of the
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activity Gadamer attributed to the phenomenon of play. Consequently, the

logic of this inner dynamic is that of the matrix schematized by the synthetic
operation that transforms the work’s sequentially ordered linear
progression into a meaningful temporal whole. Abstracting an atemporal
logic from the temporal matrix schematized through the operation of
configuring a work as a whole reifies the concept of the work’s inner form.
Thus this logic remains an empty abstraction. When Ingarden observes that
the temporal coloring enveloping a work’s sounding structure stamps the
work with its unique emotional qualities, it is because the arrangement of
parts structures the time they fill. This “structured duration,”368 which
Ingarden identifies with a musical work, and from which Dahlhaus derives
the principle of a middle ground for a musical logic, is a function of a work’s
temporal matrix. Correlatively, this matrix is the temporal schema of the
feeling that the work exemplifies. Through schematizing the mood that
resonates with the work’s disposition, the configuration intended by the
compositional mastery reflected in the arrangement of its parts gives rise to
the world that the work as a whole expresses. The fact that a mastery of
compositional materials, methods, and techniques is only a condition for
the expression of a world therefore highlights the work’s poetic aim. By
taking the measure of our inherence in the world, each work augments the
affective dimensions of our experiences as a poiesis a se [creation through
itself]. As the voice of the hidden wellspring of existence, music’s mode of
expression, for Bloch, accordingly emulates the temporalizing of
temporality at the root of the ontological difference: “cantus essentiam
fontis vocat [singing summons the existence of the fountain].”369 This
image of music’s poiesis a se bears out its mimetic relation to the difference
between beings and being. As such, the figure of music as a poiesis a se gives
a fuller measure to our earlier conclusion, in Chapter 6, that by giving voice
to the pathos and joy of our mortal dwelling, music modulates our elective
affinities with the world into which we are thrown.
The notion that, as a poiesis a se, music refigures the aporia of time’s
inscrutability brings us face to face with the paradox of the communi-
cability of feelings and moods. Carolyn Abbate skirts this paradox when,
in arguing that music mimes or “dance[s] out the world in present
time,”370 she distinguishes music’s mimetic character from narrative art’s
diegetic one. For her, the lack in music of a preterite tense signifies a
distinction that is at once fundamental and terrible: by precluding music’s
ability to recount actions and events by speaking in the past tense, the
mimetic impulse in music “traps the listener [inescapably] in present
experience and the beat of passing time.”371 By deriving this impulse
from the opposition between mimetic and diegetic functions, Abbate’s
analysis of music’s mimetic essence subordinates the worlding of the
work to time’s relentless passage. The occultation of a composition’s
configurational dimension by the ever-presencing succession of its parts
114
not only eclipses the difference between music’s anchorages in the affective
dimension of our experiences and the narrative art’s recourse to the
semantics of action; by emphasizing music’s temporal immediacy against
narrative’s diegetic function, Abbate’s contention that music dances out its
world also abrogates the role reflecting judgment plays.
The work’s exemplification of the mood it expresses calls for a synthetic
apprehension of the arrangement of a work’s manifold parts as if to place
it under a universal. Ricoeur reminds us that for Kant, reflective judgment
reverses the determinate judgment that places particulars under a universal
concept. Reflective judgment is merely subjective in the sense that the
judging subject does not determine objectively valid universals but “only
takes into account the procedures the mind follows in the operation of
subsumption.”372 Ricoeur explains that, “in the absence of the objective
universality proper to determinant judgment, reflecting judgment—to
which aesthetic experience belongs—”373 has its universality in the play
between imagination and understanding. This play can be shared only as
it is incarnated in a work. For Kant, the “feeling of freedom in the play of
our cognitive powers, a play that yet must also be purposive, . . . underlies
that pleasure which alone is universally communicable although not based
on concepts.”374 This pleasure attests that the “rule” elicited by the
“thought” or “idea” (dianoia) the work expresses originates with the
work’s singular configuration of its world. In response to the question,
problem or perplexity for which it provides an answer, each work puts
imagination into play through its internal ordering of tones, motives,
themes, harmonies, dissonances, temporal modulations, timbres, repeti-
tions, and reprises.375 Imagination, which as the operation of reflective
judgment draws together the sequential presentation of these manifold
elements, schematizes the world that the work expresses.
The exemplarity of the “rule” that this schematizing operation evinces
consists in the unique expression, in a work, of a model for inhabiting
the world. For Ricoeur, the proximity of aesthetics with ethics turns on
this conjunction of the work’s singularity with its communicability.
Being drawn to follow models set by exemplary moral acts, the effect of
which stems from the apprehension of the fit between singular acts and
the situations to which they answer, is “really the equivalent of the
communicability of the work of art.”376 In the end, the communicability of
this fit is attributable to the operation of reflecting judgment.377 The
followability (Nachfolge) of exemplary works and acts, through which the
singularity of each seeks the normativity of its “rule”, constitutes its claim
to universality. This universality has its point of futurity in the apprehension
of the “fittingness” of the work or act in relation to the problems, aporias,
and perplexities to which they reply. Like the injunction that issues from
the example of a singular moral act, the suitability of the world that is
expressed by a work testifies to a possible modality of inhabiting the world.
115
The fact that a work’s exemplification of a mood or feeling consists in

the work’s unique expression of its own musical world sets the work’s
singularity in relief. In this respect, the work’s singularity and its
communicability offer a solution to the dilemma of a work’s aesthetic and
historical significance. (Recall that Dahlhaus provided one of the most
succinct formulations of the problem when he asked how it might be
possible to “reconcile the autonomy aesthetic with a sense of history, to
do justice at one stroke to both the historical and the aesthetic dimensions
of musical works without sacrificing either coherence of presentation or
the strong concept of art.”378 Following Dahlhaus, Treitler suggested that
the possibility of such a reconciliation exists “only insofar as the historian
is able to show the place of individual works in history by revealing the
history contained within the works themselves, that is, by reading the
historical nature of works from their internal constitution.”379 The
singularity of the work is, in this regard, both at the root of the problem
and the key to its solution.) Ultimately, the history contained within the
work consists in the work’s individual reply to the unique problem, crisis,
or aporia for which it provides the solution.380 I would go so far as to
suggest that the adequation of the problem and the reply that the work
provides (which the listener apprehends in grasping the “fit” exemplified
by a uniquely individual work) might shed some further light on the vexing
and seemingly inexhaustible problems concerning the authenticity of
intentions, meanings, performances, and receptions. In all events, in
response to the dilemma of a music history that fails as history by treating
works as autonomous entities, or that fails as a history of works by
locating unique compositions in chains of events, the individual work’s
exemplarity is a testament to the communicability of an experience that is
in principle open to everyone.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung is instructive in this regard. Written
during the brief period of Schoenberg’s expressionist experimentation,
Erwartung stands almost alone in its figuration of the traditional tonal
paradigm’s exploded legitimacy. Faced with the failing authority of tonal
closure, Schoenberg freed dissonance from the normative requirement of its
resolution. With the “emancipation of dissonance,” the nomic generalities
of tonality no longer applied. Through refusing to force his music into “the
Procrustean bed of tonality,”381 he uncovered new expressive resources
appropriate to the demands of Erwartung’s freely atonal style. Based on a
text by Marie Pappenheim, Erwartung portrays a world inhabited by a
solitary figure in search of her dead lover. This monodramatic Angsttraum
exemplifies the feeling of foreboding initially evoked with the woman’s
hesitant question: “Hier hinein? Man sieht den Weg nicht. . . . ” (Example
7.1). In meeting the demand for expression at every moment, Erwartung
elicits the feeling of dread that Carl Schorkse identified with the fin de siècle
crisis of confidence.382 To be sure, the rupture with tradition brought about
116
by Schoenberg’s negation of tonality is comparable to the event in think-

ing wrought through the loss of credibility of the Hegelian system of
thought.383 Adorno once claimed that in registering the traumatic shock of
the modern individual’s powerlessness, Erwartung’s figuration of isolated
Example 7.1 Schoenberg, Erwartung, mm. 1–4
Schoenberg ERWARTUNG, Op. 17

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117
moments became the work’s formal technical law.384 Adorno’s critique

notwithstanding, the power of the work resides in its unique figuration of
its world’s darkening horizons. In arresting the dissonances’ forward-
moving tendency to resolve, Schoenberg in Erwartung intensified the sense
of anxiety haunting the lonely figure’s solitary quest. Through coalescing,
in Hoeckner’s words, “into a single moment of despair,”385 Erwartung
exemplifies the mood of the deepening crisis to which it gives voice in the
way that only this singular expression of a welling anxiety could.
Limit Experiences
Erwartung’s exemplification of the feeling of dread contrasts starkly with
the ethos of the “period of slackening”386 that Jean-François Lyotard
identifies with the current time. Where in Erwartung explosive frag-
mentary moments coalesce in configuring dissonance’s arrested drive, the
loss—better, the absence—of this modernist sense of discord gives rise to
the sense of slackening that, for Lyotard, distinguishes the postmodern
condition. By shattering the Hegelian confidence in history and reason,
Erwartung’s expression in its naked singularity of suspenseful foreboding
reveals the crisis of a deepening discrepancy between the space of our
experiences and the horizon of our expectations that recedes more quickly
than it can be approached.387 In contrast, in response to the discredited
utopianism of the modernist project and the supposed violence of its
totalizing claims, the specifically anti-teleological mood of slackening
resonates with sempiternal presence. As one of the possible representations
of an “eternity” experience, the figuration of an instant of time infinitely
extended into the past and future attests in its own way to the existential
deepening of the experience of time. Through placing moods that
correspond to this existential deepening in a higher register, music moves
us, as Charles Taylor comments, “because it incarnates being profoundly
moved.”388 At the limit, music’s replies to the aporia of time’s ultimate
inscrutability refigure the meaning of time through exemplifying moods
and feelings that, in creating heightened senses of being “out of time” or
even “beyond time,” open the world to us anew.
Music’s mimetic redescription of time’s existential deepening is one
among the diversity of cultural figures that attests to the breadth of a
variety of experiences of otherness. Taylor’s remark—that in trying to
“express what is chthonic, cosmic. . . . [music] trades on resonances of the
cosmic in us”389—might in this regard be taken as an acknowledgment of
the cultural significance of limit experiences in which time is surpassed
by its other. Ritual practices in which time is surpassed by eternity, by
nonbeing, or by a return to a time in illo tempore¸ for instance, are
nonspeculative, nonphilosophical modes of thinking that give voice to the
moods that rule over them, and for which “eternity transcends history
118
from within history.”390 Like narrative, whose transcultural necessity

Ricoeur defends, music attains its real value and meaning when it becomes
a condition of a way of inhabiting the world. Trance, ecstasy, and ritual
practices, in suspending the order of profane existence through the
creation of special worlds of time, multiply the “eternity” experiences that
in their own ways reply to the enigma of time and its other. The mythic
archaisms that haunt speculations on time link the variety of tonalities
evidenced by these “eternity” experiences to the more radical experience
of nonmastery that wells up in the face of time’s immensity. This aporia,
Ricoeur explains, “springs forth at the moment when time, escaping any
attempt to constitute it, reveals itself as belonging to a constituted order
always already presupposed by the work of constitution.”391 It is not
thinking that fails; rather it is the “hubris . . . that impels our thinking to
posit itself as the master of meaning. Thinking encounters this failure . . .
when time, escaping our will to mastery, surges forth on the side of what,
in one way or another, is the true master of meaning.”392 The rediscovery
of unavoidable figures of time’s inscrutability (arising from the ground of
philosophy’s break with mythical beginnings), and the Hebraic inspira-
tion behind Augustine’s meditations (bearing witness to eternity’s
irreducibility to an immutably stable present) both attest to the mythic
archaisms that return speculations on time to nonspeculative modes of
thinking. Accordingly, the variety of cultural figures in which time is
surpassed give voice to a way of dwelling in the world in accordance with
the avowal of a feeling of dependence that wells up in the face of the
enigmas of time.
The reality of an “eternity” experience gains force in proportion to the
heightening of the feeling of transcending time. A. J. Racy’s study of the
culture and artistry of ‚tarab is exemplary in this respect. As a term
describing the “extraordinary emotional state evoked by the music,”393
‚tarab, Racy explains, is also related to salt‚anah, an ecstatic state in which
the “perfomer becomes musically self-absorbed (mundamij), and experi-
ences well-focused and intense musical sensations.”394 More generally,
salt‚anah, and ‚tarab, evince an “altered sense of time, more specifically as
‘timelessness’ or temporal transcendence.”395 In this ecstatic time, the
aesthetic heightening and intensification of emotions captivates performers
and listeners in the superrreal world of ‚tarab performance. By highlighting
the affinity of lexical associations of ‚tarab with joy (farah) and sadness
·
(huzun), Racy accentuates ‚tarab ecstasy’s ontological vehemence. In giving
voice to the depths of sadness and the heights of joy the “enchanting
melancholy . . . evoked by the voice that captivates through its beauty or
rather, overwhelms [performers and listeners] through its sweet pathos.”396
Accordingly, ‚tarab ecstasy’s poetic expression sublimates the “‘mood’ of
finitude” that Ricoeur reminds us is “rendered conscious of itself”397
through meditative memory’s sadness.
119
The clinical reality of Tumbuka “dancing prophets,” and the thera-

peutic experience in which music plays a quintessential role constitute yet
another cultural figure of time transcended from within. In his ethnog-
raphy, Stephen Friedson describes how nchimi healers, after having
danced the “‘disease of the prophets’ (nthenda ya uchimi),”398 receive
divinatory powers. By dancing the disease, nchimi adepts become healers
for whom dancing is the source of the heat that fuels their divinatory
trance. The sacral character of nchimi healing practices attests to a manner
of inhabiting the world that Friedson identifies with the disclosive power
of vimbuza drumming. Since each type of vimbuza spirit only responds to
its own rhythmic mode, only vimbuza drumming can divine which spirits
are the source of the patient’s affliction. The drumming that heats these
spirits and hence calls them out, and the dance in which these spirits reveal
themselves and which cools them down, structure the superreal world of
the Tumbuka “dancing prophets.”399 In this world, in which “vimbuza
spirits are made present in sound,”400 the sacred time that envelops the
clinical reality of the thempli (healer’s temple) gives the experience of spirit
possession its own sacred presence. Dancing the disease elevates “the
quotidian world to a more intense level of reality, one that involves a
compelling engagement with the spirits.”401 Accordingly, the sacred reality
of the “dancing prophets” projects a way of being from within the clearing
of its superreal temporal heights.
The diversity of cultural figures in which “eternity” experiences
exemplify the mood ruling over the aporias of time exceeds more tradi-
tional ways of espousing the limits of our mortal condition. In evoking a
sense of “time beyond time,” music in which the drive toward closure gives
way to the infinitely extended expanse of a single moment recaptures the
feeling of the sublime. According to Kant, for aesthetic judgments of taste
“the basis of the pleasure is posited merely in the form of the object for
reflection in general.”402 Conversely, in judgments of the sublime the feeling
of displeasure stemming from the imagination’s inability to provide a form
of presentation adequate to reason’s objective finality arises indirectly
through the presentation of a form’s “unboundedness,” to which “we add
. . . the thought of its totality.”403 For Kant, the “feeling of displeasure that
arises from the imagination’s inadequacy . . . is at the same time also a
pleasure, aroused by the fact that this very judgment, namely, that even the
greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is [itself] in harmony with
rational ideas, insofar as our striving toward them is still a law for us . . .
[and which, in accordance with the feeling of the sublime, promotes our]
‘supersensible vocation’.”404 The real sentiment of the sublime, Lyotard
concludes, combines pain with pleasure: the “pleasure that reason should
exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not
be equal to the concept.”405 Hence the contra-finality that Lyotard
maintains results from the “severe reexamination which postmodernity
120
imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment”406 also evinces the force of

a limit experience in the face of the ultimate unrepresentability of time.
For example, the recurring cadential figure in Philip Glass’s Einstein on
the Beach (his portrait-opera of the saint-like figure who was also the
herald of a catastrophic age) exemplifies its apocalyptic ending with a
cyclic progression that enharmonically alters the B chord in the sequence:
F minor—D major—B major/A major—B major—E major. This lowered
resolution on E major motivates, as it were, the cadence’s repetition.
Transvaluing the “time-honored closing”407 of a traditional cadential
progression by initiating its incessant repetition reverses the role played by
the “sense of an ending” in transforming indefinite successions of events
into one temporal whole.408 The contra-finality of an ending that is
infinitely repeatable, and hence is in principle infinite, ushers in an ending
that is without end. The simulacrum of the eternal present, this figure of
the sempiternal “end of time,” evinces yet another modality in which time
is surpassed by its other.
Steve Reich’s Piano Phase similarly stakes out the borderlines of eternity.
As the exemplar of an “infinite canon,” this work’s “slow motion” dis-
placement of cyclically repeating melodic patterns gives rise to the sense of
timelessness that Jonathan Kramer identified with the “verticalization” of
time. In stretching “a single present . . . into an enormous duration, a
potentially infinite ‘now’ that nonetheless feels like an instant,”409 Piano
Phase figures the feeling of being out of time. In the first and longest of the
work’s three sections, the gradual acceleration of a repeating twelve note
melodic pattern against its constant repetition gives rise to differential
displacements to which Reich attributed the creation of the work’s
“psycho-acoustical by-products.”410 This recurring twelve-note pattern
consists of two interlocking figures, one which consists of three notes
(E—B—D) and one which consists of two notes (F—C), which, when it is
interlocked with the repeating three-note figure produces the alternating
pattern (F—C—F; C—F—C) (Example 7.2). This repeating, interlocked
“pentatonic” motif is initially repeated by the first pianist (Piano I), who is
then joined by the second pianist (Piano II). After a short number of
repetitions (between twelve and eighteen), the second pianist gradually
increases the tempo, slowly moving ahead. In the first section of Piano
Phase, this process continues until the recurring pattern in the second piano
completes the circle and rejoins the first piano in their initial unison.
The feeling of temporal dislocation that Piano Phase achieves through
suspending any goal-directed sense of progression replies in its own way
to the existential deepening of the experience of time. Kramer’s attempt to
capture the deepening of this experience through a theory of different
species of time only approximates music’s mimetic relation to the aporias
of time. By deriving the architemporal order of a “vertical time,” or a
“time of timelessness,” from the ordinary concept of time, according to
121
Example 7.2 Reich, Piano Phase, 1–3
Reich PIANO PHASE

© 1980 by Universal Edition
Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, U.S. and Canadian agent
for Universal Edition Ltd., London.
which time consists in the relentless succession of instantaneous “now”

points, Kramer’s typology of the species of time—linear time, nondirected
linear time, multiply-directed time, moment time, and vertical time—
occludes the aporetics of temporality brought to light by the
phenomenology of time. Yet by suggesting that, in the absence of any
temporal progression, “ordinary time . . . become[s] frozen in an eternal
now,”411 Kramer, too, reserves a place for exploring the boundary
between time and its other. That a work in vertical time “simply is”412
ultimately attests to the mimetic character of a limit experience in which
the sempiternal present overruns the historical and temporal borders of
memory and expectation, and of past and future. Like other works in
whose worlds time is surpassed by its other, Piano Phase refigures the
aporia of time’s inscrutability. Accordingly, through exemplifying the
mood that rules over the experience of being out of time, Piano Phase
redescribes the meaning of time in staking out the borderlines of the other
of time.
In the end, the mimetic refiguration of time in limit experiences rejoins
the existential deepening of the feeling of the difference between beings
and being. The sublimation of the mood of finitude, which the feeling of
melancholy renders conscious of itself, finds multiple expressions in the
122
variety of figures that avow the feeling of dependence in the face of our
ultimate nonmastery of the meaning of time. Being beyond essence, it is the
radicalization of moods and feelings that—in response to the difference
between being and our part in it—interiorizes reason’s supreme intention
to think the unconditioned without knowing it through its objective
determination.413 Even the postmodern apotheosis of the feeling of the
sublime (according to which pain exceeds the pleasure that, for Kant, bore
witness to our supersensible—that is, moral—vocation) cannot liberate
itself from a modality of feeling whose formlessness attests all the more
forcibly to the difference that is the source of our anguish and joy. A
diversity of figures, in which time is surpassed by its other, manifests a
plurality of such modalities of feeling. In response to the distinction
between being and beings, the refiguration of affective dimensions of our
belonging to being raises anew the question of a phenomenon that, at the
limit, is no longer accessible to hermeneutic phenomenology as such.414
Through refiguring our inherence in the world, limit experiences summon
moods and feelings that rule over them. To the extent that the commitment
proper to these limit experiences’ ontological vehemence demands a
response, the exploration of modalities of feeling again touches the
fundamental element in raising anew the question of the meaning of our
inherence in the world.
123
8
POLITICAL CRITIQUE
AND THE POLITICS OF
MUSIC CRITICISM
The conviction that music is caught up in political struggles is as common

today as was once the idea that music stood apart from all socially
practical exigencies. In fact it would seem that in all but the most
recalcitrant quarters, the fight against Western art music’s canonic status
has been won. In demystifying absolute music’s aesthetic autonomy, music
criticism took an inevitable political turn. Set against the consecration
of both absolute music’s metaphysical dignity and formalist conceits,
contemporary critical practices deconstructed the ideological defenses of
music’s—and especially Western art music’s—culturally privileged value.
My interest in the politics of criticism in its most recent incarnation hinges
on the seeming inevitability of the political turn of current critical
strategies. The problem, as I see it, is that the turn to self-consciously
politicized forms of criticism appears to be constrained by a conceptual
framework instituted by the aesthetic’s ideological valorization. In order
to understand how this framework affects how critics position themselves
in relation to their object, it is helpful to recall some of the history of
the concept of the aesthetic inaugurated by Kant’s subjectivization
of aesthetics. By differentiating between judgments of taste and the
knowledge of reality, Kant laid the cornerstone for establishing art’s and
music’s autonomous standpoint. In turning against music’s metaphysical
elevation, critical practices aimed to uncover music’s worldly, as opposed
to its otherworldly, character. In my view, the problem in its entirety
rests here. The occultation of the worlding power of music, which in the
previous chapter I attributed to music’s mimetic capacity to refigure
affective dimensions of our experiences, therefore proves to be decisive.
To the extent that the struggle against music’s otherworldliness defines
this struggle’s political stakes, criticism finds itself firmly positioned within
the schema inaugurated by Kant.
124
POLITICS OF MUSIC CRITICISM
Music as Social Violence

Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the field in which music operates as a form of
social violence initially justifies an enterprise aimed at divesting music of
the vestiges of the bourgeois religion of art. For him, the misrecognition of
art, and especially of music as “pure” aesthetic objects, is essential to their
symbolic value as weapons in the fight for social position and power. The
field of cultural production, in which the social belief in the work of art’s
aesthetic autonomy masks the work’s symbolic value as such a weapon,
turns the world of ordinary economic relations upside down. The space of
possible positions taken by artists, authors, and composers constitutes the
field of struggles in which artists, authors, composers, as well as critics
seek to accrue the economic and symbolic profits, such as literary prestige
and critical acclaim that are at stake. Within the space delimited by this
field, every position “is subjectively defined by the system of distinctive
properties” that situates it in relation to all others. Since the field of
cultural production is the space of the positions structured by the
“distribution of the capital of specific properties,”415 even the dominant
position depends upon the positions defined in relation to it.
The efficacy of the reversal through which the field of cultural
production assumes the aura of an autonomous domain depends upon the
social misrecognition of this field’s structure and stakes. By dissembling the
struggle among artists and critics to dominate the field, the belief in the
aesthetic as a separate sphere conceals the social conditions that produce
this belief. This belief, which Gadamer argued also imposes on art and
artists the impossible demand of redeeming the world aesthetically,
elevates the interest in the “pure” work of art above economic interests by
masking the cultural capital vested in the work. As “the most radical and
most absolute form of the negation of the world, and especially the social
world,”416 music exemplifies the demand that the bourgeois ethos of
aesthetic cultivation makes of all forms of art. In this regard, music’s
symbolic value promotes the logic of the economic world’s reversal,
according to which the inner sanctum of a realm of experience free from
material exigencies occludes real economic struggles. Accordingly, as one
of the “gentle, hidden form[s] which violence takes when overt violence is
impossible,”417 the belief in music’s transcendent autonomy masks the
social distinctions this belief celebrates.
The belief in music’s autonomy consequently stakes its claim to
legitimacy on the bourgeois ideal of an education to art. On Bourdieu’s
analysis, the belief in the work of art as a pure aesthetic object detached
from ordinary practices constitutes the work as such. This belief, in other
words, organizes and guarantees the social misrecognition on which the
efficacy of this belief, and hence of the work’s symbolic value, depend.
125
Detaching the purely aesthetic gaze directed toward the object from the
belief that produces the aesthetic object isolates this gaze from its social
institution as a marker of privilege and a life of ease. From the vantage
point of a critique of the bourgeois religion of art, the dissociation of the
aesthetic gaze from the listener’s, reader’s, or spectator’s social disposi-
tion is “the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic
necessities,”418 in which freedom from economic necessity actively dis-
tances this disposition from a life of labor. In consecrating the “sacred
frontier which makes legitimate culture a separate universe,”419 the
invention of the pure gaze coincides with the advent of the taste of liberty
or luxury guaranteed by this life of ease. According to Bourdieu’s science
of taste, the invention of this privileged social hexis crystallizes in the
movement that legitimates the autonomy of art works, their producers,
and the principles of their aesthetic evaluation. Through dominating the
distinctions that define the struggle over the legitimate definition of
culture, the invention of the pure gaze accordingly singles out taste as
marking and enforcing social distinctions among different classes and
groups.
Bourdieu’s diagnosis of the field in which a work’s value depends upon
the set of agents who have a stake in the production of its meaning also
accounts for the moral and political hexis of critique. Like all “who
confront each other in struggles where the imposition, of not only a world
view but also a vision of the artworld is at stake,”420 agents, curators,
producers, collectors, etc., as well as critics, and musicologists participate
in producing the value of music. Since every position within the field is
defined negatively in relation to all others, the strategic heterodoxy of
deconstructive critiques depends upon the aesthetic’s institution as a
separate sphere. Hence the authority vested in demystifying critiques
paradoxically ratifies the schema in question. The consequence of
reversing the cult of Bildung’s conscious differentiation of music and art
without reversing the effects of Kant’s transcendental justification of taste
means that there is no position, and hence no claim to meaning or truth,
beyond that of the struggle to impose the legitimate disciplinary definition
of music. Rather, the field delimited by the invention of the pure aesthetic
gaze defines the stakes. To the extent that the invention of the pure
aesthetic gaze and the concomitant belief in the aesthetic object constitutes
the ground of this field, the field itself springs from the conscious
differentiation of music and art that Gadamer argued alienates readers,
spectators, and listeners from the experience of the work. Hence a strategic
heterodoxy tends to position contemporary critical currents within the
field produced through the invention of the aesthetic gaze. The heterodoxy
of politically enlightened critiques springs from the ruins of traditional
disciplinary beliefs in this respect. In short, the new orthodoxy concerning
music’s worldliness derives its legitimacy from the orthodoxy it replaces.
126
Treating “claims to knowledge as always also political claims,

inescapably affected by and affecting the knower’s position in a cultural,
social, or psychical matrix”421 mobilizes criticism in the manner Kramer
indicates. At the same time, in confirming the role of Kant’s subjectiv-
ization of aesthetics in the social invention of the pure aesthetic gaze,
Bourdieu’s diagnosis accentuates the political value vested in the
heterodoxic reversal of music’s transcendent aesthetic purity. If music is
“the most ‘spiritual’ of the arts of the spirit and a love of music . . . [is
accordingly] a guarantee of ‘spirituality’,”422 the demythologizing thrust
of a critique is at the same time the justification for this critique’s political
mobilization. For “a bourgeois world which conceives its relation to the
populace in terms of the relationship of the soul to the body, ‘insensitivity
to music’ doubtless represents a particularly unavowable form of
materialist coarseness.”423 Hence in contrast to the idea evidenced by this
account of music as the “‘pure’ art par excellence. . . . [that] says nothing
and has nothing to say,”424 modes of criticism oriented towards cultural
studies wrest their political stance from the schema they denounce. (This
political stance may also explain the preeminence accorded to the place of
the body in much contemporary music criticism.)
Accordingly, the diagnosis that music is one if not the most effective
weapon in the fight for position and power redounds on critique. To the
degree that music’s social emancipation sets the terms of the struggle over
the definition of music as socially constructed representations of gendered
subjectivities, or as a material signifier circulating within a general
communicative economy, the politics of criticism operates within an
inherited framework. In my view, the real dilemma—confusing, or
even conflating, music’s aesthetic character with criticism’s political
motivation—is hidden within this struggle. Certainly, the critical insights
gained by deconstructing the idea that music rises above the contingencies
and exigencies of material existence have toppled the claim that music
stands apart. At the same time, the occultation of the worlding power of
individual works redoubles the force of the political stakes of the struggle
over music’s legitimate definition. Defining music as an aesthetically
autonomous entity justifies formalist practices aimed at defending a
cherished canon of works. Conversely, variously defining music as a
cultural artifact or as a performative process justifies different critical,
anthropological, and ethnomusicological standpoints. The point is that,
while the political stakes are real, the intra- and cross-disciplinary struggles
over music’s meaning and value play a significant role in eclipsing the work
qua work. Despite the wide-spread use of the term cultural work, which a
well-intentioned effort to uncover music’s impact on its listeners and their
worlds exploits, subordinating a work’s power to speak to the heterodoxy
of sociologically informed critique paradoxically masks the work’s impact
on the real.
127
The difficulty is clear: how does criticism operate apart from a definition
of music that itself seems to be hostage in one way or another to the effects
of the history of music’s social emancipation?
The stakes of the struggle are equally decisive. By this I mean that the
stakes are decisive both in terms of the disciplinary and interdisciplinary
claims regarding the appropriate ways of investigating music’s meaning,
cultural value, and social significance, and in terms of the legitimacy of the
conceptual frameworks in which these ways of studying music and making
judgments about it operate. There are any number of articles and books
devoted to this topic, many of which offer rigorous defenses of different
and conflicting methodological, epistemological, and historical positions.
My more immediate concern here is with the more fundamental effects of
the schema that justifies the distancing attitude that is basic to these
different epistemic standpoints. In order to set this concern into relief, it
might be useful to briefly recall the problem posed by extracting music’s
productive meaning from the dissimulating function attributed to the
work’s aesthetic differentiation: the impossibility of deriving a creative
impact on reality from the social condition of music’s aesthetic autonomy
that led to a critical impasse. This impasse reappears in another guise when
subverting the construction of a realm of freedom achieved through the
social fiat of a life of ease becomes complicit with the aesthetics’ ideological
constriction. Bourdieu cautions that the critic’s position as judge or referee
presents the most tempting and most irreproachable method of entering
the struggle in which the categories critics use to define themselves and
their adversaries are both weapons and stakes.425 The violence that makes
music an instrument in the struggle for position and power could scarcely
have left criticism untouched. Ultimately, the extension of the reign of
social violence by symbolic means threatens to engulf the standpoint of a
critique whose opposition to formalist and metaphysical conceits locates
its vital interests within the same economy as that governing the belief in
the “pure” work of art.
Criticism and Politics in Contrary Motion

The irony—that a mode of criticism aimed at liberating our understanding
of music from traditional disciplinary categories underscores the impossi-
bility of exacting music’s power to redescribe dimensions of our experi-
ences from the aesthetic’s social determination as a separate sphere—is
impossible to overlook. In this regard, critical diagnostics of the cult of
Bildung’s deleterious effects run up against a limit outlined, as it were, by
works’ disappearance into the recesses of cultural analysis. With the escape
from reality that, Hannah Arendt argues, “gave the physiognomy of the
cultural or educated philistine its most distinctive marks,”426 the ideal of
self-cultivation through an education to art turned music and art into an
128
instrument of social violence. “[C]ulture began to play an enormous role

as one of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneself
socially, and to ‘educate oneself’ out of the lower regions, where sup-
posedly reality was located, up into the higher, non-real regions, where
beauty and the spirit supposedly were at home.”427 Unmasking music’s
social emancipation as a function of bourgeois art-religion led to the
discovery that music’s efficacy as a form of symbolic capital depends upon
its social misrecognition. Accordingly, the validity of analyzing the
production of the belief that defines the stakes in the struggle over music’s
value and definition encounters its own limits in the constitution of the
field in which this belief operates. Attributing the meaning of a work to the
position it occupies within the field delimited by the logic of the economic
world’s reversal leads to identifying judgments of taste with social
preferences and distinctions in accordance with the cult of Bildung’s
celebration of culture. Consequently, works appear to be one of, if not the
most, effective weapons in the fight for social prestige. As instruments in
the fight for social prestige, works not only no longer speak, but a work’s
meaning changes in accordance with the changing distributions of
economic and symbolic power in the cultural field.
To the extent that the “belief in the value of the work . . . is part of the
full reality of the work of art,”428 music is the object of a differentiating
consciousness “capable of considering the work of art in and for itself.”429
(The creation of private and public galleries and museums, and the rise of
a corps of professionals appointed to preserve and maintain art works,
is a function of the process of differentiation that marks the advent
of aesthetic consciousness.) Capitalizing on the art work’s conscious
differentiation to diagnose the field of cultural production and the
economic world’s reversal holds out scarcely any prospect for escaping the
effects of art’s claim to an autonomous standpoint. The violence that sets
a life of ease above the necessity of labor similarly bears out the con-
sequences of the romantic consecration of the artist’s task: as “something
like a ‘secular savior’ . . . , his creations are expected to achieve on a small
scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.”430
The verdict of the culture of aestheticism that turns art into a social
possession also elevates aesthetic culture to its universal form by drawing
everyone into the struggle for position and power. Despite critical efforts
to the contrary, aesthetic culture takes its revenge in the continuing process
of social disintegration inculcated by the violence of this struggle. The
dissolution of the historical and ethical substance that anchors judgment
in the shared sense of a fitting world bears witness to this disintegration of
the process of cultivating an enlarged “mentality” through surpassing
one’s private interests. Accordingly, the occultation of the work’s own
claim to universality silences the critique of the real that takes shape in the
laboratory of imaginative alternatives.
129
Lawrence Kramer and Gary Tomlinson’s debate over the future of

musicology accentuates the aporias that set in when music’s social recog-
nition as a form of symbolic capital became indispensable to maintaining
the cultural field. Placed against traditional musicology’s agenda, Kramer’s
defense of postmodern knowledge and Tomlinson’s advocacy for a new
historiography compete for the right to define the deconstructed sub-
jectivity that is the hallmark of cultural musicology’s claim to legitimacy.
For both Kramer and Tomlinson, an inviolate knowledge of a work’s
formal and historical character is a sign of modernist musicology’s
allegiance to the metaphysics of a subjective mastery. Hence where
Tomlinson contends that Kramer’s deconstructive program betrays a
modernist understanding of criticism by locating the context of music’s
meaning and significance in the music itself, Kramer charges that
Tomlinson’s intention to replace a critical agenda with an ethnographic
one presages the death of music and criticism. On Tomlinson’s view,
Kramer’s “too-familiar modernist mastery” of the dialogue between critic
and composer replaces “postmodern doubt, play, and problematizing of
the communicative relation”431 with the composer’s sweeping subjective
powers to speak to the critic through his work. Conversely, for Kramer,
Tomlinson’s “conviction that power always translates into an abusive or
appropriative claim of mastery”432 engenders the imaginary episteme of a
metasubjective project leading to a musicology without music. Like
Kramer’s avowal of deconstruction, Tomlinson’s commitment to others
whose music helped fashion their worlds positions him in the struggle over
the legitimate construction of postmodern subjectivities. In the interest of
dislodging the subject from its privileged place, the political stakes in this
struggle disperse music’s meaning into positional definitions. Kramer and
Tomlinson’s debate over the future of a postmodern musicology has the
advantage of illuminating this new musicology’s political stake in the
construction and representation of subjectivity at the same time that it
eclipses its essential disposition. In the fight against modernist musico-
logical practices, the positions adopted in the interest of deconstructing
subject-centered claims to knowledge, it would seem, also conform to
aesthetic culture’s denigration of judgments of taste into markers of social
distinction.
Ultimately, the political stakes vested in the struggle over musicology’s
legitimate methods, subject matter, and sphere of influence depend on the
construct they reject. Bourdieu reminds us that, in the field structured
by the distribution of the forms of capital—symbolic, economic, and
cultural—that accrue to different positions, each possible position is
defined negatively in relation to all others. From this vantage point, the
political and even moral authority of the fight against traditional
musicological dogma is indistinguishable from the symbolic, and perhaps
even economic, capital accumulated when taking a position against the
130
practice of isolating individual works from their sustaining life-contexts.

Tomlinson’s contention that Kramer maintains the stance of a modernist
mastery of the dialogue between critic and composer elicits Kramer’s
riposte: that the distinction Tomlinson draws between criticism and
ethnography is a programmatic phantasm that obscures how ethnography
disperses music’s immediacy-effects into context and brings about both
the death of criticism and the death of music as we think of it. Yet the real
object of this political struggle is the doxa of music’s self-sufficiency and
the claim of subjective mastery founded ultimately on representative
thought’s concept of language. This larger struggle against the pretense
on the part of the subject to posit itself as master of meaning makes
the enigma that arises from the attempt to derive a work’s ontological
vehemence from the aesthetic’s deleterious effects more pronounced. Set
against this larger problematic, the politics of criticism and the critique of
music’s tendentious politicization begin to move in contrary motion.
Political Commitment
The problem to which we therefore need to return is the one we first
encountered in the context of transposing the worn-out principle of
imitation onto the social plane. Then, I argued for the impossibility of
deriving music’s creative value from the conditions that contribute to its
social emancipation. In response, I argued that music refigured reality by
redescribing affective dimensions of our experiences. By placing reality in
suspense, the worlding power of the work transcends the real from within.
Transcending the real within the immanence of the work—which is the
true sign of a work’s hermeneutical autonomy—resolved the paradox that
a work’s distance is the negative condition for its redescription of the
manner in which the world is open to us. The problem, then, is that
as long as this worlding power remains hidden, critical rejoinders to tradi-
tional musicology’s mainstay—the concept of the work as aesthetically
self-sufficient—seem to have no alternative but to assail the concept of
autonomy rooted in romantic transvaluations of Kant’s aesthetics. In
order to unravel this problem, it is advantageous to revisit the enigma of
the aesthetic’s productive value. The results of this detour—through a
critique of the attempt to valorize aesthetics by countering its ideological
designation with music’s, art’s, and literature’s creative significance—will
come to fruition in the concluding chapter, when I turn to the place of
culture and politics in a hermeneutics of music criticism.
The growing unease that we first encountered in George Levine’s plea
provided an initial indication of the scope of the problem. His discontent
with critical practices that assumed works are politically complicit with the
aesthetics’ strategic mystification also motivated my quest for a more
hermeneutical understanding of music’s mimetic character. The difficulty
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facing Levine also confronts us. In view of the autonomous standpoint

gained for music and art in the context of the gnostic value of the
symbolizing power that has been attributed to the work of creative genius,
the constriction of the aesthetic to ideological coordinates that are
correlative with the concept of aesthetic autonomy makes valorizing the
aesthetic extremely problematic. By arguing for the necessity of a
productive, as well as a critical, view of aesthetics, Terry Eagleton high-
lights the aporia that springs from the attempt to derive the aesthetic’s
productive value from its ideologically constricted one. For him, the
mystifying “escape from or sublimation of unpalatable necessity,”433
which insinuates itself behind the cultural separation of processes of
fantasy and pleasure from the fulfillment of material wants, constitutes
only one of the aesthetics’ functions. Through realizing possibilities for
creative self-making, the phenomenon of culture also offers “a pre-
figurative image of a social condition in which such pleasurable creativity
might become available in principle to all.”434 Accordingly, the “imagi-
native reconstruction of our current practices”435 is indispensable to
avoiding the amalgam of disillusionment and sterile utopianisms that
afflicts the Frankfurt school critical theorists, and especially Theodor
Adorno’s relentlessly negative dialectical strategy. As a critique of
alienation, and an exemplary realization of our creative powers in
proposing an ideal reconciliation beyond the divisions of subject and
object, individual and society, and freedom and necessity, Eagleton
argues that the aesthetic can combat postmodern aestheticizations of the
political through its own inherently contradictory nature. The aesthetics’
positive impetus, evidenced by the way works prefigure alternatives to
existing social conditions, counteracts the aesthetics’ negative function as
a means of sublimating social inequities and injustices. Consequently,
the aesthetics’ valorization constitutes the necessary condition for its
political revitalization in the face of the countervailing forces that
aestheticize politics.436
Eagleton’s effort to recover the productive side of the aesthetic
underscores the resilience of the power of imagination. For him, the
“transformative labour”437 involved in producing a work makes literature
more than a mere reflection of reality. Accordingly, the contradiction in
English Marxist criticism that subscribes to both a “mechanistic view of
art as the passive ‘reflex’ of the economic base, and to a Romantic belief
in art as projecting an ideal world and stirring men to new values”438
affords a rehabilitative opening. The question of art’s political progres-
sive value is accordingly a historical question: “There are periods and
societies where conscious, ‘progressive’ political commitment need not be
a necessary condition for producing major art; there are other periods—
fascism, for example—when to survive and produce as an artist at all
involves the kind of questioning which is likely to result in explicit
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commitment.”439 The fact that political commitment is not a necessary

condition for producing works of value suggests that the source of a
work’s power to prefigure alternatives to an existing social order lies
elsewhere. More pointedly still, the transformative labor involved in
creating a work that is more than a reflection of reality presupposes a
break or rupture with the real that is incarnate in singular experiences of
a work. Valorizing the aesthetic captures the effect of placing reality at a
distance that a work achieves through expressing its world. However, the
productive value of the aesthetic is more properly attributable to the power
of thought and imagination. Eagleton’s intention to overcome the
disillusionment of sterile utopianisms leads back to the hermeneutical view
that a work’s effect on reality is proportional to the force of its retreat into
its own poetic world. In the end, the attempt to valorize the aesthetic
attests in its own way to the biting power of individual works.
Adorno’s resistance to the idea that politically progressive works are
correlates of their composers’, authors’, or artists’ commitments and
intentions forces the aporia dissembled by the aesthetic’s valorization into
the open. His contention that a critique of music’s social significance
should take its bearing from a work’s immanent constitution highlights the
emphatically critical function of the distance that separates a work from
empirical reality. As the first social characteristic of all authentic art, the
difference between a work and reality “makes it an artwork in the first
place.”440 By constituting itself “in relation to what it is not,”441 art
becomes social by virtue of its opposition to calcified systems and relations
of power. The difference between an art work’s inner complexion and
the reigning social order is therefore critical to a work’s prefiguration
of a reconciliation that modern music and art express negatively when
they witness to inexpressible suffering. As a critique of the rationally
administered world’s instrumental violence, for Adorno, Schoenberg’s
negation of harmony in his freely atonal compositions was exemplary in
exposing the false consciousness of modern society. At the same time, the
incessant negativity of Adorno’s critical strategy led to the impasse of its
performative contradiction, correlative with attributing art’s distance from
society to the fact of its social emancipation. This contradiction, I argued
in the first chapter, haunts Adorno’s contention that art’s semblance
character is the condition of its truth. For the sake of its social truth, the
work of art forestalls the utopian impulse that is at the same its raison
d’être. The paradox that art’s aesthetic autonomy is also its defining social
characteristic is therefore both the starting-point and the outcome of this
critical strategy. The principle of art’s autonomy, as Lambart Zuidervaart
rightly stresses, renders art ideological and at the same time serves as the
precondition of art’s emancipatory potential.442 Caught in the vicious
circularity of a contradiction that is seemingly of its own making, art’s
critical force holds out scarcely any hope for the world’s transformation.
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Adorno’s effort to save art’s truth aligns his attitude toward politically
committed art with art’s utopian function. No work, I said when reflecting
on Adorno, is able to represent the utopian reconciliation that it desires
and for which it hopes. Rather, individual works testify to the possibility
of a utopian reconciliation by recalling a condition of freedom that does
not yet exist. For Adorno, the remembrance—the anamnesis—of this
utopian condition springs from the trace of memory in art’s mimetic
impulses. Accordingly, mimesis in art preserves art’s difference from the
instrumental rationality that he saw as overrunning all spheres of life. As
a refuge for the subject’s mimetic comportment toward a world of
unspeakable suffering, art’s secularization of the magic identification with
nature consecrates individual works’ immanent laws of form.443 By virtue
of this law, each work gives a figure to the spontaneous impulses that
animate it. Ultimately, these impulses are the ground of art’s truth. As the
origin and source of an artwork’s nonidentical relation with the social
totality of which it is a part, mimesis in art is the repository of the as yet
unfulfilled promise of happiness beyond the subject’s domination. The
recollection in art of a utopian ideal predicated on the essence of natural
beauty is, for Adorno, “the anamnesis of precisely what does not exist for-
an-other.”444 For Adorno, the only philosophy that one can practice
responsibly “in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things
as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption”;445
hence the survival of mimesis in art is critical to the task of liberating
reason from its instrumental purposiveness. Reason, “which in artworks
effects unity even when it intends disintegration, achieves a certain
guiltlessness by renouncing intervention in reality, [that is, in] real
domination.”446 As a form of knowledge, art is rational to the extent that
its nonconceptual affinity with the goal of reconciliation without violence
attests negatively to the lack of freedom in reality. The negative dialectical
requirement that Adorno imposes on art therefore preserves the sense of
alterity that for him is the condition of art’s truth.
As the refuge of an imaginary reconciliation of subject and object, and of
the subject with nature, artworks promise an end to antagonisms through
their negativity. Even the total negation of the real by the work of art holds
out this promise when, incapable of taking up a position beyond the
existing order, the work remonstrates against the bad infinity of the world’s
instrumental integration through identifying with it.447 The spontaneity
with which a work’s sense of form acquires its sense of inevitability is in
reality only the semblance of the real condition of freedom that, for
Adorno, is the telos of all knowledge. For art, the utopia it recalls remains
hidden in mourning. Art recalls the true utopian condition, from which all
means of violence and coercion have been expelled, by the force of art’s
resistance to that which merely exists. Hence the melancholy of art arises
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from the fact that art achieves its fictive reconciliation at the cost, as it were,
of being able to intervene in the social order.
In the end, the melancholia of art’s condition overruns the problem of
politically committed art. The proscription against sinking to the level of
ideology demands that art’s semblance of the true be faithful to the spirit
of the illusionless truth to which Adorno’s philosophy remains committed.
Thus armed, art’s relation to society congeals into the perennially
antithetical image of society’s false consciousness. As the refuge of truth
in a world overrun with social, political, and economic violence, art’s
gesture toward the real is suspended in the abyss of receding utopian
expectations. Conversely, the promise of a just life is one that can only be
realized within the field of action [praxis] from which art retreats. This
enigma, which is also the condition of art’s social truth, highlights the
aporia of art’s political meaning and value. In contrast to Walter
Benjamin’s claim that the politicization of art constitutes a mechanism
for affecting mass consciousness, Adorno prudently emphasizes the
paradoxical nature of art’s engagement with politics. For Adorno, art
works become political by pointing “to a practice from which they abstain:
the creation of a just life.”448 Accordingly the aporia springs from the fact
that art’s distance from the real is the condition of its truth. Adorno states
the aporia in this way: Politically committed art, which is “necessarily
detached as art from reality, cancels the distance between the two.”449
Conversely, “‘[a]rt for art’s sake’ denies by its absolute claim that
ineradicable connection with reality which is the polemical a priori of the
very attempt to make art autonomous from the real.”450 Similar to
Gadamer, Adorno rejects the idea that one can conceptually recuperate a
“message” addressed to readers, spectators, and listeners by a politically
committed artist. For Adorno, even if the message is politically radical, the
idea that the work serves as the medium for conveying it is already a
falsifying accommodation to the political realities the work is intended to
challenge. Accordingly, as the “principle of commitment . . . slides toward
the proclivities of the author,”451 playwright, or composer, the constitu-
tive difference between the art work and the world against which it
remonstrates disappears. Adorno’s investment in art’s dialectical relation
to social reality here comes fully to bear on the aporia that undermines
art’s politicization. In seeking the means to have a positive political impact,
art surrenders its claim to autonomy—and hence the only possible
condition of its truth. The aporia is intractable. In the interest of
transforming the world, politically committed art intends to intervene in
praxis at the cost of its declaration of being art. Confronted with art’s
melancholic situation, politically committed art renounces the promise
of autonomous art. Hence the paradox that only art that is truly com-
mitted is art that withholds making political pronouncements for the sake
of its critical truth.
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Adorno’s struggle with the question of politically committed art should

give us pause to consider the difficulties that are knotted around the nexus
of aesthetics and politics. In view of the preceding discussion, these
difficulties arise on several related fronts. First and foremost, there is the
question of the legitimacy of investing art’s critical vehemence in a concept
of autonomy that itself bears the legacy of art’s symbolic value in the fight
for social position and power. We saw how, by situating the meaning of a
work in the field of cultural production, criticism’s political positioning
and even its posturing falls victim to the aesthetic’s ideological contain-
ment. The attempt to rescue a productive moment by valorizing the
aesthetic led me to conclude that the impasse we first encountered in
Adorno’s efforts to save the paradox of a work’s truth gives rise to a
problem that is irresolvable at the level at which it is initially posed.
Eagleton’s objective in overcoming the sterile utopianism evidenced by the
performative contradictions endemic within Adorno’s aesthetic theory
offered some further justification in support of the hermeneutical claim
that a work’s retreat into its own world is indispensable to its ontological
vehemence. This claim finds even further support in the paradoxes with
which Adorno wrestles. Ultimately, in defending art’s aesthetic autonomy
against art’s politicization, Adorno sets the stage for reprising the enigma
of art’s truth on the plane in which aesthetic experience, the phenomenon
of culture, and political judgment intersect. In a sense everything
undertaken up to this point, in this book, has prepared for this moment.
One theme especially stands out. The impossibility of exacting a work’s
productive character from the ideological confines delimited by music’s
aesthetic isolation compels thought about music to seek a remedy for the
proliferation of aporias and paradoxes in the experience of the work. In
the concluding chapter, I will therefore return to the question of the
communicability of the work in the context of a reflection on aesthetic and
political judgment.
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9
T O WA R D A H E R M E N E U T I C S
OF MUSIC CRITICISM
Music’s communicability stands at the forefront of a hermeneutics for

which music’s worlding power precedes the kinds of judgments of
argumentation evidenced by deconstructive critiques. Aesthetic experi-
ence’s resistance to its critical mastery underscores the impossibility of
attributing music’s power to redescribe reality to the aesthetic’s ideo-
logical containment. The work itself—which for aesthetic experience is
inseparable from the work’s expression of its world—resists its assimi-
lation, or better, subordination to the distinction aesthetic consciousness
draws between the “pure” work of art and the world it leaves behind. This
distinction, which is also the source of criticism’s ideologically constricted
standpoint, fuels the temptation to relegate the work to the recesses of
cultural analysis and social critique.
In refusing to accede to this temptation, the hermeneutics of music
developed over the course of this book leads back to the question that
motivated this inquiry. How, I asked in the first chapter, could individual
works break through congealed understandings and representations apart
from some distancing relation to reality? The series of reflections, analyses,
and critiques undertaken in the course of examining the places of theories
of imitation in the discourse of absolute music, the controversy over
formalist aesthetics and musical hermeneutics, and representative
thought’s residual role in deconstructing the music–language divide led to
attributing music’s power to redescribe affective dimensions of our
experiences to music’s mimetic character. Limit experiences in which time
was surpassed by its other exemplified music’s mimetic transpositions of
affective dimensions of experience in feelings of transcendence worthy of
the avowal of our finite existence. In the face of the enigma of time’s
ultimate inscrutability, music’s expression of feelings and moods, I
concluded, had an ontological significance. Hence in response to the
impossibility of exploiting music’s separation from reality as the condition
of its critical force, I maintained that music exercised its bite over the real
by mimetically refiguring a way of inhabiting the world. Consequently,
the thesis for which I will argue in this chapter—that, as judgments of
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TOWARD A HERMENEUTICS OF MUSIC CRITICISM
argumentation, criticism is a second-order discourse whose limits and

validity are circumscribed by the work’s power to speak—reprises my
earlier conclusions. By setting a hermeneutical perspective on the work’s
ontological vehemence against the seductive fascination of reversals (such
as the one that leads to transposing the principle of interpretive fidelity
onto the social plane) that preserves the outlines of the schema inaugurated
by Kant, the recovery of the hermeneutics of music beyond the decon-
structions of music’s sublime ineffability prepared the stage for con-
fronting criticism with the challenges posed by music’s communicability
one last time. The impasse we have encountered several times therefore
offers yet one more opportunity to reexamine the relation between music
and criticism, this time in the context of a hermeneutical consideration of
the ideological phenomenon, the singularity and universality of aesthetic
experience, and aesthetic judgment’s lateral transposition into other
domains.
Aesthetics and Ideology

In view of the impasse that springs from the attempt to attribute a critical
significance to music’s aesthetic distancing from reality, the practice of
denouncing music’s complicity in the social representation of gendered
subjectivities must be submitted to yet another critique. This distance, I
previously argued, is attributable to the conscious differentiation of a work
from its sustaining life contexts. Aligning this distance with music’s, art’s,
and literature’s ideologically deleterious functions, however, covers over
the productive distance that, in Chapters 6 and 7, I argued was the negative
condition of a musical work’s mimetic refiguration of our inherence in
the world. Identifying music’s ideological character with bourgeois
ideals of aesthetic cultivation inevitably contributed to the intractability of
this alignment. Within the framework forged by the history of modern
aesthetics, aesthetic distance and music’s ideological character were
synonymous. Nothing, however, compels us to continue to adopt this
framework. In fact, the critique I initiated in Chapter 1 with the analysis
of the performative contradiction that haunts Adorno’s critical strategy
opened a line of questioning that, in leading beyond Gadamer’s pheno-
menological description of play and the language of art to a hermeneutics
of music’s mimetic character, already parted ways with this instituted
framework. Consequently, it was only at the end of this line of questions
that I could take up the question of the politics of music criticism.
Throughout this discussion, the residual question of the relation between
music’s productive character and the ideological phenomenon’s dis-
simulating function was for the most part left in abeyance. Now, however,
this question comes fully to the fore. Armed with the preceding critiques,
the time has come to ask whether the ideological phenomenon itself is
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reducible to the alignment wrought by tearing works from the world in

which they continue to insert themselves.
Ricoeur’s regressive analysis of the phenomenon of ideology is especially
instructive in this regard. By following the path of a genetic pheno-
menology, he shows how the ideological phenomenon’s negative meaning
is based on ideology’s more positive significance. Ideology’s patho-
logical function in systematically distorting images of reality by way of
ideology’s legitimating function, in other words, presupposes its pheno-
menologically more primitive function in constituting how a social
group represents itself. With Clifford Geertz, Ricoeur argues that socio-
logical diagnoses of social ills do not in themselves explain how these
illnesses work. Confronted with questions concerning the relation between
praxis and the systemically distorted expression of social interests, he asks
how a social interest can be “‘expressed’ in a thought, an image, or a
concept of life.”452 The answer: the dissimulating function of ideology
inherited from Marx presupposes an integrative function onto which
ideology’s distorting function is grafted. Accordingly, there is no culture
without a system of symbolic representations through which social
experiences, positions in society, and feelings and dispositions are arti-
culated; for human beings, there is no nonsymbolic mode of existence.453
Prior to reality’s dissimulation by images and representations that
systematically distort the play of interests and forces, ideology functions
at the basic level of social reality’s symbolic mediation to structure the
interpretive systems in which action (praxis) and its reasons, objects, and
aims are intersubjectively meaningful. Here, the ideological phenomenon
appears in all its originality. Ricoeur’s great insight is to locate the
ideological phenomenon within a theory of social motivation, where social
praxis has its analogue in an individual project. Animated by the “will to
show that the group which professes it is right to be what it is,”454 every
ideology is a justification and a project as well as a reflection of an existing
order. The doxic character of ideology (which, as an idealized image of a
group, enhances ideology’s social efficacy) secures the group’s social
cohesion at the price of mutating a system of thought into a system of
belief. Hence the dissimulating function of ideology emerges only when
particular instances of domination traverse an ideology’s integrative and
legitimating character by systematically distorting the representations by
means of which individuals and social groups interpret and understand
themselves.
The discrepancy between the “necessity for a social group to give itself
an image of itself, to represent and to realise itself, in the theatrical
sense of the word,”455 and the domination of one group by another
within the social hierarchy underscores the ideological phenomenon’s
legitimating function. Placing this function at the “centre of the ideological
apparatus,”456 accordingly ties the problem of power to ideology’s
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constitutive and distorting roles. Ultimately, the “mechanism of distor-

tion”457 is plausible only if it is joined to the “unavoidable symbolic
mediations of action”458 by way of the legitimation of a system that orders
and distributes relations of power. (Ricoeur points out that, at “the limit,
it would only be in societies without a hierarchical structure of power—
and, in this sense, societies without power—that we might have a chance
of encountering the naked phenomenon of ideology as an integrative
structure in its, so to speak, innocent form.”459) Ideology’s dissimulating
effects spring from those instances where domination grafts itself to the
legitimation of a system of power. In interpreting and justifying the
relation of individuals and groups to the system of authority that seeks to
legitimate itself, an ideology tends to enforce the claim of legitimacy over
against the beliefs held by those subject to the existing social order.
Following Weber, Ricoeur argues that not only is the claim regarding the
legitimacy of order constitutive of a hierarchical order, but he also stresses
that it is “only within a system of motives that the legitimacy of an order
may be guaranteed.”460 An ideology asserts itself as the justificatory system
of the power exercised over others at the point where the claim to
legitimacy by the ruling authority outstrips an individuals’ belief in the
legitimacy of the authority’s system of rule. For Ricoeur, this
disproportion between belief and demand is the origin of the surplus-value
that is intrinsic to the structure of power. Consequently, the question of
the claim to legitimacy is political to the extent that it concerns the
legitimate use of force. However, this claim only makes sense within the
motivational framework Ricoeur opposes to Marxist orthodoxies.
Opposing ideology to science rather than to praxis occludes the
motivational framework in which social interests are expressed in
representations, thoughts, and images. Thus the system of legitimation,
too, is a form of motivation in which the opacity of the “relationship
between an interest and its expression in ideas”461 masks how ideas and
representations linked to particular interests appear universally valid.
The results of this brief review of the ideological phenomenon’s different
functions reinforce my earlier conclusion that a work’s power to refigure
reality is irreducible to a situation in which the work’s distance from the
real is deemed to be ideological. By highlighting the privileged place that
ideology’s legitimating function has with respect to politics and the
problem of the just sharing of power—a function that also mediates
between ideology’s integrative and dissimulating roles—Ricoeur’s analysis
opens a space for thinking about the work’s distance from reality in
different terms. Placed within the more comprehensive motivational
framework this analysis lays out, a work’s significance can no longer be
identified only with the work’s dissimulating effects. On the contrary, the
ideologically dissimulating role that a work might play is more radically
rooted in the power of thought and imagination at work in imaginative
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explorations that, as heuristic fictions, penetrate the real. In his Principle

of Hope, Ernst Bloch reminds us that utopia—the place that is in reality
no place—is a possibility that is not yet a reality.462 In a similar vein, by
placing ideology and utopia within the same conceptual framework,
Ricoeur similarly emphasizes two sides of a relation to reality that
characterizes the social and cultural imagination. Within this conceptual
framework, the pathological function of an ideology has its counterpart in
utopian escape. Ideology’s legitimating function and its contestation,
too, are corollary poles. At the most fundamental level, imaginative
explorations of the “possible” counterpoint how ideology’s integrative
role constitutes the identities of cultural groups.463 Where ideology’s
resistance to attrition and its “obturation of the possible”464 lag behind
experiences of the practical field, expressions of the wishful landscape
of utopian longing, to borrow Bloch’s expression, run ahead. The
insuperable tension between ideology and utopia evinces the mode of
noncongruence that, Ricoeur stresses, is as much a part of our belonging
to society as is our mode of participation without distance. Consequently,
not only is “social imagination . . . constitutive of social reality,”465 but the
noncongruence among all the figures that by turn codify and transgress the
“categorical order”466 brings out both the filiations of the cultural
imaginary and the continuing efficacy of its mythopoetic core.
Placing the question of music’s distance from reality alongside the
noncongruences between congealed representations of the status quo and
subversive prefigurations of possible alternatives constitutes a first
rejoinder to the aporias and paradoxes that aesthetic’s ideological
designation unleashes. The epoché effected by the mimetic displacement
of the real places reality in suspense. The noncongruence between the
work’s expression of its world and the world the work leaves behind, so
to speak, by transcending the real from within, is therefore an effect of the
work’s distancing relation to the real. This distancing relation precedes
any subsequent political investment in music and art. (Both the effort to
mobilize art in the interest of politics, and critiques aimed at demystifying
hidden political agendas forget, or overlook, this fact.) Acts of imagination
are undoubtedly vital to acts of political resistance. Just as every critique
of the real originates with a distancing glance, no act of resistance is
possible apart from an exemplary alternative to the dominant order. As
heuristic fictions, individual works model ways of inhabiting the world.
Dissembling representations of hegemonic power relations, gendered
identities, etc., are in this respect the negative correlate of the heuristic
value of cultural works. No one doubts that cultural works reinforce
beliefs and practices in the interest of preserving an existing hierarchical
order. At the same time, the meaning, value, and even efficacy cultural
works have cannot simply be reduced to the ideological phenomenon’s
dissimulating function. It is here that the troubling problem of the base-
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superstructural model—a model that to a large degree lies at the root of

this attempted reduction of a work to pathological coordinates—reaches
a critical threshold.467 The role played by the social and cultural
imagination both in constituting the social bond, and in transgressing it
provides a felicitous alternative to the dichotomy between theory and
praxis—an alternative that is correlative with the mimetic displacement of
the real by cultural works. In claiming that ideology’s integrative concept
“cannot be used in political practice except for . . . preserving even in the
situation of struggle the problematic of recognition,”468 Ricoeur not only
highlights the ethical dimension of the social bond that expresses the will
to live together well in just institutions, but he also reinforces the
importance of placing ideology and utopia within the same conceptual
framework. It is worth stressing one last time that, in view of the fact that
the symbolic character of reality is unsurpassable, the aesthetic pre-
figuration of possibilities for renewing reality in accordance with exem-
plary models proffered by individual works transcends the practical field
from within. Ultimately, the aesthetic’s productive significance is therefore
only an effect of the power of thought and imagination working to
intensify the modes of noncongruence that are as much a part of our sense
of belonging to society as are our modes of participation.
The thirst for the possible consequently need not lose itself in receding
horizons of expectation. On the contrary, only a relentless hermeneutics
of suspicion could fail to acknowledge the ways in which cultural works
refigure reality through their exemplary expressions of their own unique
worlds. Whether a work’s proposal of meaning represents a productive
alternative to, or a flight from, reality is a matter of judgment, critical
discernment, and argumentation. The fact remains that to the degree that
alternative ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling have not been exhausted,
reality itself stands in a horizon of as yet undecided possibilities.469 Despite
the legitimacy and even necessity of dismantling the edifice erected by
aesthetic culture, there is no justification for confining a work’s imitation
of the real to the ideological phenomenon’s pathological dimension. On
the contrary, the attempt to valorize the aesthetic in its own way attests to
the ineradicable tension between the creative force of a work’s worlding
power and the competing and conflicting claims that ensue.
Culture and Politics

Setting music’s mimetic relation to reality within the conceptual frame-
work that joins the ideological phenomenon to its utopian counterpart has
yet another advantage. Not only is music’s significance as a cultural work
irreducible to ideology’s pathological dimension, as I argued, but the
distancing relation, correlative with a work’s transcendence of reality from
within, also subtends the properly political problem that arises with a
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society’s hierarchical order. To the degree that the struggle to legitimate

an existing authority or system of rule constitutes the ideological
phenomenon’s politically privileged function, aesthetic figurations
precede, as it were, the contestation or affirmation of an existing order.
There is no question but that symbolic resources available to a culture
can be deployed in historical narratives, literature, art, music, and dance
in such a way as to serve the interest of a ruling group, a nationalist
identity, or a colonial power.470 In this regard, Adorno’s insistence on
holding fast to art’s and music’s aesthetic autonomy in the face of their
tendentious politicization provided a refuge for the non-political—better,
prepolitical—deployment of these resources in works of art. (Adorno’s
polemical attack against music’s tendentious politicization highlighted the
decisive significance of the distancing relation that, for him, was the social
condition of art. The implausibility that an artwork can serve an express
political purpose while retaining its character as art put a spotlight on the
aporia with which Adorno was wrestling. For him, treating a work as a
political instrument meant breaking faith with art’s raison d’être.
Consequently, his refusal to choose between vulgar sociological reductions
and the self-justificatory pretences of formal analysis portended an
alternative blocked, as it were, by the performative contradiction that
sprang from his allegiance to the principle of art’s and music’s aesthetic
autonomy.) Reality’s symbolic mediation, which ideology’s integrative
function effects, constitutes the ground of the practical field in which
cultural works have their respective anchorages. At the same time, the
distancing relation a work achieves by placing reality in suspense is
susceptible to ideological manipulation. Placed in the service of a ruling
authority or dominant group, music, literature, and art can play an
ideological role in affirming the status quo or in reproducing the ruling
authority’s claim to legitimacy in a disguised form. Conversely, a work’s
subversive force, which I have continually maintained cannot be divorced
from the work’s power to produce imaginative representations that in
reality exist “nowhere,” breaks open ideologically congealed experiences
and even expectations. The adventures of the imagination give rise to the
“possible” that, in contrast to dissimulating representations, opens onto
new thoughts, new feelings, and new horizons. One might even be so bold
as to venture that, apart from the aesthetic prefiguration of possibilities to
which thought and imagination give shape, political resistance would be
an empty platitude masking the eclipse of the future.
The habit of treating cultural works as social and political weapons
has a significance that extends and prolongs the critique initiated by the
analysis of ideology’s plurivocal functions. Viewing cultural pheno-
mena as politically charged brings to the fore the economies of risks and
stakes in which the available forms of capital—symbolic, cultural, and
financial—have their allotted values. By the same token, the struggle to
143
impose the legitimate definition on art, music, and criticism gives the
symbolic and cultural commerce with works a value that, following
Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the victory that in the modern age made labor
the preeminent activity of human beings, could only be achieved by means
of a catastrophic reversal that, she argues, has brought our tradition of
political thought to an end. The reversal of the hierarchy of thought and
action, which the ancient Greeks identified with philosophy and politics,
placed all activity in the service of means and ends. Our tradition of
political thought, which “began when the death of Socrates made Plato
despair of polis life,”471 bears the wound of the original abyss between
thought and action. At the beginning of this tradition, Arendt explains,
“politics exists because men are alive and mortal, while philosophy
concerns those matters which are eternal, like the universe.”472 Marx
reinterpreted the distinction the Greeks made between philosophy and
politics in defining man as an animal laborans. By subsuming “under this
definition everything tradition passed down as the distinguishing marks of
humanity,”473 Marx, according to Arendt, identified the essence of
humanity with its laboring activities. In Arendt’s view, Marx consequently
elevated the activity that “tradition had unanimously rejected as
incompatible with a full and free human existence”474 by treating labor as
the rational principle of history’s productive forces. Hence the necessity
of labor came to define all human activity. On Arendt’s analysis, our
tradition of political thought, which begins with the mutual suspicion
between the man of action and the man of thought, ends by “attributing
to labor a productivity it never possesses.”475 Labor, Arendt remarks “is
not a free and productive activity but is inextricably bound up with what
compels us: the necessities that come with simply being alive.”476 Within
this tradition, the reversal of the vita contemplativa and the vita activa
completes the reversal within the vita activa of labor, fabrication, and
action. With the victory of the animal laborans, the phenomenon of a
societal space overtakes the abyss between thought and action. By
enlarging the “sphere of personal ownership, the sphere of the idion—in
which the Greeks thought it ‘idiotically’ stupid for anyone to spend his
time,”477 this societal space with its collective energies overruns the
plurality of unique individuals who together preserve and maintain
the world.
The tension between culture and politics that Arendt opposes to the
reversal that gives the activity of labor its pre-eminence highlights yet
again the worlding power that cultural works have. Under the sign of the
activity that she sees overrunning all other activities, freedom from
necessity—the conditio per quam of the properly political activities, speech
and action478—becomes the mark of a life of ease. The relegation of the
aesthetic to a special sphere completes, as it were, the conquest of the
public space. Consequently, the validity of denouncing the belief in the
144
“pure” work of art runs up against the violence of the struggle that the
necessity of labor imposes on the effort to exist. Aesthetics and politics
suffer the same fate: abject subordination to the ideological calculus of the
struggle for position and power. And yet, in the face of the overwhelming
evidence of instrumental reason’s increasing encroachment on all spheres
of life, and seemingly against all odds, Arendt tells us that politics springs
from the fact that human beings can truly exist only in a world “where the
plurality of the human race is more than simple multiplication of a single
species.”479 Hence “wherever human beings come together—be it in
private or socially, be it in public or politically—a space is generated that
simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one
another.”480 Politics is coextensive with the plurality of unique individuals
whose absolute differences guarantee their relative equality within this
intermediary space. The freedom of movement that the plurality of
individuals who speak and act together makes possible is accordingly the
“substance and meaning of all things political.”481 The possibility of
understanding the world from another, or another’s, perspective therefore
arises only within this intermediary space. This space is also one in which
cultural works appear. The cultivation of a world that is fit to house and
shelter human life accompanies the political activities with which human
fabrication stands in tension. (Culture, Arendt reminds us, comes from the
Latin colere.482) Every culture that cherishes its inheritance recognizes this
inheritance’s value in educating its people in a meaningful way of being.
Just as the concern for human affairs that lies at the center of politics
thrusts itself into the space between people, human artifice confers a sense
of permanence on the world in which human affairs take place. By
inserting themselves in the world, cultural works augment the world’s
horizons. The power exercised by individuals and groups when they
initiate new courses of action find an apt counterpart in cultural works’
refigurative power. Ultimately, both the power to act and the power to
invent allusions to the real that open us to the world anew bear witness to
a condition of freedom in which thought, imagination, and judgment
all have a share. The tensions and conflicts between art and politics
notwithstanding, experimenting with as yet unrealized possibilities,
together with the specifically political activities of speaking and acting,
mutually promote the world’s transformation.
Judgment and Imagination

The preceding discussion of culture and politics, and the ineradicable
conflicts between them, brings to the fore one last time the mimetic activity
through which music, too, promotes the worldliness of the world. If setting
music’s relation to reality within the conceptual framework of ideology
and utopia had the advantage of drawing attention to music’s productive
145
significance as well as its deleterious force, placing the efficacy of cultural

works in tension with politics illuminates one last time the communic-
ability of the experience through which a work exerts its effects. In setting
aside the question of the role that imagination plays as a force for political
resistance (to which I hope to return at another time), I intend to
emphasize the role that judgment plays in the communicability of aesthetic
experience of a work. To be sure, insofar as acts of resistance are a
response to a sense of injustice, they admit at the very least the possibility
of an alternative practice, the model for which may be aesthetically
prefigured by a work or works. Acts of judgment and imagination, one
might be tempted to say, are a wellspring for initiating changes in the social
and political order. The question that underlies my current preoccupa-
tion with music’s expressive power is also basic to the presupposition
that the effort to resist an oppressive political authority aims at reforming
or overthrowing that authority. In this respect, the question of judgment’s
discriminatory power is more radical than the particular relevance that
imagination and judgment have within different aesthetic, ethical, and
political domains.
The analogy between the singularity and communicability of individual
works and the exemplary acts that justify the lateral transposition of
aesthetic experience into the moral realm provides a privileged point of
access to a consideration of the role that reflecting judgment plays with
regard to the claims that works and acts make. Like the beauty of the
work of art, the “beauty specific to the acts that we admire ethically”483
manifests the fit between the moral act and the situation that calls for it.
Grasping the fittingness of the moral act, which in its singular quality gives
the “rule” that the act exemplifies, is itself an act of judgment. Similarly,
in the realm of aesthetic experience, the prereflexive, antepredictative
apprehension of a work’s expression of its mood is only attributable to
a mode of judgment that, in the absence of determinate judgment’s
objective universality, discovers the “rule” in the singular experience that
the work affords. As “the modality of the universal without concepts,”484
the exemplification by an individual work of the mood or feeling it
possesses sets the game of imagination and understanding in motion. In
this game, reflecting judgment seeks the “rule” under which to place its
singular expression. The play that discloses the spirit is therefore
paramount; in each case, a work gives the “rule” that the work exemplifies
through expressing its world. A work communicates the experience that
is unique to it by means of this exemplarity. Consequently, the com-
municability of the experience that is unique to an individual work,
listener, and occasion is the result of the fittingness of the work’s con-
figuration to the expression of the feeling or mood that the work possesses.
The role of reflecting judgment therefore prohibits turning the relation
between expression and exemplification into an empty tautology. Rather,
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the work’s communicability bears witness to the paradox of a judgment

that grasps a work’s particular configuration in its singularity as if it were
under a universal. This paradox has a corollary in the fact that the
experience communicated is, in each case, unique. By occasioning an
experience that involves an individual listener who intuitively grasps the
work’s meaning, the work by virtue of its communicability guarantees that
this experience is not only communicable to others, but is in principle
communicable to all. A work’s claim to universality is therefore grounded
in its exemplarity. The solution to the problem or aporia constituted by the
work anchors the work’s claim to universality in its singular expression of
its world. Hence, like moral acts, the work summons the “rule” to which
the work attests.
The paradox that a work or act summons the “rule” the work or act
exemplifies reopens the question of the truth of a work. In asking whether
the work of art is “not a model for thinking the notion of testimony,”485
Ricoeur draws attention to the capacity for following after (Nachfolge)
exemplary works or acts. To the extent that the effect of being drawn
to follow exemplary lives and acts “is really the equivalent of the com-
municability of the work of art,”486 a work testifies to a possible manner
of inhabiting the world by aesthetically prefiguring it. Opening us to the
world, and the world to us, anew, gives the work’s claim to truth its
prospective dimension. Ricoeur points out that it is questionable whether
“Heidegger’s substitution of truth as manifestation for truth as adequation
responds to what mimesis demands of our thinking about truth.”487 It may
be that Heidegger’s notion of truth as disclosure (alethia) captures the
force of an injunction that springs from the recognition of a work’s claim
on us, which Gadamer also stresses. Ricoeur’s claim that mimesis demands
more of our thinking about truth than either the concept of truth as
adequation or as disclosure provides seems to rest on the way in which
individual works and acts seek their normativity by giving the “rule”
through exemplifying it. From this vantage point, each act’s, and each
work’s, claim to universality stands out against the horizon of the plurality
of claims and possibilities. Each claim to universality has its point of
futurity in the exemplarity and followability of the model each proffers.
As a model for thinking about testimony, the prospective dimension of a
work’s fitting production of the mood or feeling it possesses is the ground
and figure of the notion of truth that unites the work’s exemplarity and its
claim to universality under the “rule” that the work summons. In response
to Arendt’s extension of Kant’s aesthetic judgment to politics, Ricoeur
asserts that reflective judgment’s prospective dimension counterpoints
its retrospective one. (The political condition of plurality, Ricoeur
explains, “offers an evident kinship with the requirement of communic-
ability implied by the judgment of taste.”488) For him, the “acknowledged
exemplarity of works of art, like that of great historical events, would
147
not constitute a pledge of hope if exemplarity did not serve as a handhold,

if not a proof, for hope.”489 Attending to “the work of an imagination
invited to ‘think more’”490 turns the regard for past acts toward future
expectations. Filled with the promise of their model solutions, individual
acts have their points of futurity in the effect of our being drawn to emulate
them. Like the hope founded on exemplary acts, the “thought” that is at
work in exemplary works that reply to problems or perplexities also attests
to the promise of as yet unrealized possibilities. In seeking to communicate
the “rule” to which each attests, individual works also stand as a pledge
of hope. Thanks to a work’s power to renew the real, this hope illuminates
the horizon of a work’s power to speak.
If, as Arendt argues, Marx’s glorification of labor brings our tradition
of political thought to an end, the analogy between aesthetic experience
and political judgment holds out a different prospect. Perhaps acknow-
ledging the end of this tradition draws the long history of the effects of
Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics to a close. The victory that, Arendt
argues, crowns the reversal of the hierarchy of human activities, also caps
music’s aesthetic elevation as the sign of a life of ease. The struggle for
position and power notwithstanding, the poetic thought that remakes the
world breaks with the history that by turn celebrates and excoriates
music’s transcendence of the world. The tensions between the power at
work in poetic invention and the power that arises with the plurality
constitutive of the body politic occasions the difference between art and
politics. By inserting itself in the world, the invitation a work holds out
demands a response. By the same token, historical actors transform the
world by intervening in its historical course. Between the communicability
of individual works and the moral and political direction of the will to a
life in common, the sense in common (sensus communis) that founds and
sustains a historical community is also its hope and expectation.491 Music’s
and art’s disappearance into the recesses of the struggle for position and
power is not the final word. Beyond the presumed collusion of aesthetics
with politics, the power of a work to give direction to the human will calls
for judgment (phronesis) in those concrete situations in which we find
ourselves.
Toward a Hermeneutics of Music Criticism

The role that judgment plays in aesthetic experience draws criticism
beyond the threshold of the discourses that once blocked the way to an
understanding of music’s expressive vehemence. Throughout the course of
this book, music’s power to refigure our inherence in the world by
redescribing dimensions of our experiences that had no prior referent in
reality has served as a guiding theme. The recovery of music’s mimetic
significance from discourses in which music’s power to speak was
148
variously subordinated to occult magic, theories of imitation wedded to

representative thought, formalist conceits, and even musical hermeneutics,
led by degree to the reevaluation (undertaken above) of aesthetic
experience, culture, and politics. Of all the themes that the preceding
brings to the fore, one in particular stands out: the priority of the
experience communicated by a work. By making explicit music’s mimetic
relation to the pathos (passions) of human existence, the hermeneutics of
music has the added advantage of confronting criticism with its limits and
task. In recalling that for Juan Luis Vives, a Renaissance humanist, the
“part of Dialectic that is called criticism, with a word taken from the
Greek, means the judgment of argumentation,”492 Valdés draws attention
to the proximity this meaning of criticism has to “our contemporary sense
of the hermeneutic commentary on the indeterminate writing of the
imagination.”493 The critical act presupposes the communicability of an
experience whose meaning, value, and relevance the critic unfolds along
different axes. Every critique is an interpretation that the critic’s arguments
justify and support. (Ricoeur has told us that, in determining the relevant
facts, explanation is already caught up in the interpretive process.494) As
judgments of argumentation, criticism is a second-order discourse that
aims to clarify and comment on the meaning intended by a work.
Criticism therefore encounters a first limit in the fact that the uni-
versality of the experience communicated by a work is in each instance
occasioned by the singular encounter with the work. Placed under the
properly hermeneutical question: What does the work say to me and how
do I respond? socio-historicizing questions concerning the conditions of a
work’s production, performance, and reception illuminate the limits of a
present interpretation. Every encounter with a work occurs within a field
of changing horizons. Just as the different understandings, preconceptions,
and expectations that we bring to listening and performing direct our
attention to different aspects and dimensions of a work, every genuine
encounter broadens the field of experiences in which these understandings,
preconceptions, and expectations are rooted. More crucially still, the
movement of understanding follows the hermeneutical arc traced by the
experience (Erfahrung) in which a work first raises the challenge it presents
by putting our prior understandings into question. The singularity of an
aesthetic experience that is in principle open to all bears out the fact that
a particular judgment of argumentation stands in a similarly unique
relation to the work. Just as importantly, the singularity and universality
of the experience that testifies to the work’s inexhaustible meaning dispels
the hubris of a critique that would put itself in the place of ultimate
mastery. A work’s sensuous abundance is the plenipotentiary source of its
indefatigable meaning. In unfolding this meaning along different and
diverging axes, judgments of argumentation clarify and explain different
aspects of a work’s polysemic density. This density is the correlate of the
149
work’s power to gather together the heterogeneity of constitutive elements

through expressing its world. Consequently, this density is also the source
of conflicting and competing interpretations that are the life of a com-
munity whose history of critical commentary adds to our understanding
of the meaning and value of individual works.
The critical act rediscovers its own condition of possibility a second time
in the hermeneutical autonomy of a work. By highlighting contemporary
choices and alternatives against the historical horizons that conditioned
the work’s creation, critical commentaries reintroduce the sense of
distance between present and past horizons that the contemporaneity
of the experience of a work tends to cover over. Contextualizing
reconstructions tie aesthetic pleasure to the perception of the difference
between the work’s original horizons and the horizons of the world in
which the work inserts itself anew by bringing contemporary prejudices
more sharply into focus. Through dislodging the pleasure of the work from
self-satisfying prejudices and interests, criticism returns the work to its
proper field of play. At the same time, it is only because, on each occa-
sion, a work communicates a meaning it bears within itself that critical
commentaries and contextualizing reconstructions are possible.
The capacity or power of a work to transcend its creator’s intentions,
its conditions of production, and the horizons of its original reception is
the hallmark of its hermeneutical autonomy. The fact that a work, in
surpassing the conditions of its original creation, production, and
reception also transcends reality from within, puts an end to the aesthetic
conceit vested in the idea of music’s metaphysical dignity. How, apart
from this capacity to transcend reality from within, could works speak in
new contexts and situations? Every musicological and ethnomusicological
endeavor, and every performance of a work, attests to our confidence in
the fact that works hold their meaning in readiness. Moreover, it is only
by reason of this fact that the work’s hermeneutical identity—the identity
that it maintains with itself—joins the inner historicity of the experience
of a work to the histories and traditions that nourish its further inter-
pretation and critical reception.495 Judgments of argumentation aug-
ment the history of a work’s independent afterlife by redoubling the play
of questions and answers set in motion by the experiences occasioned by
a work. Thus in its own way the critical act bears witness to the challenge,
and even the crisis, posed by a work. By shattering reality, the experience
afforded by a work sets critical reflections, analyses, and commentaries to
work. The fact that no analysis or interpretation can master the meaning
a work holds in readiness reveals the inexorable connection that binds a
work’s hermeneutical autonomy to its ontological vehemence. This
vehemence is the secret presupposition of every exercise of reason in the
name of critique. In response, the judgment pronounced by the critic
remains dependent upon the worlding power of the work.
150
The responsibility on the part of the critic to do justice to the work

therefore calls for a judgment that is comparable in its own way to the
juridical verdict that decides the outcome of a trial. Like the juridical
process, which subjects the interpretation of facts to the rigors of
argumentation, the force of a critique relies upon its powers of persuasion.
In the same way that, in the juridical process, the interpretation of the facts
charges them with meaning, the rhetoric of critique convinces readers of
the critique’s rightness on the basis of the fittingness of its representa-
tion of interpreted “facts” for the case it presents.496 Not only are the
determining “facts” of a work’s social, historical, cultural, political, and
affective significance subject to deliberative arguments, but precedents
governing decisions regarding a work’s individual character, its innovative
value, its dependence upon the history of which it is a part, and even
upon the tradition in which the critique operates are equally matters of
interpretation. To the extent that the persuasive force of a critique depends
on its internal coherence, the art of rhetoric is indispensable to it. Yet the
internal coherence and logical consistency of arguments that terminate in
a critical decision about a work are not sufficient in and of themselves.
Judgments of argumentation, too, are situated in a space of experiences
that is illuminated by changing horizons. Like all practical judgments,
criticism also calls for prudential wisdom (phronesis). Rooted in the
effective history of a community of both performers, listeners, and
composers, and critics, scholars, publishers, and impresarios, the exercise
of critical reason is therefore irreducible to the structural systems and
positional matrices that, sociologically regarded, comprise the conditions
for, and materials of, “musical life.” Armed with this insight, music
criticism crosses the threshold set for it by the hermeneutics of music.
In the end, the hermeneutics of music criticism acknowledges the limits,
conditions, and necessity of undertakings that lead to deeper under-
standing and appreciation of the singularity of individual works. Just as
the work’s worlding power precedes the critic’s explanations, the work of
the critic augments our experiences of individual works. To be sure, the
movement from a naïve interpretation to a critically informed appro-
priation of a work follows detours through descriptions, analyses, and
interpretations that deploy different strategies to expound new insights.
And yet, like experiences occasioned by our encounters with individual
works, every critique operates within its own historical horizons.
Criticism, too, has a history that bears on its efforts to explain, analyze,
and ultimately judge the merits, value, and meaning of traditional musical
compositions, avant-garde and postmodern experiments, and the products
of popular culture. The horizons—past and future—that condition our
encounters with individual works therefore constrain the adventures of
criticism at the same time that they make the work of critique possible.
These encounters testify to criticism’s hermeneutical situation. Like
151
aesthetic judgment, criticism is bound to the experience of the work. Yet

critique, too, has its reason. Like political judgment, the adequacy of
criticism’s response to the demands of a work within particular social,
cultural, and historical horizons is the measure of criticism’s veracity. The
deconstructive ruin of formalist and metaphysical conceits and the
disappearance of aesthetically autonomous works is therefore not the final
word. The power of the language that works speak continues to invite us
to think and to feel more. Conflicting and competing interpretations over
music’s social, political, and cultural relevance all lead back to music’s
power to affect our understanding of ourselves and our world. By
redescribing dimensions of experience, works of music open the world
anew. Music’s power of redescription is music criticism’s ground and
justification. In response, the hermeneutics of music criticism anchors the
practice of critique in the acknowledgment that the work’s aesthetic
pleasure is also the source of the critic’s unending task.
152
NOTES
1 Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1985). By appealing to empirically verifiable theoretical
tenets, the systematic analysis of individual works provided a basis for a
positivist approach to music as art. When in the nineteenth-century analysis
became wedded to music theory, the “process of subjecting musical
masterpieces to technical operations, descriptions, reductions and
demonstrations purporting to show how they ‘work’” (65) shored up the
ideological precepts that music theory was called upon to defend. Theory,
Kerman argues, is culpable in that it sets out a scientific standpoint for
musical analysis. This “scientifically” systematic analysis ostensibly
functions as an implicit mode of criticism “that could draw on precisely
defined, seemingly objective operations and shun subjective criteria” (73).
See Joseph Kerman, “How We Got into Analysis and How to Get Out,”
Critical Inquiry 7:2 (Winter 1980). Kerman accordingly concludes that the
“true intellectual milieu of analysis is not science but ideology” (314), since
it grounds its explication of a musical work’s formal structural coherence
and teleological organization in the supposed objectivity of the ideals that
this formal coherence and teleological organization is taken to represent.
2 See for example Susan McClary. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and
Sexuality (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Rose
Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western
Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Rose Rosengard
Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Lawrence Kramer,
Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995); Lawrence Kramer. Music as Cultural Practice,
1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Lawrence
Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical Historiography (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002).
3 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge; Kramer, Music as
Cultural Practice; Kramer, Musical Meaning; Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute
Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999); Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-
Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
4 Lawrence Kramer, “The Musicology of the Future,” repercussions 1:1
(1992), 10.
5 Kramer, “Musicology of the Future,” 5.
153
NOTES
6 On the hermeneutics of suspicion, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy,

trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 30 ff.
7 See George Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology (New Jersey: Rutgers University
Press, 1994), 13.
8 Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology, 15.
9 Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology, 3.
10 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5; see Theodor W.
Adorno, “Commitment,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed.
Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982). For
Adorno, art’s connection with reality is the “polemical a priori of the very
attempt to make art autonomous from the real” (301).
11 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 238.
12 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 180. For Adorno, immanent analysis—analysis
which follows the immanent dynamic of a composition—serves the broader
goal of uncovering a musical work’s social truth. Hence, so long as music is
regarded as an aesthetic object whose relation to reality is severed by its self-
contained form, immanent analysis will continue to be “misused as a slogan
to hold social reflection at a distance” (180). When the idea of l’art pour
l’art becomes a formal condition of a work’s autonomy, the element of self-
deception in immanent analysis abets the work’s ideological isolation from
social reality. It then serves the function of identifying the “objective”
features and operations which are presumed to distinguish the musical work
as a self-sufficient and hence autonomous whole. Accordingly, the task of
aesthetic criticism is not to feign false proximity, as though musical works
directly and realistically reproduced real social conditions. Rather, as a form
of social critique, aesthetic criticism is charged with the task of deciphering
a work’s truth by deducing the difference between the work’s immanent
configuration and empirical existence.
13 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B.
Ashton (New York: Continuum), 214ff. See Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1991); Fabio D. Dasilva, “Introduction: On the Hermeneutics of
Music,” All Music: Essays on the Hermeneutics of Music, ed. Fabio B.
Dasilva and David L. Brunsma (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1996), 25 ff. For a
discussion of the critique of idealist philosophies and positive social science
that leads Adorno to identify art’s aesthetic autonomy as the condition of its
social truth, see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer
to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Martin Jay,
The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and The
Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973); Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics:
Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New
York: Free Press, 1977).
15 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 8; see Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of
Music, 204.
16 John Blacking, How Musical Is Man (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1973); see my “Being, Transcendence and the Ontology of Music,”
world of music [forthcoming].
17 The performative contradiction in which, Jürgen Habermas argues,
Adorno’s strategy of ad hoc negation is suspended also ensnares art’s
154
NOTES
utopian function in the enigmatic condition of its truth. See Jürgen

Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge., Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 114 ff.
18 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 131; see my “Dissonant Conjunctions: On
Schönberg, Adorno and Bloch,” Telos 127 (2004).
20 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 135; see Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute,
15 ff.
21 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 206. For Adorno, the
“question of the mediation of mind and society far transcends music, where
it is too easily whittled down to that of the relation of production and
reception. It is probably true that this mediation does not occur outwardly,
in a third medium between the matter and society, but within the matter”
(207). Accordingly, the “social totality, having sedimented itself in the form
of the problem and of the unity of artistic solution, has disappeared therein.”
The rationality principle, which Adorno contends operates at the level of
form, materials and techniques, is consequently “nothing but the unfolding,
extra-artistic social rationality” that takes shape in autonomous music. See
Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Problem of Music Analysis,” Music Analysis
1:2 (1982).
22 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 5.
23 Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion
between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of
Utopian Longing” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and
Literature. Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 12.
24 The impasse in Adorno’s music criticism places postmodernist decon-
structions of absolute music in a different light. Critical musicology’s
destruction of formalist conceits intersects with Adorno’s rejection of the
idea that music’s aesthetic worth can be distinguished from its social truth.
Yet, Adorno’s renunciation of vulgar sociological analyses, which regard
works only as aesthetic extensions of socially constructed positions and
identities, presupposes a difference between art and reality. This difference,
which is constitutive of art as such, distinguishes Adorno’s critical enterprise
from critical musicology’s reversal of musical transcendence. This reversal
collapses the opposition that Adorno’s paradoxical formulation of music’s
aesthetic truth struggles to maintain. The opposition between music and
reality that for Adorno is the condition of music’s social truth, and its
postmodern reversal, spring from Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics.
Adorno’s negative dialectical formulation also labors under the schema
inaugurated by Kant. Yet the claim of art’s constitutive difference, which
anchors the paradox of art’s distance from social reality in his critical
strategy’s performative contradiction, indicates the path of a reflection that
conjoins this difference with the power of imagination.
25 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B.
Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 117. By dis-
sociating itself from the phenomenological presuppositions of contemporary
philosophical hermeneutics, musical hermeneutics prolongs the effects of
musicology’s philosophical, cultural and intellectual inheritance. For a
discussion of the phenomenological presuppositions of hermeneutics, see
Ricoeur’s essay, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” in this volume.
155
NOTES
26 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 117. According to Ricoeur,

this function in principle precedes and supports the linguistic medium it
summons.
27 Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J.
Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 148.
28 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 119.
29 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962); Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1989); Paul
Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences.
30 Mario J. Valdés, Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of
Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 7. Valdés argues
the coming of age of literary studies mandates that criticism take account of
a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophers including Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.
31 Valdés, Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature, 7.
Valdés consequently argues that to “anyone who reflects upon the
main line of contemporary academic literary criticism it is clear that its
claims are impossible to verify, and paradoxical in their very formulation.
The general claim to knowledge of academic criticism is that it moves the
reader a step closer to the definitive meaning of the literary work. But if this
were so, it follows that our age would be continuously consuming and
discarding literary works of the past like so many empty containers only fit
for the garbage heap of literary history. The paradox could not be greater.
Academic literary criticism’s aims, if realized, would destroy the very
creativity it extols as literature’s contribution to civilization” (43).
32 Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition (Der freie Satz). Volume II of New
Musical Theories and Fantasies, trans. Ernst Oster (New York: Longman,
1979). Through identifying fore- and middle-ground linear progressions
with a fundamental Ursatz, Schenker believed he had uncovered the essential
principle of a composition’s inner, organic life. By attributing music’s inner
law to the organic processes of free composition, Schenker’s theory
reinscribes the ideals of the creative genius and of the absolute value of their
works that, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become part of the
dogma of the “great” tradition’s cultural authority. See Kerman, “How We
Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out”; Ruth Solie, “The Living Work:
Organicism and Musical Analysis,” 19th Century Music 4: 2 (1980).
33 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life,
trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 50. Adorno here inverts
Hegel’s dictum: Das Wahre ist das Ganze [the whole is the true].
34 Anthony Newcomb,”Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative
Strategies,” 19th Century Music 11: 2 (1987), 165. According to Newcomb,
the last movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C minor, op. 18, no. 4
is a “typical late eighteenth-century example of this musical plot paradigm”
(171). See Anthony Newcomb, “Sound and Feeling,” Critical Inquiry 10: 4
(1984); Anthony Newcomb, “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century
Narrative Strategies,” 19th Century Music 11: 2 (1987).
35 Newcomb, “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies,”
165.
36 Newcomb, “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies,”
166.
156
NOTES
37 Newcomb, “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strate-

gies,”167.
38 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin
and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984),
64 ff.
39 Susan McClary, “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute Music’: Identity and
Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony,” Musicology and Difference:
Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, ed. Ruth A Solie (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 333.
40 McClary, “Narrative Agendas” 330; see Susan McClary, “A Musical
Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart’s Piano Concert in G Major, K.
453, Movement 2,”Cultural Critique 4 (1986), 137; Susan McClary,
“Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation,” Enclitic 7: 1
(1983).
41 Susan McClary, “Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory, Cultural Studies,
Feminist Criticism,” Perspectives of New Music 32: 1 (1994), 69. McClary
maintains that “under a cultural studies umbrella, it ought to be possible
both to investigate the syntactical conventions that grant coherence to our
repertoires and also to examine the ways music participates in the social
construction of subjectivity, gender, desire, ethnicity, the body and so on”
(69). McClary claims that her deconstructions of absolute music extend
beyond hermeneutics to social critique. While she acknowledges her debt to
Adorno’s music criticism, she argues that her concerns with gender and race
were not among Adorno’s priorities. Through her critique, she intends to
reveal the links between music and society that Adorno attributes to music’s
social mediation. In her study of Brahms’ Third Symphony, for example, she
claims to trace contradictions of bourgeois subjectivity by penetrating the
formal procedures that seem impervious to such analyses. Yet, by identifying
formal procedures with a politically motivated narrative agenda, she
subordinates the critical difference between music and society, which
Adorno attempts to capture dialectically, to a social semiotics of gender
(McClary, “Narrative Agendas; see also her reading of Tchaikovsky’s
Fourth Symphony in Feminine Endings).
42 McClary, Feminine Endings, 15; see 80 ff.
43 McClary, “Musical Dialectic,” 151.
47 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. John Cumming (London: Verso 1979).
49 Janet Wolf, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan Education
Ltd., 1981), 86; see my “Adorno, Criticism and the New Musicology,”
Perspectives in Systematic Musicology. Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology
12 (2005).
50 Wolf, Social Production of Art, 72; see McClary, “Narrative Agendas”;
McClary, “Sexual Politics in Classical Music,” Feminine Endings.
McClary’s readings of Brahms’s Third Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth
Symphony, for example, similarly rely on a narrativizing strategy.
52 Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and
Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 237.
157
NOTES
53 Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, 238.

54 Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 28. It is unlikely, in
Dahlhaus’s view, that “this reconciliation will ever take place unless an
interpretation arises that allows us to see the place of an individual work in
history by revealing the history contained within the work itself” (29). For
him, contemplating works in isolation is at odds with their historical
character. Conversely, the “vogue for viewing works solely as sources of
information on the evolutionary stage they represent, and the tendency to
divert attention from the works themselves onto the surrounding social
fabric of which they form a part” (27) are inimical to the emphatic concept
of art. See Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Treitler similarly suggests that such
a reconciliation “is possible only insofar as the historian is able to show the
place of individual works in history by revealing the history contained within
the works themselves, that is, by reading the historical nature of works
from their internal constitution” (173). Consequently, for him, the
“interpretation of art and the history of art proceed from the same grounds”
(35). According to Treiter, illuminating a work in its individuality marks the
difference between analysis and criticism. In terms of the history of forms
and genres, analysis consequently is from his standpoint “a narrative of the
dynamic between the stereotyping of aesthetic perception and the generation
of new stylistic and generic norms with the aesthetic attrition of older ones”
(173–4). For a related discussion in literary criticism, see Hans Robert Jauss,
Toward an Aesthetics of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982), especially 3 ff., 51 ff.
55 See for example Kramer, “Musicology of the Future”; Nicholas Cook and
Mark Everist, Rethinking Music (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999).
56 See Alastair Williams, Constructing Musicology (Burlington: Ashgate
Publishing, 2001). Williams attributes this paradigm shift to the “wider
repertoires now studied and the impact of theory on research in the
humanities and social sciences” (vii). The impact of theory by means of the
discourses that define and determine music as musicological object more
generally reflects the shift away from formalist perspectives toward
strategically positioned analyses of music’s socially constructed character
and meaning. See McClary, “Musical Dialectic,” 134; John Shepherd, Music
as Social Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
57 In combating a work’s aesthetic isolation, contextualizing interpretations
paradoxically participate in the reduction of the aesthetic to its ideological
coordinates. The abstract opposition between the ideal of aesthetic
autonomy and the material reality behind music’s social emancipation
therefore perpetuates the schema that drives the interest of deciphering
music’s social content. In this respect, deconstructing the chimera of
pure music only inverts the principle of music’s social emancipation.
Consequently, the reversal of the cult of Bildung’s deployment of music’s
symbolic capital in the fight for social position advances socially informed
critique’s struggle against formalist deceptions at the expense of music’s
ontological vehemence.
58 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 119.
59 Goehr, Imaginary Museum, 104.
158
NOTES
60 See for example Gadamer, Truth and Method, 58.

61 According to Goehr, the Werktreue ideal reinforced the institution of
artificial music and its correlate, the imaginary museum of musical works.
See Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François
Azouvi and Marc de Launary, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998). Ricoeur interprets the idea of an
“imaginary museum” from the perspective of the work’s power to fully
deploy its expressive function. Accordingly, he remarks that
it is only in the twentieth century, when the break with representation has
been completed that, as in the wish expressed by Malraux, an ‘imaginary
museum’ has been created, in which works of very different styles coexist,
provided that each excels in its own realm. . . . For this to be possible, it
was necessary that the signs had to be emptied of any external designation;
only then could they enter into all sorts of imaginable relations with other
signs; between them there is now a sort of infinite availability for
incongruous associations. Everything can go together, from the moment
that one admits along with Malraux that there is no progress from one
style to another, but only within each style, moments of perfection (176).
62 See Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and
David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially
68 ff.
63 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82.
64 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 43. My italics. See Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur
Reader. Ricoeur comments that the “constant tendency of classical
philosophy to reduce fiction to illusion closes the way to any ontology of
fiction. Kant himself has rendered this step most difficult both in insisting on
the subjectivity of the judgment of taste and in placing fiction within the
aesthetics of genius” (129).
65 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 21.
66 Cited by Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 82; see Kai Hammermeister, The
German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 42 ff.
68 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82. Gadamer argues that “when Schiller
proclaimed that art is the practice of freedom, he was referring more to
Fichte than to Kant. Kant based the a priori of taste and genius on the
freedom of the faculties of knowledge. Schiller reinterpreted this
anthropologically in terms of Fichte’s theory of impulses: the play impulse
was to harmonize the form impulse and the matter impulse. Cultivating the
play impulse is the end of aesthetic education.”
70 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 85. Gadamer thus remarks that “giving
aesthetics a transcendental philosophical basis had major consequences and
constituted a turning point. It was the end of a tradition but also the
beginning of a new development. It restricted the idea of taste to an area in
which, as a special principle of judgment, it could claim independent
validity—and, by so doing, limited the concept of knowledge to the
theoretical and practical use of reason” (40).
159
NOTES
74 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 80. My italics.

76 Cited by Gadamer, Truth and Method, 58. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1987), 175.
77 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 145. Gadamer points out that the occasion of
a work’s coming-to-presentation is most clearly evident in the performing
arts, especially in music and theater, “which wait for the occasion in order
to exist and define themselves only through that occasion” (147). Hence it
is “[e]ssential to dramatic or musical works . . . that their performance at
different times and on different occasions is, and must be, different” (148).
In Gadamer’s view, a “person who reflects himself out of a living
relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition in exactly
the same way. In seeking to understand tradition historical consciousness
must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as
if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must,
in fact, think within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition
does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible” (360–1.
Original emphasis.). The “dialectic of reciprocity that governs all I-Thou
relationships [, which] is inevitably hidden from the consciousness of the
individual” (359–60) also governs our encounters with individual works.
79 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 145. Gadamer argues that however
fluid and controversial the borderline between an intentional allusion
referring to something specific and other documentary aspects of a work,
there is still the basic question whether one accepts the work’s claim to
meaning or simply regards it as a historical document that one merely
interrogates. The historian will seek out every element that can tell him
something of the past, even if it counters the work’s claim to meaning. He
will examine works of art in order to discover the models: that is, the
connections with their own age that are woven into them, even if they
remained invisible to contemporary observers and are not important for
the meaning of the whole. This is not occasionality in the sense intended
here, which pertains rather to those instances in which alluding to a
particular origin is part of a work’s own claim to meaning (146).
80 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1989), 7.
81 Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 8.
82 See Thrasybulos Georgiades, Greek Music, Verse and Dance, trans. Erwin
Benedikt and Marie Louise Martinez (New York: Merlin Press, 1973),
especially 107 ff.; see also Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music
and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1999), 544 ff.; Thomas J. Mathiesen, “Harmonia and
Ethos in Ancient Greek Music,” The Journal of Musicology 3 (1984).
Mathiesen here explains that “through mimesis, music makes the order of the
soul like the order of the universe. Thus the harmonia of music may create a
like harmonia in the soul, and this in turn creates a particular ethos” (268).
83 See Solon Michaelides, The Music of Ancient Greece: An Encyclopedia
(London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 214. Michaelides indicates that the term
mousike generally came to refer to an independent art separate from poetry
in the fourth century B.C. Isolating harmony and rhythm from the logos
160
NOTES
tended toward identifying music without words as a technē rather than a

means of ordering the soul in accordance with the harmony of the universe.
84 Aristides Quintilianus, On Music In Three Books, trans. Thomas J.
Mathiesen (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1983), 126.
85 John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music From Language: Departure
from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (London and New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986), 2. For Neubauer, the Pythagorean tradition is
fundamental to dislodging mimesis as aesthetic foundation. However, this
tradition itself depends upon music’s mimetic function as imitating the
harmony of the spheres. Consequently, the question of reference proves to
be inescapable.
86 Neubauer, Emancipation of Music, 193.
87 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1958).
88 Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of
Others (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 45. The
“sixteenth-century magus . . . saw himself as the creator of a new type of
occult thought, one that was distant in many regards from the magical
practices of the immediately preceding centuries” (44). Tomlinson rightly
sees the magical order of reality as no less real than the scientific order that
shapes the modernist gaze. In the world of occult thought, where knowledge
of resemblances is the source of the magus’s power, similitude had the force
of truth. His archaeological enterprise springs from a certain disaffection
with demythologizing the worlds of others. In this respect, the hegemony
that he condemns extends to his suspicion that hermeneutics remains a form
of subjective mastery.
89 Tomlinson, Renaissance Magic, 50. Music “attracted celestial influence by
its power to imitate.”
90 Tomlinson, Renaissance Magic, 112.
91 Tomlinson, Renaissance Magic, 83. By binding bodily humors and
psychological temperaments to the celestial hierarchy, Ramos matched
humors and modes with the planets that ruled them.
93 Tomlinson’s concern for, and commitment to the music of others who have
made music in the process of making their worlds dominates a postmodern
musicology characterized by its insistent questioning of its methods and
practices. By locating archeologically excavated meanings beneath the
conscious understanding of individual subjects, Tomlinson preserves the
radical alterity of others and their worlds at the cost of the hermeneutical
encounter with works and texts. See Ricoeur, History Memory, Forgetting,
pp. 200 ff.
96 Tomlinson, Renaissance Magic, 112. According to Tomlinson, the ninth-
century Arabic philosopher
Al-Kindi’s treatise offered Ficinio an explanation of magic based
on the rays or influxes emitted by all things and the universal
harmony that endowed these rays with operative force. Words,
sounds, and songs all emitted rays and could be used for magical
operations. . . . For Al-Kindi, . . . significatio was a consequence of
harmonia (118).
161
NOTES
In his De vit coelitus comparanda, Ficinio provides an account of “the

ontological sources of his magic—of the world soul and the world spirit that
mediates between it and the world body of the correspondences and
harmonies of all things, and of the planetary and stellar influxes raining
down on us in the form of Al-Kindian rays (130).
97 Tomlinson, Renaissance Magic, 207. The “changed conception of poetic
furor reflected a deeper change in the status of language itself” (206).
99 See Aristotle, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, trans. Lane Cooper (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1932), 207; Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram
Bywater in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York:
Random House, 1947).
100 Tomlinson, Renaissance Magic, 209; see 50.
101 Tomlinson here cites Eugenio Donato’s phrase, “the basic poetic reality . . .
was impressed upon the words through the metaphor’” (210). Tomlinson’s
musicological archaeology is a testament to the enduring influence of
concepts of metaphor and mimesis on critics, philosophers, and musical
practitioners. In this respect, contemporary criticism’s reflexive self-
understanding stands out against the horizon of its perspectives on these
interrelated concepts.
104 Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing,
1992), p. 74 [398d]. According to Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, who
apparently attributed the term to his brother Claudio Monteverdi, the
seconda prattica privileges the text in accordance with this precept.
Consequently, the demands placed on musical expression by the text justify
innovations in the use of harmony. The birth of tonality attributed to
Monteverdi’s use of a dominant seventh chord in the madrigal Stracciami
pur il core is in this respect an effect of the seconda prattica’s adherence to
Greek ideals. See Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the
Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
105 See Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German
Baroque Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
106 Chua, Absolute Music, 62; see Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric
Musical Form and the Metaphor of Oration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991). According to Bonds, the “idea of music as a
rhetorical art rests on the metaphor of music as a language. . . . [T]his image
. . . began to take on a new importance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries with the concept of musica poetica.” (61); see also Bartel, Musica
Poetica, 19 ff.
107 Chua, Absolute Music, 63. Hence the “pure play of signs in instrumental
music was considered by the Romantics as the very grammar of ironic wit”
(204).
108 Chua, Absolute Music, 63.
The voice was therefore doubly authentic; it was the articulation
of linguistic concepts that controlled the passions and also the origin
of moral sentiment that breathed music into words. The voice,
the promise of language, . . . was the “transcendental signifier”. . . .
162
NOTES
Conversely, instrumental music had no presence except as a

simulation of the voice and its representations. Music was therefore
declared an imitative art, despite the fact that it was not particularly
good at mimesis.
112 See Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting:
The original use of “modern” in low Latin (the adverb modo
signifying “recently”) and of “ancient” (in the sense of what belongs
to the past) was neutral. . . . Neutrality is out of place when the term
“modern” adds to itself the epithet “new,” the praiseworthy term par
excellence beginning in the sixteenth century, when it will no longer
have as its opposite simply the ancient but also the medieval, in
accordance with the division of history into three periods: ancient,
medieval, and modern (306–7).
114 Cited in Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 49.
115 Cited by Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 49 from Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Dictionnaire de Musique (Paris, 1768; reprint Hildesheim, 1969), 42.
According to Dahlhaus, “Abbé Dubois’s thesis . . . that the origin of music
lay in language and that music could attain its purpose only by imitating and
stylizing passionate speech” (47) was appropriated by Rousseau and later by
Herder. Neubauer similarly suggests that Abbé Charles Batteux anticipates
Rousseau’s apology for melody by distinguishing “language, the organ of
reason, from music and gesture, the languages of the heart that provide us
with an elemental and universal ‘dictionary of simple nature’ known from
birth” (Neubauer, Emancipation of Music, 63). See Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology, trans. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1976), 195 ff. In Derrida’s view, the role imitation
plays in Rousseau’s theory of music privileges melody’s expressive power as
the supplementary trace of the difference between music and language. Since
for Derrida “[i]mitation redoubles presence, [and] adds itself to it by
supplementing it” (203), Rousseau’s appeal to music as an imitative art
evidences Rousseau’s need of mimesis as the principle of the re-presentation
of the passions. Mimesis here effaces the trace of the metaphysics of presence
that Derrida denounces. Nothing, however, demands that mimesis be placed
in the service of this redoubling of presence. See Chapter 7.
116 According to Mathiesen, melos [µέλος] is an ontological term that includes
the production of sound and the perception of it. Consequently, melos
constitutes the mode of being of musikē’s mimetic activity. Thomas J.
Mathiesen, “Problems of Terminology in Ancient Greek Theory,” Festival
Essays for Pauline Alderman: A Musicological Tribute, ed. Burton L. Karson
(Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1976) 5–6; see Mathiesen,
“Harmonia and Ethos in Ancient Greek Music,” 268.
117 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, trans. Nicholas
Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 36; see 101 ff.; see
Neubauer, Emancipation of Music, 82 ff.; Chua, Absolute Music. For Chua,
“[w]hatever his intentions, Rameau’s harmonic genesis sounded too much
like the cosmic pneuma (breath) of the vital materialists, as if instrumental
sound could animate the body in the same way that the cosmic pneuma
could inhabit matter”(99).
163
NOTES
118 The impossibility of attaining the Absolute is one of the sources of Romantic
irony. See for example Chua’s discussion of the immiscible aspects of
romantic efforts to grasp the Absolute in its organically utopian dimensions
in his Absolute Music, especially 199 ff.
121 Subotnik, Developing Variations, 174.
122 Subotnik, Developing Variations, 175.
123 Chua in this respect points out that for Schlegel, musical logic was “an ironic
movement . . . hovering over words as giant inverted commas that suspend
the truth of representation to trip up language in its attempt to say something
determined” (Chua, Absolute Music, 204).
124 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 76–81.
125 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 73. Gadamer points out that from the
standpoint of art, the symbol thus “has its own positivity as a creation of the
human mind” (80). Accordingly, the freedom of the mind’s symbol-making
activity founded nineteenth-century aesthetics and its cult of genius.
126 E. T. A. Hoffman, “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” E. T. A.
Hoffman’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer,
Music Criticism, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 236.
127 Hoffman, “Review,” 238.
130 See Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 54 ff. Dahlhaus argues in this regard
that the “metaphysical prestige of absolute music came about via a transfer
of the poetic idea of unspeakability, a transfer whose locus classicus is the
passage about the Stamitz concerto in Jean Paul’s Hesperus” (146).
131 Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis I: Symphonies (London:
132 Tovey, Essays I, 49.
133 Cited by Tovey, Essays I, 44–5.
134 Tovey, Essays I, 46.
135 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 46. Ricoeur counters that:
“understanding has nothing to do with an immediate grasp of a foreign
psychic life or with an emotional identification with a mental intention”
(220. Original emphasis.).
136 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 59. Gadamer argues that Schopenhauer
and the philosophy of the unconscious popularized the “romantic and
idealist concept of unconscious production” that propels the nineteenth-
century concept of genius to its apotheosis. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The
World as Will and Representation 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York:
Dover Publications, 1969), especially vol. 1, 255 ff. See also Carl Dahlhaus,
Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 29 ff.; Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute
Music,32. Dahlhaus argues in a related vein that Schopenhauer’s aesthetics
places the metaphysics of absolute music within the context of a metaphysics
of the will. Schopenhauer’s aesthetics philosophy achieved its pre-eminence
through Wagner’s adoption of it.
138 Friedrich Schleiermacher, cited by Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences, 46 from F. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. H. Kimmerle
164
NOTES
(Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1959), 56. By raising regionalized hermeneutics

to the level of a general hermeneutics, Schleiermacher introduced episte-
mological considerations into the art of interpretation. Ricoeur explains that
Schleiermacher’s “hermeneutical programme . . . carried a double mark:
Romantic by its appeal to a living reality with the process of creation, critical
by its wish to elaborate the universally valid rules of understanding” (46).
The aporia that Ricoeur identifies in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics pushes
the epistemological problem engendered by joining the intent to recreate the
creative act in its original meaning with critical consideration of the objective
conditions of understanding to its breaking point. On the one hand, by
subsuming the “understanding of texts to the law of understanding another
person who expresses himself therein,” the enterprise stipulates that the aim
of interpretation is “not what a text says, but who says it” (52. Original
emphasis). On the other hand, by shifting the object of hermeneutics away
from the text toward lived experience, the knowledge of others and of the
historical interconnections that support it has the same pretensions as the
Hegelian ideal of universal history (52–3; see Gadamer, Truth and Method,
197 ff.). The shortcoming of a psychologizing interpretation that claims to
rise above the flux of history compelled philosophical hermeneutics to
confront the pretense of this psychologistic intent with the experience of
human finitude that characterizes and conditions all understanding. In
confronting this experience, hermeneutics transformed the task of
understanding from seeking a meaning behind a work or text to interpreting
the world that the work or text opens up in front of itself.
The roots of this epistemological bias can be traced back to the rise of
positive science in the nineteenth-century. Gadamer stresses that the concern
with epistemology is a function of the rise of empirical research. According
to him, the “nineteenth century became the century of epistemology because,
with the dissolution of Hegelian philosophy, the correspondence between
logos and being was finally destroyed.” The “word Erkenntnishtheorie
(epistemology) arose only in the period after Hegel. . . . when empirical
research had discredited the Hegelian system”(Gadamer, Truth and
Method, 220). The concern with history and with the historical sciences gave
the task of methodologically grounding the human sciences its episte-
mological urgency. In opposition to Romantic metaphysics, the human
sciences adopted the model of intelligibility which in the natural sciences
derived from empirical explanations of observable phenomena. See Hans-
Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 151 ff.
139 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 273. This schema is also at the root of the
reversal which Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue takes its
revenge on reason in the dialectic of Enlightenment through the return to
myth in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.
142 Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose vol. 1: The Art-Work of the
Future, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers,
1966 [1895]), 125–6. See John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus, The New
Grove Wagner (New York: Norton, 1984), 117; Dahlhaus, The Idea of
Absolute Music, 18. Wagner first used the term “absolute music” in his
1846 “program” to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Accordingly, the
Gesamtkunstwerk represents the fulfillment of the symphonic tradition
165
NOTES
through reuniting music with poetry and dance in a music drama that
restores the ideal of Greek tragedy in the total work of art. Dahlhaus and
Deathridge comment that “Wagner’s constant invocation of the theatre of
Aeschylus and its rapt audiences was only a cover for the extremely up-to-
date idea of art for art’s sake, the idea that the audiences were the servants
of the work of art, thus ceasing to be ‘audiences’ and instead becoming
‘congregations’” (Dahlhaus and Deathridge, 95). The consecration of the
Gesamtkunstwerk’s aesthetically redemptive power advanced the process in
which aesthetic consciousness created a bulwark against the pedestrian
world. Accordingly, the art-religion of the Gesamtkunstwerk instituted a
new mythology founded on the disintegration within cultured society of the
process whereby one rises above one’s private interests. See Chapter 1; see
also Michael P. Steinberg, Listening with Reason: Culture, Subjectivity and
Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
143 Hilda Meldum Brown, Leitmotiv and Drama: Wagner, Brecht, and the
Limits of “Epic” Theatre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 48. Brown
credits Hans von Wolzogen with inventing the term leitmotiv for Wagner’s
Grundmotiv.
144 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the
Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 177.
145 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 179.
148 See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 195 ff.
149 Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism. Dahlhaus argues that, in
Wagner’s and Berlioz’s music, the production of metaphysical effects by
means of a musical technology had already troubled Wackenroder when he
propounded a romantic aesthetics of music almost a half century earlier. See
Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingston
(London: Verso, 1981). According to Adorno, the formal law governing
Wagner’s works consists in the “occultation of production by means of the
outward appearance of the product. . . . In the absence of any glimpse of the
underlying forces or conditions of its production, this outer appearance can
lay claim to the status of being. Its perfection is at the same time the
perfection of the illusion that the work of art is a reality sui generis that
constitutes itself in the realm of the absolute without having to renounce its
claim to image the world” (74; see 90 ff.). See Theodor W. Adorno,
“Wagner’s Relevance Today,” Essays on Music. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002). In a related vein, Ángeles Sancho-Velázquez points
out that by emulating the instrumental tenor of the epoch to which the cult
of this aesthetically redemptive art-religion is seemingly opposed, Wagner’s
quixotic reversal of Romantic aesthetics culminates in a “technology
of the sublime.” Ángeles Sancho-Velázquez, “The Legacy of Genius:
Improvisation, Romantic Imagination, and the Western Musical Canon,”
(Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2001), 178.
150 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans.
Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Friedrich Nietzsche,
“On Music and Words,” trans. Walter Kaufmann in Dahlhaus, Between
Romanticism and Modernism.
151 Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 3. Accordingly, “‘programming the
absolute’ is no less than a trope for our field.”
166
NOTES
152 Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 165. See Vera Micznik, “The
Absolute Limitations of Programme Music: The Case of Liszt’s ‘Die Ideale’,”
Music & Letters 80:2 (1999). According to Micznik, Liszt claimed that “the
‘definite impressions’ contained in the programme, which the ‘painter-
symphonist’ (like Berlioz, or himself) communicates to the public, are
exactly those that triggered the composer’s conception of the music: ‘The
painter-symphonist [as opposed to the “specifically musical symphonist”]
. . . setting himself the task of reproducing with equal clarity a picture clearly
present in his mind, of developing a series of emotional states which are
unequivocally and definitely latent in his consciousness-why may he not,
through a programme, strive to make himself fully intelligible?’” (211).
153 Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 167.
154 See Carl Dahlhaus, “Fragments of a Musical Hermeneutics,” Current
Musicology 50 (1992); Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 152 ff. The
opposition between an aesthetics of form and one of content, which Dahlhaus
lays out in his sketch of musical hermeneutics, placed musical hermeneutics
in the service of a form of criticism that aims at identifying the referential
value of a musical work’s internal process, features and configuration.
155 Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the
Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co., 1986), 15.
156 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 2.
157 See Chua, Absolute Music, 227 ff. Chua identifies the excised passage as
referring to music as the “sounding image of the universe” (Cited by Chua,
230). See also Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music. Dahlhaus notes that
“Hanslick’s central category, the concept of form perfected in itself, was
closely related to the interpretation of music as a metaphor for the universe
in the development of that esthetic” (28; see 109 ff.). Accordingly,
Hanslick’s concept of “absolute” music harbors its metaphysical
implications within the principle of music’s self-perfecting form. The
metaphysical trace in the metaphor of form’s self-perfection attests to the
persistence in Hanslick’s aesthetics of the romantic concepts of art and its
genius. See also Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, 151 ff.
158 Kerman, Contemplating Music, 73.
159 See Kerman, “How We Got Into Analysis”; Kerman, Contemplating Music.
Kerman was one of the first to challenge musicologists to overcome the
limitations of musical formalism by breaking with traditional musicology’s
penchant for positivistic inquiry. His critique of a positivistic orientation
that “could draw on precisely defined, seemingly objective operations and
shun subjective criteria” combats the dogmatic “concentration on internal
relationships within the single work” that tears the work from its cultural,
social, and historical matrix (73). The recourse that musicologists such as
Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Caroline Abbate, Fred Maus, Anthony
Newcomb and Gary Tomlinson have made to such diverse and varied
interpretive strategies as feminist criticism, deconstruction, narratology, the
new historicism and musical hermeneutics can be understood as a reaction
to the “virtual blackout” (42) that Kerman has argued positivist musicology
imposed on the critical interpretation of a work’s aesthetic, cultural or
historical significance. From this vantage-point, the formal description and
analytic demonstration of an autonomous musical composition’s ostensibly
self-sustaining organic unity serves only to celebrate the supposed virtues of
a treasured body of musical works.
167
NOTES

163 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 81; see Gadamer, Relevance of the
Beautiful; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 110 ff.
166 See Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, 109 ff.
167 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 81. My emphasis.
169 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 81–2. My emphasis. The analogical
character of the logic of a work’s development evidences the hermeneutical
presuppositions of Hanslick’s aesthetics. The sense of unity and coherence
that Hanslick ascribes to the principle of music’s formal beauty is more
properly attributed to the role imagination plays in configuring a temporal
whole from which the formal logic of a work is abstracted. See Chapter 7.
170 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 30. For Hanslick, the composer
“composes and thinks . . . at a remove from all objective reality, in tones”
(82). Correspondingly, Hanslick’s contention that music’s ideal content
takes the form of the “mind giving shape to itself from within” (30)
reinforces the gnostic function vested in absolute music’s metaphysical
dignity.
173 For a discussion of Hegel’s influence, see Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music,
109 ff.
174 Hermann Kretzschmar, “Suggestions for the Furtherance of Musical
Hermeneutics: The Aesthetics of Musical Compositions,” Musical
Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, vol. 3, ed. E. A. Lippman (New York:
Pendragon Press, 1990 [1905]), 9; see Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful,
10 ff.
175 Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 9.
176 Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 9; see 5–6.
178 Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 6; see Lee A. Rothfarb, “Hermeneutics and
Energetics: Analytic Alternatives in the Early 1900s,” Journal of Music
Theory 36: 1 (1992), 51 ff.
179 Hermann Kretzschmar, “New Suggestions for the Furtherance of Musical
Hermeneutics: The Aesthetics of Musical Compositions,” Musical
Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, vol. 3, ed. E. A. Lippman (New York:
Pendragon Press, 1990 [1905]), 32.
180 Kretzschmar, “New Suggestions,” 33.
181 Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 6; see Rothfarb, “Hermeneutics and
Energetics.” Rothfarb comments that, “[l]ike others of his generation,
Kretzschmar reacted to the infiltration of Positivism and the methods of the
natural scenes into the realm of the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften”
(50).
183 Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 11. For Kretzschmar, the idea that “there must
be a means of disclosing the spirit of a whole musical piece and of its
individual parts down to the smallest sections; in a word, a musical
hermeneutics must be possible” (8) justifies this task.
168
NOTES
184 See Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 17.

185 See Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 5–6. Musical hermeneutics attained its
theoretical stature from the fact that it constitutes a serious attempt to make
accessible the full understanding of the works of the great master. From
Kretzschmar’s standpoint, Hanslick forced his opponents into admitting
that music differed from all the other arts in its capacity for expressing
human sentiments and feelings. Consequently, those like Kretzschmar
who decried Hanslick’s attack on musical sentiment were compelled to
acknowledge that music’s difference from the other arts presented a unique
problem with respect to its interpretation. Forced to acknowledge the
difference between music and the other arts, Kretzschmar seizes on the
problem of imitation as a way of overcoming a perceived weakness in
music’s capacity to express definite feelings and thoughts. Kretzschmar’s
grasp of the problem that the confrontation with musical formalism presents
is remarkable in this regard. Kretzschmar admits that music is incapable of
representing exact images or definite concepts. Yet, for him, music’s
deficiency only works to its metaphysical advantage. Hence, Kretzschmar’s
attempt to decipher music’s vital content occludes the ontological
vehemence of music’s power to redescribe affective dimensions of our
experiences.
186 Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 22. Consonance and dissonance, and major
and minor keys complete the lexicon of resources of contrasting colorations.
187 Kretzschmar, “New Suggestions,” 34.
188 Kretzschmar, “New Suggestions,” 34. For Kretzschmar the prelude “with its
melody concealed in delicate broken chords and veiled by chains of
dissonance is like a dream image woven of distant little clouds of anxiety, of
quiet lament and dark foreboding.”
189 See Paul Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences. Ricoeur points out that the rise of positivism as a
philosophy corresponded to the “demand that the model of all intelligibility
be taken from the sort of empirical explanation current in the domain of the
natural sciences” (48–9). The distinction Carl Dahlhaus draws between the
poeticizing hermeneutics of romanticism, which attempts to “put in
stammering words that which is beyond words,” and Kretzschmar’s and his
student, Arnold Shering’s, programs confirms that the positivist ethos that
motivated Hanslick’s scientific agenda also impacted Kretzschmar’s
hermeneutics. Carl Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 68; see Bojan Bujic,
“Delicate Metaphors,” The Musical Times 138, no. 1852 (June 1997), 16,
21. Bujic, too, hints at this positivist compulsion within musical her-
meneutics. The compulsion toward cultivating interpretive methods that
identify formal processes and structures with the embodiment of a sub-
stantive meaning or content extends beyond Kretzschmar’s aesthetics of
themes.
191 Kretzschmar, “Suggestions,” 13. Original emphasis.
194 Contesting the cultural authority conferred on autonomous music
challenged the legitimacy of defending and justifying a body of canonic,
high-art works. See for example Kerman, Contemplating Music; McClary,
Feminine Endings; Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge;
169
NOTES
Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music; Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the
Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
195 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the
Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1977), 284.
196 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 284.
197 See for example Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Susan McClary, Modal
Subjectivities: Self-fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004); Adam Krims, “Disciplining Deconstruction (For
Music Analysis),” 19th Century Music 21: 3 (1998).
198 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 15; see Kramer,
Musical Meaning, 11 ff.
“Musicology of the Future.” Correlatively, the “supposition that music
represents a non-linguistic immediacy” (9) constitutes the first line of defense
against contextualizing analyses and interpretations that locate music’s
meanings within the worlds of flesh-and-blood composers, performers and
listeners.
200 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 16. Original
emphasis.
201 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 17.
202 Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975 (London, Los Angeles
and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 16. See Kramer,
Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 14 ff.
203 Seeger, Studies in Musicology, 22.
204 Seeger, Studies in Musicology, 22.
205 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 15. Kramer’s
deployment of the distinction Kant makes between music and poetry
prefigures this deconstructive reading of Seeger’s formulation of the
linguocentric predicament. According to Kramer’s analysis, Kant ratifies
music’s inferiority to poetry on the grounds that music communicates only
by means of pure sensations, whereas poetry communicates by means of
concepts. Accordingly, the distinction between music and poetry ostensibly
rests on the difference between pure sensations and reflection. Kramer
contends that Kant’s attempt to stabilize this difference founders, since
music, too, incites reflection. Kant’s recourse to a mimetic theory, according
to which music is a “language of affects” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, 199)
lends itself to an interpretation that equates privileging poetry over music
with placing concepts above sensation within a cultural hierarchy. At the
same time, equating reflection with conceptual thought too narrowly
circumscribes the role of reflecting judgment in the communicability of
singular works. See also Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 2 ff.
208 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 6.
209 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 18.
211 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 16; see 163 ff.
212 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 20; see Lawrence Kramer, Critical Musicology
and the Responsibility of Response (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), xii.
213 See Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 262.
170
NOTES
215 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1. Accordingly for Kramer, “[un]der

the hermeneutic attitude, there is and can be no fundamental difference
between interpreting a written text and interpreting a work of music—or
any other product or practice of culture” (6). This hermeneutics attitude
frames the textual analyses Kramer pursues under the rubric of decon-
structing music’s separation from language.
217 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 12. Paradoxically, the difference
between music and language that authorizes absolute music’s ineffable
transcendence of reality haunts the act in which a work’s quality of
formation and hence its communicability is surrendered to its tropological
adequation.
222 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 79. “In Haydn’s
frame of reference, to represent the dawn of creation is inevitably to stage a
first sounding of the primal consonance, the C-major triad: traditionally the
chord of nature, the chord of light, and, for Haydn’s Austrian audience, the
tonic triad of the solemn Mass” (87).
223 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 87; see ff.
225 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
226 Ricoeur, Ricoeur Reader, 137.
227 Ricoeur, Ricoeur Reader, 137.
229 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 4. The identification of this remainder is the
primary, if not sole, objective of Kramer’s effort to rehabilitate the notion
of autonomy in its interplay with the contingencies of historically con-
structed representations, an interplay he claims “is the general, higher-order
context and condition of intelligibility of most modern Western music” (2).
230 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 241; cited by Kramer, Classical Music
and Postmodern Knowledge, 70. Derrida continues that the “sense of a
noun, instead of designating the thing which the noun habitually must
designate, carries it elsewhere . . . By virtue of its power of metaphoric
displacement, signification will be in a kind of state of availability, between
the non meaning preceding language (which has a meaning) and the truth of
language which would say the thing such as it is in itself, in act, properly”
(241). Kramer subsequently argues that the act of interpreting metaphors
entails correlating discursive affiliations of a metaphor with the
characteristics of the representation it informs—in this case [Debussy’s
metaphorical reference to rhythm in his “Des pas sur la neige”] with musical
figures and processes. Hence for Kramer, this correlation moves in two
directions. It “‘condenses’ the discursive field into the music and at the same
time reinterprets the discourse by means of music” (71). This theory of
metaphor licenses Kramer’s tropological strategy. Moreover, it justifies
Kramer’s assertion that “interpretation does not locate meaning as a
recoverable substance within the work, musical or otherwise, but as an
171
NOTES
activity or disposition within a cultural field” (Kramer, Musical Meaning,

19). Kramer’s conviction that language is the dominant force behind the
cultural production of meaning within Western communicative systems
transposes the wearing-away of metaphor, and its raising up into
metaphysics, to the difference between music and language. Although he
acknowledges that Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor offers an alternative to
Derrida’s (in Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 268, endnote 8),
he does not pursue the implications Ricoeur’s theory has for a hermeneutical
understanding of music’s communicability.
234 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 18; see 11 ff. The
distinction between music’s nonlinguistic immediacy and musicological
knowledge sets the terms for dismantling the historical opposition between
music’s metaphysical placement and language’s constative function. Hence
for Kramer, “[c]ommunicative acts arise in signification and at the same time
constitutively exceed it. . . . Dissemination opens out the play of surplus and
lack within signification with no prospect of stabilizing or closing it”
(11–12). Correlatively, music’s seeming deficiency with regard to its capacity
to denote ostensive meanings licenses an interpretive program that
dismantles the strategic hierarchy privileging music’s sensuous immediacy
over its socially constructed significance. See also Kramer, Music as Cultural
Practice.
235 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 7; see Kramer, Classical Music and
Postmodern Knowledge. For Kramer, the
semiotic is articulated as an immediacy only through an already-
significant symbolic that endows the immediacy of the semiotic with
an already-reflective meaning. All musical styles, accordingly, as
well as certain musical works, embody a certain relationship to
the signifying process. The relationship can prompt and reward
interpretations, both in general terms and more abundantly by
producing specific sites of interplay between the semiotic (or the
imaginary) and the symbolic. These sites are where music, and for that
matter visual and verbal discourses, are simultaneously at their most
immediate and most explicitly disseminal. The occasions of surplus on
which one register overflows into the other, and the occasions of
deficit on which one register breaks down into the other, thus form a
cardinal source of what I have elsewhere called hermeneutic windows,
sites of engagement through which the interpreter and the interpreted
animate one another (20–1).
237 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 286–7.
242 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 145; see Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 16.
243 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 146. By revaluing absolute music’s ineffability as
the sign of language’s failure to master the world, the resignification of
music’s nonobjective immediacy holds the communicability of the work
172
NOTES
hostage to the system of reversals it exploits. In this respect, the destruction

of the music–language divide only reverses the signification of music’s
transcendence of reality. Music’s displacement of speech from its
metaphysical position as the privileged figure of full and immediate presence
sets the stage for the culminating reversal, in which music’s metaphysical
elevation becomes the condition of its function as the supplement to
language. This reversal follows the reversal of historical judgment that
elevates music from an inferior art to the supreme representation of a
“language beyond language.” The reversal of a reversal, the destruction of
the music–language divide revalues the difference between them.
244 Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 111; see Jonathon
Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
246 Kramer, “Musicology of the Future,” 9.
250 Music’s value as a supplement to language is the corollary of this
impossibility. By functioning as the locus of the dissemination of meaning,
music’s semblance of immediacy seemingly returns the production of this
meaning to its field of play.
253 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 145 ff.
254 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 318.
255 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 318.
256 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 318. We should also not overlook the relation
between passivity and the evil of violence toward others. Ricoeur explains
that
[w]ith the decrease of the power of acting, experienced as a decrease
of the effort of existing, the reign of suffering, properly speaking,
commences. Most of these sufferings are inflicted on humans by
humans. The result is that most of the evil in the world comes from
violence among human beings. Here, the passivity belonging to the
metacategory of one’s own body overlaps with the passivity belonging
to the category of other people; the passivity of the suffering self
becomes indistinguishable from the passivity of being the victim
of the other (than) self. Victimization appears then as passivity’s
underside, casting a gloom over the “glory”of action (320).
257 Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 7. Dahlhaus cautions that the
“poeticizing” hermeneutics of romanticism, the attempt to put in
stammering words that which is beyond words, must not be
misconstrued as determination of the characters, as Hermann
Kretzschmar postulated, let alone as a sketch of “esoteric programs”
in Arnold Shering’s sense. . . . That one nonetheless attempted an
interpretation of the “poetic” at all—while conscious of its general
insufficiency—bespeaks, on the other hand, that absolute music—
understood to be the realizing of the idea of a “purely poetic” art—
did not exhaust itself in being form and structure (68).
173
NOTES
Rooted in the poetic conceit of a “language beyond language,” the inability

to adequately translate music’s expressions of feelings and emotions into
words was regarded as the mark of absolute music’s essential nature.
259 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 117; see Gadamer, Truth
and Method, 101 ff.
260 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 162.
261 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 443. Original emphasis. See Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1976), 79.
262 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 446 ff.; see also Gadamer, Philosophical
Hermeneutics; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation:
Reflections and Commentary, trans. Richard E. Palmer (London and New
Haven: University Press, 2001). This “linguistic experience of the world”
(Philosophical Hermeneutics, 78) is universal: language, which “exists only
in conversation” (Gadamer in Conversation, 56), is the event in which the
meaning that takes shape informs our understanding both of the world and
of ourselves.
263 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 3; see 11 ff.; see Gadamer, Truth
and Method, 389 ff. For Gadamer, the “structure of the hermeneutical
experience, which so totally contradicts the idea of scientific methodology,
itself depends on the character of language as event” (463).
264 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 17.
267 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 457; see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 1,
trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1984), 119.
268 Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, 33; see Gadamer, Truth and Method,
450 ff.; Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation.
269 Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, 37.
273 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 13. The language of music and art
share the ontological significance of this hermeneutical phenomenon. The
meaning that works of art bear within themselves, too, is one each brings to
presentation in the mode of play. Like language, the work of art has its true
being in the event in which it speaks. Aesthetic consciousness appeals to the
“fact that the work of art communicates itself” (96). Yet, by differentiating
between the work and its performance, aesthetic consciousness occludes the
speculative movement in which the art work expresses the meaning it bears
through its unfolding course. Within this speculative movement, the
meaning and the being of the work of art are inseparable. Gadamer concedes
that the spoken word is different from the understanding of self and world
that comes to language. Yet, “the word is only a word because of what
comes into language in it” (Truth and Method, 475). Therefore for
Gadamer, the structure of understanding does not exist prior to language;
language is the mode in which we exist understandingly.
Gadamer’s claim that “[v]erbal experience of the world is ‘absolute’.”
demands to be understood in this light. Accordingly, our
verbal experience of the world is prior to everything that is recognized
and addressed as existing. That language and world are related in a
174
NOTES
fundamental way does not mean, then, that world becomes the object
of language. Rather, the object of knowledge and statements is always
already enclosed within the world horizon of language.
Gadamer clarifies: “That human experience of the world is verbal does not
imply that a world-in-itself is objectified” (Truth and Method, 450. Original
emphasis.). Rather, as the medium through which our understanding of the
world takes shape, language houses the living exchanges among individuals
and their traditions and cultural heritages.
275 See for example Subotnik, Developing Variations, especially 174 ff.;
Kerman, Contemplating Music, 64 ff. The idea that music’s sounding
discourse is amenable to logical analysis supported theoretical justifications
of the value and greatness of Western art music.
276 Seeger’s contention that music and language comprise different com-
municative systems forestalls this insight into music’s communicability by
treating these communicative systems as the means for conveying messages
that take the form of ideas, feelings and thoughts.
277 The surplus of meaning manifest in the experience of a work is irreducible
to the difference between music’s sonorous sensuality and verbalizing
representations. Identifying this surplus with the difference between music’s
mode of communicability and second-order discourses about a work’s
quality of formation and its socio-historical value arrogates the work’s
inexhaustibility as the deconstructive supplement to the supposed
demiurgical pretensions of language. For a romantic aesthetics of music,
absolute music’s inexhaustibility serves as the sign of its unspeakability.
Paradoxically, this formulation of absolute music’s metaphysical surplus
ratifies the illusion that the truth of language consists in the adequation of
concept and thing. Music’s supposed representational deficiency, which calls
for its explanatory supplement, is a function of this concept of truth.
278 For a discussion of the significance of this epistemic break for history, see
Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting, “Part II: History, Epistemology.”
279 The dogma that music’s expression of moods and feelings for which words
are lacking is a vestige of nineteenth-century aesthetics that blocks the path
opened by the question of music’s ontological vehemence. Moreover, the
idea that music is a language without concepts substantiates the doxa that
singles out the absence of literal references as the index of music’s essentially
nonrepresentational character. (Adorno’s claim in his Introduction to the
Sociology of Music that music is a “language without concepts” (44) is
instructive in this respect.) Music’s lack of literal references and its attendant
nonrepresentational character derives some value from the sense of
immediacy with which music’s affective qualities make themselves felt.
Within the context of the nineteenth-century cult of genius and its ideal of
somnambulistic production, this affective immediacy signifies the presence
of the sublime in the absence of all definite representations of emotions
or feelings. Here music’s lack of language is the virtue of its referential
deficiencies. Under the rule of this metaphysics of feeling, music’s affective
immediacy is the sign of the presence of the absolute as the condition of its
own possibility. The derivation of this affective immediacy from music’s
essentially nonrepresentational nature caps the illusion that, in the absence
of words, music expresses a meaning that transcends language. This illusion,
which is the object of deconstructive critiques of music’s transcendent
ineffability, only ratifies the view of language that obscures the lingual
175
NOTES
character of our understanding of self and world. Converting the sense of

affective immediacy attributed to music’s lack of conceptual resources into
the sign of music’s pure excesses maintains a fundamentally epistemological
standpoint. The resulting transvaluation of music’s difference from language
identifies music’s sensuous abundance with a remainder that subtends the
recuperation in language of a meaning that continually eludes it. As the
figure of disseminating forces unleashed by the destruction of absolute
music’s metaphysical pretensions, this remainder’s supplementary value
remains predicated on the epistemological function that language fulfills as
the instrument of knowledge.
280 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 284. See Chapter 5.
281 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 301. Original emphasis.
282 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 290. From this vantage point, the “baffling
fecundity of dead metaphor is even less awesome when one takes the true
measure of its contribution to the formation of concepts. To revive dead
metaphor is in no way to unmask concepts: first of all because revived
metaphor functions differently than dead metaphor, but above all because
the full genesis of the concept does not inhere in the process by which
metaphor is lexicalized” (292).
283 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 282. Such allegorizing interpretations, in which
distinctions between proper and figurative meanings legitimate textual
analysis of poetry and works of art, subordinate metaphorical expression to
this metaphysical distinction. Shifting the principle of Werktreue onto the
social plane is but once instance of the ironic return of a metaphysics of
presence.
284 Heidegger, Being and Time, 175. Original emphasis. “Phenomenally, we
would wholly fail to recognize both what mood discloses and how it
discloses, if that which is disclosed were to be compared with what Dasein
is acquainted with, knows, and believes ‘at the same time’ when it has such
a mood.” Hence from “the existential-ontological point of view, there is not
the slightest justification for minimizing what is ‘evident’ in states-of-mind,
by measuring it against the apodictic certainty of a theoretical cognition of
something which is purely present-at-hand.” See Martin Heidegger, The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans.
William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1995), 67–8. For Heidegger, the profound boredom in which one is
entranced by time with the emptiness of an indifference enveloping beings
as a whole, for example, impels one toward the “originary making-possible
of Dasein as such” (144). This telling announcement in the “telling refusal
of beings as a whole” is accordingly a calling [Anrufen] to authentic being-
there (143).
285 Heidegger, Being and Time, 177. Original in italics.
286 Heidegger, Being and Time, 177. Original in italics.
287 See for example Derek Matravers, “The Experience of Emotion in Music,”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61 (2003); Peter Kivy,
“Experiencing the Musical Emotions” in New Essays on Musical
Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 92–118; David
Carr, “Music, Meaning and Emotion,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 62: 3 (2004); Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness” in The
Pleasure of Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 1996); R. A. Sharpe, Music
and Humanism: An Essay in the Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
176
NOTES
288 Heidegger, Being and Time, 177. Heidegger points out that this fundamental
condition of knowledge should not be interpreted as an attempt to
“surrender science ontically to ‘feeling’” (177).
289 Heidegger, Being and Time, 176–7. Moods make it possible to direct
ourselves toward something by assailing us. Correlatively, “[l]etting
something be encountered is primarily circumspective: it is not just sensing
something, or staring at it. It implies circumspective concern, and has the
character of being affected in some way [Betroffenwerdens]. . . . But to be
affected by the unserviceable, resistant, or threatening character
[Bedrohlichkeit] of that which is ready-to-hand, becomes ontologically
possible only in so far as Being-in as such has been determined existentially
beforehand in such a manner that what it encounters within-the-world can
‘matter’ to it . . . is grounded in one’s state-of-mind; and as state-of-mind it
has already disclosed the world—as something by which it can be
threatened, for instance. Only something which is in the state-of-mind of
fearing (or fearlessness) can discover that what is environmentally ready-to-
hand is threatening. Dasein’s openness to the world is constituted
existentially by the attunement of a state-of-mind” (176).
290 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 462. See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 300 ff.
The relation between feelings of belonging and interiorization is implicit in
this hermeneutical form of address.
291 Heidegger, Being and Time¸ 205.
292 Newcomb, “Sound and Feeling,” 615.
296 Newcomb, “Sound and Feeling,” 625. Newcomb borrows the term
“creative metaphor-making” from Jan L. Broeckx.
297 Newcomb, “Sound and Feeling,” 625. Accordingly for Newcomb, “verbal
metaphor is only a secondary example from the range of expressive potential
in the primary musical meaning” (637), which falls under the purview of
formal interpretation.
299 See Newcomb, “Sound and Feeling,” Newcomb recognizes the “danger . . .
that the medium of the interpretation may swamp the music, especially in a
culture much more adept verbally than musically. The critic can combat this
by returning constantly to the impetus for the particular metaphor in the
musical processes themselves . . . and by insisting that the verbal metaphor
is only a secondary example from the range of expressive potential in the
primary musical meaning” (637).
Transposing Goodman’s theory of metaphorical exemplification onto the
plane of expressive interpretation makes verbal metaphor a second-order
predicate of a work’s structural features and processes. Accordingly,
Newcomb’s recourse to expressive interpretation overcomes the difficulty
posed by the lack of agreement concerning music’s expressive meaning
by shifting the problem of denotation onto the plane of expressive
interpretation. The potential for licensing tropological strategies is striking:
“Goodman’s theory often remains close in practice to the various versions
of the isomorphic theory” (625). Newcomb therefore defends Goodman’s
theory of metaphorical exemplification for permitting a range of interpretive
resonances. Consequently, “metaphors of all sorts may be presented and
appealed to in proposing the relationship with those other aspects of
177
NOTES
experience in which expression lies” (625). Under this principle of expressive

interpretation, exemplification by means of verbal metaphors compensates
for the lack of a logically demonstrable connection between the “inside” and
“outside” of a work by constituting the relation between formal and
expressive predicates. See Abbate, Unsung Voices. Abbate, too, cautions
against the “interpretive promiscuity of plot-analysis” (28) that can too be
easily contrived as an interpretive industrial machine ending in analogies
that feign apodictic certainty.
300 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 231 ff.
301 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
Inc., 1968), 265. Cited by Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 232.
302 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 231; see Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory:
Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian
University Press, 1976). Ricoeur acknowledges that the “opacity of a symbol
is related to the rootedness of symbols in areas of our experience that are
open to different methods of interpretation” (57). At the same time, he
points out that the distinction between denotation and connotation
corresponds to a comparable distinction with the tradition of logical
positivism. Within this tradition, the “distinction between explicit and
implicit meaning was treated as the distinction between cognitive and
emotive language. And a good part of the literary criticism influenced by this
positivist tradition transposed the distinction between cognitive and emotive
language into the vocabulary of denotation and connotation. For such a
position only the denotation is cognitive and, as such, is of a semantic order.
A connotation is extra-semantic because it consists of the weaving together
of emotive evocations, which lack cognitive value” (46).
303 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 232. Ricoeur points out that, on a first
approximation, reference coincides with denotation.
The opposition between representing and expressing will not be a
difference of domain (for example the domain of objects or events and
the domain of feelings, as in an emotionalist theory), since representing
is a case of denoting, and expressing is a variant by transference of
possessing, which is a case of exemplifying; and since exemplifying and
denoting are cases of making reference, with only a difference of
direction. A symmetry by inversion replaces an apparent heterogeneity,
by means of which the ruinous distinction of the cognitive and the
emotive—from which that of denotation and connotation is derived—
could creep back in again (234).
307 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, p. 233. In this regard, Ricoeur points out that
for Roman Jacobson, the “poetic function consists essentially in
accentuating the message as such at the expense of the referential function”
(209; see 143 ff.); see also Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as
Cognition, Imagination and Feeling,” On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 150.
309 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 238. Hence “they belong to things over and
above being effects subjectively experienced by the lover of poetry.”
310 Ricoeur, “Metaphorical Process,” 148.
178
NOTES
311 Ricoeur, “Metaphorical Process,” 148; see Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor.

Metaphor not only “consists in talking about one thing in terms of another
[; it also] . . . consist[s] . . . in perceiving, thinking, or sensing one thing in
terms of another” (83).
314 See Ricoeur, “Metaphorical Process,” 155. Ricoeur follows Northrop Frye, in
that each poem “structures a mood which is this unique mood generated by this
unique string of words. In that sense, it is coextensive to the verbal structure
itself. The mood is nothing other than the way in which the poem affects us as
an icon.” At the same time, Ricoeur goes further in suggesting “in a tentative
way, that the mood is the iconic as felt.” This “felt iconicity” is the correlate of
the communicability of the work. The effect of the work’s iconic augmentation
of the real is therefore felt as much as seen or heard. Accordingly, mood
“introduces an extra-linguistic factor, which is the index of a manner of being
. . . A mood or ‘state of soul’ . . . is a way of finding or sensing oneself in the
midst of reality. . . . [T]he epoché of natural reality is [therefore] the condition
that allows poetry to develop a world on the basis of the mood that the poet
articulates . . . [Consequently,] the poem itself . . . opens up access to reality in
the mode of fiction and feeling” (Rule of Metaphor, 229).
315 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 59.
316 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 270. Hence for Nussbaum,
any “good analysis of the expressive properties of music must ground itself
in the specifically musical properties of the work” (251).
317 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 59.
318 Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1986), 85; see 129.
319 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 89; see 102 ff.
[The] instantaneous grasping of the new congruence [produced by the
metaphorical resemblance] is “felt” as well as “seen.” By saying that it is
felt, we underscore the fact that we are included in the process as
knowing subjects. If the process can be called, as I called it, predicative
assimilation, it is true that we are assimilated, that is, made similar, to
what is seen as similar. This self-assimilation is a part of the commitment
proper to the “illocutionary” force of the metaphor as speech act. We
feel like what we see like. . . . To feel, in the emotional sense of the word,
is to make ours what has been put at a distance by thought in its
objectifying phase. Feelings, therefore, have a very complex kind of
intentionality. They are not merely inner states but interiorized thoughts.
It is as such that they accompany and complete the work of imagination
as schematizing a synthetic operation: they make the schematized
thought ours. . . . Feeling is not contrary to thought. It is thought made
ours. This felt participation is a part of its complete meaning as a poem.
Ricoeur therefore highlights the fact that “feelings are not merely the
denial of emotions but their metamorphosis has been explicitly asserted by
Aristotle in his analysis of catharsis. . . . . It is the tragic poem itself, as
thought (dianoia), which displays specific feelings which are the poetic
transposition—I mean the transposition by means of poetic language—of
fear and compassion, that is, of feelings of the first order, or emotions. The
179
NOTES
tragic phobos and the tragic eleos (terror and pity, as some translators say)
are both the denial and the transfiguration of the literal feelings of fear and
compassion (155–6).
See Göran Sörbom, “Aristotle on Music as Representation,” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52: 1 (1994).
321 Paul Ricoeur, “Arts, langage et herméneutique esthétique.” Interview with
Jean-Marie Brohm and Magali Uhl (1996). http://www.philagora.net/
ricoeur.htm; Paul Ricoeur, “Arts, Language and Hermeneutic Aesthetics,”
trans. R. D. Sweeney and John Carroll, http://www.philagora.net/philo-
fac/ricoeur-e.htm.
322 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, 52. Original in italics.
323 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, 52.
324 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, 56. In treating mimetic activity as
effecting both a break and connection with reality, Ricoeur highlights the
mimetic displacement of ethics to poetics. The movement from narrative’s
anchorages in the practical field (mimesis1) to the fictive realism (mimesis2),
opens the kingdom of the as if. Ricoeur points out that whereas the “term
muthos indicates discontinuity, the word, praxis, by its double allegiance,
assures continuity between the two realms of action” (47). This continuity
reasserts itself in the refiguration of reality (mimesis3) in accordance with a
heuristic fiction’s proposal of meaning.
328 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, 54 ff.
329 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 225. Prior to reality’s
dissimulation, ideology functions at the basic level of social reality’s
symbolic mediation to structure the interpretive systems in which action
(praxis) and its reasons, objects and aims are intersubjectively meaningful.
See Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting, 80 ff.
330 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Can One Speak of Narrative in Music?” Journal of
the Royal Musical Society 115: 2 (1990), 257. Original emphasis. Nattiez
argues further that “[l]iterary narrative is invention, lying. Music does not
lie, because of necessity the task of linking these phantoms of characters to
suggestions of action will fall to me, the listener: it is not within the
semiological possibilities of music to link subject to a predicate” (244).
331 Nattiez, “Can One Speak of Narrative in Music?” 249. Original emphasis.
Nattiez attributes the “narratological temptation of recent musicology . . .
in this post-modernist era . . . [to] an attempt to conceive music according
to what it has in common with literary narrative, according to this
fundamental dimension of linearity” (257). For Nattiez, the linear
dimension of narrative elicits a casual nexus of interrelated events: “In a
narrative there exists simultaneously a linear dimension—events happen at
different moments in time—and relations of cause and effect between these
different events” (242). However, any such casual nexus owes its credibility
to the narrative configuration, which transforms the contingencies of
episodic incidents into events necessary to the development of the plot. The
heuristic value narrative structures arguably had for composers such as
Schumann offers no justification for the claim that music is narrative. The
danger of succumbing to the intentionalist fallacy is perhaps no greater than
when the idea that a work emulates a plot structure serves to legitimate
narrativizing interpretations of it.
180
NOTES
332 Fred Everett Maus, “Music as Drama,” Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988),
67. Maus’s strategy for linking formal analysis with expressive inter-
pretation offers a compelling example of the temptation to narrativize a
musical passage or a work. By identifying musical events with the actions of
imaginary agents, his strategy assimilates the musical expression of a
temporal configuration to the semantics of action. Maus emphasizes how the
“the notion of action is crucial in understanding the Beethoven passage. A
listener follows the music by drawing on the skills that allow understanding
of commonplace human action in everyday life” (65–6). Moreover, the
“related notions of action, behavior, intention, agent, and so on, [that] figure
in a scheme of explanation or interpretation that applies to human beings”
(66) belong to a semantics. Since the character is a function of the plot,
recourse to the semantics of action proves to be indispensable to an
interpretative strategy that aims at ascribing thoughts, intentions, motives,
moods, feelings, or psychological states to agents that could be identified as
the authors of their actions. For Maus, describing the Beethoven passage in
terms of the semantics of action, “explains events by regarding them as
actions and suggesting motivations, reasons why those actions are
performed” (67. Original emphasis.).
333 Maus, “Music as Drama,” 65.
335 Maus, “Music as Drama,” 65–6.
341 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, 67.
342 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 174.
343 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker. Revised by R. F. Stalley (Oxford:
344 Aristotle, Politics, 309; See Aristides Quintilianus, On Music, 124 ff.
345 See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 89.
346 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 89.
Now, since the whole of our language has been worked out in the
dimension of objectivity, in which the subject and object are distinct
and opposed, feeling can be described only paradoxically as the unity
of an intention and an affection, of an intention toward the world and
affection of the self. This paradox, however, is only the sign pointing
toward the mystery of feeling, namely, the undivided connection of
my existence with beings and being through desire and love.
347 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1988), 271.
351 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, 273. This fundamental element, to which
lyric meditations on the brevity of human life in the face of the immensity of
time gives voice, is more radical than our historical condition. Ricoeur asks:
“Is thinking still the master of meaning when it comes to this being-affected,
more fundamental than the being-affected by history” (267)? “[B]ound to
181
NOTES
the representation of something beyond time,” (264) polymorphic figurations

of time, and the valuations of human time to which they give rise, attest to
time’s ultimate inscrutability. The ultimate unrepresentability of time
evidenced by the diversity of figures that seek to speak of time and its other
reveals the root of a sense of being-affected that shatters the assertion of our
radical autonomy. Ricoeur maintains that, in contrast to this assertion, the
recognition of this fundamental element takes the form of an “avowal of an
element of passivity in my existence, an avowal that in some ways I receive
existence” (Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H.
Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 32). This avowal of
dependence, which shipwrecks the hubris of a thinking that posits itself as the
master of meaning, “is perhaps the only possible truth of religion” (32). The
affirmation of this sense of dependence attests to the condition of finitude at
the heart of mortal existence. The primary affirmation of the pathos that we
experience—better, that we undergo—in being-affected therefore constitutes
a response to the enigma of time and its other.
Poetry and perhaps more especially, music, respond to the enigma of
time’s inscrutability by taking the measure of mortal dwelling. In his exegesis
of a poem by Hölderin, Heidegger interprets the upward glance as meting
out the dimension that spans between the earth and sky. In refusing to give
a name to this dimension, Heidegger affirms the nature of the dimension.
The measure according to which man dwells on the earth, for Heidegger,
“consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is revealed as
such by the sky” (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 223. Original
emphasis). By disclosing that which conceals itself, the sky reveals the
unknown god not by enabling us to wrest “what is concealed out of its
concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment.
Thus the unknown god appears as the unknown by way of the sky’s
manifestation” (223). This disclosure of the concealment of the unknown
god is the measure poetry takes for mortal dwelling. Similarly, figures of
time and its other in narrative, poetry and music revalue human time in
response to the enigma of time and its other.
352 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 245. The “phenomenological objectivity of
what commonly is called emotion or feeling is inseparable from the tensional
structure of the truth of metaphorical statements that express the
construction of the world by and with feeling. The possibility of textural
reality is correlative to the possibility of a metaphorical truth of poetic
schemata; the possibility of one is established at the same time as that of the
other”. (255) . . . Mood, therefore, is the “hypothetical created by the poem
. . . that, as such, . . . occupies the place in lyric poetry that muthos occupies
in tragic poetry” (245). See Ricoeur, “Metaphorical Process.” Ricoeur’s
analysis of the metaphorical process prepares the way for joining this lyric
muthos to a lyric mimesis in the poetic creation of mood. In the metaphorical
process, the
instantaneous grasping of the new [predicative] congruence is “felt” as
well as “seen.” By saying that it is felt, we underscore the fact that we are
included in the process as knowing subjects. If the process can be called,
as I called it, predicative assimilation, it is true that we are assimilated,
that is, made similar to what is seen as similar. This self-assimilation is a
part of the commitment, proper to the “illocutionary” force of the
metaphor as speech act. We feel like what we see like. . . . To feel, in the
182
NOTES
emotional sense of the word, is to make ours what has been put at a
distance by thought in its objectifying phase. Feelings, therefore, have a
very complex kind of intentionality. They are not merely inner states but
interiorized thoughts. It is as such that they accompany and complete the
work of imagination as schematizing a synthetic operation: they make the
schematized thought ours. . . . Feeling is not contrary to thought. It is
thought made ours. This felt participation is a part of its complete
meaning as a poem (154).
356 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 106:
If being is “beyond essence,” if it is horizon, it is understandable that
the feelings that most radically interiorize the supreme intention of
reason might themselves be beyond form. . . . The height of the feeling
of belonging to being ought to be the feeling in what is most detached
from our vital depth—what is absolute, in the strongest sense of the
word—becomes the heart of our heart. But then one cannot name it;
one can merely call it the Unconditional that is demanded by reason
and whose inwardness is manifested by feeling (105–6).
See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3. In the closing pages of Time and
Narrative Ricoeur notes that the distinction Heidegger draws between
temporal and temporalizing has but a single function, which is to point to
the ontological difference between Being and beings. This difference
discloses the radical nature of human finitude by manifesting temporality’s
inscrutable character:
Apart from this role, it [the ontological difference between Being and
beings] only succeeds in indicating the inscrutable character of
temporality understood as the wholeness of Dasein. For, taken by
itself, the distinction between temporal-being and temporality no
longer designates a phenomenon accessible to hermeneutic pheno-
menology as such (270).
357 Aristotle, Politics, 309.
359 Aristotle, Politics, 312–13.
362 Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Revised by C. D. C. Reeve
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992), 78.
363 Plato, Republic, 80.
364 See for example Bonnie C. Wade, Thinking Musically: Experiencing Music,
Expressing Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 97 ff.;
A. J. Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of
T‚arab (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 100 ff.
365 Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, 36; see Michel Dufrenne, The
Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973). The world to which the order pledged
by a work corresponds is the ground of the atmosphere emanating from the
work’s composition. Michel Dufrenne points out in this regard that a work’s
atmosphere emanates from the ensemble of elements that produces that
183
NOTES
atmosphere. For Dufrenne, feeling is the “specific mode of apprehending”

(198) the singular world expressed by a work. The composition of a work
not only refers to the formal arrangement of its component parts, but it
also consists in schematizing the world to which the work as a whole also
refers. The disposition of a work is therefore a function and effect of its
composition. In this respect, Ricoeur notes that as “a work of composition
or arrangement, ‘disposition’ (to echo dispositio, the term of ancient
rhetoric), . . . makes of a poem or novel a totality irreducible to a simple
sum of sentences” (Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 219). The singular work
produced through its unique arrangement or composition displays a unique
world. The work’s expression of its world in turn calls for a hermeneutical
understanding of this worlding of the work.
366 Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope, 3 vol., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice
& Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), vol. 3, 1072:
[W]hile music in the sense of mood is lodged entirely in vagueness,
music in the sense of proportion, the art of composition, has from the
earliest times been mathematicized. While music as mood is supposed
to cease to be music once it has been arranged comprehensibly, and
therefore passed over into plastic art, into poetry, music as form, as
proportion, is supposed to become all the more itself the more it
expresses itself in accordance with laws and is cosmographic.
367 Dahlhaus, “Fragments of Musical Hermeneutics,” 17; see Carl Dahlhaus,
Esthetics of Music, trans. William Austin (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 81 ff.; Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem
of Its Identity, trans. Adam Czerniawski (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986). This inner dynamic achieves its expression in the temporal
movement through which a work as a whole unfolds. The logic of this inner
dynamic is therefore that of the matrix schematized by the synthetic operation
that transforms the work’s sequentially ordered linear progression into a
temporal configuration. This matrix is the schema of the work’s disposition.
Abstracting a musical logic from this matrix reduces the schema produced by
the work’s configuration to the concept of an inner form, thereby redoubling
the prejudice that isolates a work’s self-referential, intramusical organization
at the expense of the work’s ontological vehemence.
368 Ingarden, Work of Music, 90.
369 Bloch, Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1070.
370 Abbate, Unsung Voices¸ 53.
371 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 53. The distinction Abbate draws between the
mimetic function of music and the diegetic function of music by interrogating
the analogy between music and the act of narrating obscures the mimetic
effects of a work’s epoché of reality. Accordingly, she appeals to Ricoeur’s
claim that poetics never stops borrowing from ethics as an argument for
identifying narrative discourse with the use of verb tenses “to achieve a kind
of moral distance in recasting the referential object” (52). Abbate here cites
Ricoeur: “What is essential to the narrated world is foreign to the immediate
or directly preoccupying surroundings of the speaker” (53). Ricoeur,
however, states that what is “essential is that the narrated world is foreign to
the immediate or directly preoccupying surroundings of the speaker” (Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 68–9. My emphasis.).
By emphasizing the foreignness of the narrated world, Ricoeur stresses the
184
NOTES
epoché of the real. For Abbate, diegetic genres entail both the time of
narrating (Erzähltezeit) and narrated time (Erzählte Zeit). Conversely, in
“mimetic genres there seems to be only the time of telling. The time of telling
is the time being told about; there is no teller, only time itself” (54; see Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 77 ff.). Hence for
her, the lack of differentiation between Erzähltezeit and Erzählte Zeit justifies
identifying music’s temporal configuration with a mode presentification that
ultimately is bound to the ordinary concept of time.
372 Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 95.
373 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 180. Hence the “subject of aesthetic
experience is placed in a relation comparable to the relation of adequation
that exists between the emotion of the creator and the work that conveys it.
What he experiences is the singular feeling of this singular suitability” (178).
374 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 173–4.
375 It is striking in this regard how, in an effort to overturn the institution of the
art work, dematerializing or deconstructing the aesthetic object fails to avoid
putting imagination into play. Intentionally displacing the problem of a
work’s aesthetic formation relieves the artist of the responsibility for a
work’s composition. However, this retreat to a concept or program to be
executed by performers, spectators or listeners only postpones the work of
ordering through which a work achieves its expression. The genealogy of
John Cage’s compositional changes evinces one of the more forcible
instances of this retreat. Cage’s use of chance achieves its apotheosis in his
famous silent work 4’33” (the formal title of the concept piece is Time; each
work-performance has as its title the time it took to perform it. 4’33” is the
duration of David Tudor’s 1952 première performance), in which the
musical silences signified by the three TACET movements delimit spans of
time for ambient sounds occurring within them.
376 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 182–3.
377 That a work communicates the mood or feeling it possesses by expressing
a world breaks emphatically with romanticizing ideals concerning the
composer’s intentions. In this regard, relegating the expression of feelings
and moods to some sympathetic hum of noumenal vibrations succeeds only
in occluding the role that reflecting judgment plays.
378 Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, 28.
379 Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination, 173. For Treitler, the
“interpretation of art and the history of art proceed from the same grounds”
(35). Accordingly, illuminating a work in its individuality marks the
difference between analysis and criticism. In terms of the history of forms
and genres, analysis consequently is from his standpoint “a narrative of the
dynamic between the stereotyping of aesthetic perception and the generation
of new stylistic and generic norms with the aesthetic attrition of older ones”
(173–4). See Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, 27 ff.
380 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, 162. Following G. F. Granger,
Ricoeur suggests that if “a work is considered as the resolution of a problem,
itself arising out of prior successes in the field of science as well as in the field
of art, then style may be termed the adequation between the singularity of
this solution, which the work constitutes by itself, and the singularity of the
crisis situation as this was apprehended by the thinker or artist.” Ricoeur is
quick to point out, however, that identifying the work with an author
185
NOTES
“implies no conjecture about the psychology of invention or of discovery,

therefore no assertion concerning the presumed intention of the inventor.”
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 375. In a similar vein, Gadamer points out
that since there is no “point outside history from which the identity of a
problem can be conceived within the vicissitudes of the history of attempts
to solve it,” the questions which on the one hand works raise and to which
on the other hand they reply are always already affected by the history that
is constituted by these very attempts. A history of the questions and
perplexities that works resolve in a poetic way, in other words, “would truly
be history only if it acknowledged that the identity of the problem is an
empty abstraction and permitted itself to be transformed in questioning.”
381 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975), 86.
382 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York:
Vintage Books, 1979). See Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and
Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967), 162; Dahlhaus,
Schoenberg and the New Music, 73 ff., 87ff.; McClary, Feminine Endings.
McClary contends that the fantasy played out in Erwartung’s musical setting
careens over the edge of rational intelligibility. Accordingly, she argues that
the dissonance’s escape from all tonal constraints serves to unmask the
persuasive force of the principle of tonal closure as arbitrarily—and even
violently—imposed. Where “the semiotic construction of the madwoman
through discontinuity and extreme chromaticism” in Erwartung remains
intact, its isolating frame—”the masculine presence that had always
guaranteed the security of rationality within the music itself” (104)—is
seemingly missing—murdered by the madwoman who, in escaping reality,
is imprisoned in the unbearably immediate presence of her dead lover.
383 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3. By resisting the philosophical
temptation of a “mode of thought that embraces past, present and future as
a whole” (193), this event in thinking awakens historical consciousness to
the hermeneutical condition of the initiatives that take shape between the
horizons of the surpassed past and the future. For Ricoeur, “intellectual
honesty demands that we confess . . . we do not know if . . . [this event] is
indicative of a catastrophe that still is crippling us or a deliverance whose
glory we dare not celebrate” (202).
384 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-
Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 37; see Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory, 207. In its hostility to the aesthetic tradition of the
bourgeois religion of art, expressionism rejects communication. Yet its
insistence upon the autonomy of the work calls for coherence and
consistency, which makes the work communicable. Expressionism’s τόδε τι
attests to the contradiction at the heart of Schoenberg’s musical poetics in
this respect. For Adorno, this contradiction evinces the impossibility of
preserving the summit of expressionistic impulses. Accordingly, Erwartung’s
gestures of shock assume a formulaic quality once they are repeated. Hence
for Adorno, expressionistic music assumed its depositional character
through extracting and distilling the principle of expression from romantic
music. See Joseph Auner, “‘Heart and Brain in Music’: The Genesis of
Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand,” Constructive Dissonance, ed. Juliane
Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997). According to Auner, in Schoenberg’s most radical works, “the
unifying elements are attenuated to an unprecedented degree as a result of
186
NOTES
pursuing an image of composition as the transcription of the constantly

changing and irrational unconscious” (118).
385 Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 199. Hoeckner consequently
suggests that the “temporal paradox of Erwartung . . . inverts the paradox
in the Eroica” (198). See Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York:
The Viking Press, 1975).
386 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 71.
387 See Ricoeur¸ Time and Narrative vol. 3, 207 ff.
388 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007), 355.
389 Taylor, Secular Age, 356.
391 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, 261; see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative
vol. 1. The analysis initiated by Augustine’s question: “What then is time?”
sets the experience of time against the backdrop of eternity. The
phenomenology of time, according to which the experience of time unfolds
against the aporia of a three-fold present, emerges from this ontological
question. For Ricoeur, Augustine’s inestimable discovery was to tie the
distention of the soul (distentio animi) to the extension of time to the
slippage between the present of the future, the present of the past, and the
present of the present. Accordingly, the major aporia with which Augustine
was struggling is inscribed within the circle of the aporia of the being or the
nonbeing of time.
393 Racy, Making Music, 6.
[In a salt‚anah state,] experiences [also become] well-focused and
intense musical sensations. . . . While in such a state, the performer
finds himself captivated by the mode, particularly the intervallic and
tonal components. He feels haunted by the tonic pitch and the
intervallic structure, but is also fully prepared to evoke the powerful
t‚arab effect of the mode. Thus the strongly felt presence of an
established tonic and related intervals and notes of emphasis makes it
possible to view salt‚anah as a form of modal, and by implication tonal
and intervallic fixation, or essentially as modal ecstasy (120–1).
397 Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting, 76, Ricoeur cites Beethoven’s late
quartets and sonatas for their “powerful evocation of a sublime sadness. (77)”
398 Steven M. Friedson, Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka
Healing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10. Vimbuza,
Friedson explains, is a multivocal term that “encompasses a class of spirits,
the illnesses they cause, and the music and dance used to treat the illness. As
spirit, vimbuza is the numinous energy of foreign peoples and wild animals;
as illness, it is both a spirit affliction and an initiatory sickness; as musical
experience, it is a mode of trance” (12).
399 Friedson, Dancing Prophets. “For nchimi, the musical heat has the
alchemical-like abilities in its power to transform phenomenal reality. It is
in the act of dancing vimbuza that the ancestral mizimu and foreign vimbuza
are ‘melded together’ (the term the Tumbuka use), creating the necessary
conditions for an nchimi to ‘see’ (kuwona)” (22–3).
187
NOTES
400 Friedson, Dancing Prophets, 166; see 168.

401 Friedson, Dancing Prophets, 164.
402 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 30; see 66.
403 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 98. My emphasis. The feeling of pleasure arises
from the conflict between the imagination’s inadequacy and reason’s idea of
the supersensible. In the feeling of the sublime, the imagination’s inadequacy
to provide a standard of sensibility gives rise to the feeling of pleasure
corresponding to reason’s supersensible laws. The inability on the part of the
imagination to provide a sensible form for the object of this feeling testifies
to the latter’s supersensible quality: this failure of the imagination attests to
the “presence” of the sublime sentiment’s supersensible correlate—that is,
reason. Since reason rescues thought from the heterogeneity of its theoretical,
practical, and aesthetic capacities, the feeling of displeasure at the imagina-
tion’s inadequacy gives way to the feeling of pleasure in reason’s supersensible
laws. Hence for reflective judgment, the sublime pleasure felt by reason in the
presence of its own idea of the supersensible elevates the imagination beyond
the abyss in which, according to Kant, it “is afraid to lose itself” (115).
404 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 114–15. “The sublime can be described thus: it
is an object (of nature) the presentation of which determines the mind to
think of nature’s inability to attain to an exhibition of ideas” (127). Hence
“if something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any
reasoning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear,
in its form, contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate
with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination, and
yet we judge it all the more sublime for that” (99).
405 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81. See Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on
the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994). According to Lyotard, what in the feeling of the
sublime exceeds the imagination’s capacity to present it in a sensible form
becomes intelligible only in the felt form of the “differend of the finite and
the infinite” (151; see 94). Hence this felt form of the differend at the heart
of the feeling of the sublime “can only be felt fully in thought if the finite
thought (that of form) removes itself from its finality” (151). See also Jean-
François Lyotard, The Inhman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
406 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 73.
407 Philip Glass, Music by Philip Glass (Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1987),
60. Adorno draws a similar comparison to Stockhausen’s Zeitmaβe, which
he regards as evoking “a through-composed cadence, a fully presented yet
static dominant” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 159).
408 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, 67 ff.; vol. 2, 19 ff.
409 Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New
Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer Books,
1988), 55.
410 Steve Reich, Writings about Music (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, 1974), 10; see Paul Epstein, “Pattern Structure
and Process in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase,” Musical Quarterly 72:4 (1986);
K. Robert Schwarz: Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process (Part I),
Perspectives of New Music (1980–1981); “Part II.” Perspectives of New
Music 20:1/2 (1981–1982).
411 Kramer, Time of Music, 378; see Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political
Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985).
188
NOTES
412 Kramer, Time of Music, 57. Original emphasis.

413 See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 105.
414 See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, 270.
415 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), 30. According to Bourdieu, the space of positions
structured by this field, and the space of position-takings that manifest
individual agents’ social involvement, comprise a network of objective
relations that subtends and orients the strategies that “occupants of the
different positions implement in their struggles to defend or improve their
positions” (30.) Every position taken by an agent in the field in relation to
the space of actual or potential position-takings “receives its distinctive
value from its negative relationship” (30) with coexistent position-takings
that determine and delimit it.
416 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,
trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984),
19.
417 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 196; see 171 ff., 192; see
also Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 35.
418 Bourdieu, Distinction, 5; see Pierre Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production,
264.
419 Bourdieu, Distinction, 6.
420 Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, p. 261.
Musical Meaning, 11 ff., 166 ff. For Kramer: “Interpretive statements
win an initial credibility precisely because they are subjective, that is,
because they are culturally and socially conditioned, context-sensitive,
and the product of education and dialogue. Subjectivity is regulated by
the range of subject-positions available within a speech community”
(166–7).
424 Bourdieu, Distinction, 19. Original emphasis; see 53 ff.
425 Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production. The “categories which are used in
order to perceive and appreciate the work of art are doubly bound to the
historical context. Linked to a situated and dated social universe, they
become the subject of usages which are themselves socially marked by the
social positions of the users who exercise the constitutive disposition of their
habitus in the aesthetic choices these categories make possible” (262).
Bourdieu consequently argues that the majority of the categories used by
artists and critics in defining themselves and their adversaries are both
weapons and stakes in their struggles. Furthermore, as weapons and stakes,
combative concepts “gradually become technical categorems upon which—
thanks to genesis amnesia—critical dissections, dissertations and academic
theses confer an air of eternity.” Bourdieu concludes that “[o]f all the
methods of entering such struggles . . . the most tempting and the most
irreproachable is undoubtedly that of presenting oneself as a judge or
referee” (262).
426 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books,
1977), 202; see Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed.
Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007),
179 ff.; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82 ff. This physiognomy is
189
NOTES
inseparable from “the ability to adopt an aesthetic stance [that] is part of

cultured (gebildete) consciousness” (84).
427 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 202.
428 Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 36: “The meaning of a work
(artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each
change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader”
(30–1).
429 Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 36.
430 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 88; see 99.
431 Gary Tomlinson, “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response
to Lawrence Kramer,” Current Musicology 53 (1993), 21.
432 Lawrence Kramer, “Music Criticism and the Postmodernist Turn: In
Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson,” Current Musicology 53 (1993),
29. The struggle over the legitimate construction of postmodern sub-
jectivities figures prominently in discourses that intend to deconstruct
modern musicological precepts. For Kramer, the history of music is an
essential part of the history of subjectivity. Accordingly for him, subjectivity
“first appears as personal agency, . . . but increasingly comes to be regarded
as itself a form of action, and more specifically a form of communicative
action in recurrent, relatively stable, but historically bounded forms.” The
construction of subjectivity parallels that of the work. Hence the “subject
finds itself mirrored and notated, but also changed, in the ideal object,
though the congruity between them is never complete or seamless” (Kramer,
Critical Musicology, xv–xvi.) Kramer’s contention that the congruity
between subject and work is never fully achievable relegates both to the play
of differences and deferrals that convert modernist constructions of
subjectivity into its ironic other. Despite his antipathy toward modernist
musicology, Kramer’s allegiance to the construct of subjectivity preserves a
central position for it within postmodern doxa.
In contrast, Tomlinson’s appeal to a metasubjective level beyond the reach
of those individuals that it affects consecrates the difference between this
epistemic level and the practical and dialogical realms in which individual
subjects speak and act. Separating subjective and metasubjective levels of
cultural formation compels Tomlinson to treat the subjective level as the
object of hermeneutical analysis. Conversely, the metasubjective level calls for
the kind of archeological analysis Tomlinson identifies with the genealogical
critiques of Friedrich Nietizsche and Michel Foucault (see Music in
Renaissance Magic). See McClary, Modal Subjectivities. McClary similarly
maintains that the “madrigal can tell us a great deal about constructions of
subjectivity . . . during a crucial stage of Western cultural history” (9). By
treating musical texts as a source for historical evidence, she identifies
constructions of subjectivity in madrigals allegorically with such ideas as that
of the body, gender, and interiority and the simulation of feelings.
433 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1990), 411.
434 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 411.
435 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 407.
436 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969).
437 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976), 51.
190
NOTES
438 Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 54.

439 Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 57–8.
440 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 8; see Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of
Music, 204.
441 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 7–8; see 103, 225.
442 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 32; see Hans Robert Jauss,
Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 13 ff.; Peter Bürger,
Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984) especially 35 ff.
443 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 53–4. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of
Enlightenment.
445 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247.
446 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 134; see 54. See also Gunter Gebauer and
Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 281 ff.; Andreas Huyssen
“Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno,” New German
Critique 81 (2000). Huyssen argues that mimesis is “not identity, nor can it
be reduced to compassion or empathy. It rather requires of us to think
identity and non-identity together as a nonidentical similitude and in
unresolvable tension with each other” (72). See also Karla L. Schultz,
Mimesis on the Move (New York: P. Lang, 1990). According to Schultz:
From the perspective of Dialectic of Enlightenment, self-survival is
played out as power, dependence as domination, love as hatred. The two
literary excurses differentiate this dialectic further: both cunning
Odysseus and clever Juliette are figures whose adaptation to the social
order speaks of an attachment that exceeds it—each desires what is other
to their purpose. Odysseus, longing for a home, establishes himself as
master; Juliette, longing for pleasure, practices utmost self-discipline. As
fictions of their authors they display a divisiveness that both their and
their writers’ orders work hard to suppress. The narrative form of these
fictions, collaborative with the content, colludes with such divisiveness.
It is doubly mimetic: while the form of language imitates the structures
of reality, it also mimes ex negativo what these structures have buried.
This duplicity lies at the heart of aesthetic mimesis (97).
447 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 133 ff.
448 Adorno, “Commitment,” 317; see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 310–11. See
also Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”;
Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression
in Listening,” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed.
J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).
449 Adorno, “Commitment,” 301.
452 Ricoeur, Lectures, 10; see Ricoeur, “Science and Ideology,” Hermeneutics
and the Human Sciences.
453 See Ricoeur, Lectures, 260 ff. The symbolic structure is always already at
work in the “most primitive kind of action” (8). Consequently, Ricoeur
maintains that “[w]e must integrate the concept of ideology as distortion
into a framework that recognizes the symbolic structure of social life. Unless
191
NOTES
social life has a symbolic structure, there is no way to understand how we

live, do things and project these activities in ideas, no way to understand
how reality can become an idea or how real life can produce illusions” (8).
See Ricoeur, Ricoeur Reader, 135; Paul Ricoeur, “Ideology and Utopia as
Social Imagination,” Being Human in a Technological Age, ed. O. M.
Borchert and D. Stewart (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979). Ricoeur
points out that it “may be that our regressive analysis can go no further,
because no group and no individual are possible without this integrative
function” (Lectures).
456 Ricoeur, History¸ Memory, Forgetting, 84.
460 Ricoeur, Lectures, 188.
462 Bloch, Principle of Hope; see Bloch and Adorno, “Something’s Missing.”
463 See Ricoeur, Lectures. Ricoeur argues that the “ruling symbols of our
identity derive not only from our present and our past but also from our
expectations for the future. It is part of our identity that is open to surprises,
to new encounters. What I call the identity of a community or of an
individual is also a prospective identity. What we call ourselves is also what
we expect and yet what we are not” (311).
464 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 227; see Ricoeur, Lectures,
265–6.
465 Ricoeur, Lectures, 3. Original emphasis.
467 See Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 203 ff; Ricoeur,
Lectures, 258.
469 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 112.
470 See for example Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Eric Hobsbawm,
“Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1983); Benedict Anderson, “Introduction,” “The Angel of History,” and
“Memory and Forgetting,” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991).
471 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 2005), 6.
472 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 81.
478 Arendt, Human Condition, 7.
192
NOTES
482 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 211. Arendt therefore maintains that
“culture indicates that art and politics, their conflicts and tensions
notwithstanding, are interrelated and even mutually dependent. . . . The
common element connecting art and politics is that they are both
phenomena of the public world. What mediates the conflict between the
artist and the man of action is the cultura animi, that is, a mind so trained
and cultivated that it can be trusted to tend and take care of a world of
appearances whose criterion is beauty” (218–19).
484 Ricoeur, “Arts, Language and Hermeneutic Aesthetics.”
485 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 182. Ricoeur consequently speculates
that: “Perhaps we learn about singularity through the contact with works,
which would be, if it is true, one way of pursuing the Kantian argument in
showing how the experience of the beautiful—and even more to point, of the
sublime—leads us to morality” (182).
486 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 182–3.
487 Ricoeur, Ricoeur Reader, 153. The notion that the exemplarity of the work
of art might serve as a model for thinking about testimony intersects the
fundamental problematic separating art’s ideological function from its
emancipatory potential. Placing the problematic of art’s ideological and
emancipatory force within the concrete context of ideology and utopia
therefore sets this problematic into its appropriate framework. The
challenge of thinking about what the work’s exemplarity demands brings
out some of the temporal features at play in the figures of noncongruence
evidenced by cultural signs and works. Consequently, the work’s power to
express its world becomes a model for reevaluating the force of a work’s
claim to truth within the framework of the operative significance of the
cultural imagination.
488 Ricoeur, The Just, 103; see Gadamer, Truth and Method. By abstracting
“from all subjective, private conditions” (43), Kant’s legitimation of
aesthetic judgment’s transcendental universality authorizes its lateral
transposition into other domains. See also Hannah Arendt, Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1982).
489 Ricoeur, The Just, 106; see Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 182–3.
490 Ricoeur, The Just, 99.
491 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 43. The affinity of a work’s
communicability with the condition of plurality constitutive of the body
politic highlights the sense in common sense (sensus communis) that founds
and maintains a historical community. Hence for Gadamer, as the “concrete
universality represented by the community of a group, a people, a nation,
or the whole human race” (21), the sensus communis is critical to our
understandings of ourselves and of our ways of life. Ricoeur similarly
maintains that the status of the sensus communis “as a required condition
distinguishes it from any empirical fact” (The Just, 104). He accordingly
notes that “Hannah Arendt goes so far as to distinguish the Latin usage of
sensus communis from the popular notion of common sense as a given
sociological fact” (103).
492 Cited by Valdés, Phenomenological Hermeneutics, 7.
493 Valdés, Phenomenological Hermeneutics, 7.
494 Ricoeur, The Just, 109 ff.
193
NOTES
495 See Ingarden, Work of Music, 137 ff. By asking how “[o]ld works live . . .
in new musical epochs” (137), Ingarden initiates a course of inquiry, which
if pursued to its conclusion, would show that a work’s hermeneutical
identity is the counterpart of its hermeneutical autonomy.
496 See Ricoeur, The Just, 109 ff.
194
INDEX
Abbate, Carolyn 52, 53, 114–15 Symphony 52, 165 n. 142; String
absolute music 1, 2, 5, 6, 15–20, 24, Quartet in C minor, op. 18, no. 4
27, 33–7, 44–7, 51–3, 55–6, 58, 60, 156 n. 34; String Quartet op. 95
63, 66, 71–3, 78–85, 90–2, 102, 106–8
124, 137, 155 n. 24, 157 n. 51, 165 Bene, Giulio del 41
n. 142, 175 n. 277 Benjamin, Walter 135
“absolute philosophy” 51 Berlioz, Hector 62
Adorno, Theodor W. 14, 21, 25, 27, Bildung 29, 69, 126, 128, 129, 158 n.
71, 73, 86, 117–18, 132, 133–6, 57
138, 143; ad hoc negation 17, 154 Blacking, John 9
n. 17; immanent analysis 8–11, Bloch, Ernst 113, 114, 141
133–4, 154 n. 12 Bourdieu, Pierre 125, 126, 127, 128,
aesthetics and ideology 138–42 130
Agrippa, Henry Cornelius: De occulta Brahms, Johannes: Third Symphony
philosophia libri tres 38 157 n. 41
Al-Kindi 161 n. 96 Brown, Hilda Meldrum 52
anamnesis 10, 134
animal laborans, man as 144 Cage, John: Time 185 n. 375
aporetics of temporality 122 Camerata 40, 41
aporia 86, 105, 108, 130, 135 catharsis 112
Arendt, Hannah 128, 144, 145, 147, Chua, Daniel K. L. 4, 5, 41, 45
148 cognitive theories 94
Aristotle 39–40, 103, 109, 112, 179n.
320; hermenetia 88; mimesis 39; Dahlhaus, Carl 25, 36, 42, 44, 113,
theory of metaphor 39 114, 116
art pour l’art, l’ 154 n. 12 Dasein 176 n. 284, 177 n. 289, 183 n.
Augustine, St 105, 187 n. 391 356
Austin, A.J. 79 denotation 99
Derrida, Jacques 79
Bach, Johann Sebastian: C major dianoia 105
fugue, The Well-Tempered Klavier Dilthey, Wilhelm 13, 48
64–5; F minor fugue from the Well- Dissonance 24
Tempered Klavier 41 distance from reality 12, 86, 89,
Baroque 41 109
Batteux, Abbé Charles 163 n. 115 Duboi, Abbé 163 n. 115
Beethoven, Ludwig van 55, 56, 62, 63,
181 n. 332; Fifth Symphony 46; Eagleton, Terry 132–3
Sixth Symphony 47–8; Ninth ekphrasis 74–5, 79
195
INDEX
Enlightenment 21, 77, 120 Kant, Immanuel 14, 30, 31, 32, 35,
epistemology 165 n. 138 77, 100, 115, 120, 123, 131, 138,
exemplification 95–8 147; Critique of Pure Reason 45;
subjectivization of aesthetics 17,
Feuerbach, Ludwig 51 27–8, 46, 81, 86–7, 109, 124,
Fichte: play impulses 159 n. 68 126–7, 148, 155 n. 24
Ficino, Marsilio 38–9, 161 n. 96 Kerman, Joseph 3, 16, 59
Fontenelle 44 Kramer, Jonathan D. 121–2
formalist criticism 3 Kramer, Lawrence 4, 5, 6, 34, 35, 45,
Foucault, Michel 39 62, 67, 72–83, 88, 91, 127, 130,
Frankfurt school 132 131
Friedson, Stephen 120 Kretzschmar, Hermann 2, 18, 35,
56, 57–8, 62, 63, 64, 65–6, 67,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1, 13, 27, 28, 68, 70
29, 30, 35, 44, 45, 46, 50, 59, 66,
85, 87, 88–90, 93, 95, 107, 114, language: as Ausdruck, “expression”
125, 126, 135, 138, 147 70; of art 86–91; music–language
Galilei, Vincenzo 40 divide 34, 71–4
Geertz, Clifford 104, 139 leitmotiv 52–3
genius, concept of 26, 30, 43, 46–9, Leverkühn, Adrian: Lamentations
87, 132, 156 n. 32 55
Gesamtkunstwerk 2, 35, 51, 53, 55, Levine, George 7, 14, 131–2
165 n. 142 linear time 122
Glass, Philip: Einstein on the Beach Liszt, Franz 18, 47, 56, 62
121 logos 50, 52
Goehr, Lydia 26 Lyotard, Jean-François 118, 120
Goethe 29
Goodman, Nelson 97, 98–9 Malawi dancing prophets 108
Greek tragedy 52 Mann, Thomas: Doctor Faustus
Grundmotiv (primary motive) 52 55
Marx, Karl 139, 144, 148
Hanslick, Eduard 2, 18, 30, 35, 56, Maus, Fred 106–8
57–61, 62, 63, 64, 65–6, 67, 68, McClary, Susan 19–22, 24
70 melos 43, 63, 163 n. 116
Haydn, Josef 171 n. 222; Creation, metaphor 2, 39, 40, 45, 46, 75–6,
The 76–7 79, 81–4, 85–102; music and
Heidegger, Martin 1, 13, 94, 95, 104, 91–3
147 mimesis 2, 5, 8, 33–7, 44, 96, 103–23,
Herder 163 n. 115 147
Hoeckner, Berthold 4, 55, 56, 118 mimetic redescription 108–11
Hoffman, E. T. A. 46, 47, 52, 63 moment time 122
Hölderin 181 n. 351 Monteverdi, Claudio 42, 162 n. 104;
Horkheimer, Max 21 Lament of the Nymph 42; “Sfogava
con le stelle” 42; Stracciami pur il
idem identity 24 core 162 n. 104
Ingarden, Roman 113, 114 Monteverdi, Giulio Cesare 162 n.
ipse identity 24 104
ipseity 24 mood 93–5, 110, 111
mousike 160 n. 83
jouissance 77, 78–80 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Piano
judgment and imagination Concerto (K.453) 21–2
145–8 multiply-directed time 122
196
INDEX
music–language divide 34, 71–4 reflective judgment 115

musica humana 38 Reich, Steve: Piano Phase 108, 121,
musica mathematica 113 122
musica mundane 38 Richter, Jean Paul (J. P.) Friedrich
musica poetica 162 n. 106 47
“musical logic” 113 Ricoeur, Paul 1, 12, 13, 19, 24, 48,
musical worlds 111–18 70, 78, 83, 86–8, 92–5, 98–101,
musique imitative 43 103, 104–5, 108–11, 115, 119,
muthos 110 139, 140, 141–2, 147, 149
mythos 50, 52 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 43, 44, 46,
163 n. 115
narrative construction of identity
24 saltanah 119
narrative deconstruction 18–24, 26, Schenker, Heinrich 16
27, 32 Schiller, Friedrich 27, 28, 29, 46,
narrativization 105, 181 n. 332 159 n. 68
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 105 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 13, 48
nchimi healers 120 Schoenberg, Arnold 133, 186 n.
neo-German school 62 384; Erwartung 55, 116–18
Neubauer, John 37, 163 n. 115 Schopenhauer 48
Newcomb, Anthony 18–19, 96–7, 98, Schorkse, Carl 116
99 seconda prattica 40, 41, 42, 62,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 53 162 n. 104
nondirected linear time 122 Seeger, Charles 73, 82, 83, 90
Nussbaum, Martha 101 semiotics of gender 23
sensus communis 28
organicism 16, 59 social violence, music as 125–8
social Werktreue 25–7
Pappenheim, Marie 116 Socrates 144
pathopoeia 41 speech-act theory 79
performative contradiction 6–11, 17, stile rappresentativo 41
27, 136, 138, 154 n. 17, 155 n. 24 Stockhausen: Zeitmasse 188 n.
Plato 112, 144 407
play 12, 60, 66, 114 structure and plot 106–8
poiesis a se 114 subjectivization of aesthetics 27–31;
political commitment 131–6 see also Kant
politics in contrary motion 128–31; Subotnik, Rose Rosengard 34,
culture and 142–5 45
Positivism 51–6, 167 n. 59, 169 n. supersensible 59, 120, 123, 188 n.
189, 178 n. 302 403
prima prattica 42
program music 55–6 tarab 108, 119, 120
pseudomythic consciousness 52 Taylor, Charles 118
Tesauro, Emanuele: Il cannocchiale
quadrivium 41 aristotelico (The Aristotelian
querelle des ancienes et des moderns 5, Telescope) (1654) 39
40–4, 66, 90 Tieck, Ludwig 47
Quintilanus, Aristides 36 Tomlinson, Gary 5, 37, 38, 39, 40,
41–2, 45, 70, 130, 131
Racy, A.J. 119 tonal closure 20
Rameau 43, 44, 46 Tovey, Donald Francis 47, 76
Ramos de Pareia 38, 161 n. 91 Treitler, Leo 116
197
INDEX
trivium 41 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich

Tumbuka “dancing prophets” 120 47
Wagner, Richard 6, 18, 35, 51, 52,
utopia 9–11 56, 57, 58, 62, 64, 65, 165 n.
142; Die Walküre 53;
Valdés, Mario 13, 149 Gotterdämmerung 2; Rheingold
Venda music 9 53; Ring, The 53
vertical time 121, 122 Weber, Anton 140
Vico 28 Werktreue ideal 25–7
vimbuza drumming 120 Wirkungsgeschichte 27
vita activa 144 Wolff, Janet 24
vita contemplative 144
Vives, Juan Luis 149 Zuidervaart, Lambart 133
198

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HERMENEUTICS AND

ISBN 0-203-87515-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–99859–X (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–99859–8 (hbk)

1 Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, Criticism 1

2 Social Werktreue and the Subjectivization of Aesthetics 16

3 From Musikē to Metaphysics 32

4 Formalist Aesthetics and Musical Hermeneutics 57

5 Deconstructing the Disciplinary Divide 69

6 The Question of Metaphor 85

7 Mimesis and the Hermeneutics of Music 103

8 Political Critique and the Politics of Music Criticism 124

9 Toward a Hermeneutics of Music Criticism 137

Looking back, my interest in aesthetics and philosophy began long before

related phenomena: cultural musicology’s timely critique of the ideological

It is impossible to adequately acknowledge all those who have had a

Savage, Roger W. H. “Criticism, Imagination and the Subjectivization of

The resurgence of musical hermeneutics in recent scholarship provides an

some distance from the musical hermeneutics that Hermann Kretzschmar

Musical Hermeneutics and the Hermeneutics of Music

encompassed disciplinary stances as various as musicology’s proclivity

worldliness to a romantic metaphysics. I have no intention of avoiding

that might provide a critical foothold for challenging an established order

of music’s, literature’s, and art’s emancipation from cultic rituals and

against art’s reduction to sociological or formalist terms. Ascribing a

immanent in society’s productive forces confounds Adorno’s relentlessly

Hermeneutics and Criticism

The question of distance is decisive. The objection could certainly be

by a work’s intersection with the world, we paradoxically ratify the

In protecting music against the intrusion of social and political critiques,

in the last section of this chapter justifies my concern, regarding trans-

justifies an interpretive method in which a succession of musical events is

and the most fundamental ideological tensions available within Western

force frames the contagion of the Other as an object of surveillance and

The claim that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instrumental music

Example 2.1 Continued

the designations masculine and feminine derive their critical, rhetorical

impulses, contains a coded message. Janet Wolff reminds us that “a

The Subjectivization of Aesthetics

concepts, and ideas offers a hermeneutical guide. Accordingly, the wager

provided a bulwark against practical reality by giving flight to the freedom

work’s documentary value, this claim manifests a living relation to tradi-

The attempt to dislodge music from the culturally privileged domain

legitimacy and validity are no longer assured by an ideal of interpretive

Mimesis, Musikē, and the Discourse of Absolute Music

internal, intra-musical features and external, extra-musical references

above language’s representational value drew criticism deeper into the

which deconstruction and hermeneutics are equally at odds. As a

purely sonorous figurations and their significance as intelligible repre-

complex forms of the supercelestial and (especially) celestial realms.”89

magician’s occult knowledge of the harmony of all things bound this

La querelle des anciens et des modernes

of a text, a new sensibility demanded a then modern music in imitation of

representative thought’s concept of language and mimesis as the simulated

perfecting form and the appeal to extramusical meanings crystallizes in

to a metaphysical order, and a musical hermeneutics that upheld the

yearning which is the essence of romanticism.”127 Accordingly, Beethoven

Example 3.2 Beethoven, 2nd Movement, Sixth Symphony, mm. 129–132

Example 3.3 Beethoven, 2nd Movement, Sixth Symphony, mm. 1–7

its adherence to these precepts, musical hermeneutics adhered to this

Example 3.3 Continued

Example 3.3 Continued

incarnated myth’s primeval forces within the pseudomythical practices of

The Positivist Compulsion