Torn Halves: Structure and Subjectivity in Analysis Author(s): Alastair Williams Source: Music Analysis, Vol. 17, No.

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ALASTAIR WILLIAMS

TORN HALVES: STRUCTURE ANDSUBJECTIVITY IN ANALYSIS

The new musicology's 'discovery' that music is a contextual art is strikingly ironic when one considers that the most developed existing theory of modernism - Adorno's Aesthetic Theory - was written by a man fascinated by the intersections of music, sociology and philosophy.* Adorno's extensive legacy of music criticism has, of course, always been a resource for German-speaking musicologists, a community that has upbraided him both for doctrinaire Hegelian Matsism and for championing bourgeois culture. Carl Dahlhaus, despite an interest in Adorno that extended throughout his career, charged him with imposing a pre-formed philosophy of history onto music, while the hard left accused him of defending elitist culture.l Nor did Adorno's sociological decoding of music, which forms part of a larger study of modern subjectivity, endear him to an Anglo-American musicology in pursuit of philological certainty and quasi-scientiElcanalytical rigour. This discipline, with few exceptions, justiEledignorance of Frankfurt critical theory by foregrounding an allegedly impenetrable style and by muttering darkly about Marxist ideology.2 It is signiElcantthat the new musicology takes its theoretical bearings largely from the discourses of post-structuralism and postmodernism 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.3 Adorno's approach to musical understanding is in sympathy with analytical aims, since it is structurally based; it is, though, more sensitive to particularities than are standard analytical techniques, and it also seeks dialogue with other discourses. His strength lies in an ability to interpret the signifying practices embedded in immanent structural shapes - that is, to release their objectiEledsubjectivity. His weakrless- one shared with much analytical practice - is to underestimate, at least with regard to European art music, the range of institutional practices and codes that contribute to musical meaning in a nonimmanent sense. Well aware of the role played by these steering forces on popular 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 Analysis 'Adorno and Analysis'day held at the Universityof Bristol, 15 February1997. I am gratefulto Alan Street for helpful comments on an earlierdraft.

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site of cultural negotiation than as immanent structure. In terms of Jurgen Habermas's reworking of the Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason, one would say that Adorno's critique of popular music fails to recognise lifeworld resistance to systemic dysfunctionality. His focus on truth content emphasises what art works are over what they do or have done to them. Even though Adorno's work on film music, like contemporary film theory, makes clear that music can participate in a wide web of signification, his theory of instrumental reason tends to make him pessimistic about such possibilities.4 Given Adorno's sensitivity to cultural manifestations of subjectivity, it is surprising that he is reluctant to recognise that the subjectivities conveyed by Western classical music are ethnically and geographically constructed though, as mentioned below, he does start to tackle these themes in his Mahler critique. Nevertheless, situating classical music does not, as some of the cruder manifestations of postmodernism suggest, give cause to denigrate it. By mirroring the notion that art music is value free, populist theory concludes that, when this belief is shattered, once-venerated texts are of no more significance than other artefacts. This viewpoint certainly ruptures high art's protective shell and recognises that all cultural products deal with conventions and human codes; but to situate, say, a Brahms symphony enables one not only to perceive it as a constructed artefact among many, it also encourages one to contemplate it as an intriguing and beautiful codification of subjectivity, offering aesthetic sustenance and worthy of reflection. Rose Rosengard Subotnik has argued that Adorno's stress on structural listening works in tandem with his narrow cultural perspective, which refuses to see the co-ordinates of his own tradition as a construction instead of the condition of music.5 In effect, she uses Adorno's own apparatus to show that what he presents as an apparentlynatural state of affairs is historically derived, whatever his own preferences. Thus far, her argument is convincing, and it successfully dismantles the claims of neutrality made on behalf of structural listening. But structural listening is not alone in depending on an aesthetic formation, nor is it substantially invalidated by this perspective since no mode of listening can claim to be value free. Adorno was certainly overly dismissive of surface sonority and refused to countenance varied ways of listening, but most of the repertoire he discusses is illuminated by structural analysis. And, crucially,his materialist reading of structure opens it to historically-configured subjectivity, though this frequently appears in abstract and congealed guises. Whatever its sedimentation, however, structure is still subjectivity, and Adorno's greatness, as Subotnik acknowledges, lies in his willingness to decode, critique and interpret the social spaces forged in music. When one witnesses Adorno working within the tradition familiar to him, one finds the ideology of structural listening amply breached, with numerous border crossings between the inside and outside of the text. He exposes the illusions of structural closure
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and disinterested observation, while simultaneously defending autonomy, since it is within internal configurations that he detects social signification. Analysis and high modernism

The implication of Adorno's approach is that even the most formalist battery of graphs and tables, or the most recondite pre-compositional diagram, represents a mode of subjectivity, and that talk of a neutral level is a fiction (though it may be one worth indulging on a temporary and provisional basis). If, however, we look at what Adorno has to say about structuralist composition in 'The Ageing of the New Music', we find an unflattering picture of formalist subjectivity.6In somewhat unspecific terms he accuses Darmstadt composers of hiding behind pre-fabricated material, of imagining that precompositional decision-making is a substitute for composition, and of creating a self-deluding complexity divorced from the density of experience: in short, of failing to understand that objectivism represents an impoverishment of subjectivity. Such compositional ideology may elicit a commensurate analytical response, which would receive the same Adornian rebuke, or it may generate an analytical critique which draws attention to the music's narrow stance, or a listener may even refuse to tackle the music on terms laid down by its theoretical environment. Despite his own resistance, however, Adorno considers that high modernist music is most likely to generate a response commensurate with its aesthetic of production. The problem from Adorno's point of view is that high modernist composition becomes an index of instrumental rationality, instead of a vehicle for scrutinising and engaging it; and, by association, analytical techniques impose a one-dimensional concept of coherence on their objects. If, as is generally the case, the key analytical practices are understood to be Schenkerian theory and Fortean pitch-class set theory, it cannot be fortuitous that both enjoyed their zenith during the heyday of structuralism. Schenkerian theory was retrospective when first formulated and became doubly so in its American incarnation, while set theory applies principles derived from serial technique to earlier post-tonal repertoire. (My intention is not to condemn a non-synchronism between technique and repertoire, but to indicate the contemporaneity of these techniques with a high modernist and structuralist age.) Schenkerian methodology, stripped of its metaphysical justification, relates surface heterogeneity to deep structure, while set theory is openly derived from mathematical models. Such structuralismis both iconoclastic in not seeking to isolate art from an increasingly regulated world, and traditional in so far as it accepts a narrow view of subjectivity as its starting point. Each approach alike evinces a rationality that has bitten deep into areas once understood more practically than cognitively. Nevertheless, while both shun a liberal humanist notion of art as something inexplicable, both are also beguiled by an intensifiMusicAnalysis,17/iii ( 1998)
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subsumes its of the bourgeois notion of music as a unified whole, which cation into a single spatial construct. parts formalist Like classical structuralism as practised by Claude Levi-Strauss, as Levijust And articulation. reduces lived experience to underlying analysis remight structures deep failed to contemplate that allegedly neutral Strauss the or observer the flectparticular interests, in the community of either univermuch analysis has worked under the banner of disinterested observed, culture, popular If Adorno, too, tends to reduce the particularities of sality. codes are to underlying determinants, he is at least aware that its especially, against limconstructed, and the thrust of his own aesthetics pushes socially than an autojudgements that refuse to contemplate anything much more ited music as the popular condemns Adorno subjectivity in this realm.Yet if mated in the subfinds structuralism culturalembodiment of crushed subjectivity, The probobjectivity. new a ject'sabsence not an historical catastrophe, but familiar: now are subject lemsencountered when theory tries to eliminate the of the instatement inPeters Dews' words, the situation 'leads merely to the metaof kind as a symbolicsystem itself, self-enacting and self-perpetuating, modernity, - a meta-subject that touches the steering mechanisms of subject'7 John Cage's attempts butahistoricises them to a natural condition. Ironically, determinants of far-from-neutral the toremove the composing subject release has not explicitly industrialsociety. While music analysis, unlike John Cage, invariance has underlying for celebrated the end of the subject, its search is quick contrast, by evokeda comparable meta-subjectivity.Adornian theory, of parembodiments to read nature and structure as history and culture, the ticularsocial configurations. subtlety of SchenIt is not surprising, then, that while acknowledging the of it, Adorno in his keriananalysis, and despite his haziness about some aspects to generalised struclecture on analysis should fault it for reducing particulars conceptual sysabstract all of makes tures;8 indeed, this is the complaint he statements in concrete tems. Set theory also suffers difficulties with irreducible of the parasome encounters music that resist assimilation or reduction, and problems The schemes. doxes characteristic of over-determinist compositional the known: well are generated when zealous construction is imposed on music which elements unable to control individual intended order becomes arbitrary, structural control and extreme chance severe That assert a life of their own. between Pierre procedures map onto each other is exemplified by the parallels both highly determinIa and John Cage's Musicof Changes, Boulez's Structure operations.9 Set aleatoric by other the ist scores, one generated schematically, or measurable another to theory, where one event can be made equivalent itself from the immunise against another according to abstract criteria, cannot technique is the sense, potential for order to be perceived as arbitrary.In this characterisan application of the pervasive logic of equivalence and fungibility
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tic of advanced industrial societies, whose monitoring of detail produces randomness and indeterminacy because events are endlessly exchangeable. At its most automated, set theory mirrors Cage's aesthetic detachment. If it is honest enough not to shield music from technocratic reason, while responding to stylistic diversity and to an increasing density of relationships, set theory is blind to the possibility that art might constitute a critical response to malfunctions of the lifeworld caused by that same instrumental reason.l Arguing against Leo Treitler's critique of analytical objectivism, Pieter van den Toorn asserts that attention to music's structure reflects upon the immediacy of aural experience, and does not therefore constitute sterile positivism.ll What he misses, however, is the sense that the object is congealed subjectivity, that, to use Adornian terminology, immersion in the object is immersion in subjectivity. Berating socio-political commentary on music, van den Toorn comments: 'Drawn more and more into the uses of the world, into forms of ideological and personal-political manipulation, they [musical structures] are less able to function as alternatives to those uses or to awaken a capacity for that alternative.'l2 In one sense, this is an Adornian argument about art offering some resistance to instrumental rationality,but it misses the rider that unless such configurations are understood as encoded subjectivity, then their ability to open reason to non-purposive goals will be lost. Indeed, it is unclear how a non-socialised art could supply a panacea to social dysfunction.

Van den Toorn perceives that a subject unwilling to follow the inner life of music simply imposes his or her personal-political agenda on it, while critical musicology observes that a fetish of objectivism excludes the contextual understanding of music. Put in Adornian terminology, van den Toorn realises that without identity, music is reduced to unbridled particularism, and his chosen opponents recognise that music's social codes cannot be reduced to abstract identity. What he depicts as seemingly mutually incompatible positions are, however, presented as a dialectical tension within the status of autonomous art by Adornian aesthetics: autonomy is an illusion, but a productive one since art's apparent closure enables it to turn a dominant logic away from its standard channels. Though Adorno tips identity towards non-identity (the concept towards the object) he resists collapsing the one into its other, thus espousing neither an all-embracing concept (objectivism) nor random particularism. Current positions offer some gains over Adornian musicology, critical musicology showing greater awareness of the non-immanent framing of music, and van den Toorn employing more sophisticated analytical tools in his close readings. Furthermore it is a tribute to the new musicology that such debates are forcing theorists, as never before, to theorise their own stance, instead of assuming blithely that it is underpinned by a scientific foundation. Nevertheless, the debate between immanent and contextual approaches to music, as framed
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by van den Toorn, is a good deal less developed than the position attained by Adorno decades earlier. If we are to move beyond Adornian aesthetics, it can only be by drawing on its strengths. Modernist analysis and art suffer the same dialectical bind, a bind which emerges from a situation, rather than from a taste for dialectics. On the one hand, analysis mimes an ever more pervasive form of rationality;on the other hand, it can arise from empathy with an object and seeks to open the concept to its Other. Because analysis is a discursive medium, however, it is more likely to track the technical within art. Adorno had once toyed with the idea that completely rationalised material would facilitate free and intuitive composition.l3 A similar illusion informs the analytical notion that systematically processing the structural qualities of music will open it to direct perception. If analysis is to turn to the Other, the criterion for success will be the question Adorno 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

subjectivity

Before considering how analysis might deal with this dilemma, I shall consider some of Adorno's comments on Mahler, since the Mahler monograph in particular contains some of Adorno's most sympathetic and effective discussions of music. Here he writes from the experience of the music, advancing the perspective of the educated rather than the specialist listener.14 This is not to suggest that specialism will not add further insight, merely that music as signifying practice is not the exclusive realm of the expert. Nevertheless, Adorno's ear for interruptions and inconsistencies is keener than most, his tracking of subjectivity attuning him to inconsistencies that rub against the unity frequently sought by analysis.l5 As always, analysis for Adorno extends beyond the notes to deciphering the subjectivity encoded by them. In the case of Mahler, he hears a misfit between the materials and genres used, which traditionally signify notions of bourgeois order, and the subjectivities which the music releases.l6 Adorno is often criticised for using established methods of thematic analysis a good deal less sophisticated than his materialist critique, but when writing on Mahler he is prepared to deal with specific formations of the non-identical in music. In Adorno's Mahler, the self-legitimating bourgeois subject is shattered not only by its own contradictions and uncertainties, but also by an openness to experiences beyond its normal boundaries. The folk and popular melodies allude to the culture of rural and urban people outside the frame of bourgeois art, foregrounding the illusory status of a closed aesthetic. Polyphony in Mahler, Adorno claims, 'means the tendency toward chaotic, unorganised sound,
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the unregulated, fortuitous simultaneity of the "world",the echo of which his music, through its artistic organisation, seeks to become'.l7 The idea of the outside or the excluded coheres in Adorno's description of the Mahlerian variant, which for him contains vestiges of the 'narrative element in oral tradition'.l8 Instead of modifying a theme, as in conventional variations, variants moderate a nucleus that is never stated in an Ur-form.l9Variants, it is claimed, emerge from a collective world of images reminiscent of Stravinsky (Adorno means from a paleo-symbolic part of the psyche); through them, standard language is made to sound different, and they deviate from the official version of history that has come out on top.20 Put this way, the variant sounds like a deconstructive lever, and this description does indeed convey the off-balance feel created by Mahler. Adorno is able to tie this claim down to specific musical events, though he fails to follow through their interaction with large-scale events. Using the trope of the joker in the pack, he describes the adventures of a one-bar motif from the opening theme of Mahler's Fourth Symphony.The motif certainly takes on a life of its own, and does vary its internal make-up and harmony without becoming something else; but no explanation is given as to why these events might estrange other processes in the music (though his hypothesis could be tested analytically). Adorno argues that the Chinese element in Das Liedvon derErdeplays a similar role to that occupied by folk song in earlierworks:it is a 'pseudomorph that does not take itself literally but grows eloquent through inauthenticity'.2l What he seems to be saying is that this exoticism is neither voyeuristic nor integrated; instead it represents an affinity with the excluded. In this case little analysis 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 philosophy of music.22 His concluding comments on Das LiedvonderErdeshoot way beyond the confines of analysis, a deep empathy pushing to make the object speak, in writing which possesses poetry in its own right.When Adorno talks of the 'Long Gaze' he shows that a mind capable of tough, analytical rigour can also, like the artist, trust its intuitions. Adorno is able to press analysis of structure towards social discourse and the psyche because his philosophy turns the subject towards the object. Because for him a musical object is a sedimentation of subjectivity,he refuses to honour the sovereign split between subject and object, which Lawrence Kramerwhile noting Adorno's exception to the rule - considers to be a touchstone of modernist thought.23 Indeed, because the subjectivity encountered in music is socially and not entirely individually constituted, there is an implicit intersubjectivity in Adorno's stance, opening the individual to a world constructed and understood by others, while suggesting there is more at stake in analysis than the individual relating to a music object. Analytical practice has been MusicAnalysis,17/iii ( 1998)
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more guilty than Adornian theory of honouring a split between subject and object, of imposing concepts onto objects, but there is inherent within it the Adornian idea that illumination will result from immersion in the object rather than imposition on it. Such analysis, which will be sensitive to the music's internal configurations, will also be attuned to its subjectivity, even without knowing it. This is because, for Adorno, the more discursive thought turns itself towards the object, the closer it moves to that object's social mediation.

From structuralism to stuctures of feeling

As a critic sensitive to the contradictions inherent in art's social mediation, and to the tyranny of the totalising concept or sign-unit, Adorno is no more impressed than post-structuralists by attempts to systematically universalise the particular.But unlike Jacques Derrida, he is not transfixedby the transcendental theme of origin, or its lack, and is less dismissive of Enlightenment narratives than Michel Foucault or Jean-Fransois Lyotard. Instead of demonising unity, he envisages a collection of partial complexes, which together constitute something largerthan a mere assembly in which one configuration is not dominant; hence his fascination with the way Mahlerian variants constellate around an unstated core. Nor is it a revelation for Adorno that autonomous art is complicit in the dominant value systems of its age, but, unlike some less sophisticated theorists, he recognises that in many cases these aspects are subjected to scrutiny and confronted with what they exclude in the forms of sensuous particularity. By tracking the tension between concept and idea in music, analysis can attempt to decode discursively music's non-discursive unfolding of a logic that does not exclude the particular and sensuous. It seems unlikely that the major analytical techniques could be modified to incorporate deconstructive moments - unless one could envisage adding a 'sensuous particulars' graph to middleground reductions - but they can become part of a larger discourse that will pay attention to such features.This is not to suggest, however, that the Schenkerian illusion of art as a seamless whole should be simply abandoned, ratherthat analysis should also track what Adorno calls the pull towards the particular. No single analytical technique will be adequate to the varying perspective of Adorno's multifaceted approach to music; indeed sensitivity to varying levels of signification repels uniformity, envisaging something closer to Kramer'sview of musicology as an ensemble of
discourses.24

I suggested above that Adornian theory, at its most uncompromising, can be used to make modern analytical techniques appear to be a crude parody of bureaucratised modernity; but this is partly due to Adorno's monolithic understanding of instrumental reason, which becomes more differentiated when reframed by Habermas's distinction between system and lifeworld: between
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increasingly integrated technological and economic specialist systems, and the cultural fabric.What Adorno describes as the reification of a well-nigh universal instrumentality, Habermas views as a dysfunctionalism brought about by the penetration of specialised and impaired systems into fragile lifeworld structures of feeling. Specialised systems are not to be condemned for being impaired or limited languages;but problems arise when they start to control areas of experience that draw on a wider communicative web. Analytical techniques can fairly, and without disparagement, be called specialised and limited forms of rationality, which when appropriately applied produce rewarding results. Difficulties arise when their objectivity becomes self-serving and closes down other dimensions of enquiry, when musical blind-spots and inconsistencies are relentlessly ironed out. Formalist analysis is most convincing when it is awarethat it does not constitute the complete representation of a music object, and is porous to other approaches. It would certainly be tiresome were every analysis to conclude with a mandatory 'bit of subjectivity', but no reading should prohibit exploration of this dimension.Van denToorn's suggestion that octatonic sets provide a way of talking in more concrete, context-sensitive terms about something reconcilable with the abstractions of set theory suggests a route to semantic considerations:25 taken with RichardEaruskin'sassociation of octatonicism with a Russian tradition, and its intersection with diatonicism, Stravinsky'shandling of the technique indicates a switching between central European and Russian codes of musical subjectivity.26Nor need a repertoire's theoretical environment control responses to its texts. In a convincing move, Susan McClary refuses to dismiss Milton Babbitt's Philomel on grounds of the composer's reluctance to discuss anything other than the techniques of electronic and serial manipulation employed in the piece; instead she listens to the music's narrative of suffering and survival.27In other words, she is able to experience the music against the grain of the composer's stated intentions, and to introduce another signifying context. For Adorno, likewise, analysis should be critique: it should decode music's subjectivity and that of its own techniques. My own work on new music takes seriously Adorno's belief that 'the crisis in composition today ... is also a crisis in analysis', along with his suggestion that a work is a force-field organised around a problem.28My analytical critiques are based on discussion of compositional procedure to a greater extent than is normal, but, in a repertoire with constructional methods as conscious as is analytical technique, it is entirely relevant to ask what impact they have on perception of the music. The problem encountered in high modernist music is one already described in relation to analysis:over-system-dependent compositional techniques produce arbitrariness,whereby extreme equivalence meets extreme difference. Having failed to eliminate 'freethinking' particulars - or their partners, 'freespirited' structures - much composition has learned to enMusicAnalysis,17/iii (1998)
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counter its breakawaymoments. In Boulez's Repons, where subjectivity is deeply sedimented, particularity appears in sonorities which are related to their structural material, but not governed by it. Other music raises notions of nonidentity and signification more directly by invoking objects with attached associations. Wolfgang Rihm, for example, is able to create a dislocation between structure and subjectivity by allowing music with historical associations to float into configurations conceived in a modernist logic. This inclusive aesthetic precludes purely structural understanding: subjectivity is forced onto the agenda. Adorno's attempts to think beyond unity to a constellation of affinities hence remain of great relevance to the experiences that contemporary music and analysis seek to address. Before speculating further on how analysis might become sensitive to signification, I should like to say a few words about construction and mimesis, a celebrated Adornian dialectic which can become a little rigid after repeated use.29 It is now well documented that, according to Adornian aesthetics, the poles of mimesis and construction cross over in successful art, technical control emerging from the needs of its Other. Mimesis is on both sides of the equation, since it refers both to the miming of, or camouflaged adaptation to, a surrounding environment, and to the miming of an intuitive form of behaviour threatened by modernity. Mimesis does not map exactly onto notions of the Other, but the fit is close enough to justify considering the role of the Other in Adorno, enabling greater exchange with critical theory in general. Adorno's music criticism examines the fate of the subject in art in varying degrees of specificity, depending on the music being scrutinised. Discussion of Beethoven and Schoenberg is pitched in terms of subject and object, contemplating what one might call the big Other, while commentary onWagner and Mahler ranges wider because specific Others are more obviously present. What Adorno tends to call the non-identical, or particular,has, with variable success, been transformed into more concrete others by recent musicology. The introduction to Susan McClary's Feminine Endings feels like a gendered reading of Adorno's attempts to turn the concept towards the particular. Both authors interrogate objectivity, universality and transcendence, but when McClary concludes that these are 'presumably masculine virtues' it should be added that female experience is not all they exclude.30To her credit, McClary acknowledges Adorno's formative role in her own thinking and in pushing musicology beyond positivism, suggesting additionally that modern critical theory should examine the 'many areas of human experience that Adorno overlooks or denigrates as regressive, such as pleasure or the body'.3l While musicology should certainly venture beyond Adorno, it is worth observing that he does not denigrate pleasure and the bodyperse; rather,he repels representations of them dominated by exchange value. Administered desire is an overworked theme in Adorno's aesthetics because, as previously suggested, he
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over-estimates the grip of instrumental reason on subjectivityin all its manifestations. It is this that makes him see popular-cultural offers of pleasure as false promises, and the body as something closer to the pared down subjectivity of Beckett's Endgame than an arena for sensuous resistance. But Adorno's onesided reminder that pain and suffering are as constitutive of bodily experience as pleasure is surely of relevance to a somatic musicology, and his theories are a damning indictment of the persistent exploitation of the body by contemporary advertising.32 If 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 analysis will be one. Certainly, mixing Frankfurt theory with the primarily pQStstructuralist discourses currently informing musicology is a delicate operation, which can, in Robert Hullot-Kentor's estimation of Fredric Jameson's book on Adorno, disintegrate into parodies of suitably postmodernist activities such as bumper-car driving, bungee jumping or even tattoo flexing, all performed in a giant arena called 'compare and contrast'.33If Adorno can be faulted for reducing specific cultural formations to abstract discussion of identity and nonidentity, the postmodernist discourses on which the new musicology draws are culpable of the opposite deficiency: of celebrating a multitude of interest groups which would rather assert their differences than find affinities with one another. When sensitively engaged, though, the new themes of musicology have a resonance with a tradition of aesthetic thought, in its imploded Adornian form. To be really post-Adorno will require a commensurate overturning of his theories from within. A post-formalist analysis, meanwhile, would contemplate turning an understanding of structural rigour towards an empathy with structures of feeling. NOTES
1. For a discussion of Dahlhaus's critique of Adorno, see James Hepokoski, 'The Dahlhaus Project and its Extra-Musicological Sources', 19th-CenturyMusic,14/iii (1991), pp. 221-46. For a summary of Konrad Boehmer's views on Adorno, see Max Paddison, Adorno, Modernismand Mass Culture (London: Kahn & Averill, 1996), pp. 24-9. 2. 3. Rose Rosengard Subotnik is a notable exception. Milton Babbitt makes a comparablepoint about Schoenberg,suggestingthat he was neverin fashionand is now old-fashioned,in Words aboutMusic, eds. StephenDembski and JosephN. Straus (Madison:Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 165. See Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: The Athlone Press, 1994) and for modern ideas on film music, Claudia Gorbman, UnheardMelodies:Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

4.

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5. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, 'Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A Music Variations: Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky',Deconstructive Press,1996), Minnesota of University (Minneapolis: Society inWestern andReason pp.148-76. 6. Theodor Adorno, 'The Ageing of the New Music', trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor 77 (1988), pp.95-116. and FrederickWill, Telos, 7. 8. 9.

and the Claimsof Thought Post-Structuralist Peter Dews, Logicsof Disintegration: (London:Verso,1987), p.77. Theory Critical Theodor Adorno, 'On the Problem of Musical Analysis', trans. Max Paddison, Analysis,l /ii (1982), p.174. Music For a more developed discussion of this issue, see AlastairWilliams, New Music (Aldershot:Ashgate, 1997), chapter 3. ofModernity andtheClaims

10. Alan Street also finds an ambiguity in set theory, viewing it as 'either benignly rendering the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of Western musical development structurally comprehensible, or malignly extending the power of commodity fetishism 13/ii-iii (1994), into every fibre of musical substance' ('Carnival', MusicAnalysis, p.292). (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniImagination 11. Leo Treitler's MusicandtheHistorical versity Press, 1989) and various writings by Susan McClary constitute the principal targets of van den Toorn's polemic. (Berkeley: University of and theAcademy 12. Pieter van den Toorn, Music,Politics, California Press,1995), p.61. trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter Faustus, 13. This view is found in Thomas Mann's Doctor that Adorno advised known well is It 468. p. 1968), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, novel. this of aspects musical the on Mann 14. The 'good listener', whose perspective informs Adorno's musicology, is described ofMusic,trans. E. B. Ashton (NewYork: Seabury to theSociology in his Introduction Press, 1976), pp. 5-6. For discussion of listening within the 'broader field of rhetorical, expressive, and discursive behaviors', see Lawrence Kramer, Classical (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1995), Knozuledge MusicandPostmodern

p. 31.
15. Robert Samuels draws attention to the fissure Adorno detects before the second subject of the first movement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, and notes that Sixth this lacuna would not be perceived by a Schenkerian reduction (Mahler's Press, University Cambridge (Cambridge: Semiotics Musical in Study Symphony:A 1995), pp. 140-43). 16. For a syrnpatheticdiscussion of the gap between material and subjectivity in Adorno's Mahler, see Peter Franklin,"'. . . his fracturesare the script of truth."Adorno's Mahler', in Stephen E. Hefling (ed.), MahlerStudies(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.271-94. trans. Edmund Jephcott (ChiPhysiognomy, A Musical 17. Theodor Adorno, Mahler: cago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 112.
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IN ANALYSIS STRUCTURE ANDSUBJECTIVITY TORN HALVES:

293

18. Ibid.,p.88.
19. For another discussion of this issue, see JulianJohnson, 'Analysis in Adorno's AesAnalysis, 14/ii-iii (1995), p.310. thetics of Music', Music

Physiognomy, p. 89. It should be noted that the affinity 20. Adorno, Mahler:A Musical Adorno finds between Mahler and Stravinskydoes not heighten his opinion of the latter, since he is keen to assert that Mahler's variants are temporally driven, unlike Stravinsky's static constructions. For further discussion of Adorno's understanding of collective images in music, see AlastairWilliams, 'Technology of the Opera 3rournal, Archaic:Wish Images and Phantasmagoria in Wagner', Cambridge 9/i (1997), pp. 1-15. Physiognomy, p.148. 21. Adorno, Mahler:A Musical 22. Ibid.,p.149. Knowledge, p.6. 23. Kramer, Classical MusicandPostmodern 24. Ibid.,p.25. Politics, andtheAcademy, pp. 190-92. 25. Van den Toorn, Music, and theRussian Tradi26. This is a prevalent theme in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky Through 'Mavra'(Oxford: Oxford University Press, tions:ABiography of theWorks 1996). Use of the octatonic scale is discussed in chapter 4. 27. Susan McClary, 'Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composi12 (1989), p.75. tion', Cultural Critique, 28. Adorno, 'On the Problem of MusicalAnalysis', p. 181. 29. Dai Griffiths makes this point in a review of Anthony Pople (ed.) Theory,Analysis (1996), p.388. andMeaning in Music,in MusicAnalysis,15/ii-iii and Sexuality(Minneapolis: Endings: Music, Gender, 30. Susan McClary, Feminine
UniversityofMinnesotaPress, l991),p. 17.

31. Ibid.,p.29. of theAesthetic 32. For a somatic reading of Adorno, see Terry Eagleton, TheIdeology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 341-65. (1991), 33. Robert Hullot-Kentor, 'Suggested Reading:Jameson on Adorno', Telos,89 pp. 167-77.

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