Torn Halves: Structure and Subjectivity in Analysis

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Torn Halves: Structure and Subjectivity in AnalysisAuthor(s): Alastair WilliamsSource: Music Analysis, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Oct., 1998), pp. 281-293Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/854417.

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ALASTAIR WILLIAMSTORN HALVES: TRUCTURE ND SUBJECTIVITYN ANALYSIS

The new musicology's 'discovery' that music is a contextual art is strikinglyironic when one considers that the most developed existing theory of modern-ism - Adorno's Aesthetic heory was written by a man fascinated by the inter-sections of music, sociology and philosophy.* Adorno's extensive legacy ofmusic criticism has, of course, always been a resource for German-speakingmusicologists, a community that has upbraided him both for doctrinaireHegelian Matsism and for championing bourgeois culture. Carl Dahlhaus, de-spite an interest in Adorno that extended throughout his career, charged himwith imposing a pre-formed philosophy of history onto music, while the hardleft accused him of defending elitist culture. lNor did Adorno's sociological decoding of music, which forms part of alarger study of modern subjectivity, endear him to an Anglo-American musi-cology in pursuit of philological certainty and quasi-scientiElcanalytical rigour.This discipline, with few exceptions, justiEled gnorance of Frankfurt criticaltheory by foregrounding an allegedly impenetrable style and by mutteringdarkly about Marxist ideology.2 It is signiElcant hat the new musicology takesits theoretical bearings largely from the discourses of post-structuralism andpostmodernism which have arisen, in the main, since Adorno's death in 1969.Once 'too speculative and subjective', now'too dogmatic and modernist',Adorno, it seems, is condemned to be permanently out of fashion.3Adorno's approach to musical understanding is in sympathy with analyticalaims, since it is structurally based; it is, though, more sensitive to particulari-ties than are standard analytical techniques, and it also seeks dialogue withother discourses. His strength lies in an ability to interpret the signifying prac-tices embedded in immanent structural shapes - that is, to release their ob-jectiEled ubjectivity. His weakrless- one shared with much analytical practice- is to underestimate, at least with regard to European art music, the range ofinstitutional practices and codes that contribute to musical meaning in a non-immanent sense. Well aware of the role played by these steering forces onpopular music, which he attacked for its lack of internal structural resistance,Adorno was blind to practices in which music is to be understood more as a* This paperwas presentedat the RoyalMusicalAssociationand Society for Music Analy-sis 'Adorno and Analysis'day held at the Universityof Bristol, 15 February 1997. I amgrateful o Alan Street for helpful comments on an earlierdraft.MusicAnalysis,7/iii (1998) 281


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site of cultural negotiation than as immanent structure. In terms of JurgenHabermas'sreworkingof the FrankfurtSchool's critique of instrumental rea-son, one would say that Adorno's critique of popular music fails to recogniselifeworldresistance to systemic dysfunctionality. His focus on truth contentemphasiseswhat art works are over what they do or have done to them. Eventhough Adorno's work on film music, like contemporary film theory, makesclear that music can participate in a wide web of signification, his theory ofinstrumentalreason tends to make him pessimistic about such possibilities.4Given Adorno's sensitivity to cultural manifestations of subjectivity, it issurprising that he is reluctant to recognise that the subjectivities conveyedby Western classical music are ethnically and geographically constructed -though, as mentioned below, he does startto tackle these themes in his Mahlercritique.Nevertheless, situatingclassicalmusic does not, as some of the crudermanifestations of postmodernism suggest, give cause to denigrate it. By mir-roring the notion that art music is value free, populist theory concludes that,when this belief is shattered, once-venerated texts are of no more significancethan other artefacts. This viewpoint certainly ruptures high art's protectiveshell and recognises that all cultural products deal with conventions and hu-man codes; but to situate, say, a Brahms symphony enables one not only toperceive it as a constructed artefact among many, it also encourages one tocontemplate it as an intriguingand beautiful codification of subjectivity,offer-ing aesthetic sustenance and worthyof reflection.Rose Rosengard Subotnik has argued that Adorno's stress on structurallistening works in tandem with his narrowcultural perspective, which refusesto see the co-ordinates of his own tradition as a construction instead of thecondition of music.5 In effect, she uses Adorno's own apparatusto show thatwhat he presents as an apparentlynaturalstate of affairsis historicallyderived,whatever his own preferences.Thus far, her argument is convincing, and itsuccessfully dismantles the claims of neutrality made on behalf of structurallistening. But structural listening is not alone in depending on an aestheticformation, nor is it substantiallyinvalidatedby this perspectivesince no modeof listening can claim to be value free. Adorno was certainly overlydismissiveof surface sonority and refused to countenance varied ways of listening, butmost of the repertoirehe discusses is illuminated by structuralanalysis.And,crucially,his materialistreadingof structureopens it to historically-configuredsubjectivity,though this frequently appears in abstract and congealed guises.Whatever its sedimentation, however, structure is still subjectivity,and Ador-no's greatness, as Subotnik acknowledges, lies in his willingness to decode,critique and interpret the social spaces forged in music. When one witnessesAdorno workingwithin the traditionfamiliarto him, one finds the ideology ofstructurallistening amply breached, with numerous border crossings betweenthe inside and outside of the text. He exposes the illusions of structuralclosure

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TORN HALVES: TRUCTURE ND SUBJECTIVITYN ANALYSIS 283and disinterested observation, while simultaneously defending autonomy,since it is within internal configurations that he detects social signification.Analysis and high modernismThe implication of Adorno's approach is that even the most formalist batteryof graphs and tables, or the most recondite pre-compositional diagram, repre-sents a mode of subjectivity,and that talk of a neutral level is a fiction (thoughit may be one worth indulging on a temporary and provisional basis). If, how-ever, we look at what Adorno has to say about structuralist composition in'The Ageing of the New Music', we find an unflattering picture of formalistsubjectivity.6In somewhat unspecific terms he accuses Darmstadt composersof hiding behind pre-fabricated material, of imagining that precompositionaldecision-making is a substitute for composition, and of creating a self-deludingcomplexity divorced from the density of experience: in short, of failing to un-derstand that objectivism represents an impoverishment of subjectivity. Suchcompositional ideology may elicit a commensurate analytical response, whichwould receive the same Adornian rebuke, or it may generate an analytical cri-tique which draws attention to the music's narrow stance, or a listener mayeven refuse to tackle the music on terms laid down by its theoretical environ-ment. Despite his own resistance, however, Adorno considers that high mod-ernist music is most likely to generate a response commensurate with itsaesthetic of production. The problem from Adorno's point of view is that highmodernist composition becomes an index of instrumental rationality, insteadof a vehicle for scrutinising and engaging it; and, by association, analyticaltechniques impose a one-dimensional concept of coherence on their objects.If, as is generally the case, the key analytical practices are understood to beSchenkerian theory and Fortean pitch-class set theory, it cannot be fortuitousthat both enjoyed their zenith during the heyday of structuralism. Schenkeriantheory was retrospective when first formulated and became doubly so in itsAmerican incarnation, while set theory applies principles derived from serialtechnique to earlier post-tonal repertoire. (My intention is not to condemn anon-synchronism between technique and repertoire, but to indicate the con-temporaneity of these techniques with a high modernist and structuralist age.)Schenkerian methodology, stripped of its metaphysical justification, relatessurface heterogeneity to deep structure, while set theory is openly derived frommathematical models. Such structuralism s both iconoclastic in not seeking toisolate art from an increasingly regulated world, and traditional in so far as itaccepts a narrow view of subjectivity as its startingpoint. Each approach alikeevinces a rationality that has bitten deep into areas once understood morepractically than cognitively.Nevertheless, while both shun a liberal humanistnotion of art as something inexplicable, both are also beguiled by an intensifi-MusicAnalysis,17/iii ( 1998) c Blachvell Publishers Ltd. 1998



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cationf the bourgeois notion of music as a unified whole, which subsumes itspartsnto a single spatial construct.Like classical structuralism as practised by

Claude Levi-Strauss, formalistanalysiseduces lived experience to underlying articulation.And just as Levi-Straussailed to contemplate that allegedly neutral deep structures might re-flectparticular interests, in the community of either the observer or theobserved,much analysishas workedunder the banner of disinterested univer-sality.f Adorno, too, tends to reduce the particularitiesof popular culture,especially,o underlying determinants, he is at least awarethat its codes aresocially onstructed, and the thrust of his own aesthetics pushes against lim-itedudgements that refuse to contemplate anythingmuch more than an auto-matedubjectivityin this realm.Yetif

Adorno condemns popular music as thecultural mbodiment of crushed subjectivity,structuralismfinds in the sub-ject'sabsence not an historical catastrophe, but a new objectivity.The prob-lemsencountered when theory tries to eliminate the subject are now familiar:inPeters Dews' words, the situation 'leads merely to the instatement of thesymbolicsystem itself, self-enacting and self-perpetuating, as a kind of meta-subject'7 a meta-subject that touches the steeringmechanisms of modernity,butahistoricises them to a naturalcondition. Ironically,John Cage's attemptstoremove the composing subject release the far-from-neutraldeterminants ofindustrialsociety. While music analysis, unlike John Cage, has not explicitlycelebratedthe end of the subject, its search for underlying invariance hasevokeda comparable meta-subjectivity.Adornian theory, by contrast, is quickto read nature and structure as history and culture, the embodiments of par-ticularsocial configurations.It is not surprising, then, that while acknowledging the subtlety of Schen-keriananalysis,and despite his haziness about some aspects of it, Adorno in hislecture on analysisshould fault it for reducingparticularsto generalisedstruc-tures;8indeed, this is the complaint he makes of all abstract conceptual sys-tems. Set theory also suffersdifficultieswith irreducibleconcrete statements inmusic that resist assimilation or reduction, and encounters some of the para-doxes characteristicof over-deterministcompositional schemes.The problemsgeneratedwhen zealous construction is imposed on music arewell known:theintended orderbecomes arbitrary,unable to control individualelements whichassert a life of their own. That severe structural control and extreme chanceprocedures map onto each other is exemplifiedby the parallelsbetween PierreBoulez's Structurea and John Cage'sMusicofChanges,oth highly determin-ist scores, one generated schematically,the other by aleatoric operations.9Settheory, where one event can be made equivalent to another or measurableagainstanother according to abstractcriteria,cannot immunise itself from thepotential for order to be perceived as arbitrary. n this sense, the technique isan application of the pervasivelogic of equivalenceand fungibilitycharacteris-

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TORNHALVES:TRUCTURENDSUBJECTIVITYNANALYSIS 285tic of advanced industrial societies, whose monitoring of detail produces ran-domness and indeterminacy because events are endlessly exchangeable.At itsmost automated, set theory mirrorsCage's aesthetic detachment. If it is honestenough not to shield music from technocratic reason,while responding to sty-listic diversity and to an increasing density of relationships, set theory is blindto the possibility that artmight constitute a criticalresponse to malfunctions ofthe lifeworldcaused by that same instrumentalreason.lArguing against Leo Treitler'scritique of analyticalobjectivism, Pieter vanden Toorn asserts that attention to music's structure reflects upon the imme-diacy of aural experience, and does not therefore constitute sterile positiv-ism.ll What he misses, however, is the sense that the object is congealedsubjectivity, that, to use Adornian terminology, immersion in the object is im-mersion in subjectivity. Berating socio-political commentary on music, vanden Toorn comments: 'Drawn more and more into the uses of the world, intoforms of ideological and personal-political manipulation, they [musical struc-tures] are less able to function as alternatives to those uses or to awaken acapacity for that alternative.'l2 In one sense, this is an Adornian argumentabout art offering some resistance to instrumentalrationality,but it misses therider that unless such configurations are understood as encoded subjectivity,then their ability to open reason to non-purposive goals will be lost. Indeed, itis unclear how a non-socialised art could supply a panacea to social dysfunc-tion.Van den Toorn perceives that a subject unwilling to follow the inner life ofmusic simply imposes his or her personal-political agenda on it, while criticalmusicology observes that a fetish of objectivismexcludes the contextual under-standing of music. Put in Adornian terminology, van den Toorn realises thatwithout identity, music is reduced to unbridled particularism,and his chosenopponents recognise that music's social codes cannot be reduced to abstractidentity.What he depicts as seemingly mutually incompatible positions are,however,presented as a dialectical tension within the status of autonomous artby Adornian aesthetics: autonomy is an illusion, but a productive one sinceart'sapparentclosure enables it to turn a dominant logic awayfrom its stand-ard channels.Though Adorno tips identity towards non-identity (the concepttowards the object) he resists collapsing the one into its other, thus espousingneither an all-embracing concept (objectivism) nor random particularism.Currentpositions offersome gains overAdornianmusicology,criticalmusicol-ogy showing greater awareness of the non-immanent framing of music, andvan denToorn employing more sophisticated analyticaltools in his close read-ings. Furthermore it is a tribute to the new musicology that such debates areforcing theorists, as never before, to theorise their own stance, instead of as-suming blithely that it is underpinned by a scientific foundation. Nevertheless,the debate between immanent and contextual approaches to music, as framedMusic Analysis, 17/iii ( 199 8) Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998



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286 ALASTAIRWILLIAMSby van den Toorn, is a good deal less developed than the position attained byAdorno decades earlier. If we are to move beyond Adornian aesthetics, it canonly be by drawing on its strengths.Modernist analysis and art suffer the same dialectical bind, a bind whichemerges from a situation, rather than from a taste for dialectics. On the onehand, analysis mimes an ever more pervasive form of rationality;on the otherhand, it can arise from empathy with an object and seeks to open the conceptto its Other. Because analysis is a discursive medium, however, it is more likelyto track the technical within art. Adorno had once toyed with the idea thatcompletely rationalised material would facilitate free and intuitive composi-tion.l3 A similar illusion informs the analytical notion that systematically pro-cessing the structural qualities of music will open it to direct perception. Ifanalysis is to turn to the Other, the criterion for success will be the questionAdorno brings to new music: does it emerge from the density of experience,from lifeworld formations, or is it held in thrall to a system-dominated subjec-

. .tlvlty?

Deciphering subjectivityBefore considering how analysis might deal with this dilemma, I shall considersome of Adorno's comments on Mahler, since the Mahler monograph in par-ticular contains some of Adorno's most sympathetic and effective discussionsof music. Here he writes from the experience of the music, advancing the per-spective of the educated rather than the specialist listener.14This is not to sug-gest that specialism will not add further insight, merely that music as signifyingpractice is not the exclusive realm of the expert. Nevertheless, Adorno's ear forinterruptions and inconsistencies is keener than most, his tracking of subjectiv-ity attuning him to inconsistencies that rub against the unity frequently soughtby analysis.l5As always, analysis for Adorno extends beyond the notes to deciphering thesubjectivity encoded by them. In the case of Mahler, he hears a misfit betweenthe materials and genres used, which traditionally signify notions of bourgeoisorder, and the subjectivities which the music releases.l6 Adorno is often criti-cised for using established methods of thematic analysis a good deal less so-phisticated than his materialist critique, but when writing on Mahler he isprepared to deal with specific formations of the non-identical in music.In Adorno's Mahler, the self-legitimating bourgeois subject is shattered notonly by its own contradictions and uncertainties, but also by an openness toexperiences beyond its normal boundaries. The folk and popular melodies al-lude to the culture of rural and urban people outside the frame of bourgeoisart, foregrounding the illusory status of a closed aesthetic. Polyphony in Mah-ler, Adorno claims, 'means the tendency toward chaotic, unorganised sound,

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TORN HALVES: TRUCTURE NDSUBJECTIVITYN ANALYSIS 287the unregulated, fortuitous simultaneity of the world , the echo of which hismusic, through its artistic organisation, seeks to become'.l7 The idea of theoutside or the excluded coheres inAdorno's description of the Mahlerian vari-ant, which for him contains vestiges of the 'narrative element in oral tradi-tion'.l8 Instead of modifying a theme, as in conventional variations, variantsmoderate a nucleus that is never stated in an Ur-form.l9Variants, it is claimed,emerge from a collective world of images reminiscent of Stravinsky(Adornomeans from a paleo-symbolic part of the psyche); through them, standard lan-guage is made to sound different, and they deviate from the official version ofhistory that has come out on top.20 Put this way, the variant sounds like adeconstructive lever, and this description does indeed convey the off-balancefeel created by Mahler. Adorno is able to tie this claim down to specific musicalevents, though he fails to follow through their interaction with large-scaleevents. Using the trope of the joker in the pack, he describes the adventures ofa one-bar motif from the opening theme of Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Themotif certainlytakes on a life of its own, and does vary its internal make-up andharmony without becoming something else; but no explanation is given as towhy these events might estrange other processes in the music (though his hy-pothesis could be tested analytically).Adorno argues that the Chinese element in Das Liedvon derErdeplays asimilar role to that occupied by folk song in earlier works: t is a 'pseudomorphthat does not take itself literally but grows eloquent through inauthenticity'.2lWhat he seems to be saying is that this exoticism is neither voyeuristic norintegrated;instead it represents an affinitywith the excluded. In this case littleanalysis is offered to support his viewpoint, though it could be partially tested.There is, however, a layer in Adorno's writing that is hard to verify in notes,and is endorsed by his statement that to be musical converges with the philoso-phy of music.22 His concluding comments on Das Liedvon derErde hoot waybeyond the confines of analysis, a deep empathy pushing to make the objectspeak, in writing which possesses poetry in its own right.WhenAdorno talks ofthe 'Long Gaze' he shows that a mind capable of tough, analytical rigour canalso, like the artist, trust its intuitions.Adorno is able to press analysis of structure towards social discourse and thepsyche because his philosophy turns the subject towards the object. Becausefor him a musical object is a sedimentation of subjectivity,he refuses to honourthe sovereign split between subject and object, which Lawrence Kramer-while noting Adorno's exception to the rule - considers to be a touchstone ofmodernist thought.23 Indeed, because the subjectivity encountered in music issocially and not entirely individually constituted, there is an implicit inter-subjectivity in Adorno's stance, opening the individual to a world constructedand understood by others, while suggesting there is more at stake in analysisthan the individual relating to a music object. Analytical practice has beenMusicAnalysis,17/iii ( 1998) o Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998



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288 ALASTAIRWILLIAMSmore guilty than Adornian theory of honouring a split between subject andobject, of imposing concepts onto objects, but there is inherent within it theAdornian idea that illumination will result from immersion in the object ratherthan imposition on it. Such analysis, which will be sensitive to the music'sinternal configurations, will also be attuned to its subjectivity, even withoutknowing it. This is because, for Adorno, the more discursive thought turnsitself towards the object, the closer it moves to that object's social mediation.From structuralism to stuctures of feelingAs a critic sensitive to the contradictions inherent in art's social mediation, andto the tyranny of the totalising concept or sign-unit, Adorno is no more im-pressed than post-structuralists by attempts to systematically universalise theparticular. But unlike Jacques Derrida, he is not transfixed by the transcenden-tal theme of origin, or its lack, and is less dismissive of Enlightenment narra-tives than Michel Foucault or Jean-Fransois Lyotard. Instead of demonisingunity, he envisages a collection of partial complexes, which together constitutesomething larger than a mere assembly in which one configuration is not domi-nant; hence his fascination with the way Mahlerian variants constellate aroundan unstated core. Nor is it a revelation for Adorno that autonomous art is com-plicit in the dominant value systems of its age, but, unlike some less sophisti-cated theorists, he recognises that in many cases these aspects are subjected toscrutiny and confronted with what they exclude in the forms of sensuous par-ticularity. By tracking the tension between concept and idea in music, analysiscan attempt to decode discursively music's non-discursive unfolding of a logicthat does not exclude the particular and sensuous.It seems unlikely that the major analytical techniques could be modified toincorporate deconstructive moments - unless one could envisage adding a'sensuous particulars' graph to middleground reductions - but they can be-come part of a larger discourse that will pay attention to such features. This isnot to suggest, however, that the Schenkerian illusion of art as a seamlesswhole should be simply abandoned, rather that analysis should also track whatAdorno calls the pull towards the particular. No single analytical techniquewill be adequate to the varying perspective of Adorno's multifaceted approachto music; indeed sensitivity to varying levels of signification repels uniformity,envisaging something closer to Kramer'sview of musicology as an ensemble ofdiscourses.24I suggested above that Adornian theory, at its most uncompromising, can beused to make modern analytical techniques appear to be a crude parody ofbureaucratised modernity; but this is partly due to Adorno's monolithic under-standing of instrumental reason, which becomes more differentiated whenreframed by Habermas's distinction between system and lifeworld: between

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TORNHALVES:TRUCTURENDSUB}ECTIVITYNANALYSIS 289increasingly integratedtechnological and economic specialist systems, and thecultural fabric. What Adorno describes as the reification of a well-nigh univer-sal instrumentality, Habermas views as a dysfunctionalism brought about bythe penetration of specialised and impaired systems into fragilelifeworld struc-tures of feeling. Specialised systems are not to be condemned for being im-paired or limited languages;but problems arise when they start to control areasof experience that draw on a wider communicativeweb. Analytical techniquescan fairly,and without disparagement,be called specialised and limited formsof rationality, which when appropriately applied produce rewarding results.Difficulties arise when their objectivity becomes self-serving and closes downother dimensions of enquiry, when musicalblind-spots and inconsistencies arerelentlessly ironed out.Formalist analysis is most convincing when it is awarethat it does not consti-tute the complete representation of a music object, and is porous to otherapproaches. It would certainly be tiresome were every analysis to concludewith a mandatory 'bit of subjectivity',but no reading should prohibit explora-tion of this dimension.Van denToorn's suggestion that octatonic sets provide away of talking in more concrete, context-sensitive terms about something re-concilable with the abstractions of set theory suggests a route to semantic con-siderations: 5 taken with RichardEaruskin'sassociation of octatonicism with aRussian tradition, and its intersection with diatonicism, Stravinsky'shandlingof the technique indicates a switching between central European and Russiancodes of musical subjectivity.26Nor need a repertoire's theoretical environ-ment control responses to its texts. In a convincing move, Susan McClaryrefuses to dismiss Milton Babbitt's Philomeln grounds of the composer's re-luctance to discuss anything other than the techniques of electronic and serialmanipulation employed in the piece; instead she listens to the music's narrativeof suffering and survival.27 n other words, she is able to experience the musicagainst the grain of the composer's stated intentions, and to introduce anothersignifying context. For Adorno, likewise, analysis should be critique: it shoulddecode music's subjectivity and that of its own techniques.My own work on new music takes seriouslyAdorno's belief that 'the crisis incomposition today ... is also a crisis in analysis',along with his suggestion thata work is a force-field organised around a problem.28 My analytical critiquesare based on discussion of compositional procedure to a greaterextent than isnormal, but, in a repertoire with constructional methods as conscious as isanalytical technique, it is entirely relevant to ask what impact they have onperception of the music. The problem encountered in high modernist music isone already described in relation to analysis:over-system-dependent composi-tional techniques produce arbitrariness, whereby extreme equivalence meetsextreme difference. Having failed to eliminate 'freethinking'particulars - ortheir partners, 'freespirited' structures- much composition has learned to en-MusicAnalysis,17/iii (1998) c Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998



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290 ALASTAIRWILLIAMScounter its breakawaymoments. In Boulez's Repons, here subjectivity is deep-ly sedimented, particularity appears in sonorities which are related to theirstructural material, but not governed by it. Other music raises notions of non-identity and signification more directly by invoking objects with attached asso-ciations. Wolfgang Rihm, for example, is able to create a dislocation betweenstructure and subjectivity by allowing music with historical associations tofloat into configurations conceived in a modernist logic. This inclusive aes-thetic precludes purely structural understanding: subjectivity is forced ontothe agenda. Adorno's attempts to think beyond unity to a constellation of af-finities hence remain of great relevance to the experiences that contemporarymusic and analysis seek to address.Before speculating further on how analysis might become sensitive to signifi-cation, I should like to say a few words about construction and mimesis, acelebrated Adornian dialectic which can become a little rigid after repeateduse.29 It is now well documented that, according to Adornian aesthetics, thepoles of mimesis and construction cross over in successful art, technical con-trol emerging from the needs of its Other. Mimesis is on both sides of theequation, since it refers both to the miming of, or camouflaged adaptation to, asurrounding environment, and to the miming of an intuitive form of behaviourthreatened by modernity. Mimesis does not map exactly onto notions of theOther, but the fit is close enough to justify considering the role of the Other inAdorno, enabling greater exchange with critical theory in general. Adorno'smusic criticism examines the fate of the subject in art in varying degrees ofspecificity, depending on the music being scrutinised. Discussion of Beethovenand Schoenberg is pitched in terms of subject and object, contemplating whatone might call the big Other, while commentary onWagner and Mahler rangeswider because specific Others are more obviously present.What Adorno tends to call the non-identical, or particular,has, with variablesuccess, been transformed into more concrete others by recent musicology.The introduction to Susan McClary's Feminine ndingseels like a genderedreading of Adorno's attempts to turn the concept towards the particular. Bothauthors interrogate objectivity, universality and transcendence, but whenMcClary concludes that these are 'presumably masculine virtues' it should beadded that female experience is not all they exclude.30To her credit, McClaryacknowledges Adorno's formative role in her own thinking and in pushingmusicology beyond positivism, suggesting additionally that modern criticaltheory should examine the 'many areas of human experience that Adornooverlooks or denigrates as regressive, such as pleasure or the body'.3l Whilemusicology should certainly venture beyond Adorno, it is worth observing thathe does not denigrate pleasure and the bodyperse; rather,he repels representa-tions of them dominated by exchange value. Administered desire is an over-worked theme in Adorno's aesthetics because, as previously suggested, he

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over-estimates the grip of instrumentalreason on subjectivity in all its manifes-tations. It is this that makes him see popular-culturaloffers of pleasure as falsepromises, and the body as something closer to the pared down subjectivity ofBeckett's Endgame than an arena for sensuous resistance. But Adorno's one-sided reminder that pain and sufferingare as constitutive of bodily experienceas pleasure is surely of relevance to a somatic musicology, and his theories are adamning indictment of the persistent exploitation of the body by contempo-raryadvertising.32If musicology is to address the body as an arena of suffering and pleasure,then clearly it will have to draw on a multitude of discourses, of which analy-sis will be one. Certainly, mixing Frankfurt theory with the primarily pQSt-structuralist discourses currentlyinformingmusicology is a delicate operation,which can, in Robert Hullot-Kentor's estimation of FredricJameson's book onAdorno, disintegrate into parodies of suitablypostmodernist activities such asbumper-car driving, bungee jumping or even tattoo flexing, all performed in agiant arena called 'compare and contrast'.33 If Adorno can be faulted for re-ducing specific cultural formations to abstractdiscussion of identity and non-identity, the postmodernist discourses on which the new musicology draws areculpable of the opposite deficiency: of celebrating a multitude of interestgroups which would rather assert their differencesthan find affinities with oneanother. When sensitively engaged, though, the new themes of musicologyhave a resonance with a tradition of aesthetic thought, in its imploded Ador-nian form.To be reallypost-Adorno will require a commensurate overturningof his theories from within. A post-formalist analysis, meanwhile, would con-template turning an understanding of structural rigour towards an empathywith structures of feeling.NOTES1. For a discussion of Dahlhaus's critique of Adorno, see James Hepokoski, 'TheDahlhaus Project and its Extra-MusicologicalSources', 19th-CenturyMusic,14/iii(1991), pp. 221-46. For a summary of Konrad Boehmer's views on Adorno, seeMax Paddison, Adorno, Modernismand Mass Culture (London: Kahn & Averill,1996), pp. 24-9.2. Rose Rosengard Subotnik is a notable exception.3. Milton Babbitt makes a comparablepoint aboutSchoenberg,suggestingthat he wasnever n fashion and isnow old-fashioned, n WordsboutMusic, ds.Stephen DembskiandJoseph N. Straus (Madison:Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 165.4. See Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composingor the Films (London: TheAthlone Press, 1994) and for modern ideas on film music, Claudia Gorbman,UnheardMelodies:Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1987).Music Analysis,17/iii (1998) c Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998



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292 ALASTAIRWILLIAMS5. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, 'Towarda Deconstruction of StructuralListening: ACritique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky',Deconstructiveariations:usicandReasonnWesternocietyMinneapolis:Universityof Minnesota Press,1996),

pp.148-76.6. Theodor Adorno, 'The Ageing of the New Music', trans. Robert Hullot-Kentorand FrederickWill, Telos,7 (1988), pp.95-116.7. Peter Dews, Logicsof Disintegration:ost-Structuralisthought ndtheClaimsofCriticalTheoryLondon:Verso,1987), p.77.8. Theodor Adorno, 'On the Problem of Musical Analysis', trans. Max Paddison,MusicAnalysis, /ii (1982), p.174.9. For a more developed discussion of this issue, see AlastairWilliams, NewMusic

andtheClaims fModernityAldershot:Ashgate, 1997), chapter 3.10. Alan Street also finds an ambiguity in set theory, viewing it as 'either benignlyrendering the kaleidoscopic fragmentationofWesternmusical development struc-turallycomprehensible, or malignly extending the power of commodity fetishisminto every fibre of musical substance' ('Carnival',MusicAnalysis,3/ii-iii (1994),p.292).11. LeoTreitler'sMusicand heHistoricalmaginationCambridge,MA: HarvardUni-versityPress, 1989) and variouswritingsby Susan McClary constitute the princi-pal targets of van denToorn'spolemic.12. Pieter van den Toorn, Music,Politics, ndtheAcademyBerkeley:University ofCaliforniaPress,1995), p.61.13. This view is found in Thomas Mann's DoctorFaustus,rans. H. T. Lowe-Porter(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 468. It is well known that Adorno advisedMann on the musical aspects of this novel.14. The 'good listener',whose perspective informs Adorno's musicology, is describedin his IntroductionotheSociologyfMusic,rans.E. B. Ashton (NewYork:SeaburyPress, 1976), pp. 5-6. For discussion of listening within the 'broader field ofrhetorical, expressive, and discursive behaviors', see Lawrence Kramer,ClassicalMusicandPostmodernnozuledgeBerkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1995),p. 31.15. Robert Samuels draws attention to the fissureAdorno detects before the secondsubject of the first movement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, and notes thatthis lacuna would not be perceived by a Schenkerian reduction (Mahler's ixthSymphony:Atudy nMusicalSemioticsCambridge:Cambridge University Press,1995), pp. 140-43).16. For a syrnpatheticdiscussion of the gap between materialand subjectivityin Ador-no's Mahler,see PeterFranklin, '.. his fracturesarethe scriptof truth. Adorno'sMahler', in Stephen E. Hefling (ed.), MahlerStudies Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997), pp.271-94.17. Theodor Adorno, Mahler: MusicalPhysiognomy,rans. Edmund Jephcott (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 112.

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TORN HALVES: TRUCTURE ND SUBJECTIVITYN ANALYSIS 29318. Ibid.,p.88.19. For another discussion of this issue, see Julian Johnson,'Analysis in Adorno's Aes-thetics of Music', MusicAnalysis,14/ii-iii (1995),p.310.20. Adorno, Mahler:AMusicalPhysiognomy,. 89. It should be noted that the affinityAdorno finds between Mahler and Stravinskydoes not heighten his opinion of thelatter, since he is keen to assert that Mahler's variantsare temporally driven, un-like Stravinsky's static constructions. For further discussion of Adorno's under-standing of collective images in music, see AlastairWilliams, 'Technology of theArchaic:Wish Images and Phantasmagoria in Wagner',Cambridge pera rournal,9/i (1997), pp. 1-15.21. Adorno, Mahler:AMusicalPhysiognomy,.148.22. Ibid.,p.149.23. Kramer,ClassicalMusicandPostmodernnowledge,.6.24. Ibid.,p.25.25. Van den Toorn, Music,Politics, ndtheAcademy,p. 190-92.26. This is a prevalent theme in Richard Taruskin,Stravinskynd the RussianTradi-tions:ABiography f theWorks hroughMavra'Oxford:Oxford University Press,1996).Use of the octatonic scale is discussed in chapter4.27. Susan McClary, 'Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composi-

tion', Cultural ritique,2 (1989), p.75.28. Adorno, 'On the Problem of MusicalAnalysis', p. 181.29. Dai Griffiths makes this point in a review of Anthony Pople (ed.) Theory,AnalysisandMeaning n Music,n MusicAnalysis,15/ii-iii1996),p.388.30. Susan McClary, FeminineEndings:Music, Gender, nd Sexuality Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress, l991),p. 17.31. Ibid.,p.29.32. For a somatic reading of Adorno, see Terry Eagleton, The deology f theAesthetic

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 341-65.33. Robert Hullot-Kentor, 'Suggested Reading:Jamesonon Adorno', Telos,89 1991),pp. 167-77.

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Torn Halves: Structure and Subjectivity in Analysis

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