Not long ago, I was editing the penultimate draft of the doctoral thesis of a very smart Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) student (a DMA is a doctorate in performance, usually given in the candidate’s performance specialty – in this case, it was violin. The degree is a nearly always uncomfortable, but occasionally fruitful, amalgam of intensive Conservatory-style performance training with an attempt at serious scholarship. It is usually awarded after a final recital given in tandem with a dissertation). At a certain point in the proceedings, I found myself writing to the candidate, ‘I recommend that you interrogate very carefully the phrase “personal expression” whenever you use it (or read it for that matter). It’s one of those vague phrases that too often serve to obscure meaning.’ It is, of course, also an extremely common phrase among practicing musicians. The candidate was using it pragmatically, as musicians do, to signal an entire complex of historically and culturally contingent, unstable ideas – all as if they were self-evident.
Perhaps James Davies’ new book will serve, finally, to put that term ‘expression’ into the same category with other similarly baggy and obfuscatory terms, to be rendered difficult if not impossible to use in academic prose, by the obligatory scare quotes: ‘musicality’, ‘talent’, ‘authenticity’, ‘tradition’.
As he puts it in the book’s Epilogue:
The dream of unmediated expression or authentic utterance was just that: a dream, founded on just another form of rhetoric, another set of conventions, other matters of musical concern, alternate political ideologies, and competing strategies of training. […] the age-old determination to wish the fact of mediation away. (182)
Across six chapters, Davies elaborates a series of dialogues between period medical literature, and the careers of a set of virtuosi – mostly pianists and vocalists – in the 1820s and 1830s in ‘the lucrative London–Paris musical circuit …’ (8). His objects of inquiry are, precisely, the hands and voices of those virtuosi. We learn frequently astonishing details of the bodies and careers of people like Giovanni Battista Velluti, ‘the last great operatic castrato’ (13), Frédéric Chopin, Niccolò Paganini, the sopranos Henriette Sontag and María Malibrán, the pianists Sigismund Thalberg and Friedrich Kalkbrenner, the tenors Domenico Donzelli and Adolphe Nourrit, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt. In addition to the musicians in question, we hear from a wonderful array of doctors and medical specialists; poets and novelists famous and not so famous; philosophes and philosophers; salonnières; instrument builders; entrepreneurs; authors of pamphlet literature; recording artists dead and living; thieves and scoundrels. All make cameo appearances.
Davies is a fabulous writer on the ‘surface’ level of managing language: vivid, gyrating, full of fascinating detail, always graceful. He is also a high-wire artist on the ‘deeper’ levels of narrative and argument. A favoured strategy is to begin with an anecdote – the further afield from his chapter’s ostensible purpose it appears, the better – and then wend his way amusingly, elaborately, richly, and with increasing momentum, towards his point.
And yet, that point proves curiously elusive in the end. A book about the hands and the voices of specific people at a specific time might seem to suffer from too narrow a focus. But ideas of both ‘hand’ and ‘voice’ shift, evaporate, and reappear throughout the book, flickering in and out of recognizability, never the same twice. The book’s large cast of historical characters is not just a dazzling, entertaining display of surplus erudition; it is a necessary tool for establishing one of the book’s main arguments, which is that human embodiment is never stable: it is constantly negotiated by embodied humans. In the nineteenth century, musicians were important participants in these negotiations, but by and large they neither controlled nor defined them.
Thus it is that this becomes a book-length deconstruction of more than just a tired old nonce-word like ‘expressionʼ; the hands and voices that are Davies’ objects have acquired implicit scare quotes by the end, and this is a rather unnerving experience for the reader. All that is solid melts into air. In this sense, despite the ‘Romantic’ in its title, I think the book could be usefully conceived as an exploration of the musical foundations of modernism.
Perhaps inevitably, as a stylist Davies skirts a mildly irritating breeziness at times (viz. the opening of Chapter 6) and he can sometimes be coy (parts of Chapter 2); but surely this is to be preferred to trudging. And it is worth pointing out that his is never the breeziness of carelessness. The proportion of the book’s main text to its notes attests to this: its six chapters add up to only 183 pages. The balance of the meticulously detailed endnotes, fascinating in themselves, to the main text is thus nearly 33%.
The book’s slightness, then, belies its density and its multivalence: it is a neat package. Inevitably, of course, I wish that there had been room for a somewhat broader, a frankly messier, approach at certain key points. Davies is perhaps a little more eager than he needs to be, to tie up loose ends, to have the last word.
I would like to have seen a little more time spent on the negotiations around ‘hand’ and ‘voice’ a couple of generations prior to the 1820s and 1830s (especially since a good argument can be made for locating ‘romanticism’ as beginning in approximately 1760). Farther afield, in the category of ‘I really hope some day Davies takes this on’, is the question of how the circulating, self-cancelling economies of embodiment he so beautifully evokes might have manifested around the world of classical ballet. The very period of which he writes was as formative and turbulent in that world as it was in instrumental music, and, I think, for some of the same reasons. Indeed, I think the scholarship that most closely resembles Davies’ work – in its ability to engage fruitfully with the historiographical problem of the elusive, evanescent performing body, though not in its style – is that of the dance scholar Susan Foster.
It is safe to say that this book will make quite an impact in musicology, Davies’ and my home discipline; in addition to raising the bar several notches on academic writing in our field, he is doing a fine job at asking new questions and turning older paradigms of investigation inside out. As he puts it in his Introduction, and subsequently realizes it in the ensuing chapters:
I want to go one step further and ask what it would mean, not to define voices and hands as mere instruments for music, but to turn the tables: to define ‘music’ instead as an instrument for the induction, even acquisition, of hands and voices. I want to assume an avowedly realist stance and ask how bodies are acquired as they are heard, trained, and performed. How does music act in the cultivation of bodies? (2)
It is harder to say whether the book will be much read in other fields, though it certainly should be: I think it would be of tremendous interest to historians of nineteenth-century Europe and England, in particular. Perhaps also to historians of medicine in that era. The book might not at first glance seem to have all that much to do with the field of sound studies, purview of this journal; but in its ready willingness to explode received categories around the study of music, Davies’ work certainly participates in a similar movement of thought. Dare we call it a groundswell?
In any case, I say to the musicology graduate students who will surely read this book: ‘Take note: here’s your man: thick description does not have to be turgid!’
Notes on contributor
Elisabeth Le Guin is Professor of Musicology in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Department of Musicology; founding member of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the Artaria String Quartet; author of Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology and The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain (2014); winner of the American Musicological Society’s Alfred Einstein Award and Noah Greenberg Award; and has received grant support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the University of California (UC) Presidents’ Research Fund, the Institute for International Education (Fulbright program), UCLA’s International Institute, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and United States Universities, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) California Consortium. Re-started UCLA′s long-defunct Early Music Ensemble in 2009, and has served two terms as Study Center Director for the UC Education Abroad Program in Mexico City.
Department of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, United States
[email protected]
© 2015 Elisabeth Le Guin
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079978