PREFACE

As soon as Joseph Kerman telephoned to invite me to deliver the Bloch Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, I started casting about for a suitable project—one that would best take advantage of the public platform offered by this distinguished series. It took me quite a bit of time to weave the various themes treated in Conventional Wisdom into a coherent pattern. But my first priority—the one around which all the others coalesced—was to find a topic that would allow me to move easily between European art music and popular repertories.

I doubt that this is what Joe had expected. My name was most closely identified at the time—and probably still is today—with projects concerning gender, and the chapters that follow testify to the fact that they were written by a feminist. But feminism has always counted as only one of my interests. At a far deeper level, all my work addresses questions of musical signification—in particular those aspects of musical practice that seem so natural as to elude observation. This is why even the essays in Feminine Endings invariably came around to focusing on formal procedures and tonality. For it had seemed when I was writing Feminine Endings that the (to me) self-evident representations of gender and eroticism I was tracing would reveal the complicity of these basic formal principles in a variety of culturally specific agendas, thus enabling a thorough historical reassessment of these elements.1

I should have anticipated, however, that the attention of the discipline would fixate on the scandals of gender and sexuality themselves. Or, in the words of Madonna, “Oops! I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex (I musta been crazy!).”2 Moreover, because much of the music I examined in Feminine Endings participated in or operated in deliberate opposition against the somewhat sexist enterprise that most culture has been, my demonstrations took on a pessimistic tone not characteristic of much of my other work. As a result, I became widely identified as a basher of Western culture.

Yet my principal critical concerns date back to my work on seven-teenth-century Italy. I became increasingly dissatisfied with the accounts of early music available when I was in graduate school in the late 1960s, and I sought to find ways of explaining—to myself, if to no one else—how music of the 1600s “works” (whatever that means, as my exasperated mentors lamented). Because I could find no models that shared my ways of thinking or hearing, I had to cobble together my own methods from old modal treatises and score study. From the outset of that project, it seemed clear to me that I had to learn to resist the easy solutions my tonal theory training had given me. To be sure, tonal analytical devices allowed me to label chords; but when I had finished attaching my Roman numerals, I found that my perplexity had only increased. What I was seeking could not be discovered as long as I littered the score with ready-made but inappropriate tags. By the time I finished my dissertation, this habit of disallowing tonal answers had become so ingrained that I no longer took “tonality” as something already understood, even when I dealt with eighteenth-century music.

But I soon experienced what felt like a catastrophic professional setback, as journals sent my dissertation-based articles back to me with the condescending explanation: “You don’t seem to understand: music of this period can’t be analyzed because its composers hadn’t figured out yet how music should go.” Now recall, if you will, that I wasn’t working with what musicologists like to call a Kleinmeister (nasty term!) but with Claudio Monteverdi, whom I thought we counted among the biggies of all time. Silly me! (Oops! I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about modes!)

After having run through most of the professional journals with much the same response, I decided that before I could do my seventeenth-century work in peace I would have to make explicit the cultural premises that underlie the music that “works the way music is supposed to work.”3 And that meant placing in their respective historical contexts the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Schoenberg, and so on and so forth. Alas! If the Powers That Be had agreed to publish my innocuous little articles on mode, I might be contentedly analyzing Obrecht now.

While I was in the midst of this now-notorious rereading of the standard repertory, I also came into contact with feminist and cultural theory. Moreover, I began listening to the popular music that I had always avoided for fear of immediate professional death. These enterprises—feminism, cultural theory, popular-music studies—are very different from each other, yet together they reinforced the urgency of my original agenda and encouraged me to explore genres I never would have anticipated. Along the way, I became persuaded that our difficulty in telling a coherent history of music in the twentieth century stems in part from our refusal to acknowledge one of the most important facts about culture of the last hundred years: namely, that the innovations of African Americans have become the dominant force in music around the globe—universal in ways Kant could not even have begun to imagine. But dealing with these other kinds of music also requires different sets of approaches—ones that engage with musical specificity without trying to stuff pieces into irrelevant formal criteria.

The Bloch Lectures gave me the opportunity to focus on the broader philosophical issues that had driven my work. Many of these issues have only gradually become apparent to me, sometimes only after I inadvertently stumbled over a tripwire that triggered unexpected reactions. Thus projects that would seem to have nothing in common—the analysis of a madrigal from 1604, the examination of sexual politics in Richard Strauss’s Salome, the discussion of harmonic strategies in Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”—have produced responses that sent me back to the same basic set of questions: how can we talk about meaning in musical procedures?

I have chosen to retain as much as possible the discursive quality of the original lectures in this book. Although I have expanded the texts of the five hour-long talks a bit, I wanted to maintain the sense of interconnection among the chapters rather than allowing each to become the book-length study it obviously deserves. But I hope the ideas that emerge from my assemblage will justify its odd juxtapositions and compensate for its more-than-occasional sketchiness.

I focused in each of the Bloch Lectures on at least one and often several pieces of music—a relatively simple thing to do in a live presentation but a rather more difficult feat to pull off in the format of a book. Because many of my examples in the final chapter still have considerable commercial value, it has proved prohibitively expensive to collect them into a single CD for the reader’s convenience. Yet the discussions throughout the book will make little sense in the absence of the sounds they attempt to interpret.

Fortunately, most of the pieces featured in the book (with the exception of the arias by Stradella and Scarlatti, both of which appear here in score) are reasonably easy to find in libraries and record stores. In putting the lectures together, I sought to draw together a wide variety of dazzling tunes—tunes that ordinarily would not show up in the same context— and the resulting sonic montage is itself a crucial part of the project. Consequently, I urge the reader to take the trouble to locate and listen to the music along the way; anyone who does so will have the reward of experiencing directly these extraordinary repositories of conventional wisdom.