‘Effing the Ineffable’:¹ The Work of Susan McClary and Richard Leppert and (Part of) their Legacy

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Notes

¹ Susan McClary, ‘Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-Century French Music’, Echo 2/2 (2000), para. 30. Quoted in Musicological Identities, ed. Baur, Knapp and Warwick, xix.

² See Joseph Kerman, ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’, Critical Inquiry 7/2 (1980), 311–31; and Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana Press: Collins, 1985; also published in the United States as Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology). For more on this moment in time, see, for example, Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 4ff. McClary describes Kerman as ‘the godfather of us all’: Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, Bloch Lectures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 2.

³ Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, 5.

⁴ Richard Taruskin, ‘Material Gains: Assessing Susan McClary’, Music and Letters 90/3 (2009), 258. Subotnik was also a participant at the highly significant conference organized by Leppert and McClary: see McClary, Reading Music, xi; and Leppert, Sound Judgment, xii.

⁵ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 258.

⁶ Those two titles are part of the series Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology, which also includes volumes devoted to the writings of Lawrence Kramer, Gary Tomlinson, Simon Frith and Nicholas Cook.

⁷ For example, in 1992 Georgina Born commented, in her review of McClary's landmark title Feminine Endings: ‘She has become, in the USA, the accepted face, and (reluctantly) a star, of feminist musicology and music criticism. I say this without meaning to demean this role: it is inevitable. McClary has been one of the crucial means whereby feminist music scholarship has gained an audience and institutional support (even if limited) from within mainstream musicology’. Georgina Born, ‘Women, Music, Politics, Difference: Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality’, Women: A Cultural Review 3/1 (1992), 79.

⁸ See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Richard D. Leppert and Susan H. Gillespie, Essays on Music (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2002).

⁹ See, for example, Richard D. Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

¹⁰Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception ed. Richard D. Leppert and Susan McClary, 1st paperback ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

¹¹ Susan McClary, ‘The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year’, in Music and Society, ed. Leppert and McClary, 13–62.

¹² I remember McClary at the Musicological Society of Australia conference in Melbourne in the mid-1990s dancing in her keynote to the music of Prince. It induced mixed and powerful, memorable feelings for me—I squirmed in squeamishness—but there was also the sense of a secret, semi-guilty coveting. Was it okay, now, to respond to music in such a whole-body manner?! Could one actually get in touch with one's hormonal and automatic nervous systems when contemplating the interpretation of music?!

¹³ For more on the ideology supporting Schenkerian analysis and the works to which it is applicable, see Kerman, ‘How We Got into Analysis’.

¹⁴ Taruskin comments that as ‘ten of its seventeen contributors members and products of McClary's home department, it could be read as a window on l'école UCLA, and there can be little doubt that the UCLA musicology department has been recreated in the image of McClary’. But he also acknowledges that the other seven contributions, ‘mainly by old comrades-in-arms, also typify today's musicology in sharp contrast to how they would have looked twenty years ago’. Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 456.

¹⁵ Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, 5.

¹⁶ Theo Van Leeuwen, ‘A Material Girl in Bluebeard's Castle (Review of Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality)’, Social Semiotics 2/1 (1992), 196.

¹⁷ Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Harvard, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

¹⁸ Rose Rosengard Subotnik, ‘The Role of Ideology in the Study of Western Music’, Journal of Musicology 2 (Winter 1983), 1–12. The conference was the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, in Bloomington, Indiana, 1980.

¹⁹ Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translation of Bruits: Essai Sur L'économie Politique De La Musique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Susan McClary, ‘Afterword: The Politics of Silence and Sound’, in Attali, Noise, 149–58.

²⁰ Catherine Clément, Opera, or, the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

²¹ Susan McClary, ‘Foreword: The Undoing of Opera’, in Opera, or, the Undoing of Women, ed. Clément, ix–xviii.

²² He quotes himself here from Richard D. Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology, and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England, 1st paperback ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, [1988] 1993), 3.

²³ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 458. Also see McClary, Reading Music, xi; and Leppert, Sound Judgment, xii.

²⁴ A seminar at Leppert's course in his postgraduate days gave the sole task of labelling ‘every vertical note concurrence, movement by movement [of Bartók's six quartets]. That's all. Six miniature scores with pencil marks under each beat. That was Bartók. Nothing—nothing—else’. Leppert, Sound Judgment, x.

²⁵ Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4.

²⁶ Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, 5.

²⁷ Kevin Ernest Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15. See Pieter Van den Toorn, Music, Politics and the Academy (London: University of California Press, 1995). Also see Peter Van Den Toorn, ‘Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory’, Journal of Musicology 9/3 (1991), 275–99. For a response, see Ruth A. Solie, ‘What Do Feminists Want? A Reply to Pieter Van Den Toorn’, The Journal of Musicology 9/4 (1991), 399–410.

²⁸ Korsyn, Decentering Music, 15.

²⁹ Cited in Rian Samuel, ‘Feminist Musicology: Endings or Beginnings?’, Women: A Cultural Review 3/1 (1992), 65.

³⁰ Craig Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Forster (New York: New Press, [1989] 2002), 61.

³¹ Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ‘Chapter 2: Authors’, 58). Felski adds, echoing McClary: ‘Threatened by the dramatic upsurge of interest in writing by women, these scholars were trying to sabotage feminist criticism by discrediting one of its guiding concepts’ (p. 58). Not all feminists agreed on this matter, however, which Felski acknowledges and then goes on to describe other than the either/or situation of ‘the truth of authorship or the death of the author’, a ‘third feminist approach to authorship that is steadily gaining round’ (p. 59). Also see Sally Macarthur, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music (Farnham, UK and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 98–106.

³² Born, ‘Women, Music, Politics, Difference’, 80. Born concludes here that McClary's ‘postmodern best’ is exhibited in McClary, ‘Afterword’. More recently, see McClary, ‘More Pomo Than Thou’, New Formations 66/1 (2009), 28–36.

³³ I was a little disappointed not to see one of my favourite Leppert texts in his collection here—Richard Leppert, ‘Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano’, 19th-Century Music 16/2 (Fall 1992), 105–28.

³⁴ Sally Macarthur provides a comprehensive list of derogatory reviews and responses to McClary. See Macarthur, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music, 100–1, n. 51.

³⁵ McClary wrote a personal note to Richard Taruskin in which she remarked ‘we're among the few comic writers in an otherwise grim and humorless discipline’, in response to which he ‘felt much complimented and well understood’ (Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 456); he also says that he and she are ‘even united in what I trust are resilient bonds of affection’ (ibid., 453).

³⁶ Even if of a fifteen-page piece, two-thirds are more fault-finding than accolade-offering.

³⁷ Susan McClary, ‘Review of Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music’, Music and Letters 87/3 (August 2006), 408–15; and Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

³⁸ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 461.

³⁹ McClary, ‘Blasphemy’, 53, in McClary, Reading Music, 459.

⁴⁰Ibid., 459.

⁴¹Ibid., 459.

⁴²Ibid., 459.

⁴³Ibid., 459–60. James R. Currie makes a similar point regarding the New Musicology, which, he says, replicates ‘the structural dynamics of the very object that it nearly always rejects in order to validate itself’. James R. Currie, Music and the Politics of Negation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), x. Also see my review of this book in Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association: Vol. 71. No. 1. Sept. (2014): 114–116.

⁴⁴ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 460; emphasis added.

⁴⁵ Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 764–5. Also see Richard Taruskin, ‘Orff's Musical and Moral Failings’, New York Times (6 May 2001) (accessed 28 January 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/arts/music-orff-s-musical-and-moral-failings.html.

⁴⁶ Quoted in Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 460.

⁴⁷Ibid., 460.

⁴⁸ Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–9.

⁴⁹ See, for instance, Felski, Literature after Feminism, 58; and Macarthur, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music, 98–106.

⁵⁰ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 462.

⁵¹Ibid., 461.

⁵²Ibid., 462.

⁵³ See McClary, Feminine Endings, Chapter 3: Sexual Politics in Classical Music.

⁵⁴ Earl Jr. Jackson, ‘Scandalous Subjects: Robert Glück's Embodied Narratives’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3/special issue, ‘Queer Theory’ (1992), xv, 118–19, quoted in McClary, Reading Music, 188, cited in Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 464.

⁵⁵ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 464.

⁵⁶Ibid.

⁵⁷ One of the most moving auto-ethnographical pieces I have read is a gay man's finding his sense of self-acceptance as a teenager through music—in this case, the second of Schubert's Moments Musicaux (in A-flat major) (the structure of which features what might be called ‘stretched’ thirds relationships [A-flat Major/F# Minor]). See Charles Fisk, ‘Schubertian Confidences’, GLSG Newsletter (Fall 2000), 4–7.

⁵⁸ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 464.

⁵⁹Ibid., 466. He exclaims over Leppert, ‘the Adorno man!’, writing a piece on Patsy Cline. Ibid.

⁶⁰Ibid., 453–4.

⁶¹Ibid., 466.

⁶² Michael W. Morse, ‘Twenty Years After: A Review Essay of Musicological Identities’, International Association for the Study of Popular Music (17 February 2009), http://www.iaspm.net/96/#1.

⁶³Ibid.

⁶⁴ Christopher Morris, ‘Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (Review)’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 4 (2008–09), 56.

⁶⁵ John Shepherd, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 65. Cited in Morris, ‘Musicological Identities (Review)’, 56.

⁶⁶ Morris, ‘Musicological Identities (Review)’, 56.

⁶⁷ Tom Solomon, ‘Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (Book Review)’, Popular Music 31/3 (October 2012), 511.

⁶⁸ For more of these, see Musicological Identities, ed. Baur, Knapp and Warwick, xx.

⁶⁹ Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Review: Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music by Susan McClary’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66/2 (Summer 2010), 556. Cusick writes: ‘However the expert readers of this journal might feel about it, I know that the code-switching, pop references, and nonspecialist identifications would appeal to my dean, a neurobiologist with vast knowledge of blues-based musics but almost none of Bach, much less Cavalli or D'Anglebert. This book will help deans like him understand what historical musicologists do and why it matters’ (p. 560). See Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

⁷⁰ Taruskin, ‘Material Gains’, 467.

⁷¹ And who describes himself as one ‘who just as fervently as McClary has yearned and striven to expand the horizons of musicology’. Ibid., 457.

⁷² McClary, ‘Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-Century French Music’, para. 30, quoted in Musicological Identities, ed. Baur, Knapp and Warwick, xix.

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Linda Kouvaras

Linda Kouvaras, senior lecturer at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, is a musicologist, composer and pianist. She is a represented composer at the Australian Music Centre. She is also resident Faculty Coordinator and Tutor in Music at Ormond College, a piano examiner for the Australian Music Examinations Board, and she maintains a robust piano teaching studio. Her monograph Loading the Silence:Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (2013) is published by Ashgate. Email: [email protected] © 2014, Linda Kouvaras