Having finished Johnson's Listening in Paris I now feel that any apposite critique of Romanticism must come from a posture of having, if not embraced Romanticism, gone hand in hand with Romanticism for some way. Perhaps I wouldn't want to defend Romanticism except for the existence of anti-Romanticism, which leans towards pulling the shade down on what it's really like to have an experience. Our first anomaly evinces itself in recognizing an experience that one would rather not have taken for an experience in any Romantic sense. It points to a shortcoming in vision of *language as a giver of experience, for even though Johnson is a historian who specializes in musicology, the key to his thinking is the idea that "music is a language," and by "language" he means something that, unconsciously and from the outside, constructs experience. (We may wish to credit Johsnon with giving us something more subtle than a simple critique of Romanticism; he means to criticize the conditions of possibility of Romanticism. I would still turn the critique around to investigate the conditions of possibility of an "anti-Romantic" experience.) The specific problem Johnson's discourse raises is this: given an expectation of silent listening, how does one adequately and appropriately communicate one's boredom at the opera without being mistaken for either having a profound experience or for genuinely being polite? At this point I'd like to register my sympathies with elite audiences who feel that their responsivity, their very capacity for formulating and communicating responses to music, which must in only one respect happen both spontaneously and at once if they are to be responses, has been truncated, repressed, or otherwise mired in stupidities and awkward, if all too easy, niceties. Do such listeners suffer from too much Romanticism or, as may be evident were we to take our feelings into account, too little? Bear with me a second. I'm not going to argue that boredom represents a deep experience or an experience any less constructed or more interior than any other kind of experience. I will say that boredom is felt, and, most germaine to our critique, an urge to communicate this feeling arises even when approved codes of expressing such a feeling are not readily at hand. To think this through we must return to the question of response, which now must be thought with a new understanding of readiness, for it is only in one respect that responses are formulated and communicated spontaneously and at once, and that is in respect to the synkairotic and the spasmoreality that pertains to its breach. The synkairotic differs from synchronic in that its at onces are not in binary opposition to the diachronic, and may be stretched and bent in response to exigencies of moment. What we call one respect of response may be better conceptualized as one moment of response. The fact that response has other moments is not obscured or obliterated by the breach of the synkairotic. In actuality the inculcation of stillness (of which silence is but one mode) into the body of the elite listener reveals itself as an extreme kind of violence not because it denies an expression–this would the Romantic conceit of the anti-Romantic–but because it misplaces readiness. This may also stand as a metaphor for zombification, this stillness. We should not think of this zombification, however, in the sense of there being a Difference between Life and Death which may be suspended, but only in the sense of a readiness having been misplaced or even misappropriated. Readiness belongs with the response and with experience at once. Of course in embracing the momentary we must depart from the instant and the infinite experience it has been made to represent. So be it. We cannot listen well while allowing readiness to be restricted to the instantaneous.
Our second anomaly is a straightforward critique of the Boasian linguistic unconscious by Claude Hagège: On the Part Played by Human Conscious Choice in Language Structure and Language Evolution (pdf). (This may appear to be an ordered catalogue of anomalies; I take the existence of linguistic consciousness to be a single fact which any adequate thinking about language would have to account for, so I count it as one anomaly, without ruling out any finer analyses.)
James H. Johnson argues that the revolutionary politics of the Terror fostered a musical style that was conservative and reactionary. Here he talks about polyphony:
[T]he cultural climate of Jacobinism worked against polyphony, for polyphony implied a divided social body. Dramatically, it signified protagonists at cross purposes; experientially, it made transparency between stage and spectator difficult; and musically, it promoted dangerously personal experience. In short, polyphony was the musical equivalent of dissent.
(Listening in Paris, pp. 152-154)
Perhaps the relation between personal experience and music seems obvious, but I will probe it just a bit. How would polyphony in particular promote a personal experience of music? Is it actually animus towards the personal that drives the suppression of polyphony? The political forces that would stomp out plurality would also stomp out personal liberty and in extreme though not genuinely rare cases they would stomp out music as well. Should we let the people who would stomp out music tell us what music means, or even provide the vaguest outline of what constitutes a musical experience?
The suppression of music ranks among the most vicious forms of the challenge to pluralism for which there is no easy rejoinder, no unambiguous defense. The champion of liberty must concede that one is free to hate music, to express one's hatred of music and to persuade others to hate music even while denying that one is a person, or, more commonly, that a human being must be thought of as an entity endowed with personal liberty. I sense there is more at stake in the suppression of music than any particular variety of political liberty, though I am not quite imagining a musical experience absent a political liberty.
Do I have to be precisely at liberty to even think that there must be something more than liberty? That is, is it liberty that affords me something more than itself?
Liberty without music is worthless to me. I can even say that music is liberating. Music gives liberty as much as it is born in liberty and for this reason liberty appears to me to be polymorphous. There are as many forms of liberty as there are forms. (I might be sliding away from a view that liberties exist as such.) In addition there are transformative liberties, metamorphoses, monstruations and kaleidiations of liberty.
Is personal experience the domain of the transformative par excellence? (I don't know that this is true, but I will not fear to think it.)
In all likelihood personal experience doesn't need to be promoted. Johsnon has shown that the dominant aesthetic during the reign of the Jacobins heard music as something that promoted feelings, or, perhaps, elicited feelings. I imagine a danger arising from a diffuse feeling that the feeling touches the personal, but maybe that would have been beside the point. The transition from the elicited to the illicit may have to do with an atmospheric hostility towards feelings; on the other hand the stomping out of feelings may be an unintended casualty of an aggression against free representations of liberty–I'd even say relatively free representations of liberty, because unlike Nancy I don't know what absolute freedom would mean in this context. I don't know that feelings elicited by music, created or sounded by music, are themselves absolute feelings or have any contact with an absolute freedom or a domain of the absolutely personal. At the same time, I don't deny the existence of the feeling or the personal or the free. Perhaps the Jacobins correctly surmised the polymorphousness of liberty, and, given a certain dogma about representation, the injuction (the enjoinment, which would be at the same time a disjunction) against polyphony took shape as if by necessity. And the most dangerous liberty of all would be the transformative.
Questions for a later date: is the formless transformative? Is the transformative necessarily formless or of the formless?
On May 29, 1789, professors of the Conservatoire de Musique gave a concert for a pair of Asian elephants, Hanz and Marguerite. The concert was part of a scientific experiment intended to determine whether music stirred the passions of listeners in a natural state.
The experiment was a success. The swift and direct effect of music upon sensitive listeners uncorrupted by the monarchy was confirmed. A rough correlation between particular types of music and specific response could now be made. Most important, the passionate impact of military music, just as the Greeks had chronicled, now seemed indubitable. The central lesson of the experiment was just what Ginguené had said earlier in the decade: music acts most strongly when listeners respond most naturally. The report offered a lofty conclusion: "Such is the empire of music over all beings endowed with life and with sensitivity, that men may make use of it. . .to civilize themselves and regulate their morals."
(James H. Johsnon, Listening in Paris, p. 131)
Johnson touches on without answering the questions "What is music?" and "What is listening?" The latter question suggests how Johnson would go about answering the former. The question "How is collective experience possible?" also arises from his work. These are all good questions. Johnson's work has forced me to acknowledge my own prejudices regarding music, to realize that my thoughts about music are culturally, historically shaped. My prejudices about music are also personally shaped to such an extent that I notice that nobody really shares exactly my views of what music is or what it means.
I spent some time this morning listening to Dr. Chandrakant Sardeshmukh's cd, Celebration. "Happiness Forever: Raga Hemant" is in 16, so it was good to work out to–I do all my exercizes in reps of 16; 32 of these, 48 of those, 64 of the other, 96, 128, 192....–though perhaps not as good for working out as the Ohio Players. My counting was a bit of a distraction. Is this an unnatural way to listen to "Happiness Forever"? Well, is there a natural way to listen to "Happiness Forever"? It was a live recording but the audience was silent until the very end when they all burst into applause. That was nice, I thought. Would I want to call that unnatural? Dr. Sardeshmukh links to the following video clip on Youtube, make of it what you will:
I'll add a thought. Is it the case that there's one activity called "listening" that people pursue in various ways, with varying intensity, with varying degrees of attentiveness; or is "listening" in fact a label for diverse activities that would be given different names were our common language more precise. If one follows the latter path, what must one say about music? Oh, and since I'm at it, what does the phrase "aesthetic imperialism" suggest to you?
"Ideally I would have been born in the Rococo Era":
James H. Johnson's prose reminds me of why I enjoy reading histories:
These were the years of sensibility in France, when to feel at all was to feel passionately, and to show it in public de rigueur. Tears, sanglots, crises, palpitations, bouleversements, convulsions and frissons of every sort agitated hearts in the 1770s (often with uncanny regularity, as with one acquaintance of Mme de Genlis who managed to have a fainting spell from an excess of sensibility twice weekly, just after guests had arrived for her salon). To open the soul to delicious sentiments was for these cultivated aristocrats the meaning of Rousseau's challenge to live simply and honestly, and Gluck more than any other composer encouraged precisely this.
(Listening in Paris, p. 65)
As for Johnson's argument (commenting on an argument as it unfolds is de rigueur–no, really!) he has shown that the sensibility of Parisian opera goers in the 1770's differed from the sensibility of Parisian opera goers in the 1740's, if indifference can be called a sensibility. This difference in sensibilities is a curious fact. What sort of phenomenon is a dominant sensibility that it can be so easily overthrown, without anybody losing their head? What is the power of social dominance in general? I've already indicated my feeling that with regard to music in particular a dominant taste never covers everything, never applies to everybody in every situtation. Johnson takes the position that before a way of hearing could be fully experienced (what is a less than full experience, btw?) it must be thinkable (p. 41). With that as a premise, and a sufficiently stringent definition of thought, one could blot out much of human history, or, conversely, break it down into narratable pieces. How much life takes place outside the beau monde? I feel that I have journeyed through many beaux mondes, so I am extremely hesitent to allow that the beau monde covers all of life. Have I ever been a place where the beau monde had absolutely no reach? Well, there are always memories of adolescence. Is a history of social dominance essentially adolescent? Perhaps aesthetics is predominantly adolescent. Adolescent as the subject of the beau monde may be, as with Coppola's Marie Antoinette, a terror waits on the horizon, and terror has its serious defenders. Just because one needn't lose one's head doesn't mean one won't. We'll see how Johnson navigates those waters in a later post.
Some maintained that it was bad form to stay for the entire opera. The young dandy Almair in La Morlière's Angola, described as a "scrupulous observer of etiquette [bienséance]," claims that there is "nothing so indecent as staying to the end" of an opera. The practice was apparently common enough for the Mercure to mention it disapprovingly: it was a "disgrace," the paper wrote, for women to leave during the last acts of Atys and Roland. Others held a prejudice against listening too intently to the music. A traveler to Paris who was quick to grasp the dynamics of behavior at the Opéra wrote with some derision that the only spectators who listened to the music were "several clerics, several shopkeepers, several schoolboys, sucklings of the muses and soldiers just returning from or about to leave for a tour of duty." And a young nobleman explained to his guest that listening to the music with focused attention was "bourgeois." "There is nothing so damnable," he went on, "as listening to a work like a street merchant or some provincial just off the boat."
For these spectators, attentiveness was a social faux pas, as the Mercure observed: spectators who attempted to listen to a work before judging it, the paper claimed, were regarded by the rest as "creatures from another world." Circulating, conversing, arriving late, and leaving early were an accepted part of eighteenth-century musical experience, grudgingly tolerated by some and positively encouraged by others. "We listen at most to two or three pieces consecrated by fashion," as a character in Angola declares, "and at the end we excessively praise or thoroughly damn the whole work."
(James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (University of California Press, 1995), p. 31)
A peculiar effect of Johnson's brand of cultural history is that the experiences at the opera of sucklings of the muses and others on the sidelines of the business of the aristocracy don't really count as musical experiences. They have no meaning. Musical meaning, Johnson says, "resides in the particular moment of reception, one shaped by dominant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically structured" (p. 2). He denies that there are as many Don Giovannis as there have been listeners. He holds that there is absolutely zero meaning outside of a horizon of expectations which is socially defined and cannot be understood as belonging to individuals (p. 3). Johnson' analysis, then, produces the curious effect that an Eighteenth-Century aristocrat who doesn't listen to an opera has a musical experience while attendees who do listen do not have meaningful musical experiences. Of course, we recieve Johnson's work amid dominant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically structured. (How then should I interepret signs of conflict in his account, the possibility of other readings of the same material?) One dominant expectation greeting Johnson's work may be that sucklings of the muses have no meaningful experiences, no horizons worth exploring, no history that needs to be told. Yet if I didn't suspect Johnson of harboring a secret affection for the sucklings of the muses I would read no further–and I intent to read further. I've already decided that Listening in Paris is quite an engaging book.