Privacy And Pleasure: Edward Said on Music

Dan Miller

North Carolina State University
<dcmeg@ncsuvm>

 

Said, Edward W. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 109 pp. $19.95.

 

Edward Said’s 1989 Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine, published as Musical Elaborations, are meditations on classical music in the Western tradition. They confront a sharp antinomy: on one hand, music is an intensely solitary and subjective experience for the performer or listener; on the other hand, music is also public occurrence, fully implicated in the social and cultural world. Said sets out to resolve the antinomy; he intends to show that, however private the experience of music may seem, it never escapes social context and functions. But as Said pursues that resolution, difficulties arise. He often moves from the private to the public dimensions by modulations that are themselves more musical than logical. Some of the most assured passages in the book assert the solitary, not the social, pleasures and powers of music. Said is often more successful at describing the ways in music eludes social appropriation than he is at demonstrating how it serves social ends. As a result, the argument of Musical Elaborations is strangely, powerfully at odds with itself: it wants to hold that classical music is a fully social enterprise, but it cannot help celebrating music in solitude. But while these lectures tend to undermine their own conclusions, they also succeed in a way that Said did not intend. His case for the socially determined nature of music actually serves to diagnose weaknesses in current, socially-oriented cultural analysis.

 

Musical Elaborations is a richly varied book. It mixes theoretical speculations in both musicology and literary theory with autobiography. Foucault and Adorno mingle with Brahms and Wagner. Music criticism, sometimes technical and sometimes impressionistic, joins with literary criticism, and both intertwine with narrative and remembrance. These are personal essays, loose in structure, unapologetic in their subjectivity. While Said calls himself an amateur in musicology, he is clearly among the most expert amateurs. His columns on music have appeared for several years in The Nation, and, as he delivered these lectures, he played brief passages on the piano to illustrate his points.

 

At issue throughout the book is the postmodern insistence, exemplified by Foucault, on the social construction of art and individuality. Ostensibly nonrepresentational and highly formal, highly individualized in its composition and its performance, classical music offers the most challenging test case for social analysis. Said notes that music writing, governed by the assumption that classical music develops according to its own internal and formal logic, independently of social history, has been relatively untouched by recent developments in literary and cultural theory. His goal is to treat music as a cultural field and to see (or hear) music as always implicated in social distinctions and roles, in questions of national and regional identity, in its own institutions, in the dispositions of cultural power. For Said, music is marked by the fluidity of its affiliations: it always has a social setting and role, but settings and roles are always changing, always temporally and spatially variable. What Said calls the “transgressive” character of music–“that faculty music has to travel, to cross over, drift from place to place in a society, even though many institutions have sought to confine it” (xix)–is its ability constantly to re-affiliate itself and establish new connections. Music plays a central role in the constitution or, in a term Said borrows from Gramsci, “elaboration” of a social order, and as such it normally works to preserve social power and relations. But it does so through its transgressive ability to break from its social context and function in other contexts.

 

For Said, the essential, and most paradoxical, instance of music is the performance. Said points out repeatedly how rare moments of musical transcendence take place only in one of the most socially ritualized, unchanging, often stultifyingly conservative institutions imaginable: the concert itself, with its highly restricted performance repertory, with its absolute separation of roles (performers are not composers, listeners are usually not performers themselves, and composers are not performers, in part because they are, almost as a rule, dead), and with the long, specialized training of performers aimed at a level of sheer expertise far beyond ordinary musical abilities. Performance is an “extreme occasion,” an irreproducible event, divorced from normal life, highly ritualized and specialized, devoted to almost superhuman virtuosity. It is at once social and solitary: both performer and listeners are, when the performance succeeds, alone with the music, yet all are alone together, by virtue of the social institutions that make performance possible. Said recognizes that, in many ways, the modern concert represents a profound de-socialization of music since it rests upon a debilitating division of musical labor among performers, listeners, and composers. Yet, for Said, only at the moment of overpowering performance can music break out of the very social constraints that make it possible.

 

Said is fascinated by musicians who seek extreme control, who dominate both the music and the conditions of performance. While Said notes how appropriate Arturo Toscanini’s style was for an American broadcasting corporation intent on creating a mass audience for classical music, it is the rigorous logic of Toscanini’s musical vision that attracts Said’s attention: “What Toscanini seems to me to be doing . . . is trying to force into prominence, or perhaps enforce, the utterly contrary quality of the performance occasion, its total discontinuity with the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life” (20). In the music and career of Glenn Gould, Said finds again the power of discontinuity and the force of individual will effecting the break. In his “retirement” from public playing and withdrawal into exclusively filmed and recorded performance, Gould created “a sort of airless but pure performance enclave that in turn paradoxically kept reminding one of the very concert platform he had deserted” (23). As in Toscanini’s control, so in Gould’s almost mathematically precise fingering, Said discovers a world apart, almost redemptively divorced from normal life. Said notes that Gould’s ideals of “repose, detachment, isolation” (29) are symptoms of an art condemned to social marginality, yet Said is himself drawn to these ideals.

 

Said extols those moments–points of completion in a composer’s musical evolution, times of mastery in performance, instants of complete absorption in listening–when nothing else but music in its purity remains. And at those moments, music breaks free of the social field: there are “a relatively rare number of works making (or trying to make) their claims entirely as music, free of the many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially tyrannical pressures that have limited musicians to their customary social role as upholders of things as they are. I want to suggest that this handful of works expresses a very eccentric kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by uncommon, perhaps even excessive, displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render music socially superfluous and useless–to discharge it completely–but to recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act of freedom” (71). Said’s cases in point are interesting: Webern’s Variations, Bach’s “Canonic Variations,” and a work that normally seems immersed in cultural context and value, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. Absolute virtuosity, rigorous musical development (though variations and elaborations), “pure musicality in a social space off the edge” (72) that is hardly still social at all–these represent escape and freedom. There is, Said allows, some truth to the Romantic view “that music to a consummate musician possesses a separate status and place . . . that is occasionally revealed but more often withheld” (xix-xx).

 

While much of Musical Elaborations is an argument against Theodor Adorno and the view that modern music, exemplified by Schoenberg, represents a fatal rift between culture and society, Michel Foucault makes his presence felt throughout the book. Said acknowledges the Foucauldian nightmare of a social order shaped and dominated by power even in its apparently most secret and individual recesses, producing opposition only to manage and contain it. Yet here, as in other books and essays, Said works toward a social vision that allows real possibilities of change and some degree of escape. For Said, both Foucault and Adorno are guilty of a totalizing theory does little to contest the totalizing society it confronts. “No social system,” Said writes, “no historical vision, no theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives or practices that exist within its domain. There is always the possibility to transgress” (55). Even Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, epitome of musical elaborating a social order, contains its own transgression: “Read and heard for the bristling, tremendously energetic power of alternatives to its own affirmative proclamations about the greatness of German art and culture, Die Meistersinger cannot really be reduced to the nationalist ideology of its final strophes stress” (61). Music itself is the last and best hope, it seems, for transgression.

 

The extraordinary performance, the virtuoso as master, the singular event and individual, absolute music, the moment of complete transgression–these are the motifs of Romanticism, musicological idealism, and individualist aesthetics, exactly the targets of Said’s polemic. Said confesses that the language of idealism tinges these lectures, but he never acknowledges the degree to which the book is divided against itself:

 

Let the word "melody" . . . serve as a name both for an actual melody and for any other musical element that acts in or beneath the lines of a particular body of music to attach that music to the privacy of a listener's, performer's, or composer's experience. Here I want to emphasize privacy and pleasure, both of them replete with the historical and ideological residue of that bourgeois individuation now either discredited or fully under attack. (96)

 

For Said, there is no music without melody, that intensely particularized utterance that is “authorial signature” (95)–even of a composer for whom melody in the normal sense is not primary–and mark of all that is least social and most a departure from the cultural field. Even Glenn Gould, archly anti-Romantic in style and repertory, is, as Said describes him–the eccentric genius who turns his back on the world and any trace of normal life, who constructs for himself a life of pure art and, in so doing, creates (and destroys) himself–a perfect instance of late Romanticism. Musical Elaborations is clearly not a defense of individualist aesthetics, but it does suggest that much of the traditional language of music’s (and perhaps, by extension, art’s) inwardness, autonomy, originality, and uniqueness cannot be jettisoned without substantial loss. Said’s recourse to idealism, in an intellectual climate (created in large part by Said himself) dominated by programmatic anti-idealism, indicates something more interesting and powerful than a lapse in logic. The postmodern vocabulary may allow Said no language to describe musical interiority other than traditional Romanticism, even though what he strives to say may no longer be Romantic.

 

Said begins his third chapter, “Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation,” by invoking Proust’s remembrances of music past and of memories brought to life by music:

 

Proust's recurrences inevitably point away from the public aspects of an occasion--sitting in a concert hall or salon, for instance--to its private possibilities; for example, the recollection, often shared, often lonely, of pains, anguish, bodies, miscellaneous as well as musical sounds, and so on. I find this characteristic tendency in Proust very moving, obviously because in its poignancy and psychological richness it has helped me to comprehend a great deal about my own experiences of music, experiences that seem to me like an unceasing shuttle between playing and listening privately for myself and playing and listening in a social setting, a setting whose constraints and often harsh limitations . . . only suddenly and very rarely produce so novel, so intense, so individualized, and so irreducible an experience of music as to make it possible for one to see in it a lot of its richness and complexity almost for the first time. (76)

 

He recounts how hearing Alfred Brendel play Brahms’ “Theme with Variations for Piano” led him, through a complex, apparently private and idiosyncratic course of associations, to other music (theme-and-variation pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Elgar), to other performances and versions of the same music (including part of a Louis Malle film score), to comparable musical effects (in Schumann, Wagner, Strauss), finally to “the voice and even the pianistic gestures of an old teacher, Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had come to Egypt (which is where I met him in the 1950s), after he had discovered the impending portent of fascism for him as a European musician and performer during the 1930s,” to his playing of a Brahms concerto, and then to “a whole tradition of teaching and playing that entered into and formed my relationship with Tiegerman, as it must have between him and his colleagues and friends in Europe” (90-91).

 

There is an obvious point about this narrative, but it is one that Said never quite makes. The most moving private moment has shown itself to be fully social, though not social in the way Said has been using that term. Throughout the book, Said treats public and private, solitary and social, as simple, polar opposites. Inwardness and musical meditation are, almost by definition, non-social, anti-social. But his own story demonstrates that seemingly private experience is social at its heart. Even at the instant of greatest isolation and involvement, it is exactly the music of another being heard. Music here illustrates an extreme sociality, where self and other are so intimately tied and interwoven that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. In addition, the most private inevitably reveals itself as the most social and the most painfully historical (the story of Ignace Tiegerman resonates with Said’s references, elsewhere in the book, to the Palestinian dispossession and the role played in it by elements of European fascism). Said resolves the antinomy of public and private not in the way he had intended, through analysis of musical institutions and settings, but exactly where it seemed a resolution was least likely to be found, in what seemed to be pure inwardness and formal pleasure.

 

Pushed to an extreme, “public” and “private” are no longer opposites. If we attend to what Said’s discussion actually shows, rather than what it asserts, we see that the tension between public and private remains, even as both are, in effect, different inflections of the social. Here social forces are refracted through individual experience and, unlike the obviously institutional dimensions of the concert, are powerfully interior. It is far from clear what sort of social analysis could genuinely illuminate the domain of inwardness, but Said has at least suggested the poverty of a postmodernism incapable of accounting for privacy and musical pleasure. If our concern, after Foucault, is with what is genuinely transgressive, then music and interiority and a certain kind of individualism cannot be discounted. Of course, what kind of individualism makes a considerable difference. There is a great difference between holding the individual and private experience are of value because they transcend social determinations and because they represent the complexity, hence the variability, of social structures. And the same holds true when the private experience is that of an artwork, musical or literary.