Currie - Music After All

Music After All
Author(s): James Currie

Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp.
145-203
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Music After All
JAMES CURRIE
For Andrea Spain, who says yes (and so no)
Part 1: Work
Context
I
once received a sales letter and promotional materials for a music history
text book from the Executive Marketing Manager of the Thomas
Schirmer publishing company. This in itself is not very astounding. After
all, it is a mundane enough experience for musicologists to find such tediously
shiny things in their mailboxes at the beginning of a long day of teaching.
What is perhaps a little shocking, however, is that I read it. It informed me:
“Music is the expression of people living at a particular time and in a particular
place, and this cultural context is vital to an understanding of music history.
The great music of the Western classical tradition was written by real men and
women, often during tumultuous times. Cultural context, therefore, is vital to
an understanding of this music and its history.”
I was curious here about how a tautology could be passed off as an argu-
ment: a first sentence, rhetorically structured as an assertion, followed by two
sentences structured as a logical proof, the only addition justifying the spe-
cious logic of the progression being the strange detail that these “real” people
Many people helped with this essay. Andrea Spain and David Banash argued, laughed, and cy-
cled their way through nearly every one of its turns during the long idyll of the summer in which
it was first drafted. Richard Leppert, a fine friend and mentor, carefully read the first version, en-
couraged, and offered sound advice regarding the acknowledgement of those who came before.
The composer Robert Phillips, friend and inspiration, read Žižek with me in a series of hysterically
productive meetings over the course of many months. And the five readers at the journal gener-
ously and patiently lead me to the understanding that while it is fine for an article to have sharp
teeth, it also needs to be house-trained. Finally, my former partner, now long gone, Carlos
Arévalo-Gómez (1958–2003); he was the shade, in the long farewell of whose cool quiet shadow
I wrote.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 62, Number 1, pp. 145–204, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN
1547-3848. © 2009 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.145.

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146 Journal of the American Musicological Society
were writing music “often during tumultuous times.” These “tumultuous

times” seemed to me to have the status of a vaguely defined tourist attraction
hanging around in the background of the sentence’s panoramic aspirations; a
danger that ultimately would not threaten me, but whose reality would guar-
antee that the day excursion I was signing up for was not a decadent distrac-
tion but a possibility to encounter the real itself. As with a tourist brochure,
the prize I was being offered was myself, the reality of the encounter mirroring
my own: the starry skies above and the moral law within. I was being offered
the chance of becoming as real as those “real men and women”; I would take
the risk, for I knew it to be “vital to an understanding of this music and its his-
tory”; studying music is relevant and context shows us how. Yet all that I had
encountered was a rather thuggish piece of sophistry. The words “tumultuous
times” added very little, merely functioning to turn up the volume on what
was being repeated. If I had risen animated to my feet at the second playing, it
would merely have been as a result of the increased magnitude of the utter-
ance, not argumentative logic. Context, one might say, has force.
However, force itself is beyond good and evil, indifferent as the wind.
Which means that the vibrant health of musicology’s contextual economy may
not necessarily denote value. After all, economies can be inanely tautological,
circulating things simply because at a strategic moment the things can be
made to circulate successfully; formalist, since the contents of things are sub-
sidiary to the autonomous self-reference of this movement. Musicology in
later modernity resonates with such concerns as knowledge itself is increas-
ingly commodified. And indeed, the kinds of redundant justifications charac-
teristic of the way we are made to reduce college curricula or our own research
to the marketable stuff of economic exchange has been the subject of
critique.1 But what of context?
In these spectacularly disturbing times, we are bombarded on an almost
daily basis with evidence of how we are caught in an increasingly tighter yet
expanding web of relations and complicities: the inhuman conditions else-
where in the world in which our clothes are manufactured; the appalling for-
eign policy decisions looming over the gas station; the vulnerability to political
surveillance of the systems of communication we now have to employ, partic-
ularly in the academy with regard to e-mail; the censorship that can precede
the music we might listen to; the pressures that infringe upon us in our minds
as we consider our actions, scholarly and artistic, and possible dissents in an
age of problematic legal transformations instigated by the Patriot Act, home-
land securities, and the suspension of habeas corpus.2 Increasingly our homes,
1. For example, Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical

Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
2. Here, the disturbing case of Steve Kurtz can serve to illustrate—he is a professor in the
Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and
founding member of the internationally renowned Critical Arts Ensemble. In May 2004 the Joint
Terrorism Task Force illegally detained Steve, who was working with legal biological materials for

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Music After All 147
literal and metaphorical, are no longer a refuge outside of the world in which
we live—if, in fact, they ever were. Robert Hullot-Kentor, for example, com-
menting on American life earlier in the last century, writes that whereas culture
“presupposed an autonomous individual . . . the contemporary American has
been so overwhelmed by real and constant anxiety, has been so broken in on
by heteronomous forces, that this autonomy and its capacity to breach subjec-
tivity’s own claustrum could no longer be presumed.” He continues, “the col-
lapsed family no longer provides a buffer between society and person, which is
part of why the American child is flooded with anxiety.”3
So it is no surprise to find J. Martin Daughtry writing the following in his
introduction to Music in the Post-9/11 World, “In tense and momentous times
such as these, the place of music scholarship, or even its relevance, may seem
less than clear to some.”4 Faced with the certainty of uncertainty and the im-
potency to which it can give birth, there would, then, be a grandly negative,
suicidal satisfaction in asserting that musicology’s contextual practice is as
stuck on the interconnected web of the world’s political and economic rela-
tions as anything else; a paralyzed fly with the coal glint of a black star, ready to
catch the attention of a spider . . . or a corporation . . . or a government that is
almost indistinguishable from a corporation . . . or a state system undergoing
financial crisis and ready to snack on a music department . . . or any other fig-
ure that might haunt our imaginations, paranoid or not. Of course, “One can
proclaim the need for music scholarship in the post-9/11 world without har-
boring quixotic illusions of scholarship’s potential to save it.”5 But it is difficult
to whip up the same fervor, belief, and genuine excitement that in the 1990s
characterized musicology’s intense debates concerning its political responsibil-
ities and the potential for them to be fulfilled. In retrospect, perhaps it was
foolish, but there was a strongly optimistic quality to that time, fueled in part
by the end of Eastern European communism; many intellectuals, most obvi-
ously Francis Fukuyama, neoconservativism’s academic posterboy, believed
that the forms of late capitalism could be easily reconciled with the furthering
an important educational show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS

MoCA), and confiscated materials that had already been displayed in major art institutions in
Europe and North America. It was only in the summer of 2008 that the charges were eventually
dropped. Full details of this case can be found on the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund website
(www.caedefensefund.org). Broader concerns regarding academia, research, law, and censorship
in the post-9/11 world can be found, among other places, in “Homeland Securities,” special edi-
tion, Radical History Review 93 (2005).
3. Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being,” in Things
Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006), 204–5.
4. J. Martin Daughtry, “Charting Courses through Terror’s Wake: An Introduction,” in,
eds., Music in the Post-9/11 World, ed. Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry (New York:
Routledge, 2007), xxviii.
5. Ibid.

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of democratic cosmopolitanism.6 The tenor of our times, however, seems

quite different, even though the prehistory of today’s crises, in the United
States at any rate, stretch back, for example, to the success of the New Right
with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, and the growth of economic neo-
liberalism in response to the 1973 oil crisis. Today the antagonism between
capitalism and democracy (which in many ways is the other face of their
present obscene complicities) is kept constantly in view just by the various
sites, for example, in which the question of oil manifests itself—in the caution-
ary behavior of Europe when faced with the flagrancy of Russia’s relationship
to Georgia and South Ossetia, for example. Even Fukuyama has considerably
modified his earlier stance. Optimism seems a much more desperate, shrill
thing.
However, even with all of this ringing in our ears, we should resist the
temptation here to interpret the above-mentioned sales letter, for example, as
an indication of context’s too smooth incorporation into, or even complicity
with, today’s negatively totalized world. After all, contextual practice in musi-
cology is not just one thing. Contextual practice might accrue its force less
from being able to run in political parallel to the world’s wrong, and more
from the fact that its plurality makes it potentially flexible and wily enough to
adapt even to this difficult present. If we could accept for the moment that this
is indeed the case, then musicology would still owe much gratitude to those
who, in the late 1980s and 1990s and often under considerable duress, insti-
gated the postmodern turn and worked to teach the discipline a language
which it often now just speaks fluently and without self-consciousness, as if it
had always been its native tongue. As Alastair Williams succinctly puts it, “The
postmodern turn in musicology . . . means that musicology has become recep-
tive to a general body of ideas, not that it is reducible to a particular theory.”7
Even in famous indictments of earlier postmodern musicology we can en-
counter an acknowledgment, if admittedly in negative form, of the adaptive
potential of its pluralism. Take, for example, Kofi Agawu’s well-known un-
masking of the analytic conservativism on which, he rightly observed, the pro-
gressive card of the New Musicology sometimes rested. An essential part of
the New Musicology’s strategy is, as Agawu put it, “to deny any stable, collec-
tive identity, to insist on the impossibility of anchoring the first signifying rela-
tionship. Such denial is understandable in light of the different initiatives that
are gradually coalescing into a ‘new musicology.’ ” This addendum then fol-
lows: “But could such denial also be a trick aimed at ensuring that new musi-
cologists are always able to shift their identities in order to, as it were, remain
6. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,
1992). For an extended critique of Fukuyama, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of
the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and
London: Routledge, 1994).
7. Alastair Williams, Constructing Musicology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 115.

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Music After All 149
on top?”8 If the answer to this were yes (which would be somewhat unfair),
and that what the New Musicology bequeathed unto us now was precisely this
somewhat questionable slipperiness, then the New Musicology, inadvertently
or not, nevertheless provided the tools for the possibility of musicology having
a home in the early twenty-first century. So we should be a little wary of the
now oft-told, and somewhat tired, Adorno-ish joke that the New Musicology
has gotten old. (And not only since there is something a little limited in the
implication that once something can no longer clean the floors of our home, it
should be put out on the street; as if the ability of something to work were its
only value—an issue to which I return in the final three sections of this essay:
Unemployment, Dance, and Rest.)
If by means of its intradisciplinary pluralization the postmodern turn in
musicology, broadly conceived, provided musicology with a certain ability to
protect itself in the more hostile environment of the twenty-first century, it
might also be noted that it preserved the possibility of contextual study itself.
Gary Tomlinson importantly reminds us that in the 1980s when musicolo-
gists, himself included, started polemicizing about context, “conceptions of
the aims and uses of history were actually narrowing and growing less venture-
some.”9 Contextualism had been a traditional part of the historiography em-
ployed by Paul Henry Lang, Nino Pirotta, and Edward Lowinsky around the
time of the Second World War. However, in the early 1970s, just after the
Beethoven bicentennial and at the time of prevalent neopositivism in the hu-
manities, scholars became “prepossessed by the revelations to be found in or-
ganic music analysis, and high-tech source studies seemed to many to
represent the best that a historical approach could offer the field.”10 Of course,
having been reintroduced into musicological debate, the notion of context
then became a site of contestation between postmodern musicologists them-
selves; perhaps most famously in the exchange between Tomlinson and
Lawrence Kramer.11 But since this merely fertilized postmodern musicology’s
already self-defining plurality, in historical retrospect it was perhaps ultimately
to musicology’s advantage.
8. Kofi Agawu, “Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime,” Journal of Musi-
cology 15 (1997): 299.
9. Gary Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique: Selected Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate,
2007), xii. The key essay here was Tomlinson’s own “The Web of Culture: A Context for Musi-
cology,” 19th-Century Music 7 (1984): 350–62, repr. in Music and Historical Critique, 1–13.
10. Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique, xii.
11. These essays were published in a special issue of Current Musicology titled “Approaches to
the Discipline” and edited by Edmund J. Goehring. See Lawrence Kramer, “Music Criticism and
the Postmodern Turn: In Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson”; Tomlinson, “Musical Pasts
and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer;” and idem, “Tomlinson
Responds,” all in Current Musicology 53 (1993): 25–35, 18–24, and 36–40, respectively. The
Kramer article was reprinted in his Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected
Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 45–55; the Tomlinson articles were reprinted in his Music
and Historical Critique, 95–106.

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Musicology has continued to consider numerous traditional sites as it con-

structs its contexts for music: for example, concert life, publication history,
music journalism, and general circulation issues; developments in technologies
of instruments and recording; broader issues regarding historical epoch, na-
tion, genre development, and stylistic history. But one of the noticeable fea-
tures of the past two decades of musicology has been an increased questioning
of confident assertions regarding the self-evidence of what constitutes a proper
context for music. Primarily, this has arisen as musicologists have expanded
their reading out into areas of the New Historicism, cultural studies, anthro-
pology, and the work of Michel Foucault, to name but the more prominent
influences. Seminal earlier studies here would include, for example, Richard
Leppert’s work linking music to questions of domesticity, imperialism, the his-
tory of the body, and visual representation and Tomlinson’s examination of
the relationships between music and magic in the Renaissance.12 What one
finds in these works is something that is now much more widespread and so
less polemical in musicology; an investigation of music’s cultural inscriptions
from a perspective that is, at first, seemingly ancillary. Leppert looks at paint-
ings on actual instruments; Tomlinson looks at magic treatises. More recently,
Mary Davis has refracted modernism through the prism of fashion; Emmanu-
ele Senici has revisited Italian opera in the nineteenth century by means of the
figure of the Alpine virgin; David Yearsely brings Bach’s contrapuntal practice
into conversation with, amongst other things, alchemy and the mid-
eighteenth-century craze for automata; Annette Richards reads treatises on
landscape and gardening and, in so doing, surprisingly reconceives assump-
tions concerning instrumental music in the late eighteenth century—and
these to mention only some of the examples that have come my own way and
inspired me.13
If contextual sites have themselves undergone a kind of postmodern plural-
ization, it is also the case that the theoretical understanding of context has
multiplied what is available. For example, coming from a position initially in-
formed strongly by anthropology (notably the work of Clifford Geertz), and
later by Foucault, Tomlinson’s understanding of context is as a web con-
structed post factum by the musicologist in which the music can be located
through an ultimately open-ended process of negotiation and renegotiation,
12. Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and idem, Music and Image: Domesticity,
Ideology, and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988); Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography
of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
13. Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2006); Emmanuele Senici, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine
Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Yearsly,
Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Annette
Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).

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Music After All 151
which for Tomlinson has strongly ethical implications. Here context is not a
separate entity that, as it were, causes or determines music; “It stresses a rela-
tionship of part to whole rather than one of antecedent to consequent.”14
Thus, this position strongly de-emphasizes the status of music as an object
that can be distinguished from the context by which it is mediated; this is the
issue in Tomlinson’s work that comes to a head in the exchange with Kramer.
By comparison, Kramer is more prepared to admit a kind of provisional status
for music as object, even though his concern has always been with musical
meaning and, therefore, not with musical objects per se. Primarily what this
allows for is the question of music’s agency, which although far from absent
in Tomlinson’s writings does not have the same kind of visibility as it does in
Kramer’s work. If we remember that context has its etymological roots in the
Latin contexere (to weave together), then one way of distinguishing Tomlin-
son from Kramer would be according to the question of who in each instance
is the weaver. In the former, context is being knitted by the scholar for a his-
torical body that will never wear it (since it is quite literally absent, past) and
for which it would never fit; context is an essay, an attempt (as in the French
verb essayer, noun essai), or something of which we are in search of (as in the
German Versuch). In Kramer, the residual object status of the music allows
music to stand as one of the sources that can weave context itself into being,
even though it itself is contextually embedded. There is a certain proximity
here to the paradox of the serpent eating its own tail, with the notable differ-
ence that now the serpent is birthing itself head first out of its own mouth; this
is one of the ways in which the hermeneutic tradition, which is important to
both scholars, manifests itself in Kramer’s work. “[M]usic, as a cultural activity,
must be acknowledged to help produce the discourses and representations of
which it is also the product,” he writes in an earlier book.15 In a later work he
talks of a “non-reductionist contextualism,” of a “critical practice meant to af-
filiate music richly with things beyond itself without either allowing it to fade
into a mere echo of those things or succumbing to the illusion that it has any
genuine identity apart from them.”16 Against a more commonsensical notion
of context as that which determines music, what is attractive here is the notion
of what manifests itself in the world only as a result of music. Kramer’s work in
this instance, thus, resonates with certain statements in popular music studies;
for example, Simon Frith’s opinion that rock music is less a representation of
sexuality, than a source that creates a certain kind of sexuality that would not
exist without the music.17 Such positions, as well as Tomlinson’s, resist what
14. Tomlinson, “Web of Culture,” 356; idem, Music and Historical Critique, 7.
15. Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 17.
16. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 6.
17. Simon Frith, “Afterthoughts,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Frith
and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 421.

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Giles Hooper has referred to as “an untenable reductionism” produced

through several strategies: “through . . . reducing music to a mechanistic sub-
strate of supervening material factors, through . . . reducing music to a blank
reflection of this or that social or historical circumstance, or through . . . re-
ducing music to a blank screen onto which are projected the contingent cir-
cumstances of a particular subject or context of reception.”18
Music theorists and analysts have also contributed considerably to the rich-
ness of dialogues regarding context. In a now-famous article, Agawu reveals a
potential lack in context—a hole in the web, to reinvoke Tomlinson—by
questioning whether a theoretical analysis of a piece of music requires histori-
cal validation. Agawu thus asserts the possibility of a certain autonomy to the
musical object and analytic practice that cannot merely be recontextualized.
“Since when did theory need such ‘confirmation’?” he asks.19 Likewise,
Arnold Whittall, in the face of a potentially overly cultural musicology, ques-
tions those who might resist “direct engagement with composer and compo-
sition.” He also accentuates a potential lack in context, but through a
somewhat political turn, asking that we keep in mind “the possibility that
works of art may be defences against the world as much as products of the
world.”20 The potentially negative in context is of course a recurring theme in
Theodor Adorno’s consideration of the problem of heteronomy. Kevin
Korsyn, in a consideration of Agawu’s piece, acknowledges the potential of
musical autonomy but questions whether Agawu’s absolutism on this point is
completely productive. For Korsyn, influenced as he is by Derridean thinking,
context and text (history and theory, world and work, outside and inside)
might be conceived more effectively less as antagonistic binaries than as fluidly
related in a kind of supplementary circularity. Through reference to the late
Jacques Lacan’s employment of the Moebius strip, Korsyn writes that “if you
follow your theoretical impulse with absolute fidelity, you will discover histori-
cal contingencies as you encounter the culture that has framed the questions
in advance by constituting you as a subject,” and vice versa.21
But what of the actual political ideas that accompany these various “con-
texts” as musicology circulates them in all the sites in which its activities occur;
in conference papers, public responses written and spoken, degree defenses,
preconcert talks, journalism, and at the seminar table and in the classroom; to
our students, undergraduate and graduate, young adults and those in continu-
ing education, blue collar and middle class; in Ivy League schools, state insti-
tutions, liberal arts colleges, and music conservatories; to the wealthy, white,
18. Giles Hooper, The Discourse of Musicology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 86.
19. Kofi Agawu, “Does Music Theory Need Musicology?”Current Musicology 53 (1993): 92.
20. Arnold Whittall, “Autonomy/Heteronomy: The Contexts of Musicology,” in Cook and
Everist, Rethinking Music, 100.
21. Korsyn, Decentering Music, 88. See also idem, “Beyond Privileged Contexts: Inter-
textuality, Influence, and Dialogue,” in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 55–72.

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Music After All 153
and comfortable, and sometimes to the enormous percentage of those who

are not? Are these political ideals as pluralized as our contextual methodolo-
gies and theorizations? And if so, do they therefore hold the same potential for
not getting fully caught out on the complicities and dangers of today’s dark
web? Can they perhaps resist or even transform? Of course, it is easy to shy
away from these questions, and to think that musicology is not directly rele-
vant in such a way. Even in the late 1990s, when political debates in musicol-
ogy were, as I have said, strong, an effort had to be made in order to convince.
For example, in a piece published in 1999, Ralph Locke wrote in reference to
the AMS online graduate discussion group that “The students often wonder
whether research, and sometimes even the teaching of music history, is be-
coming a pointless self-indulgence (and/or a profession with shrinking eco-
nomic viability).”22 But although we might despair faced with the political
question of how presently existing and increasingly totalized conditions might
be transformed, the debates of the 1990s have made it almost impossible now
to make a distinction between what we do with music and what we are doing
politically. In 1993, it would have been difficult to read the following state-
ment by Philip V. Bohlman without hearing an accompaniment of polemical
percussion ringing stridently in the immediate background: “Acts of keeping
politics out of music . . . do not prevent musicology from being a political act.
Quite the contrary, they assure that every apolitical agenda acquires an even
greater political immediacy.”23 In 2008, it presents itself to us more as norma-
tive than gauntlet. The following questions of Locke’s are ones that we now
all tend to ask ourselves automatically: “How does our scholarly work carry
out one or another social agenda, and how can we become more aware of our
own agendas, and thereby sharpen the messages that we are (inevitably) doing
our part to transmit and elaborate?” “What does a music scholar of whatever
stripe . . . owe her or his fellow creatures?”24 So just because musicology can
seem broadly irrelevant, its political ideals nevertheless circulate in a not in-
significant number of locations and to not completely homogenized social
groups, and so its responsibilities (assuming we think they exist) are far from
miniscule. If it is true, as Locke states, that the “real world, like charity, begins
at home, and at work,” we might also keep in mind that the home for musi-
cology’s work sometimes has wheels and travels long distances.25 After all, no-
madism, for better or worse, might well be the twenty-first century’s new
home and hearth. So what of these political ideas? Are they one or many? Are
they of value or not?
22. Ralph P. Locke, “Musicology and/as Social Concern: Imagining the Relevant Musi-
cologist,” in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 499.
23. Philip V. Bohlman, “Musicology as a Political Act,” Journal of Musicology 11 (1993):
424.
24. Locke, “Musicology and/as Social Concern,” 501 and 502, respectively.
25. Ibid., 529.

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Ultimately, I argue that in comparison with the plurality of contextual

methodologies, these political ideas (hereafter contextual politics) are much
more homogenized. And this may not be a problematic opposition. After all,
contextual politics could be defined broadly as a postmodern reformulation of
basic democratic principles; it has as its potentially tautological goal the cre-
ation of a fluid plurality of differences that are, nevertheless, unified around
the project of allowing for the non-coercive coexistence of differences them-
selves. Within each difference, the repetition of the ever-transmogrifying
whole is reinscribed. However, before moving on to the next section of this
essay, where I will set about critiquing contextual politics, a number of clarifi-
cations are necessary. For in talking about musicology’s politics I am not al-
ways by definition referring to what political ideals are appropriate to the
contexts in which the study of and discourse on music occurs. My initial ma-
neuver will be to decontextualize partly the primary political positions from
their functional employment within the musicological workplace and then to
hurl them strategically into a thicket of questions regarding their effectivity
beyond the parameters of the discipline.
This, then, is not an essay primarily concerning what I would call the poli-
tics of musicology. The politics of musicology, I would argue, is what moti-
vated the debates of the 1990s and their more recent restrained reruns. The
questions it formulates have tended to be provoked from statements such as
this: “Musicology’s crisis, therefore, confronts it also with a new responsibility
to come face-to-face with the political nature of all acts of interpretation and
with the political consequences of excluding for too long the musics of
women, people of color, the disenfranchised, or Others we simply do not see
and hear.”26 And so the politics of musicology asks why are issues such as race,
the body, gender, sexuality, and colonialism important for the study of music?
Why is it that they have been kept out of the study of music, even though
there is more than sufficient evidence to prove the connection? Why is it that
people who study these issues are not getting employment? Why are there not
more women and non-Caucasians employed within the field? (As an aside, it is
interesting to note that the issue of class has not often been so firmly fore-
fronted in the politics of musicology, even though there exist key texts dealing
with the issues in popular music studies and ethnomusicology.27)
None of what I write in this essay implies that there have been no develop-
ments or ethical progress within the discipline as a result of such questions.
Without doubt, the instigation of the postmodern turn in the politics of musi-
cology has resulted in an astonishing deregulation of censorship regarding
26. Bohlman, “Musicology as a Political Act,” 436.

27. For example, Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in
Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993); Aaron Fox, Real
Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004).

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Music After All 155
what can be admitted to exist (now, or as an acknowledged citizen of history),

and, therefore, what can now be allowed into the circulatory systems of the
musicological economy itself. I am under no illusions: although some of the
ideas of this essay may have been conceived without the existence of the pres-
ent politics of musicology, you certainly would not have been reading an essay
such as this in this particular journal without the precedent of their example.
However, debates within the politics of musicology tend to come with the
tacit assumption that what is appropriate for the politics of the discipline is ap-
propriate for a political understanding of the world at large and, thus, that its
political values are en route to praxis. In part, this is congruent with a basic as-
sumption of contextual politics, which is that politics is primarily about local-
ity; in Locke’s formulation, charity begins at home, in musicology itself. I will
be seeking to investigate the limitations of this position in the next sections of
this essay. For the moment, however, the following should be considered.
Even if we acknowledge that the structures of the global political crises now
with us were functioning in the 1990s, our understanding of them then had
none of the awful clarity that the first decade of this harsh new century is im-
posing upon our consciousness. We are much more in the light with regard to
how we shudder on the darkness of the web. And so if it is indeed the case that
our political understanding of the world has undergone a certain transforma-
tion, then we need to ask whether the politics that has been of enormous ben-
efit to the health and vitality of the discipline, and which seems to have
remained the majority position within it, is still one that can confidently claim
to make the leap into extradisciplinary existence. Should our politics not
change too?
Certain contemporary thinkers on whom I will be drawing extensively later
have indeed been scathing about contextual politics, for example, the French
philosopher Alain Badiou and the Slovenian, Lacanian cultural critic, Slavoj
Žižek—markedly left-wing thinkers whose vehement critiques of postmodern
political, cultural, and ethical values mean that they have often shared the same
stage, literally and metaphorically. Although my work has been deeply influ-
enced by them, I nevertheless do not assert that contextual politics is, in and
of itself, wrong. Rather, I am concerned to ask whether it is strategically ap-
propriate now. This is an important point to keep in mind during the some-
times harsh arguments to come, for I am working from the assumption that a
proper understanding of the political value of ideas must resist the temptations
presented by the paradox of historical essentialism. Political ideas are being un-
derstood in this argument more as pieces of equipment, and so that will on oc-
casion lead me into a certain proximity to ideas that we have tended, because
of their bad historical track record, to dismiss in contemporary musicological
debates. Admittedly, it is true that political ideas, like pieces of equipment, can
be imbued with the (sometimes negative) functions they have been envi-
sioned, or appropriated, to perform; to cite a phrase of Martin Heidegger:
“Usefulness is the basic feature from which this entity regards us, that is,

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flashes at us and thereby is present and thus is this entity.”28 However, the fact
that ideas can be bruised by intentions and their difficult upbringing in their
original contexts does not mean that they are merely the product of, or just
fully determined by, acts of bruising. Hope, we might say, comes from the be-
lief that humans, their ideas and tools, might not merely be reduced to the
resultant mark made upon them by the intentions that initially brought them
into being or appropriated them and so kept their sign in circulation. The fact
that at history’s darkest moments it has been possible to reduce things in this
way is not proof of hope’s unimportance but, rather, a reminder of its poten-
tial fragility, and the fragility of that which might enact transformation. What
the human inevitably (and often inadvertently) passes on to the ideas that it
creates is human potentiality itself: in other words, the reality that it can be in
excess of its own determinations. An idea is not only bruised by the intentions
that brought it into being; it also shimmers with, in Kant’s sense, freedom. A
knife may be made for killing, but it is expressive of freedom through its ability
to be appropriated for surgery and healing the sick. For example, although the
assertion of Enlightenment modes of reason, justice, and autonomous subjec-
tivity as universal categories provided an ideological foundation for the colo-
nial drives of European nations, it is also the case that the appropriating of
those very ideas by the victims of colonial domination in turn gave those polit-
ical subjects powerful fuel in their own drive toward independence. The inher-
ent ethical agency of an idea then is perhaps relatively small in comparison
with the value and force that idea can accrue retroactively as a result of having
been strategically appropriated.
However, if this is cause for hope, it also opens up a landscape drenched in
the light of a dark, if potentially laughing, sun. For if the force of an idea can
be functionally re-coerced for the good, the opposite maneuver always follows
in the wake, although rarely through a logic of purely symmetrical inversion.
This potentially is as true for contextual politics as it is for anything else. The
famous Monty Python sketch in which the Spanish Inquisition attempt to tor-
ture an old woman with a comfy chair and plump cushions captures well (too
well) the dialectical complexities unleashed by this immanent and radical am-
bivalence in political ideas. The negative potential in the “good” cushion is
not illustrated by the fact that it is now wielded by the hands of evil fanatics
against the innocent. The hysterical brilliance of the scene lies in the trap it sets
for us; to identify the old woman unambiguously as victim. But the old
woman does not writhe in agony as the attempt is made to make the velveteen
spike of the cushion’s corner pierce her side. Rather, the cushion inspires her
to wiggle about excitedly within the comfortable context of the chair itself, as
if she were enjoying a low-level transgression, naughty but nice. The at-
tempted political act of the Inquisition changes very little, merely making the
28. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 28.

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Music After All 157
old woman nestle down further into the pleasure of her already circumscribed
“life world.” In psychoanalytic terms, it is not a political act, per se, but acting
out; and as the groaningly pitiful depiction of the variously titled Judean
People’s Front in that funniest of films, The Life of Brian, attests, this a leit-
motif for Monty Python.29 From the shadows of the scene, the self-identified
agents of political change, the Inquisition, are shown to have failed to have
understood the precise nature of the cushion’s inscription within the world
they are seeking to transform, and so they have been unable to wield it to
transformative effect. The scene’s darkest suggestion is that the Inquisitors
have neither the real desire to change anything, nor the strength to admit
what they are already enjoying.
There may well indeed be an element of elitist, homosocial condescension
in a bunch of male Oxbridge graduates in drag ridiculing the smug inanity of
a female member of lower middle-class English society in the 1970s. But in a
strange way the old woman’s failure to respond to the call of the political is
not the ultimate crime. The offense lies instead with the Inquisitors and their
scam of being able to validate themselves as politically engaged when they are
just playing at fancy dress. And it is for this reason that the main aim of this es-
say is not the creation of a new set of political injunctions. In fact, I move to-
ward suggesting that at this particular moment the preservation of a certain
gap between musicological work and politics would be more productive—that
we break the covenant that the last twenty years of the politics of musicology
has sought to honor, and not because it was necessarily wrong. Rather, it is the
purpose of the next section of this essay to raise some provisional questions re-
garding the potential effectiveness of some of the political positions that musi-
cology circulates. Provoking these questions caters, I think, to a need, since
debates about these positions have become somewhat stagnant, particularly in
the discipline’s more visible places of publication; by comparison, at ground
level, in conversations with colleagues at conferences and the like, there are
more restless currents, unseen from the surface.
Politics
Contextual politics is radically democratic in orientation, asserting that we
should reject all absolute conceptualizations and universals, seeing them not
only as instances of a failure to negotiate the challenge posed to us by the pos-
sibility of a demythologized world without making recourse to God-like sub-
stitutes, but also as a kind of sublime distraction from participation in more
29. On the psychoanalytic distinction between act and acting out see Žižek, Enjoy Your
Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, rev. ed. (New York and London: Routledge,
2001), chap. 2 (“Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?”), 31–67; and idem, Violence: Six Sideways
Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), chap. 3 (“Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile: ‘A
Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed’ ”), 63–88.

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pragmatic projects that could tangibly alter people’s lives. To worry our poli-
tics with concerns regarding its universality is to avoid the important matters
at hand, if not to infect it with the very source of such problems. We are pri-
marily the product of particular times and places, perhaps even to the extent
that, as Foucault was famously to state, “man,” as a humanistic concept that
displaces God and the sovereign at the end of the eighteenth century, “is an
invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end . . . like a face
drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”30 So if the future might be ignorant of
our trace, so too might the past, thus leading us either to see nothing when we
look into its mirror, or, if we are good postmodernists and acknowledge a cer-
tain Nietzschean inheritance, to embrace joyously the fact that what we take
for reflections are probably rejections. As contextual politics tirelessly affirms,
we have nothing to lose by removing the metaphysical, transcendental, and
universalist scenery that has repeatedly been erected as the perspectival back-
drop to our lives, and to think that we do is to exhibit a profound lack of faith
in historically embedded human activity. As an act of human empowerment,
then, we should work to contextualize ourselves more locally, since the local—
once all metaphysical depth has been flattened out of it—is a surface, in and of
itself, profound. Charity begins at home.
But how are we to coordinate this belief (that the world works according to
disputes and resolutions within and between locally identifiable contexts) with
the fact that, as I have already stated, the economic and political reality of our
present condition is more totalized than ever before and so not organized
from the ground up, according to the needs and requirements of the local. We
live in world where, to appropriate Terry Eagleton’s still-relevant comment,
“The capillary connections between economic crisis, national liberation strug-
gle, the resurgence of proto-fascist ideologies, the tightening hold of the state,
have never been quite so palpable.”31 And thus, it is devastatingly ironic that
“at just this historical moment, when it is clear that what we confront is indeed
in some sense a ‘total system,’ and is sometimes recognized as such by its own
rulers, that elements of the political left begin to speak of plurality, multiplicity
. . . and the rest.” Eagleton’s conclusion is that postmodernism is by no means
a response “to a system that has eased up, disarticulated, pluralized its opera-
tions, but to precisely the opposite: to a power-structure which, being in a
sense more ‘total’ than ever, is capable for the moment of disarming and de-
moralizing many of its antagonists.” In this Marxist formulation, postmod-
ernism is tantamount to a form of false consciousness.
In a similar vein, Sumanth Gopinath has questioned Korsyn’s postructural-
ist assertion that in the postmodern condition of late capitalism we are no
30. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage, 1973), 387.
31. Quotes in this paragraph are from Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), 381.

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Music After All 159
longer dealing with one central antagonism, but a plurality of antagonisms.

Korsyn writes: “Among the various movements for social justice today, involv-
ing race, class, gender, sexuality, ecology, and so on, there is no hierarchy that
would allow one struggle to become the basis for the others.”32 But as
Gopinath comments:
If the degree and nature of present-day social antagonisms is varied and com-
plex, there does seem to be a predominant motiviating force behind many (if
not all) of these antagonisms: global neoliberal capitalism. Constituting an an-
tagonism of antagonisms, as it were, global neoliberalism—which is American
neo-imperialism for some, and the domination of global finance capital for
others—might be understood as the frame that contains the present multiplic-
ity of social antagonisms.33
If this is indeed the case, and global capitalism constitutes such a universal
frame, then local level antagonisms are never merely local. Jacques Derrida has
convincingly argued that the frame (or in his terms paragon) is never just
decorative or simply territorial; rather it is constitutive of content itself (the
work, ergon). Without the frame the content cannot support itself.34 Thus,
local level antagonisms in their present form can exist only because of their
constitutive relationship to their global frame; they are cut across by universal-
ity. Or in Žižek’s words, “the idea that today we no longer have a central
struggle but a multitude of struggles is a fake one, because we should not
forget that the ground for this multitude of struggles was created by modern
global capitalism.”35
Contextual politics, it would seem, needs to reconsider the notion of uni-
versalism. Otherwise, when it becomes euphoric over the notion of localized
contexts and the differences that their articulation can liberate, it verges to-
ward masking a despair regarding the enormous indifferent totality on which
such particularities impotently slide. The possibility of a certain complicity be-
tween the politics of difference and an acontextual agenda masking historical
issues was acknowledged early on in postmodern musicology, for example in
Ruth Solie’s remarkably balanced introduction to Musicology and Difference:
“Strong theories of difference—especially when essentialist—are often
32. Korsyn, Decentering Music, 17.
33. Sumanth Gopinath, “The Social Movement in the New Musicology and Marxist Music
Studies,” in Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 5, ed. Maciej Jabłoński and Michael L. Klein
(Pozanań: Rhytmos, 2005), 89–90. It should be noted that Korsyn is well aware of the problem-
atic nature of the relationship between local particular and global capital. See, for example, his
commentary in Decentering Music on Philip Bohlman’s “Musicology as a Political Act” (161–64).
34. “What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as surplus, it is the inter-
nal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon [or work]. . . . Without
this lack, the ergon would have no need of a parergon. [But] the ergon’s lack is the lack of a par-
ergon.” Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 59–60.
35. Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004),
149–50.

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charged with the tendency to negate history, to hypostatize categories in such

a way that change over time becomes invisible.”36 Nevertheless, many in the
academy have been tempted by the belief that difference is a kind of Trojan
horse: a seemingly singular entity, which, once it has been allowed entry into
the enemy’s compound, will unleash a vanquishing swarm of plurality. But
perhaps a more cynical reading is appropriate. After all, within the endless
ongoing crises of Modernity, the history of oppression is one of power
(re)asserting itself with barely concealed indifference to the difference that
contradicts it—such as in the superciliousness of a once-elected/twice-serving
government in the United States to expressions of mass dissent regarding the
decision to wage a war deemed by many illegal. In many ways, we could argue
that our desire to believe in the incendiary potential of the particularities of
difference has already been preempted, and that we ourselves have become the
object of our own joke, as if its punch line has, unbeknownst to us, already
been circulated prior to our performance. (Either the audience is not laugh-
ing, or they are laughing at us.37)
How, for example, do we interpret the fact that the undeniable powers that
control commodity circulation allow for such a wide range of differences? Is it
a political oversight that a strategic intervention might exploit for purposes of
emancipatory destablization, or a cruel bit of irony, indicating a certain neu-
tralization of difference’s force at this particular moment? What kinds of dis-
tinctions should we make between, for example, the dizzying array of choices
exhibited by niche markets for musical recordings, and the endless parade of
contexts for music that the major university publishing houses keep in circula-
tion through their musicology series? As Marx said, when contemplating capi-
talism and the forces of modernity, our thinking must be doubled; or as
literary critic and Marxist political thinker Fredric Jameson puts it, we need
“to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe
and progress all together.”38 The pluralization of the commodity field does in-
deed allow for the acknowledgment of some things that were previously ideo-
logically marginalized. Take the increasing prevalence of gay men on television
(in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for example).39 However, the systems that
allow for the visibility of these “acknowledgments” are not completely trans-
parent; they mediate as well as circulate. And so how do gay men appear on
36. Ruth A. Solie, “Introduction: On ‘Difference,’ ” in Musicology and Difference: Gender
and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 15.
37. I discuss this phenomenon in my review essay of Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That
Subliminal Kid), Rhythm Science (Cambridge, MA, and London: Mediaworks/MIT Press, 2004):
James Currie, “Spookier than Spooky,” Popular Music 26 (2007): 505–12.
38. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 47. The classic study of this theme is Marshall Berman’s All
That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).
39. I have discussed the question of the relationship between gay male politics and commodi-
fication elsewhere: James Currie, “Musicology after Identity—Four Fragments,” Women and
Music 12 (2008), 87–93.

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Music After All 161
television? In Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, they play the role of commodities
that tell us how to purchase other commodities. On the one hand we are back
with the inane tautology of economies discussed in this essay’s initial state-
ments; on the other hand, we are dealing with political castration. What has
happened to the vehement political dissent of gay men in the 1980s? Where
are the political objections to the still ongoing AIDS crisis (not one person
cured! millions, gay and not, dead and dying, here and particularly in the sub-
Saharan African continent!)? Scrubbed up, given copies of Fukuyama, and
smilingly transported off to the suburbs—where, no doubt, they hope to shop
in peace—gay men, particularly if they are white, can now communicate the
message that difference can be acknowledged without the world economy
having to be disturbed. Of course, many might argue that the offense of hav-
ing the stain of political dissent scrubbed from them has been counteracted by
increasing legal securities. Perhaps. An example to the contrary, though: in
2005 the Bush administration quietly removed language that states that sexual
orientation “may not be used as a basis for a disqualifying factor in determin-
ing a person’s eligibility for a [national] security clearance.”40 And so it is po-
tentially appropriate to suggest that the hypnotic effect of a sublimity of
differences can keep us in a twilight oblivion to the fact that with regard to
what matters there is really little choice at all, and that increasingly there is but
one oppressively absolute context.
We could elaborate further on these provocations by considering a negative
theme regarding walls in our world: from the unending gated communities of
suburban America through to repeatedly raised plans for a wall on the
Mexican boarder, and perhaps even the incredibly controversial Israeli West-
Bank barrier. These walls seemingly mark the boundary line between one con-
text and another and thus communicate difference (in these instances, as
negative and problematic). Yet these walls often function not so much to pro-
tect from the threat of the Other as to protect from the terrifying claustropho-
bia of not being able to find escape in anything other, since the people who
threaten to leap over these walls are, in so many instances, those on whose ex-
ploitation the privileged wall builders’ worlds have been founded. Far from
being invading barbarians, wall leapers in these instances are structurally inter-
nal, constitutive and determinative of the context from which they have been
excluded, rather like horrifying manifestations of the Derridean supplement.
Their attempt to get inside is, in effect, merely an attempt to become the con-
tent of which they are already the form. In today’s world, then, these walls
function as a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense: as an overdetermined object
that disavows a fundamental lack elsewhere. They communicate the fact that
increasingly there are only varying degrees of power within an overarching
context, but no longer contexts per se.
40. See, for example, the Democracy Now headlines for 16 March 2006: http://www
.democracynow.org/2006/3/16/headlines.

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Where might musicology’s contextual politics be vulnerable to getting

caught out in a similarly dead dialectic? Again, where is the prevalence of dif-
ference merely an articulation of the same? In discussing the difficulties of
both embodying generalism and fighting it at the same time, Williams asserts
that “postmodernism is a deeply divided condition, and its championing of di-
versity is as problematic as its unspoken generalism.”41 Admittedly, postmod-
ern musicologists have recently begun to acknowledge forms of this, but as a
potential virtue rather than a problem. Recently, Tomlinson has spoken of
“an asymptote where human difference itself vanishes in the very commonal-
ity of our experience of it.” He continues:
The approach to this place is not a methodological retreat from difference or
from its importance in our thinking. Instead it confirms the inevitable truth
that difference inhabits and haunts our experience. The asymptote marks the
convergence where the encounter with others looms as the common origin and
telos of human perception—and the proper object of study of human sciences
critical, ethnographic, and historical. Viewed from the vantage of the social fab-
ric they embody, the countless expressive acts across the history of the species
might well all turn out to be distillations and ritualizations of this shared experi-
ence of otherness near and far.42
Difference, in this formulation, is en route to becoming a universal fact of hu-
man existence.
Even Badiou, a figure vastly different to Tomlinson, politically and in theo-
retical orientation, admits that difference is simply objective. As Badiou has
written, “Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is
the infinite deployment of infinite differences. Even the apparently reflexive
experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of
differentiations.”43 But the fact of something’s existence does not by necessity
validate it as a productive political force. At the beginning of the next section
of this essay I outline one possibility for where a certain openness to otherness
might be politically productive to musicology as it negotiates the difficulties of
recontextualizing contextual politics in the early twenty-first century. How-
ever, if we keep in mind Marx’s injunction regarding the necessity of doubled
thinking, then the following important point of Badiou’s should also be con-
sidered: “since differences are what there is [whether they are acknowledged
or ideologically excluded], and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that
which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or ren-
der insignificant.”44 If differences simply are (“Every modern configuration
involves people from everywhere”45), but if the world as it presently exists in
41. Williams, Constructing Musicology, 120.
42. Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique, xvi.
43. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London and New York: Verso, 2001), 25–26.
44. Ibid., 27.
45. Ibid.

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Music After All 163
all its difference is fundamentally wrong(ed), then difference itself cannot by

definition be a fully political category, since on some level in our increasingly
overly linked world, it must be part of the problem. “If this or that particular
identity is put into play in the struggle against oppression, against the state,
[the] problem is with the exact political meaning of the identity being pro-
moted.” In other words, “Can this identity, in itself, function in a progressive
fashion—that is, other than as a property invented by the oppressors them-
selves?”46 Badiou does not deny the possibility that in certain situations a par-
ticularity might indeed become a political category.47 However, if a distinction
cannot be made then in Badiou’s terms it is not political, since politics for him
“is less the demand of a social fraction or community to be integrated into the
existing order than something which touches on a transformation of that or-
der as a whole.”48 From a certain angle, then, to respect difference according
to the normative terms of contextual politics is tantamount to asserting that
there is no difference at all—no difference from difference itself, and thus no
possibility of something else than what is already in existence. In the extreme
case, if we are drunk on difference it is because we can no longer bear to face
the melancholy born out of our inability to hope or act.
The injunction to focus on difference can bend the perspectives of musico-
logical work on all sorts of levels. For example, in a recent article in this jour-
nal, Michael Long critiques the “vocabulary of difference that informs even
the very best modern writing on medieval music,” noting how, to take but
one example, in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s work “the remoteness of medieval
musical life and its inaccessibility winds through his discussion as an under-
stated yet determinedly pessimistic leitmotif.”49 We might note the analogies
between the political melancholy invoked at the end of my previous paragraph
and the historiographic pessimism Long perceives in Leech-Wilkinson. Long’s
subtle and understated radicalism lies precisely in his decision to invoke a logic
of the same, which in the context of my argument here sets up a completely
unforeseeable (if admittedly productively tense) resonance between Long’s
delicately crafted historical enquiries and the seemingly diametrically opposed
world of Badiou’s hysteric political philosophy. Badiou loudly proclaims: “The
whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be
purely and simply abandoned. For the real question—and it is an extraordinar-
ily difficult one—is much more that of recognizing the Same.”50 Long quietly
finishes a paragraph: “The perception of difference serves, of course, as a mag-
net for interpretation; interpretation in turn often serves as a magnifier of
46. Ibid., 107.

47. Ibid., 111.
48. Ibid., 109.
49. Michael Long, “Singing Through the Looking Glass: Child’s Play and Learning in
Medieval Italy,” this Journal 61 (2008): 254.
50. Badiou, Ethics, 25.

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alterity.”51 In both cases, however, one of this essay’s leitmotifs is once more
embedded within the texture of the statements—the self-serving tautology of
economies. For Badiou difference means the closing off of politics; for Long,
difference means the closing off of historical enquiry. Long’s hypothesis, “that
viewing trecento education from the perspective of more familiar and more
recent pedagogies and pedagogues might prove a useful and illuminating
strategy,”52 is thus dialectically erudite, for the very logic of the same that con-
textual politics has often, and not always incorrectly, scripted as some kind of
Western terrorizing of the object here returns as a productive difference.
If an insistence upon accentuating difference can twist musicological en-
quiry, it is similarly problematic when it occurs in the political sphere. The
logic of this political problem has been well articulated by the Argentine post-
Marxist political theorist Ernesto Laclau, whose earlier work, particularly the
seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written in collaboration with the po-
litical theorist Chantal Mouffe, strongly influenced Žižek’s early work.53 As
Laclau has written, “I can defend the right of sexual, racial and national mi-
norities in the name of particularism; but if particularism is the only valid prin-
ciple, I have to also accept the rights of self-determination of all kinds of
reactionary groups in antisocial practices.” As a result, particularism must al-
ways be supplemented by a value: that the rights and boundaries of other con-
texts must be respected. “As the demands of various groups will necessarily
clash with each other, we have to appeal—short of postulating some kind of
preestablished harmony—to some more general principles in order to regulate
such clashes. . . . There is no particularism which does not make appeal to
such principles in the construction of its own identity.”54 In order to be real-
ized, the injunction of difference has therefore to presume a discursive space in
which a process of reciprocal regulation is in action between law—that which
makes sure that differences are, universally, being respected—and the right to
enjoy one’s existence according to the culture to which one belongs. Since our
world is increasingly interconnected to form a negative whole, this dream
could work pragmatically only by universalizing the anti-universalizing posi-
tion that calls for a respect for difference. However, since universalization for
postmodern musicologists almost immediately implies colonial imposition and
brutality, this must be founded on the (impossible) assumption that the peo-
ples of the rest of the world have always been multicultural relativists. We as-
sume a particular humanity as an underlying fundamental that expresses itself
51. Long, “Singing Through the Looking Glass,” 256.

52. Ibid., 253.
53. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985).
54. Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity,” in Emanci-
pation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 26. I have also discussed this passage elsewhere:
James Currie, “Garden Disputes: Postmodern Beauty and the Sublime Neighbor (A Response to
Judith Lochhead),” Women and Music 12 (2008), 75–86.

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Music After All 165
socially and politically through dialogue and consensus-forming and so risk

censoring the possibility of other productive ways of social and political exis-
tence. If we cannot assert this fundamental postmodern humanity as univer-
sally the case, respect for difference would have to be insisted upon from
outside of the internal logic of certain cultures, an act that, in itself, would
contradict the respect for difference through the very insistence on its
implementation.
In our present context, then, the limit of the respect for difference is the re-
spect for difference itself. And there is a certain irony to this, since it echoes an
ideological moment within the Enlightenment—in other words, it recalls the
very discourse so many postmodern positions reject as a founding gesture of
their own constitution. Contextual politics is haunted by anxieties as to
whether there should be limits placed on the application of difference lest it
undermine the ethical value of difference itself; the Enlightenment, of course,
fretted likewise about reason.55 If, as contextual politics so often asserts, the
ongoing horrors of Western colonial history result from theoretical universal-
izations stemming from the Enlightenment, then the universalization hidden
within our anti-universalizing should at least make us pause for thought. What
if multicultural relativism were in fact a symptom of Western liberalism that, as
Žižek argues, results in “the experience of the Other deprived of its other-
ness.”56 Badiou, as ever, is prepared to take this to the edge of discomfort:
The self-declared apostles of ethics and of the “right to difference” are clearly
horrified by a vigorously sustained difference. For them, African customs are bar-
baric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter
of fact, this celebrated ‘other’ is acceptable only if he is a good other—which is
to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? Respect for differences, of course! But
on condition that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market
economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment. . . .
That is to say: I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which
differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences. Just as there can be “no
freedom for the enemies of freedom,” so there can be no respect for those
whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences.57
He concludes: “Become like me and I will respect your difference.”58
55. See for example the responses of Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant to the famous
essay question posed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1783: “What is Enlightenment?” These
and numerous other responses have been collected in Norbert Hinske, ed., Was ist Aufklärung?
Beiträge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch-
gesellschaft, 1977); and in Ehrhard Bahr, ed., Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974).
56. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 11.
57. Badiou, Ethics, 24–25. (emphasis in original)
58. Ibid., 25.

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Taking this kind of perspective on board creates tangible repercussions for

how we interpret the ways scholars study music, as is attested by Williams’s
questioning of the following assertions made by the ethnomusicologist Ellen
Koskoff. Koskoff states that she wishes to use her “knowledge and experience
of music to promote tolerance of difference—between races, ethnicities,
classes, religions, sexualities and genders”; moreover, she states that as an
“ethnomusicologist . . . I believe in the basic tenet of our field: just as all peo-
ple are inherently equal, so are their musics . . . that all musics (and people) are
equivalent in terms of the values, meanings, and integrity of their own con-
texts.”59 As Williams says, “This belief, despite its worthy intentions, is surely
dogged by contradictions, since it universalizes diversity and would presum-
ably have to respect less egalitarian viewpoints.” Williams then continues to
examine one of Koskoff ’s examples, the kalawant, a hereditary vocal musician
of North India:
Can her own beliefs about the contingency of knowledge be reconciled with
traditions in which musical knowledge is considered to be far from contingent?
Should she feel permitted to criticize the patrilineal privileges of the kalawant,
or would this be to impose a Western view of rationality on another culture?
Surely her dilemma is that while a broadly postmodernist critique of Western
hegemony is indicative of a reflexive capacity in that same culture, in moving
out of that circle she encounters a process of canon formation that is not guar-
anteed to be compatible with her own (universal) notions of equality.60
The antinomy in which Koskoff ’s position gets caught is similar to that articu-
lated above by Laclau in relation to particularism: in order to respect the dif-
ference of the Other, Koskoff can no longer respect the theoretical edifice on
which her own respect for difference is founded.
Likewise, a theoretical deadlock is articulated in Martin Scherzinger’s im-
portant critique of ethnomusicological antiformalism. Scherzinger points out
that contained within the context of Shona mbira is a respect for the au-
tonomous musical moment that is analogous to “the idea that music is a self-
regulating process, endowed with a quasi-spiritual agency”—i.e., Shona mbira
shares strong similarities with the commonplaces of enchanted Romantic aes-
thetics and the idea of absolute music. Thus, in trying to respect and under-
stand Shona mbira, antiformalist ethnomusicologists are confronted by
something that is resonant with the very foundations of the formalism that
they seek to reject from their own discourse; contained within the context
they seek to illustrate lies the seed of an inadvertent rejection of the very no-
tion of context as it is sometimes understood in the postmodern academy, i.e.,
as a fully determinating level of constitution for cultural products. Scherzinger:
59. Ellen Koskoff, “What Do We Want to Teach When We Teach Music? One Apology, Two
Short Trips, Three Ethical Dilemmas, and Eighty-Two Questions,” in Cook and Everist,
Rethinking Music, 546.
60. Williams, Constructing Musicology, 110–11.

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Music After All 167
Of course, there are profound differences between these traditions, but I am

marking their affinities to dramatize the fact that it is not only Westerners who
subscribe to notions of musical autonomy, high seriousness, and mystical trans-
figuration. Now, the radical ethnomusicological rejection of the romantic ideas
that music is self-sufficient and inhabits a privileged social standing, in favor
of an all-determining “social context,” is methodologically defeating in this
conjuncture.61
Scherzinger argues that the question as to which approach will be of the great-
est political benefit for this music can only be decided strategically. This is to
say, the antinomy can be exited only through consideration of specific constel-
lations of demands, and not according to a priori judgments regarding the
value of specific methodologies.
If contextual politics threatens to universalize its anti-universalizing injunc-
tions, its presence in musicology has repercussions not only for the relation-
ship between musicology and the world at this present historical moment, but
also between musicology and its primary object, the past. The following state-
ment from Susan McClary, occurring as it does as the conclusion of a book, is
an affirmative provocation and therefore fueled, on the one hand productively
and admirably, by a certain overdetermination. On the other hand, it shows
how being swept up in the rhetorical force of contextual politics can make that
politics prone to being caught out on something much darker that is poten-
tially immanent to it. McClary writes: “Postmodernism—with its rejection of
entrenched master narratives—demands of us a far more diversified way of
telling the history of music than we have previously permitted ourselves to en-
tertain . . . a history of perpetual bricolage and fusions of hand-me-down
codes and conventions—a history in which Western musicians have always
been reveling in the rubble.”62 There is a questionable paradox at work here: a
diversified history will come from admitting that Western musicians have al-
ways been postmodernists; difference emerges here from a sublimity of the
same, from the eradication of anything other than postmodernism itself. This
veers toward neutralizing all the historical differences (the diversity) with re-
gard to what contexts have constituted the already given, handed-down musi-
cal elements, and how they have been understood and come into being. More
difficult, though, is the way it incapacitates a potentially founding cause of his-
tory itself: the Other that comes into being and creates the transformations
that we can then document. (If there were never any such transformations we
would never have history, only ever anthropology.)
61. Martin Scherzinger, “Negotiating the Music-Theory/African-Music Nexus: A Political

Critique of Ethnomusicological Anti-Formalism and a Strategic Analysis of the Harmonic
Patterning of the Shona Mbira Song ‘Nyamaropa,’ ” Perspectives of New Music 39 (2001): 31; see
also idem, “Music, Spirit Possession and the Copyright Law: Cross-Cultural Comparisons and
Strategic Speculations,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 31 (1999): 100–125.
62. Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000), 169.

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Even if we accept the debatable assertion that the music we make is only
ever made out of what already exists, what we make from the disjecta membra
involves the becoming of a new consideration of how those discarded parts
might relate to other parts; the relations that had initially been fetishized ac-
cording to the concept of the thing as it had been normatively recognized get
negated, as Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists frequently remind us. For
something to emerge out of the rubble requires an almost Kantian under-
standing of how, in the first place, something can be understood as a thing, as
having an identity that is in surplus of our perception of its status as merely the
sum of its parts. Moreover, something logically must emerge from the rubble
and support itself in the first place, like a building, through its own form (that
is, again, more than the sum of its parts), before it can fall down and become
rubble available for the always-already postmodern musician of Western his-
tory. History relies on something that is not history, the becoming of the new;
and yet the new is history’s Other. For as Gilles Deleuze writes, “Becoming
isn’t part of history.”63 In this sense history “isn’t experimental, it is just the
set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment
with something beyond history.”64 Admittedly, without “history the experi-
mentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but ex-
perimentation isn’t historical.”65 In effect, however, history “amounts only to
the set of preconditions . . . that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that
is, to create something new.”66
For the sake of clarity, it is worth repeating here something from this essay’s
first section: that what I say is not meant as a dismissal, tout court, of the im-
portant developments in musicology over the past two decades and more.
Nothing is being denied. However, in the name of consistency neither are the
denials that have themselves been birthed from the, as it were, inherent struc-
tural limitations of those earlier affirmations. And so to bring this section to
conclusion, I would like to draw to the surface a paradox that only seems to be
ancillary. Contextual politics affirms the locality of both what is and has been
against censorious metaphysical myths of what is always and everywhere. But
if contextual politics affirms temporal particularity, then why does it counteract
that affirmation by trying to preserve the temporally particular in scholarly dis-
course, like a fly in amber? A smart and pragmatically dialectical answer would
be that in order to keep the antimetaphysical practice of particularity in circula-
tion (to stop us from forgetting) that practice must strategically submit to
63. Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 171. In the not-too-distant background
here is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59–123.
64. Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” 170.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 171.

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Music After All 169
negation within the inherently metaphysical tendencies of written discourse.

However, deeply embedded within the metaphysical paradoxes of preserving
the particular lies a sadder form of understanding, born from a fear of fading
and of the impermanence of things. I invoke this now not so as to incorporate
contextualization into a tropics of venerable existential themes, but rather to
illuminate a moment of inadvertent understanding regarding present crises
that lies hidden amidst the political delusions that elsewhere mar the relation-
ship between contextual politics and its own context. For it is precisely in our
present context that contexts are endlessly threatened with their dissolution,
endlessly vulnerable as they are to the politico-economic totality on which, to
return to an earlier metaphor, they might slide and skate, but more frequently
through which they just fall into freezing black waters to fade without trace.
As Žižek writes:
Capitalism is not just universal in itself, it is universal for itself, as the tremen-
dous actual corrosive power which undermines all particular lifeworlds, cultures
and traditions, cutting across them, catching them in its vortex. It is meaning-
less to ask “Is this universality true or a mask of particular interests?” This uni-
versality is directly actual as universality, as the negative force of mediating and
destroying all particular content.67
Thus, we might say that the import of the notion of particularity has emerged
precisely when and because it has become impossible.
A relatively obvious example would be to compare the Broadway of the
Upper West Side of Manhattan of fifteen years ago with today. Whereas before
it was a strange and sometimes funky salad of mostly privately owned business,
it is now increasingly constituted, as a result of commercial deregulation, by a
mantra of corporately organized franchises and stores that could be found in
any mall in any part of the Northeast and that repeats itself every ten to twenty
blocks: Banana Republic, Gap, Starbucks, Old Navy, McDonald’s, Ann Taylor
(Loft, Atelier, or anything else—theme and variations technique, after all, is
not an unknown trait in this musical style). If one has been walking from
Columbia University at West 116th Street, by the time one gets to 42nd Street
and Times Square one will have achieved what many practitioners of yoga
spend years merely hoping for: the flimsy ego will have dissolved into the one
within, which will then open out onto the one without of which one is but one
within. And so you will be completely congruent with where you find your-
self, for Times Square is now one. Even in the early 1990s, this area was still
truly beyond good and evil; no mere commodified tourist attraction, but in
the best, and therefore potentially volatile sense, a sexual, commercial, racial,
legal, criminal, and class jungle where there was the possibility of an authentic
encounter.68 It is now Disney—owned, surgically modified, and dressed.
67. Žižek, Violence, 132.

68. For a brilliant analysis of the negative effects of the clean up and gentrification of Times
Square, see Samuel R. Delany, “. . . Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red, 1998,” in

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However, although its crime demographic has changed, its crime rates have
not; although it now only smiles, it is still dangerous.
Far less inspiring of wit would be the numerous examples provided by the
desperate sites of conflict between indigenous peoples and government-
backed corporations, primarily in third world countries, as for example in the
ongoing complexities in the Niger basin delta of Nigeria. As an area incredibly
rich in oil resources, drilling in this area could have provided funds for local
resources—an oft-dashed hope in Africa. However, not only do an average of
60 percent of the massive profits from this area go to the government, 40 per-
cent to the oil companies (primarily Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and Exxon-
Mobil), and absolutely nothing to the region itself (companies not even
employing locals), but indifference to environmental issues means that fishing
ponds have become polluted, farm lands rendered useless, and the air com-
pletely toxified. As a result, indigenous peoples, such as the Ogoni, whose
lands have been targeted for oil since the 1950s, have not benefited from the
exploitation of resources on their own lands; moreover, their very existence
has been put in jeopardy, and their attempts at protest and dissent squashed.
The story of the Ogoni writer and activist Ken Saro Wiwa is a case in point. A
spokesperson and then president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni
People (MOSOP), he was arrested by the Nigerian Military in 1994 on
charges of incitement to murder after heading a nonviolent campaign particu-
larly against Shell. Found guilty in a trial that was widely criticized by human
rights organizations, he was then executed by hanging in November of
1995.69
I invoke these examples not as punitively shocking news to berate us arro-
gantly out of our political indifference; anyone who has read a newspaper in
the past ten years is aware of such things. Rather, it is to point out that a
politics of difference, such as one finds in contextual politics, even if it takes ac-
count of local-level antagonism, reaches a limit with regard to its understand-
ing of such now-common global phenomena. For the activism of the Ogoni is
not merely one that takes place in the name of difference; in their world, that
name is cut across by universality itself, as it is in Times Square and practically
everywhere else. As Žižek points out, “the universality of capitalism resides in
the fact that capitalism is not a name for a ‘civilization,’ for a specific cultural-
symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economic-symbolic machine
Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, 19–85 (London
and New York: Verso, 1999.)
69. For more information see J. Timothy Hunt, The Politics of Bones: Dr Owens Wiwa and the
Struggle for Nigeria’s Oil (Toronto: McCelland and Stewart, 2005); Onookome Okome, Before I
Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics, and Dissent (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
2000); and the open letter of protest sent by the PEN America Center (New York City) and
signed by Chinua Achebe, G. F. Michelsen, Ben Okri, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Robert
Stone, and Norman Rush, “The Case of Ken Saro-Wiwa,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 7
(20 April 1995).

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Music After All 171
which operates with Asian values [for example] as well as others.” And so
“critics of Eurocentrism who endeavor to unearth the secret European bias of
capitalism fall short here: the problem with capitalism is not its secret
Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social
relations.”70 In part, contextual politics understands the endless threat to the
survival of the particular, but it is faced with alienation (its inability to think the
totality of late capitalism of which it is part). For Žižek, this alienation is struc-
turally necessary, a constitutive support of postmodern politics itself: “Post-
modern politics definitely has the great merit that it ‘repoliticizes’ a series of
domains previously considered ‘apolitical’ or ‘private’: the fact remains, how-
ever, that it does not in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and
form of the ‘political’ within which it operates is grounded in the ‘depoliticiza-
tion’ of the economy.”71
Whether we agree with this or not, the alienation itself makes contextual
politics vulnerable to a kind of superstitious tautology in which the route to-
ward preserving the particular, it is implied, will come from the passionate
repetition of the mantra “preserve the particular!” But as this incantation re-
verberates in ever-increasing circles, it eventually makes contextual politics
transform into the very form of theoretical universalization that was its original
object of critique, and so masks the indifferent universal force of that which
today destroys what the labor of contextual politics claims to work to preserve.
And so it would seem that contextual politics must become history, not in the
somewhat mean colloquial sense, that it must be superseded, but in the more
positive Nietzschean sense, that it will inadvertently step beyond itself by
somehow catching itself out, and so actualize something new into the musico-
logical world. The somewhat odd question to which I turn in Part 2 is
whether music might itself have any role to play in how this might happen. Or
is it just music after all, merely our object of study?
Part 2: Play
Unemployment
Narcissus tries to see the impossible (the ideal of himself as himself, in-and-of-
himself ) and so he dies. Because he is caught in this impossible desire, others
(Echo) are encouraged only to repeat (echo) what he says, and ultimately to
fade away. One of the implications of the Echo and Narcissus myth is that in
order to become something else and stop the destruction of oneself and oth-
ers, one needs to be distracted out of the tautological economy that supports
70. Žižek, Violence, 156.

71. Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Žižek
(London and New York: Verso, 2000), 98. (emphasis in original)

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the impossible idea of oneself that one can, nevertheless, never own. To a de-
gree, many musicologists have concurred. Korsyn asserts that the route out of
the particular discursive problematic he articulates “is neither another theory
of musical structure, nor more ethnographic fieldwork, nor more historical
criticism—however valuable such things may be.”72 Instead, what is required
is “an ethical transformation that will make us, in the words of Mark Bracher,
‘more capable of accepting and nurturing otherness’ both in ourselves and in
others.”73 A similar kind of critical orientation has also, of course, long been
part of Tomlinson’s position. In his famous exchange with Kramer, for exam-
ple, he argued that in our attempts “to show the ways in which some of our
most basic, apparently ‘natural’ categories are local cultural constructs . . . cru-
cial leverage might come from our exposure to more distant musical others
than most of us usually encounter.”74 By definition, any work that has been
strongly influenced by anthropological and certain hermeneutic models com-
municates how the encounter with the Other might productively transform a
critic’s relationship to the givens of his or her own interpretive practices. So,
for example, Timothy Rice, an ethnomusicologist who employs phenomeno-
logical hermeneutics, talks about his initial attempts to learn Bulgarian bag-
pipe performance as arising from various narcissistic appropriations. Not only
was Rice motivated by “a selfish desire to learn the tradition for myself,” but
also for the purposes of “what it could do for me in the American world of
scholarship and amateur performance of Balkan music.”75 At first, then, his
engagement was mediated by the psychological and economic dynamics of
personal property, and the acquisition of professional and cultural capital.
However, what developed was a friendship with his teacher, Kostadin, a
friendship that had been autonomous of Rice’s initial narcissistic economy but
that ultimately transformed not only himself, but also his teacher. Kostadin
“in turn began to pressure me to appropriate the tradition completely, that is,
to transform myself into a gaidar, for himself. My self-transformation
had become meaningful and important to him and his self-definition and
self-regard.”76
If transformation involves negating the deadlock of a certain narcissistic
structure, then when contextual politics looks into the pool perhaps it is in the
distractions created by the rippling distortions cutting across its own reflection

73. Ibid.
74. Tomlinson, “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies,” 23, repr. in Tomlinson,
Music and Historical Critique, 100.
75. Timothy Rice, “Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience in Ethno-
musicology,” in Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, ed.
Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116. In the passage
preceding this, Rice has been discussing the phenomenologist Paul Ricouer’s ideas on the possi-
bility of a nonnarcissitic appropriation.
76. Ibid.

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Music After All 173
that it must be inextricably caught. The problem posed so far in this essay
could, therefore, conclude as follows: contextual politics must practice what it
appears to preach and open itself up to the other of the different political posi-
tions that, in both theory and praxis, exist in the world today (none of which
implies necessarily accepting those positions). Ironically, the solution perhaps
is that contextual politics should contextualize itself, performing the same
careful and difficult work that should characterize any contextual understand-
ing of music on the very political givens that often are internally interwoven
within and also used from without to validate the broader relevance of the var-
ious contextual methodologies in circulation. As Williams precisely puts it:
“We can offer postmodernity some of its own medicine and ask it to reflect on
the specifics of its own historical location,” which for Williams would mean a
proper consideration of where it is not in existence.77
On some level, such a project would necessitate a certain distancing from
the pleasures and securities that come from identifying with contextual politics
itself—a certain disinterestedness, to invoke Kant. Approached from the Left,
some of the issues that this would need to negotiate might be a mortifying ac-
knowledgment (once again) of our often uninterrogated use of the term
democracy as a kind of absolute virtue whose structure and functioning we as-
sume are so self-evident and uncontested that they require no further exami-
nation. This practice, which, in one of its typical maneuvers, often pits the
self-evident good of democracy against the self-evident evil of variously identi-
fied totalitarianisms, on the one hand helps to mask the deeply problematic
complicities of democracies over the past hundred years. Badiou talks of how
those involved in such a maneuver wish, for example, “to conceal the deep
and secret bond between the political real of Nazism and what they proclaim
to be the innocence of democracy,” and thus asserts that there is a real prob-
lem “to be located in the linkage between ‘democracies’ and that which, after
the fact, they designate as their Other—the barbarism of which they are
wholly innocent.”78 On the other hand, this practice works to neutralize a cer-
tain excess within democracy itself and thus, some might argue, to delimit
democracy into something it is not. For example, the French, post-Marxist
philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued, that there is a tendency to
want to make democracy into a kind of regime, a “form of society,” where
“the political, the sociological and the economic” are conflated. For Rancière
this results in a drive toward overly certain and fixed types of political agendas
that ultimately give rise, in his interpretation, to a dominant “sociology of
narcissistic consumerism.”79 Allied to this questioning of democracy would be
an interrogation of whether, as Žižek has put it, capitalism really is “the only
77. Williams, Constructing Musicology, 119.

78. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 4–5.
79. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 22.

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game in town.”80 The reconsideration of socialist politics and Marxist theory

that is already in operation, particularly amongst the group of music scholars
initially working out of the University of Alberta, would need to be more
widely and critically taken on board.81 And finally, it seems deeply pressing that
we evaluate again the virtues and pragmatics of the following notions, which
are sometimes too easily dismissed in today’s musicological circles as masks
for some kind of phallic, and often Germanic, brutality: courage, bravery,
emancipation, commitment, autonomy, idealism, utopia, belief, universalism,
sublimity, and heroism (the latter which I invoke as a possibly ungendered
potential).82
But if the solution to the problem of contextual politics in musicology is to
be found in separating political ideas from musical studies per se and subject-
ing them to the thoroughly commendable, solid, and recognized scholarly
practice of a full critical and historical examination, then the answer to the
question of whether music might have any role to play in negating musicol-
ogy’s political problematic is no. And this would imply that perhaps music af-
ter all is simply our object of study—a conclusion that sits uncomfortably with
the already-discussed theory-praxis symbiosis often implied in musicology’s
self-validations. So while musicology is off doing something other than musi-
80. Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” 95.

81. A list of representative titles here could include Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, ed., Music
and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002); Adam Krims, ed., Music/
Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998); and Henry
Klumpenhouwer, “Late Capitalism, Late Marxism, and the Study of Music,” Music Analysis 20
(2001): 367–405. The beginnings of a critique of the political limitations of some of this work can
be found in Gopinath, “The Social Movement in the New Musicology and Marxist Music
Studies.”
82. In the realms of political philosophy, Badiou has been particularly vocal in reasserting the
import of these terms. See, for example, Ethics and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,
trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). The beginnings of a selective
bibliography for music-orientated work that has considered the positive potential of some of these
terms would include the following: the potential value of utopian thinking has been acknowl-
edged by Williams in Constructing Musicology, 137, and has been a recurring theme in Simon
Frith’s work, for example, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1996), and recent work by Leppert, “Music ‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence’
(Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope),” Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 92–133; work
acknowledging the critical and political import of the notion of the sublime is growing, for exam-
ple, see Robert Fink, “Beethoven Antihero: Sex, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Failure, or
Listening to the Ninth Symphony as Postmodern Sublime,” and Paul Attinello, “Passion/
Mirrors (A Passion for the Violent Ineffable: Modernist Music and the Angel/In the Hall of
Mirrors),” both in Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew
Dell’Antonio, 109–53 and 154–72, respectively (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Of critical interest would also be Adam Krims, “The Hip-Hop Sublime as a Form of Com-
modification,” in Music and Marx, ed. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, 63–78 (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2002); a key text in reevaluating the political potential of autonomy is Lydia Goehr, The
Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998).

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Music After All 175
cology, what in the meantime is music doing? The too circular and self-serving
answer would be that it is doing what it always does, taking part in and being
created out of its contexts. In other words, while musicology is busy not doing
musicology in order that it might do musicology in a more politically effective
manner, music is doing the very politics—assuming that we persist in the belief
that music’s contextual embeddedness constitutes politics—that it has always
been musicology’s political responsibility to bring to light. But what if for a
fanciful moment we were to imagine that at least some music does that work
only when musicology itself is in attendance, and that once the curtain comes
down on the scholarly paper, presentation, or article, Music then does nothing
much of anything: scrapes the makeup off with a desultory hand, wondering,
in world-weary fashion, if it is worth bothering to hang up the stage costume
lying crumpled on the floor; waits without interest for the short-lived spectacle
of the unemployment check as it nosedives from the glory of the postman’s
hand to the dust of the door mat; contentedly bored, ignorant, she smokes,
the sublime activity of all unproductiveness.83
It is to the possibility of this kind of unemployed art that Leo Bersani and
Ulysse Dutoit addressed themselves in their well-known study of art and im-
poverishment, in which they argued against the notion that the role of art is to
redeem, comfort, and improve us ethically, culturally, and politically, and pro-
posed, rather, the import of an art that voids meaning, and dares to fail. In
their discussions of Beckett and late Rothko, they showed how
It is as if each of them were saying to his reader or spectator: I have very little
(perhaps nothing) to say to you, I have very little (perhaps nothing) to show
you. To put this in another way: My work is without authority. You will learn
nothing from it; you will gain no moral profit from it; it will not even enhance
your life with that delight or superior pleasure which, you have been led to be-
lieve, artists have the obligation to provide you.84
But the idea that art might be capable of being out of a job raises a certain
middle-class horror in many of us. “Our culture, though paying little attention
to art, is emphatic about its edifying value. Not only do great masterworks
(especially those of western culture) have much to teach us; they are also ex-
pected to make us better individuals and better citizens.”85 Of course, the im-
plicit injunctions against wastefulness that accompany outrage at the
possibility of art’s indolence often function to articulate real concerns. For ex-
ample, Kramer has argued that in today’s world, those who have been left in
charge have irresponsibly let classical music float into stagnant waters, like a
stick in a game whose interest has, for participants present and potential, long
since waned:
83. On the last point, see Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993).
84. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3.
85. Ibid.

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It barely registers in our schools, it has neither the prestige nor the popularity of
literature and visual art, and it squanders its capacities for self-renewal by cling-
ing to an exceptionally static core repertoire. Its audience is shrinking, graying,
and overly palefaced, and the suspicion has been voiced abroad that its claim to
occupy a sphere of autonomous artistic greatness is largely a means of veiling,
and thus perpetuating, a narrow set of social interests.86
Accordingly, if classical music is to be brought back into the current of

things, ways must be found of convincing others that it has “meaning: con-
crete, complex, and historically situated,” and, thus, that it can do cultural
work.87 For the Kramer of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, one
source from which we might construct such a successful rhetoric would be
nineteenth-century models. Significantly, Kramer admits that (1) these models
included “esoteric conceptions of music based on its apparent transcen-
dence”;88 (2) the triumph of the esoteric side in the twentieth century left the
field of discourse vulnerable to “the appalling misappropriation of the great
Germanic tradition by the Nazis”; and (3) “by the mid-twentieth century,
classical music had passed out of the public sphere.” Nevertheless, this esoteri-
cism “coexisted and contended with semantic conceptions that imbued music
with poetic, narrative, or philosophical meaning and with sociocultural
agency.” And so the aim should be “to recapture, not the content of [this]
earlier discourse, but the role of that discourse in society and culture.” If
that can be done, “it can help revivify classical music by demystifying and de-
idealizing it”: in short, “by canceling the Faustian bargain that lofts the music
beyond the contingencies, uncertainties, and malfeasances of life at the cost of
utter irrelevance.”
A moral could be drawn from this: if music, like a political idea, is a tool,
then better the unambiguous honesty that comes from smudging it with our
own rough, instrumental hands than leaving it discarded as but the music it-
self. After all, perhaps music, like God, is only as good as we are, and so by not
taking it in hand we either leave it vulnerable to interference from other hands
or we mask the potential inhumanity of what our own hands are doing while
our loving ears look longingly to song. The ultimate conclusion to be reached
here would be the well-known one articulated by Tomlinson in his criticism of
Kramer’s residual formalism: in essence, that there are only hands; or there is
the conclusion sounded in Kramer’s critique of Tomlinson: that music in its
immediacy cannot be distinguished from its contexts.89 For Tomlinson, the
formalist remainder in Kramer’s work “decontextualizes his contextualism”; as
86. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 3–4. Such themes continue to resonate in Kramer’s recent Why Classical
Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
87. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 2.
88. Quotes in the rest of this paragraph from ibid., 4–5.
89. Kramer, “Music Criticism and the Postmodern Turn,” 27.

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Music After All 177
a result, “instead of postmodern doubt, play, and problematizing of the com-

municative relation, Kramer offers a too-familiar modernist mastery,” and ulti-
mately this wounds human reciprocity itself.90 Formalism is scripted here as a
modernist specter spooking postmodern musicological discourse, like God’s
continued hauntings after His death. It is the symptom of our failure to face
up to the challenge of fully secular life, of life without the master whom—
because we lack the faith to live without belief—we preserve in a suspended
zombie state of living death. Rather than the idolatry created by love of the
musical object—the formalist fetishism that Henry Klumpenhouwer for ex-
ample has subjected to Marxist critique91—“the primary stimulus for musicol-
ogy . . . might more luminously be our love of, concern for, commitment to,
belief in, [and] alienating distance from . . . the others who have made this or
that music in the process of making their worlds.”92 For when we stop loving
God, the time spent laboring to preserve the presence of his absence can then
be taken up with rectifying the absence of the tangible presence of humans
in a world that had been too busy loving God. Coming from an engagement
with the work of Foucault, for Tomlinson this would mean the love of human
difference, rather than different kinds of humans.
Yet even with the ethical weight of all this looming over her, the “music
itself,” with seeming indifference to our concerns regarding how she might be
misused and abused, remains with cigarette in hand, seated at the table she has
been asked to leave—a stain, indelible as a ghost. And so maybe, as Hooper
writes, “in practice one can problematize a concept—the ‘truth,’ a ‘fact,’ the
‘music itself ’—only for so long before feeling obliged to acknowledge that its
continued deployment probably points to some necessary moment that can-
not in fact be problematized entirely away.”93 We can give two illustrations of
why this is structurally so. First, from Hooper’s own strongly Habermasian
perspective, the concept of “the music itself ” constitutes a logical necessity in
order to establish the possibility of meaningful discussion. In order to think,
one needs to be able to think about some thing, so if scholars claim that the
musical thing as we understand it does not exist—that, in Bohlman’s phrase,
“music may be what we think it is; it may not be”94—and yet still assert on
some level that they are talking about music, then, in short, they are not think-
ing. As Hooper puts it in his critique of Bohlman’s statement, “it is almost as
though Bohlman wants to rethink music without thinking it.”95 To a degree,
90. Tomlinson, “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies,” 20–21; and idem, Music and
Historical Critique, 97–98.
91. Henry Klumpenhouwer, “Commodity-Form, Disavowal, and Practices of Music Theory,”
in Music and Marx, ed. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, 23–41 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
92. Tomlinson, “Musical Pasts, and Posmodern Musicologies,” 24; and idem, Music and
Historical Critique, 101.
93. Hooper, Discourse of Musicology, 74.
94. Philip V. Bohlman, “Ontologies of Music,” in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 17.

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Hooper’s construal of the music itself is rather like a regulative idea as defined
by Kant. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that a regu-
lative idea directs “the understanding toward a certain goal upon which the
routes marked out by all its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection.
This point is indeed a mere idea, a focus imaginarius, from which, since it lies
quite outside the bounds of possible experience, the concepts of understand-
ing do not in reality proceed.”96 Thus, according to Hooper, scholars must
“recognize a ‘quasi-transcendental’ necessity in the prior presupposition of a
‘music in itself ’ in order that we can then, if we so choose, proceed to explore
its multiply mediated condition.”97 It is a necessary moment, rather than an
uncontested goal.98
Second, from a basic deconstructive position, the concept of the “music it-
self ” cannot be erased because of the supplementary logic that necessitates its
presence as a kind of foil guaranteeing the rhetorical success of the term
(“context”) that claims to supplant it.99 As linguistically inscribed terms, both
the music itself and context are founded, in Derrida’s language, in an “origi-
nary lack,” which only the supplementary presence of the other can mask. In
his analysis of how disciplinary identities within musical research are consti-
tuted in relation either to context or text (the music itself ), Korsyn makes a
similar point, arguing that “narratives of disciplinary legitimation often include
narratives of delegitimation.”100 At this moment of his argument, Korsyn is
working from a more Lacanian rather than Derridean perspective, but his con-
clusion, which seeks to illuminate the mutual reliance of seemingly opposed
terms, nevertheless resonates. With regard to text and context, is it not possi-
ble “that each receives his truth from the other in inverted form?”101
Timely as such analyses are for musicology’s critical self-reflection, they still
remain too tainted by the work ethic, at least for the decadent purposes of
Part 2 of this enquiry. What interests me is not so much why the music itself is
a requisite conceptual moment, nor how its negative invocation is necessary
for the creation of disciplinary identities. At this point, I am not even working
96. Cited in Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), 130.
A less clunky definition is given by Andrew Bowie: “An idea that orients our thinking without us
being able to claim to give an account of it which proves what it refers to really exists.” Intro-
duction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 278.
98. Admittedly, Hooper does not deny the historical and cultural construction of the notion
of the music itself, but he quite rightly points out, and in a fashion redolent of what I have said
about equipment, that its status as such is no more reason to abandon it “than recognizing the
contingent origins of gendered approaches to musical textuality in the discourse(s) of postwar
feminism would somehow neutralize their efficacy or negate their utility.” Ibid., 88.
99. The seminal formulation of the supplement occurs, of course, in Derrida’s famous read-
ing of Rousseau’s essay on the origins of language, in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
101. Ibid., 85.

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Music After All 179
with the exceedingly productive project of regarding how the strategic place-
ment of the music itself might work for precise political ends, although I am
endlessly teetering on its edge.102 Rather, while musicology is off sorting out
its political credentials, I am attracted by a certain late Heideggerian theme:
on the import of what happens as a result of something when it isn’t doing
anything.
For Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” something is what it is
only when it is being used, and, thus, is not directly focused within the frame
of the conceptualizing gaze. Thus, to cite his famous example: “The peasant
woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They
are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the
shoes while she is at work.”103 If one changes shoes for music, then the
Heidegger of this sentence could easily dine with ethnomusicologists.
Heidegger’s surprising move, however, is to deflect his argument away from
the most obvious pragmatic and empirical conclusion: that when the shoes are
not on the peasant woman’s feet they are then, by definition, less. He argues,
by contrast, that things can release something of themselves (for Heidegger,
their being) and so in a certain sense are made more when placed in a certain
abstraction from their functional ground, as for example when they enter the
only seemingly representational frame of the work of art. As Eagleton ob-
serves, Heidegger shares something here with the Russian Formalists’ notion
of defamiliarization.104 The hammer gives up its being only when it is broken;
the peasant’s shoes, only when they appear in Vincent van Gogh’s famous
painting. In George Steiner’s précis, for Heidegger “Art lets-be.” “Art is not,
as in Plato or Cartesian realism, an imitation of the real. It is the more real.”105
What is striking in Heidegger’s oft-read essay is the strangely fluctuating,
holographic double-focus he assigns to things: on the one hand, available as
pieces of equipment through the interested knowledge of praxis; on the other
hand, disclosed as autonomous beings in and of themselves on the disinter-
ested stage of art. Simultaneously, they are both sinking out of sight into the
thicket of their functional determinants and rising up into the clearing of their
being. This said, how is the disclosive power Heidegger assigns to the more
representational arts to apply to music? After all, music, as Steiner points out,
is noticeably absent from Heidegger’s work.106 Are we to imagine, for exam-
ple, that Rameau’s famous keyboard piece La poule discloses the being of
chicken? One would hope not. Music’s endlessly proven ability to sustain itself
102. For example, see Martin Scherzinger, “The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism
and Its Place in Political Critique,” in Beyond Structural Listening? ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio,
252–77 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
103. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 33.
104. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 64.
105. George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 133–
34, and 136.
106. Ibid., 43–45, and 131–32.

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without necessitating a directly invoked referent—even if, in Heidegger’s for-

mulation, that referent is not being imitated but revealed—suggests that mu-
sic might be thought differently. In short, music seems more like an extreme
case of a thing than an art which discloses a thing’s being. Self-evidently, like
the peasant woman’s shoes, it functions as equipment, and therefore contex-
tually. It can be molded into a rigid duple to fit the feet of marching men, for
example. Yet how would we respond, Steiner asks, if a fictive questioner from
another planet where to ask us what music is? “We would sing a tune or strum
a piece and say, unhesitatingly, ‘This is music.’ If he asked next, ‘What does
it mean?’ the answer could be there, overwhelmingly, in us, but exceedingly
difficult to articulate externally. Asked just this question of one of his composi-
tions, Schumann played it again. In music, being and meaning are inextrica-
ble.”107 Unlike a van Gogh painting, which reveals being, music—it would
seem—has being. There is a “brazen obviousness and impalpability, an en-
veloping nearness and infinite regress.” After all, being, like music, has “a his-
tory and a meaning, a dependence on man and dimensions transcending
humanity.” Heidegger, we might note, also sees being as an active “nothing-
ness” (“das nichtende Nichts”)—perhaps like Music smoking her cigarette.108
One of the great themes of Heidegger’s philosophy is that we have come
to take the being of being for granted (“We forget to be astonished”109), and
viewed from this perspective, we might argue that musicology’s sometimes
prioritization of music’s contextual embeddedness is one manifestation of our
forgetting of music’s being. If for the moment we can take this on board, how
then might music’s being be disclosed? What is the frame that will abstract
music so that we might be exposed to, and astonished once more by, its active
nothingness? Evidently, a painting, though useful in relationship to the being
of a pair of shoes, is not helpful in this instance; one can visually depict people
playing music, or one can show its effects by painting a swooning audience
member, but one cannot depict it. But music theory, however strange this
might seem, can—and not only for the obvious reason that it necessitates as
one of its opening maneuvers a certain protective framing of the musical ob-
ject from cultural practices.
In an important article already mentioned, Agawu observed that by revert-
ing to more conventional analytic methods and conclusions purportedly radi-
cal musicological work fails to acknowledge the “surplus of detail that
theory-based analysis produces.”110 Music, in just being the object it is, not
doing anything at all, nevertheless can still not be pinned down to one analytic
reading that would capture its unchanging state. Music smoking her cigarette
107. Ibid., 44.

108. Ibid., 44–45.
109. Ibid., 45.
110. Agawu, “Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime,” 304. (emphasis in
original)

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Music After All 181
is always in excess of our determinations, as if in singing only her own tune, we

realize that she is always singing something new. The static invariance of the
object itself is precisely what allows for the excessive fecundity, the continued
slippage as one new revelation after another keeps flowering forth. Seemingly
straightforward chordal affiliations can proliferate with multiple meanings, as
Charles J. Smith has most carefully and astutely demonstrated.111 A single in-
terval in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major can, in Joseph Dubiel’s
beautiful exploration of the D in the first movement’s opening tutti, have “a
sonic identity that transcends the options made available by the going theory.”
And yet the theory still remains valid, if only for the reason that its application
“helps us to articulate this escaping of its [own] categories as part of the
piece’s sound.”112 Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster have illustrated how
musical unity itself may be pluralized. Music theory has been organized pri-
marily around a canon—which for Cohn and Dempster denotes a rule, law, or
governing principle—that seeks to establish a “unity certified by prolonga-
tional hierarchies.”113 The investigations that theorists have made into the
possibility of “plural unities,” however, attest “that music theorists are equally
committed to a second, independent canon, which may best be characterized
as richness.”114
These theorists’ work bespeaks of music’s inadvertent generosity, its sub-
lime productivity even when it is at rest, and maybe it is exactly this that, tenta-
tively speaking, discloses music’s being. However, if on the one hand this
interpretive proliferation points to the almost impossible plenitude of the
musical object itself, it also brings negation in its wake, and, thus, the sense of
things being hollowed out. For the very fact that something else can keep
emerging from interpretive engagement with one musical object indexes, in a
Hegelian sense, the productive failure of each engagement’s ability to fully
constitute itself. When exposed to the disclosure of musical being, the subject
is, thus, negated. And so the musical object at rest functions in this scenario
like the Hegelian absolute.
Hegel’s detractors often script the absolute as some kind of abstract idea
that has no tangible contact with our reality per se, but whose invocation
111. Charles J. Smith, “The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords,” Music Theory
Spectrum 8 (1986): 94–139.
112. Joseph Dubiel, “Composer, Theorist, Composer/Theorist,” in Cook and Everist,
Rethinking Music, 272. Dubiel has also examined the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin
Concerto in “Hearing, Remembering, Cold Storage, Purism, Evidence, and Attitude Adjust-
ment,” Current Musicology 60 and 61 (1996): 26–50. See also Scherzinger’s critique of Dubiel’s
position in “Feminine/Feminist? In Quest of Names with No Experiences (Yet),” in Postmodern
Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judith Lochhead and Joseph Auner, 141–73 (New York and
London: Routledge, 2002).
113. Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster, “Hierarchical Unity, Plural Unities: Toward a
Reconciliation,” in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and
Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 178.
114. Ibid. (emphasis in original)

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nevertheless damages reality itself. In this misunderstanding, Hegel’s thought

is reduced to an oppressively metaphysical system in which Geist is constantly
striving toward the absolute. In this parody, Hegel’s philosophy is misrepre-
sented as a system in which positions within binaries are annulled through the
violence exerted upon them by the absolute, which collapses specificities into
each other and then further in the (w)hole of the absolute itself. From this
perspective, even in some fairly erudite readings by intellectual historians,115
the turning of the dialectic is scripted as a kind of totalitarian horror story in
which differences are forced mutually to annul each other for the purposes of
an indifferent higher good. But as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy
puts it in a widely acknowledged book on Hegel, the presupposition of the ab-
solute is, in fact, “made precisely in order to ruin all presupposition or pre-
givenness.”116 As Nancy argues, Hegel’s invocation of the absolute is a ruse
that allows for the possibility of what would commonly be understood as its
complete opposite: the endless movement of thought. Thus, the seeming ir-
refutability of the Hegelian absolute has, in fact, a paradoxically deregulatory
effect. Rather than directing the understanding comfortingly toward the ab-
solute itself, for Hegel the absolute is an impossibility whose presence within
the frame of understanding bends the space of our normative perceptions and
thus acts as a catalyst for unnerving and negating our present positions. What
we had assumed was just there becomes the point from which the transforma-
tion into otherwise might occur. Hegel, as Nancy claims, is therefore “the in-
augural thinker of the contemporary world”; he is “witness of the world’s
entry into a history in which it is no longer just a matter of changing form,
of replacing one vision and one order by some other vision and some other
order, but in which the one and only point—of view and of order—is that of
transformation itself.”117 And so perhaps at this juncture we should risk the
following rather bold, if provisional, conclusion. While musicology is off ne-
gotiating its own political problematic, what music in the meantime does
while it is doing nothing is to instigate in the subjects who are exposed to it
the very shift that musicology itself needs to undergo. Music negates (us). So
could musicology perhaps achieve more politically by doing less, hanging out
mindlessly with the unemployed, with music after all?
Dance
It would be convenient to assert that music after all is negation, but to do so
would recapitulate a problem that the previous section had sought to erase.
115. For example, see “Hegel” in Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of
Human Liberty, ed. after Berlin’s death by Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002), 74–104.
116. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven
Miller (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 10.
117. Ibid., 3, 6–7.

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Music After All 183
Part of the limitation of the contextualizing position is that it risks seeing the
musical text as merely a conduit back to the social, and thus masking the fact
that, in Hooper’s words, music “is clearly also both more and less than the
social totality of which it is a part. Less, in that it is one component within a
larger system upon which it depends for its production, reproduction, con-
sumption and interpretation; more, in that it cannot simply be reduced to a
passive reflection or expression of that same system.”118 Reading through mu-
sic as but negation would threaten to lead to the assumption that music is, yet
again, fully available to discursive articulation. However, the following suc-
cinct question can make such certainties stutter: “If all we are can be stated in
words, why does our being also need to be articulated in music, as every
known human culture seems to suggest?”119
Music is not simply parasitic on language, and so an acknowledgment that
music itself, culturally unemployed, strikes a different register in relation to the
articulation of both its contextual determination and its status as negation is
required. To focus on this registral shift—in Carloyn Abbate’s terms, on
the “drastic” phenomenological presence of music itself, particularly in the
moment of its live performance—would seem productive.120 Drawing on
Vladamir Jankélévitch, Abbate argues that “music’s precious humanity and so-
cial reality” are articulated “not by insisting that musical works trace historical
facts or release specific sanctioned cultural associations, but by emphasizing an
engagement with music as tantamount to an engagement with the phenome-
nal world and its inhabitants.”121 Music, in this sense, becomes deeply ethical:
“playing or hearing music can produce a state where resisting the flaw of lo-
quaciousness represents a moral ideal, marking human subjects who have been
remade in an encounter with an other.”122 For Abbate, both hermeneutic and
formalist approaches to music are uneasy with such “immediate aural presence
. . . [and] this may reflect unspoken uneasiness about performed music as an
ephemeral object, subject to instantaneous loss, but equally importantly as
something that acts upon us and changes us.”123 If the sudden unscripted vul-
nerability to the phenomenological into which music in its drastic present-
tense condition can seduce might negate if but momentarily the certainty
of Gnostics, could it not also act upon the potentially universalizing self-
containment of contextual politics? Theorizing within the orbit of the very
different world of Adorno, Leppert in an important recent essay gives cre-
dence to the possibility that it could: “The presence of music—any music—
references a lack. And lack, properly understood, is not an ontological
118. Hooper, Discourse of Musicology, 86. (emphasis in original)

119. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 3.
120. Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 505–36.
121. Ibid., 530.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., 532.

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condition but a social one. Lack, in other words, invites critique; critique in
turn is the precondition for social change.”124
The utopian nature of Leppert’s questions does not discredit them. As
noted in the previous section, contextual politics has been resistant to utopian
thinking, and so to expose it to the searing light of the utopian could offer the
productive respite of a clear view from elsewhere. How the utopian is articu-
lated, however, requires judgment. Although Leppert fully takes on board the
necessary impossibilities that form the tension field of Adorno’s utopian di-
alectic of art and hope, his primary point is that “music as such, even in its own
common ordinariness and inescapability, signals a difference from—more, an
opposition to—what otherwise passes as the ordinary and the expected. Music
posits the sonic possibility of something better.”125 Much of what I argue
below is in harmony with Leppert’s claim. Nevertheless, I would ultimately
reinscribe music back into the logic of equipment already outlined, and so
forefront its radical ethical and political ambivalence. Music does indeed point
to the possibility of something other, but what that might be is disturbingly
reliant not only on the nexus of forces at work at the moment we fall into the
blank transformative hole it opens up, but on that which cannot be known
until after the event that music allows. Leppert’s careful silence with regard to
utopian futurity is commendable, and not just because it is appropriately con-
gruent with Adorno’s theological insistence on the injunction against naming
the name of God. As I have said, if it is the case that to take the crisis of the
world’s wrong seriously means that it must already be reverberating through
our discourse before it empirically presents itself as an object to our under-
standing, then to articulate Utopia directly would be to reincarcerate it in the
very condition from beyond which the light of its promise must shine back on
us.126
By comparison, for the purposes of this present enquiry, Abbate’s position
seems less useful, even though there is indeed much of great value in her
much-discussed article, not least of which are the many necessary respites it
offers from the sometimes sober injunctions of the politics of musicology.
Commendably unafraid of enchantment, it does not insist on the absolute au-
thority of cultural and political work, and so later portions of this argument
will indeed smile with it. However, there is very little built into its structure to
curtail its immanent tendencies, which move too easily toward painting pic-
tures of paradigmatic dramas that define the ethical ground of the human.
Critical as Abbate is of the potentially constrictive nature of contextualizing
124. Leppert, “Music ‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence,’ ” 95–96.

125. Ibid., 98.
126. An extensive examination of the musical resonance of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s dialec-
tics of hope is to be found in Berthold Hoeckner’s remarkable Programming the Absolute:
Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 2002).

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Music After All 185
music for political ends, in its looming assumption that exposure to music as
drastic entails exposure to a human-defining ethical encounter, her alternative
replicates one of the key criticisms of contextual politics that I have already
made of contextual politics: the assumption of an underlying humanity. So be-
fore we arrive at the clearing she has opened up for music in the claustropho-
bic thicket of the discursive, she has already ploughed the ground and grown
another discursively fertilized shrub. I may question the light that Leppert
shines into the clearing he discloses, but it is still a space, and sun hats are not
difficult to find; Abbate’s clearing, however, is too overgrown. This ahistorical
perspective on human behavior is also replicated in the way she articulates her
object of critique, the hermeneutic impulse. In Abbate’s essay it appears his-
torically only vaguely, as part of a continuing Romantic allegiance whose life
expectancy has been greatly improved by twentieth-century media develop-
ments;127 its primary articulation, however, is as behavioral trait, a kind of
transhistorical potential for emotional meanness that has merely been exacer-
bated by historical conditions.
As the above examination of unemployment attests, I do not claim that
there is nothing other than history, and so Abbate’s ahistorical proclivity is not
the primary obstacle to my using it as a piece of equipment in my investiga-
tion. But the validity of such ethical encounters as a means of defining the hu-
man is not self-evident and seems to require further justification.128 Faced with
Abbate’s phenomenological drasticness, a still important question of the poli-
tics of musicology is necessary: what historical work is the ahistorical in her dis-
course being co-opted to perform? I suggest that by moving the problem of
the Gnostic away from the historical and toward the behavioral, Abbate is able
to soundproof her essay from the noise of the political, which, in our dialecti-
cally totalized world, must by definition be audible on some level within it. It
is not that she is not right with regard to the Gnostic; it is that she will not let
herself be right enough. This creates a self-serving economy, for by lowering
the threat of the Gnostic she can more effectively elevate the efficacy of the
drastic. Notwithstanding its strange reference to 9/11, the essay is reliant on a
certain blindness with regard to the political so that the ethical might prevail
over the hermeneutic, and this produces ideologically effective collateral that
127. Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” 523: “Perhaps hermeneutics was reborn of cine-
matic kitsch and manipulation, with the academic platform, like our still-powerful emotions upon
hearing sublime classical works, now being in part a Hollywood by-product. Is there anything
wrong with that?”
128. For example, that justification would come if we make a more extended detour into
Jankélévitch’s ethical philosophy. Jankélévitch was the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne
for many years, which provides some context for his position; moreover, the question of the ethics
of alterity is a key theme in twentieth-century French philosophy, notably in the work of
Emmanuel Lévinas and the later Jacques Derrida, and far from uncontroversial. Alain Badiou, for
example, sees it as a form of theologically tinged nihilism. See Badiou, Ethics, 30, and also chap. 2,
“Does the Other Exist?” (18–29), which directly confronts Lévinas.

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invalidates her claim that with performance and the drastic “there is no place
to hide,” and that we are left in the ideological raw. Music may well be able to
do this, but not in Abbate’s formulation. As a result, her essay exudes a com-
forting sense that the world is lovelier than it is. If contextualization and dis-
cursive articulation as negation threaten to exclude the phenomenological
fact of music, music’s drasticness threatens to exclude the fact of the world’s
wrong. Moreover, it potentially reinscribes us back into the world’s problem-
atic using the lure of an attractive vision of humanity whose potential shudder-
ing on the world’s dark web we are encouraged to ignore. Abbate gives us
little idea how her human might resist such reinscription, and so her essay can-
not offer mine a model of music’s ability to negate. In her essay music is pri-
marily a conduit to an identification with ethics As a result, the essay is neither
dialectical nor properly political—and she does not claim it is.
Music of course can negate; the previous section’s detour into music theory
showed how in doing hardly anything it created enough pressure to burst cer-
tain boils. But it is far from obvious that it always will. Resistance to negation is
strong, since “the subject does not survive the ordeal of negativity: he effec-
tively loses his very essence and passes over into his Other,” to quote from
Žižek once more.129 If, for example, we are dealing with an ideological inter-
polation, it is not merely the case that we get rid of the problem through some
simple act of unmasking it as “false consciousness.” As Žižek has pointed out,
the fantasmatic nature of ideology “is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social)
being,” as if that being’s “innocence” could be returned to. Rather, it is “this
being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness.’ ”130 If there is
to be some real, structural transformation, that can come only, in Hegel’s
famous phrase, “by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.” And
that is not a beautiful thing, “not the life that shrinks from death and keeps
itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and main-
tains itself in it.”131 So when beautiful music starts edging us toward the sub-
lime precipice of negation, many take precaution. Odysseus, faced with the
otherness of the Sirens’ music, has himself tied to the mast—to make sure that
his temporary negation will not lead to him cutting his bonds to how his
world has been deemed and so negate it. As Adorno and Max Horkheimer
write in their famous interpretation of this myth, “the bonds with which
[Odysseus] has irredeemably tied himself to practice, also keep the Sirens away
from practice: their temptation is neutralized and becomes a mere object of
contemplation—becomes art.”132 Odysseus wants to feel what it would be like
129. Žižek, “The Eclipse of Meaning: On Lacan and Deconstruction,” in Interrogating the
Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 217.
130. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York and London: Verso, 1989), 21.
131. G. W. F. Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 19.
132. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), 34.

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Music After All 187
to revolt without becoming so revolting as to actually do so. He demands to

be stuck to something, since music’s presence can act like an oil slick, making
the performed irrefutability of the roles in which we are presently fixed slide to
where they said they never would be.133 A painting, by comparison, rarely has
the ability to enact anything as lewd as what music enforces upon us, for ex-
ample, when it moves us into the dance. A painting’s powers lie elsewhere.
We might elaborate on music’s threat through the following allegorical
tableau vivant, which appears sometimes on Saturday nights: the boyfriend
sulkily stuck to the bar while the girlfriend attempts to coax his ship onto the
rocks beneath the sea of the dance floor where the rubbish that he has devoted
himself to being during the week will then momentarily gloriously drown. It is
interesting to pause and consider who is conventionally associated with dance.
The beginnings of a list would include women, African Americans, and homo-
sexual men. On the one hand, they are adored, for through their ability re-
spond to music and relinquish themselves to another bodily and mental
inscription, they offer us an image of how our lives might not only be other-
wise, but better, more beautifully structured and meaningfully engaged. Bad
dancing disturbs this process of suggestion, for it shows how the encounter
might fail, or how we can delude ourselves of its success. Dancers offer us a
potential truth about music: that it is neither, pace Romanticism, the embodi-
ment of the transcendent,134 nor, pace certain postmodern articulations,
merely part of what already is; rather, the truth dancers offer us is that music
forms space and environment in such a way that that which we have deemed
all can become something else. The repeated connections that have been
made between music and hope then are more than just affected emotings
born of those addicted to delusory enchantments. This does not mean that in
relationship to dance, music is therefore simply the agent of our change.
Music retains the strangely holographic double focus of the Heideggarian
thing discussed in the previous section; it is both an active part of praxis and
yet not fully consumed by that role. If we turn up at the club too early, before
anyone is dancing, Music, indifferent to our indifference, is nevertheless play-
ing; when we leave and the lights are on, Music is often still quite obliviously
loud, smoking her cigarette and failing properly to say goodbye, as if we’d
never been there anyway. In part, music does its own thing, and in so doing,
inspires us to do something in its company. Love after all comes from sustain-
ing a productive distance, not from some kind of fatalistic fusion into the One.
“Love is a dual adventure of the body and the mind,” as Badiou writes; “it is
133. Regarding music’s contrasting ability to make things stick, see Abbate, “Music—Drastic
or Gnostic?” 532 and passim.
134. As Lydia Goehr has written with regard to such aesthetics: “The suggestion that music
carried transcendent meaning led soon enough to the view that instrumental music did more than
point to the transcendent. It also embodied it”; see The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An
Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 154.

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the experience and thought of what the Two is, a world refracted and transfig-
ured by contrast.”135
To witness dancers is to witness a certain kind of love. However, the fact
that dancers can become something else in relation to music means that
they are not just women, homosexual men, and African Americans, but also
bitches, fags, and niggers. Obviously, the point being made here is not to
replicate unacceptable essentializations of these groups in relation to spuri-
ously assumed innate abilities for bodily activity in relationship to music, as if
to say that African Americans are charmingly and childishly authentic and so
are best suited to the playpen of the dance floor, that women are prelogical
and overly emotional and so flourish amidst the semantic vagueness of music,
or that gay men are sex-obsessed and so will jump at any opportunity to hip-
wiggle should the possibility of a grope and more be in the offing. Rather, it is
to point out the disturbing doubling that splits the frame in which the identifi-
cation of these figures with dance takes place, and which likewise doubles the
relationship to music itself. For if certain people, through the magnificence of
their dancing, can inspire others to love them, it is also the case that it can in-
spire a fury of volatile questions that are flung outwards and also rattle around
noisily in the interior, like malevolent peas in the hard-shelled maraca-head of
the affronted: How could one possibly trust dancers when they can so easily
give up sustaining the roles that would keep things continuing as they are?
How could one trust someone who shows you that you are not to be trusted
precisely since you are interested in such continuities? How could you trust
someone who shows you how impotent your attempts are of giving up the
deathly continuation of your own identifications? How could one bear some-
one who proves that within ourselves lies our self ’s own negation? The prob-
lematic identification of frequently marginalized groups with dance is
therefore strategically smart, since it comes with its own security system; at any
moment, should the spectacle impinge too far on the spectator, and Music
threaten to start singing her siren song, an immediately available set of preju-
dices, like a police siren, can be activated, and the performing animals will go
scuttling back into their cage. (After the shaman has performed his medicinal
magic, he must return to his hut outside the community’s perimeter.) In rela-
tionship to dancers, the obscene insult (racist, sexist, or homophobic) is a neu-
tralizing strategy against the possibility of negation. To be identified by
someone else as a gay man is potentially relatively neutral; to be called a faggot
is, by contrast, to be told that you are nothing but a gay man, which is a differ-
ent thing altogether—and not only for the flagrant assumption that a gay man
is, therefore, in and of himself, not much of anything anyway. When music
starts to become too much, the following common-sensical and violent asser-
tion often sets up a barrier to the experiencing of its limit: “It’s just music,
135. Badiou, Century, 145.

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Music After All 189
after all.” It is an assertion made in the name of self-preservation and so it is

not dialectical—and neither does it aim to be.
In Hegel, negation and continuity (in one of its manifestations, self-
preservation) seem to be compelled into the dialectic relationship that will cre-
ate the movement of becoming by means of a kind of teleological “anticipa-
tion” of what comes later.136 But it is not immediately obvious why this should
work. As I argued in the previous passage, the anticipation of something else
offered by dancers can make the dialectic come to a halt. Negation for Hegel,
however, does not simply imply that we break out of the narcissistic enclosure
of our present position by means of a notion of an alternative future that now
strikes us as more attractive. Hegel remains a figure of the Enlightenment in
his adherence to a principle of presuppositionlessness: that in order to under-
stand, thought can not be motivated by some static certainty existing outside
of itself. But this leads to an antimony: if continuity and negation engender
the movement of dialectical becoming only by means of an anticipation, but
that anticipation invalidates the movement of understanding by driving it by
means of something outside of itself, then how can anything ever become?
Regarding anticipation, Hegel is not asserting a productive sense of ex-
pectancy with regard to something in particular, but rather, in Julian Robert’s
nice précis, he asserts “the capacity to act purposively without a preexisting
purpose.”137 In most commentary on Hegel, this strangely telos-free activity is
understood as the immanent impulse of pure reason itself, and so, particularly
in the context of postmodern suspiciousness regarding such things, cause for
complaint. Provocative, however, is the resonance between the spontaneous
movement of the dialectic and Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful as
“purposiveness without purpose.” Negation potentially arises out of a mo-
ment of play, and so play is a dialectical concept.138
If negation does indeed arise out of a moment of free play, then it cannot
be turned into an injunction: always negate! Rather it is something that one
can get caught out into, as when the dancer going through the motions is
moved and starts to be danced; or when an improvisation on a standard be-
comes its own thing, as if it were now the original; or, in Hegel, when the
seemingly straightforward direction of logic suddenly confronts its own inher-
ent contradiction and shifts direction. For better or worse, negation is less the
result of a decision and more an inevitability. Negativity is not made, but is a
fact; negation merely provides it with an opportunity in which its existence al-
ready within our thinking can reassert its destabilizing force and make its pres-
sure felt. Negativity is the underlying lack in that which has been conceptually
136. For a discussion of anticipation see Julian Roberts, German Philosophy: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 75.
137. Ibid., 76.
138. This strictly dialectical inscription of play distinguishes it from the kinds of validations of
play that one finds in postmodern discourse; for example, see Korsyn, Decentering Music, 10.

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determined, and negation turns that into a productive force; it is a paradoxical

exchange in which by being exposed to the fact that our concepts are less,
we get the magnificence of more, the full presence of an absence. In the words
of the great Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa: “Yellow, amazed, utters / The
black centre that’s all.”139 And so negation is strongly aligned with music,
since before all the other arts in the West had rather self-consciously emanci-
pated themselves from adherence to representation and meaning and into the
real, if tense, possibilities of free play, music’s capacity for a play that might
negate logos and melt frozen social relations had always been so evidently a
part of its being that commentators had been forced to draw attention to it so
that suitable warnings could be made. In St. Augustine, music’s potential for
negation threatens to distract him from God. During the Enlightenment fears
were engendered by the thought that music might distract from reason if it
could not quickly be shown to be reasonable itself.140 In certain postmodern
arenas it is asserted that music must be made fully available to the discursive,
lest our politics be unnerved by whatever echoing might be left over.
Of course, even if we take all this on board, it might still be too utopian to
expect music’s play to do the job of negating the political limitations within
our own discourses, and so perhaps we should separate music from the sober
process of thinking through the political problems themselves. Is it not, after
all, a naive stretch of a seductive metaphor to propose that a political ideology
can dance itself into an ecstasy of negation and so step beyond itself into some-
thing new? What if political ideologies are simply bad dancers?141 The distinc-
tion between play and thought, however, is far from absolute, and so even if
we are just trying to think, music, irritatingly, can still be heard in the back-
ground.142 Take, for example, the following phrase of Adorno: “Every
thought resembles play.”143 For Adorno, in order to think about things, one
must do so for the sake of the pleasure that comes from the movement, in and
of itself, of one’s thought. Understanding something can occur only through
“an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment
from the weight of the factual”144—through a pleasure that exceeds, again
like dance, the instrumental conceptualization of thought as merely the means
139. Fernando Pessoa, “I Still Keep,” in Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems, 2nd ed., trans.
Jonathan Griffin (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 138.
140. For example, see Matthew Riley’s erudite and meticulous Musical Listening in the
German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004).
141. Here a dialogue could be productive by considering Lydia Goehr’s “Adorno, Schoen-
berg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien—in Thirteen Steps,” this Journal 56 (2003): 595–636.
142. This is the case even though, as Adorno argued, thought can never just be consumed
fully into music’s concept. See, for example, “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy
and Music,” newly trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 135–61.
143. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(London and New York: Verso, 1978), 127.
144. Ibid., 126.

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Music After All 191
toward an understanding of its object. As a result, intellectual labor (thinking)

resonates with artistic labor, for like dance they both require “the capacity
for being voluntarily involuntary.”145 As he writes elsewhere, “Thought is
happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it.”146 And so
the play in thought preserves the pleasure that broken life (i.e., fully adminis-
tered and instrumentalized life) attempts to dispel. For Adorno, this broken
life, presented under the aegis of progress “has anathematized both the self-
abandonment of thought and that of pleasure.”147 By comparison, proper
thought, that “unbarbaric side of philosophy,” lies in the “tacit awareness
of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of
thought” itself.148 From play.
Among other things, there are echoes here of the deeply aesthetic strain
in Marx, which likewise echoes German Romantic thinking, in particular that
of Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. For Marx, hu-
man activities, including sensation and thought, should be ends in themselves,
requiring no further justification. But this aesthetic state is not possible within
the means-orientated forms of capitalist society. “The sense caught up in crude
practical need,” Marx famously writes in the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844, “has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not
the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract being as food; it could
just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say
wherein this feeding-activity differs from that of animals.”149 Marx’s continu-
ation then links us back to Adorno: “The care-burdened man in need has no
sense for the finest play,” a point that Marx illustrates through the example of
the dealer in minerals who “sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty
and the unique nature of the mineral.”150 From this perspective, if we assert
that in thinking through contextual politics musicology should refuse the
negation offered by play, this would not only indicate the seriousness of our
commitment, but would also bespeak of a certain identification with the nega-
tively underdeveloped contexts and social structures to which our thinking has
been conform—i.e., our misery.
What is useful about this line of thinking is that it offers a potential exit
from the conundrum of anticipation within dialectics and the not illogical re-
sistance it can create, such as in the pragmatic question as to why we should
give up the potential pittance of what we already have for the uncertainties of
some future without guarantee in which we might end up with nothing. For
145. Ibid., 222.

146. Adorno, “Resignation,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. and
with a preface by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 293.
147. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29.
148. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 127.
149. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In The Marx-Engels Reader,
ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 89.
150. Ibid.

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play, which negates and so offers us the possibility of a future different from
what exists now, is at the same moment an authentic manifestation of that
something else now in the present. “All happiness is but a fragment of the en-
tire happiness men are denied, and are denied by themselves.”151 Play is not
merely instrumental, a means to another end, it is also just what it is; and so
again we come up against that Heiddegarian holographic split between praxis
and being. When Adorno enunciates unhappiness, it is as much for the happi-
ness of being able to enunciate as it is to formulate truth. The dancers on the
beach in Ibiza are not only euphoric because the sun rising over the horizon of
the Mediterranean is the promise of better things to come; they do not keep
returning, as many do, simply because that time is still not yet, and thus there
is still more dancing work to be done. Thankfully they are not, in my experi-
ence of myself, so generous. The fact that so much of the music played in the
clubs there is pervaded by messages of hope and various transformations, both
in words and sound, of the “dawn-of-a-new-day” leitmotif, is as much a pro-
ductive decoy as the somewhat simplistic slogans of a utopian political praxis.
As such it is therefore again a place where dancing is a form of love; love for
dancing itself. For as Žižek puts it, “The underlying paradox is that love, pre-
cisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal—it should retain
the status of a byproduct, of something we get as an undeserved grace.”152
Play is done in the name of the future through a move toward self-
enclosing itself within the fact of its present play; the negation of contextual
politics is instigated by the name of the political future of musicology but
functions only through a love for the present moment of negation itself. So
the final dialectical twist is that the potential problem with contextual politics
is not just that it does not open itself up to the possibility of something else,
but rather that it does not trust itself enough to turn its back for a moment on
the future it has already decided upon and in whose reflection its identity has
been uncomfortably fixed—as Lacan reminds us, Narcissus does not survive
well his encounter with the mirror.153 And so not only can contextual politics
neither play nor work properly politically at this present historical moment;
more fatally, it perhaps cannot know. Of course, there is always the risk of a
narcissistic wounding when one steps from the unfocused intoxications of the
bar out onto the vertiginous exposure of the dance floor itself. But unless you
dance, you cannot know what you might be when you are dancing.
151. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 404.
152. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 19.
153. In the essay on the mirror-stage, Lacan observes that accompanying the child’s erotic at-
tachment to the imago of its ego is a potential aggressivity towards that image, for the child can
never be fully consummated with the image and so the truth of its ego can never be fully secured:
“The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in
Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 3–9.

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Music After All 193
Part 3: Rest
With a severity that I find attractive, Hooper has put the contemporary musi-
cological notion of responsibility into focus as follows:
It would appear, then, that if those involved in the study of music are not sim-
ply indulging in what would ultimately represent a self-serving and selfish inter-
est (or hobby)—whose institutionalization merely serves as an indirect means
of acquiring an iniquitous share of the collective wealth—then the study of
music as an institutionalized discourse may well require a first-order political or
ethical justification; and one that penetrates beneath the superficial vicissitudes
of meta-discursive debate.154
Writing this conclusion, as I am, with news of the crash of global economic
markets thundering in close proximity and with the future of the state educa-
tion system in which I am employed decidedly unclear and shaky, Hooper’s
words make perhaps more specific sense and are borne forth by a stronger po-
litical force than originally intended. One suspects that musicology will indeed
be required to justify its existence on a frequent basis in the inevitably leaner
years to come. Who knows, it may even be necessary for it to dissimulate, fre-
quently, flagrantly, in order to survive. Perhaps it will need to have formulated
and memorized its own self-validations and be prepared to spit them out with
the articulate rhetorical fury that straightened circumstances have been known
to inspire in those caught in them. Indeed, for musicology, all this may well
come to fruition.
But before we all dash off to get ready for battle maybe we could pause
one final moment to reflect. Asked why he had not taken on the mantle of
Althusserian Marxism when it had seemed pressing that it be acknowledged
widely as the predominant political force in the French university, Derrida
replied “I believed I had slower but also more urgent things to do.”155 The ur-
gency of our times makes it seem imperative that we should move faster, but I
think that within our own work in the university itself, we should take the risk
of going slower while the possibility still exists. After all, as Derrida frequently
emphasized, the university is indeed one of the homes in which questions
might dwell, and so we should fight to preserve the possibility of its continu-
ance at all costs against the pervasive injunctions of instrumentality. And so
maybe, out of respect, we might bow to a convention of certain narratives and
slow down at this moment of potential departure. After all, important under-
standings have been known to be found at the moment of farewell.
What is problematic with upping the political ante in the way that Hooper’s
remarks do is that it risks masking an assumption that I find debatable: is it true

155. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. and trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 166.

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that without a “first-order political or ethical justification” musicological prac-

tices are therefore merely decadent hobbies, self-serving and self-interested?
As I have tried to illustrate with regard to contextual politics, within musicol-
ogy itself the very presence of a justification can easily function to mask either
a self interest, or the extra-disciplinary political inefficacy of those ideas—
whose ability to function broadly, the politics of musicology asserts, is proven
by the fact that they seem appropriate for musicology itself. Again, I cannot
emphasize too strongly, this politics has indeed often been remarkably produc-
tive for musicology. Nevertheless, when it assumes a direct correlation be-
tween musicological particularity and political universality, contemporary
musicological discourse not only contradicts its own sometimes tautological
insistence on particularity for the sake of particularity itself, but neutralizes
how particularity can be meaningful in a dialectically mediated contrast to uni-
versality. To throw particularity into the gnashing teeth of the universal is, as
Part 1 of this essay sought to illustrate, a necessary critical gesture. However,
merely to conflate particularity and universality, basically through a kind of mi-
crocosmic logic, comes with the affective risks of both the overly optimistic
and the too-easily melancholic. Even though, like Ariel caught by Sycorax in
the cruel indifference of the growing tree, the threads of the web can pass di-
rectly through and torturously interweave themselves amidst the sinews of life
itself, there is still Ariel. And so, like music, there is musicology after all—split
into a double focus of praxis and being, both work and play, Parts 1 and 2.
Musicology is a public site of contestations; yet it is also a secret late-night
dance gracefully performed in the numerous separate clearings that make up
that constellation of lonely desk lamps amidst the darkness.
Of course, the urgency of the kinds of political issues I was outlining in
Part 1 may accumulate such speed, get caught up so much in their own dance,
that they literally propel themselves out of the musicological environment in
which they had initially lain dormant. The dance of politics may, in the best
sense, simply negate some musicologists into taking up political work per se,
leaving musicology itself behind to share a smoke with Music, should she be
paying attention. Famous examples from other arenas would include Noam
Chomsky, who, though often speaking of the sadness of having had to have
put linguistics to the side, nevertheless has taken his political dance all over the
world. Or consider Arundhati Roy, whose astonishing first novel, The God of
Small Things, won the Man Booker prize, but who, expressing a similar
melancholy yearning for literature and writing, has nevertheless remained con-
sistently involved in political activism ever since. But politics is not the only
dance, and I think we should be at least cautious of assuming that musicology
must be that dance; that there must always be just one dance, musicology as
politics, as opposed to the possibility of two. After all, a waltz might confuse its
steps by trying to be a march, and, as I mentioned before, bad dancing can
disturb us by making us witness how easily we can convince ourselves that we
have enacted a transformation when we are, in fact, about to fall over. I am not

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Music After All 195
saying that there have not or cannot be moments of a sudden productive syn-
thesis, but I confess that a blasphemous part of me simply believes that the
kinds of problems we repeatedly encounter today are of such un-precedented
interconnected magnitude that it is simply a little delusional and potentially
highly unproductive to assume that we can guarantee such syntheses are
occurring in our work. To remain consistent with the assumption of a radical
dialectical variability in things—the one constant stretching across Parts 1 and
2 of this essay—I have to at least suggest the possibility that in just the same
way that support for “the music itself ” in the 1990s could be lambasted as a
form of escapism (often with great sophistication and erudition156), then so
too can the politics of musicology and its own seductions. Against injunctions
that there should be only one (a synthesis of musicology and politics), there
thus seems to be a profound need for the preservation of the space where the
two (musicology and politics) can be at rest within their own respective move-
ments. On the one hand, this would unclutter the doorway that can lead us
unambiguously to clearly defined political work. As a result, it would stop us
from getting embroiled in the sometimes convoluted and self-conscious polit-
ical justifications for musicology that can make us look disingenuous and
somewhat decadent when we are questioned by those doing political work
who are maybe genuinely confused by our claims. (This, at least, has been my
experience of times in my own political activities when I have tried to link
musicology and politics clearly together for others.) On the other hand, and
more importantly, the invocation of two, both musicology and politics, would
potentially preserve the possibility of a certain kind of home, which, unlike
politics—characterized as it has to be by the attempt to make a preformed
answer manifest itself in the world—is a place in which potentiality itself
dwells: a fixed formed space in which, nevertheless, a different movement, as
yet unknown, can come into being.
Musicology, in short, could be like music—a space where the possibility of
something unexpected is allowed—precisely by not deciding in advance what
is to be achieved. In this regard, I am reminded of Daniel Barenboim and the
late Edward Said’s East/West Divan orchestra project.157 The orchestra was
set up to allow musicians from Israel and other countries in the Middle East to
perform together. As a result, it necessitated that people commonly kept apart
by their extreme political divisions and even potential mutual loathing of each
other would come into contact. Barenboim has been adamant that the project
was not conceived under the aegis of some kind of idea—for example, the
Romantic notion that music brings people together and so will, by definition,
resolve political and cultural conflicts. In fact, Barenboim asserts that “I
156. For example, see Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” in Cook
and Everist, Rethinking Music, 471–98.
157. The ethical and intersubjective import of this example has also been discussed in
Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 405 and passim.

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believe in cultural matters—with literature and, even better, with music, because
it doesn’t have to do with explicit ideas.”158 Nevertheless, Said and Barenboim
have noted that engagement with the kinds of endless questions that are raised
by the performance of the music itself creates a space in which potential antag-
onists find themselves collaborating with each other. The music, momentarily,
negates their usual ideological interpolations. It allows a certain space to open
up, one with potential political repercussions. But this is done only thanks to
the pleasurable lure of an activity that is simply not political activity per se.
And so likewise, could not musicology open up as-of-yet unforeseen politi-
cal inscriptions between itself and the world by not insisting on its political
outcome? Might not musicology, like the East/West Divan orchestra, be such
a home? Is this not the reason why, contrary to Hooper’s intimation of self-
indulgence, many musicologists have made their lives much more complicated
and displaced than they might have been—moveable labor that we are? Have
we not made the possibilities of home as normally understood more difficult
precisely for the possibility of the home that the work itself provides? After all,
if it is not too arrogant to make the following assumption, what probably got
most of us into the profession of academic study of music in the first place was
not just music. Those who enter the profession for such a reason tend to leave
when they realize that there is something else involved, even though that
something, contrary to pro forma complaints of the moribund quality of
scholarly pursuits in comparison with the force of life that is music itself, is far
from unrelated to music or without life, as my discussion of dance, thought,
and play hopefully showed. Unless one is just wasting one’s time and was de-
luded enough to get into musicology for the money (why not be a lawyer,
study for less time and make more money more quickly?); or, obscenely,
one secretly hoped to use knowledge as a form of domination and self-
aggrandizement (why not enter politics and dominate more brutally and with
a bigger audience?); then the lure was most likely the possibility of a life ori-
ented around the excitations produced from the activity in and of itself rather
than with a life that was a means toward some other selfless end, for the good
of historical truth, or some such. At one time musicologists are exposed to a
moment when life is play rather than work. And as the obsessive activity of
artists attests, the picture that that invokes for us is of no life of indolence. For
some, perhaps, this is a flimsy flicker of a thing to build a home around. Fair
enough. There is no assertion here that the world would be a better place if
everyone were an academic. However, there is the absolute insistence that this
possibility in academia should be preserved—because it is in precisely these
kinds of places, in music, or in musicological play, that that which is not yet
known might find its home.
As I suggested at the beginning of Part 2, there is an urgent need for cer-
tain musicological discourses to go more slowly with regard to the political
158. Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and
Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 11.

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Music After All 197
values they circulate. At this particular moment, if musicological work does as-
sert that it should politically justify itself, then it should probably take time out
from the labor of linking its politics to musicological activity and labor to think
through the politics themselves. That might indeed lead some toward accept-
ing the full force of the political injunction, but that is a question of who gets
productively caught up into what. After all, everyone ultimately has to choose
their own dance. There is also a great urgency that we resist the temptation of
too quickly inscribing what we deem to be the political validity of our work
too far within the material itself—particularly since what commonly consti-
tutes political validity in the discipline no longer seems completely valid. At
this moment, too overbearing a sense of certainty and identification with how
a musicological project can function politically threatens to delimit severely
what musicologists will let themselves see; through an overinsistence on telling
us how we should respond, it may even circumscribe the possibility of being
taken unawares by something in the music that might be politically more
effective. Of course, at this historical moment, political work per se absolutely
must convince us to sign up to what it claims it will achieve; it must show us a
piece of equipment and tells us how it is to be used. The Democratic Party’s
failure to do this in 2004, for example, cost them the election—assuming, that
is, that the voting equipment worked properly and they did not actually win.
However, whether musicology should behave likewise now seems far from
clear, and so perhaps, pace Hooper, we should interpret intimations of musi-
cology’s lack of political commitment positively rather than as an indulgence.
In other words, we should find in them signs of musicology’s potential as a
piece of equipment, radically variable, both at work and at play . . . like music,
after all. Of course, musicology may just be a comfy cushion, and as we have
seen, a cushion does not function particularly well as a sword. But it might
work exceedingly well as a means of slowly suffocating an enemy.
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128.151.124.135 on Sun, 03 May 2020 13:51:04 UTC
Music After All 203
Abstract
For musicologists in the postmodern academy, the notion of context wields

great force, both as a hermeneutic tool and as a meeting ground for a set of
political beliefs that enable scholars to justify the meaning and relevance of
their work. Primarily, this ideology is constituted by identity politics, the poli-
tics of difference and alterity, and the politics of locality and particularity. While
acknowledging that musicological acts of cultural and historical contextualiza-
tion per se are powerful means of illuminating cultural products, this essay
nevertheless seeks, in its first half, to raise a set of questions regarding the effi-
cacy of the accompanying political ideology within the pervasively unstable
and dialectically totalized world of the early twenty-first century. Drawing ex-
tensively on the writings of the Slovenian cultural critic and theorist Slavoj
Žižek and the French philosopher Alain Badiou, I argue that increasingly any
localized context must be understood to be cut across by a kind of traumatic
universalism that is, predominantly, economic in orientation.
The second part of the essay, however, turns in a different direction and ar-
gues that the route out of musicology’s present political contradictions may
lie not so much in the project of attempting once more to synthesize musico-
logical and political practices into one, but rather through affirming the im-
port of two (both musicology and politics, and music and politics). Through
recourse to three theoretical discourses (into Heidegger, Hegel, and aspects
of the Marxist tradition), the essay revisits the notion of musical autonomy,
rescripting it—through an extensive analogy with dance—into a site where
something unknown might manifest itself. Although it is acknowledged that
this kind of site, strategically placed, might function effectively politically, it is
nevertheless asserted that it is of sufficient import, in and of itself, to be pre-
served and nurtured, and that musicology in the academy is one of the privi-
leged locations for where that might happen.
Keywords: Slavoj Žižek; Alain Badiou; music and context; postmodern politics
and music; negation, play, and dance

128.151.124.135 on Sun, 03 May 2020 13:51:04 UTC

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Music After All

Author(s): James Currie

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For Andrea Spain, who says yes (and so no)

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were writing music “often during tumultuous times.” These “tumultuous

1. For example, Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical

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an important educational show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS

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of democratic cosmopolitanism.6 The tenor of our times, however, seems

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Musicology has continued to consider numerous traditional sites as it con-

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Giles Hooper has referred to as “an untenable reductionism” produced

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and comfortable, and sometimes to the enormous percentage of those who

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Ultimately, I argue that in comparison with the plurality of contextual

26. Bohlman, “Musicology as a Political Act,” 436.

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what can be admitted to exist (now, or as an acknowledged citizen of history),

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longer dealing with one central antagonism, but a plurality of antagonisms.

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charged with the tendency to negate history, to hypostatize categories in such

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Where might musicology’s contextual politics be vulnerable to getting

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all its difference is fundamentally wrong(ed), then difference itself cannot by

46. Ibid., 107.

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51. Long, “Singing Through the Looking Glass,” 256.

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socially and politically through dialogue and consensus-forming and so risk

He concludes: “Become like me and I will respect your difference.”58

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Taking this kind of perspective on board creates tangible repercussions for

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Of course, there are profound differences between these traditions, but I am

61. Martin Scherzinger, “Negotiating the Music-Theory/African-Music Nexus: A Political

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negation within the inherently metaphysical tendencies of written discourse.

67. Žižek, Violence, 132.

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70. Žižek, Violence, 156.

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72. Korsyn, Decentering Music, 176.

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77. Williams, Constructing Musicology, 119.

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game in town.”80 The reconsideration of socialist politics and Marxist theory