Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic
A collection of essays on music theory and analysis, edited and introduced by Adam Krims, with a closing commentary by Henry Klumpenhouwer. The volume brings together music theorists and critics who share a suspicion of the idea that music can be adequately described as an autonomous, self-contained aesthetic object. Its unifying concern is “ideology” in the broad poststructuralist and postmodern sense: the assumption that analytical and theoretical descriptions of music are neutral, formal, and disinterested, when in fact they carry social, historical, and political freight. The essays examine both music and the discourse about music — particularly the inherited vocabulary of music theory and analysis — as sites where ideological positions are produced, reproduced, or concealed.
The title’s subtitle, “Resisting the Aesthetic,” names the volume’s polemical target: the tradition that isolates the musical work from its social world and treats aesthetic contemplation as the proper mode of musical understanding. Against this, the contributors argue for reading musical texts and music-theoretical texts together, asking what interests are served by particular claims about unity, coherence, structure, and expressive meaning. The essays draw on a range of theoretical resources — feminist theory, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and the work of Jean-François Lyotard — and the collection deliberately crosses the boundary between “theory” and “analysis,” offering close readings of specific works alongside critiques of the methods used to produce them.
Contents and Contributions
Introduction: postmodern musical poetics and the problem of “close reading” — Krims frames the collection’s central problem: how to read musical texts closely without reproducing the ideology of the autonomous work. He sets out the tension between the analytical tradition’s commitment to internal coherence and the poststructuralist critique of that commitment, and explains why the essayists gathered here treat close reading not as a politically innocent procedure but as a contested practice.
“A Few Words to Sing” — Lyotard’s contribution is a short, aphoristic piece rather than a systematic essay. It reflects his characteristic preoccupation with the relation between the aesthetic and the ideological, and with the possibility of an aesthetic that resists absorption into dominant systems of representation. Its brevity and elliptical style make it serve in this volume more as a provocation than as an argument.
Feminist theory, music theory, and the mind/body problem — Suzanne G. Cusick examines the entrenched dualism in music-theoretical thought, in which the mind, structure, and reason are valued over the body, sound, and sensuous pleasure. She argues that this hierarchy is not merely philosophical but gendered, and that feminist theory offers tools for rethinking what musical knowledge is and who is authorized to produce it.
Superior myths, dogmatic allegories: the resistance to musical unity — Alan Street takes aim at the near-sacred status of “unity” in musical analysis, particularly in the organicist tradition that reads works as integrated wholes whose parts are justified by their contribution to a single structural plan. He argues that such claims function ideologically — as myths and allegories rather than discoveries — and that the insistence on unity forecloses other ways of hearing and writing about music.
Rewriting Schenker: narrative, history, ideology — Richard Littlefield and David Neumeyer consider Heinrich Schenker’s analytical system and its later institutionalization, asking how a set of analytical procedures that presents itself as purely technical comes to encode narrative and historical assumptions. Their concern is with the way Schenkerian analysis has been transmitted and rewritten, and with what those rewritings reveal about the ideological commitments of music theory as a discipline.
Analytical fictions — Marion A. Guck treats the analyst’s prose as itself a kind of writing with rhetorical and imaginative dimensions. Analysis, on her account, constructs rather than merely reports; the analyst’s language shapes the object it claims to describe, and attention to that language reveals the fictive, constructed character of analytical knowledge.
Lieder, listeners, and ideology: Schubert’s “Alinde” and opus 81 — David Gramit turns to the lied repertory, examining Schubert’s setting of “Alinde” and the songs of opus 81. His focus is on the listener and on the ideological assumptions built into the institutions and conventions of nineteenth-century song — how listening was imagined, what kinds of subjectivity the lied presumed and helped to produce.
The silence of the frames — Richard Littlefield’s second contribution to the volume concerns framing: the frames, margins, and unspoken boundaries that surround a musical text and shape its intelligibility. The essay examines what is left out or silenced in the construction of a musical work as an object of analysis.
Voices within the voice: geno-text and pheno-text in Berio’s Sequenza III — Joke Dame analyzes Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III for solo voice, using Julia Kristeva’s distinction between the geno-text (the underlying, pre-linguistic productivity of signification) and the pheno-text (the surface text of communication). Dame’s reading treats the piece’s extraordinary range of vocal utterance — its fragmentation of language into breath, sound, and gesture — as an instance of the geno-text pressing through the communicative surface.
Desire, repression and Brahms’s First Symphony — Robert Fink offers a psychoanalytically inflected reading of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, considering desire and repression as categories that can illuminate both the work’s processes and the analytical tradition’s treatment of it.
Commentary: poststructuralism and issues of music theory — Henry Klumpenhouwer closes the volume with a critical commentary that draws together the essays’ methodological commitments and assesses what poststructuralist thought has to offer music theory, as well as the difficulties and contradictions involved in importing it into a discipline still largely organized around formal analysis.
Themes and Approach
The collection’s coherence lies less in a shared method than in a shared set of questions. Several of the essays converge on the discipline’s foundational texts and procedures — Schenkerian analysis above all — and read them not as transparent instruments but as cultural documents with their own histories and interests. Others take individual compositions as case studies in how meaning, desire, and ideology inhabit musical sound. Across the volume, the boundary between text and context, between the musical work and the discourse that surrounds it, is treated as porous; the essays argue that analysis cannot step outside ideology to describe music from a neutral standpoint, because the categories of description are themselves socially and historically formed.
The volume is thus an intervention in the debates that occupied music theory and criticism in the 1990s over the politics of musical analysis, the legacy of the “new musicology,” and the uses of continental theory in the study of music. Its essays range from broad methodological critique to specific analytical demonstrations, and the combination of Lyotard’s brief contribution with detailed work on Schubert, Brahms, Schenker, and Berio reflects the editors’ intention to stage a confrontation between poststructuralist theory and the concrete practices of musical scholarship.
Ideology as a problem for analysis — The volume treats ideology not as a political content added to music from outside but as the set of assumptions that make musical objects, listening habits, and analytical procedures intelligible in the first place. The slash in the title marks a relation of mutual implication rather than a simple opposition: music is not first given and then ideologically interpreted, because the categories through which it is described—work, structure, unity, listener, analysis—are themselves historically and institutionally formed. The essays accordingly ask what counts as a musical work, which features of sound are selected as structure, and what kind of subject analysis presumes.
Theory and disciplinary authority — The collection’s significance lies in its insistence that poststructuralist thought cannot be merely added to music theory as a new vocabulary. Concepts of text, frame, subject, and desire alter what analysis is supposed to do and what authority it can claim. The commentaries and case studies stage a confrontation between continental theory and the concrete routines of musical scholarship without resolving the tension; they test both the productivity and the limits of ideological critique for music studies. The volume thus remains a document of a specific moment in music theory, when the politics of analysis and the legitimacy of the aesthetic were being contested.
