Beauty and the Beast

The ‘New’ Musicology

In an essay for the Royal Musicological Association, titled ‘What is musicology’, Nicholas Cook writes:

'New' musicology, as this new approach was called, gained its greatest notoriety from the work of Susan McClary, who linked the way in which Beethoven's music drives forward from climax to climax to specifically male forms of experience.

In the article this statement functions as an apt summary of the developments in ‘gender representation’ that have featured so prominently in the musicology and music theory of the past two decades.

What is striking about the quotation is its sheer specificity. At this very first mention of a ‘New’ musicology, Cook immediately focuses on Susan McClary, despite the large pool of academics that have been identified with the movement and from McClary’s prolific musicological output, Cook chooses to single out her writings on Beethoven, specifically her critique regarding the patriarchal tendencies found in his music.

The exactitude of Nicholas Cook’s example serves to highlight pertinently the ‘notoriety’ of this single critique. As noted by many later writers, the controversy that it has conjured up springs from a fundamental crisis concerning musicology’s intellectual identity, as well as the difficulty the musical community has had in accepting an apparent attack upon the credibility of one of classical music’s most revered composers.

It must be noted that despite the significant intellectual heat that McClary’s writings have generated in music academia, much of the arguments in support or opposition of McClary’s position have been rather regrettable. Unfortunately the sensitivity of the subject matter has served to polarize a great deal of musical discourse; exemplified by Pieter van den Toorn’s traditionalist polemic in The Journal of Musicology and complimented by an equally robust and essentially misandrist rebuttal in the very next issue of the journal by Ruth Solie who, in support of McClary’s infamous account of the ‘point of recapitulation’ in the 1st movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, writes that ‘in one study of college age men, 60% said they would rape if they knew they would get away with it’ . And many others have entered into various formalist vs. reductionist dialogues that have proved equally unproductive.

Rather than add to such polarization, I would like to avoid both of the accounts articulated above, and instead attempt to address the fundamental musical and philosophical issues that lie at the root of the aforementioned dispute, in order to better understand this schism in understanding.

The Beethoven Debate

‘The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the enlightenment’

- Susan McClary

Beethoven’s primary place in the classical music canon makes for a clear starting point when attempting any new type of musical analysis. This is attested to by the large quantity of available literature on Beethoven’s music, as well as the incomparable renown of the works themselves.

A real danger, though, when focussing so significantly on Beethoven’s music, is to designate that which qualitatively marks the apex of the classical music tradition, as typical of that very same tradition.

Beethoven’s music is nothing if not atypical, but the surface structures of his symphonies fail to convey this. The weight of tradition in symphonic form, felt even then, meant that Beethoven’s symphonies utilized a relatively orthodox basic form. Beethoven’s unique musical nature isn’t even fully articulated through the realisation of these forms (the ‘possible shades on this paradigm’, as McClary puts it) because, I will argue, form is in and of itself so important in extracting the overall musical and psychological narrative of Beethoven’s work.

To McClary’s credit the blind requirements of form are used to excuse the patriarchal surface structure of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, as ‘the lovely “feminine” tune... is brutally, tragically quashed in accordance with the destiny predetermined by the “disinterested” conventions of form.’ But Beethoven is not granted that very same reprise and unfairly so.

Sonata form is incorporated into every opening of the Beethoven Symphonies, usually with slow introductory passages, such as the Adagio markings in the introduction to the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 7th symphonies. And eight of the nine symphonies are written in the standard four movements expected of a classical symphony. But this orthodox approach to symphonic form is actually an exception to the rule.

When we turn to the rest of Beethoven’s output, the use of form is rather different. Beethoven’s chamber music demonstrates a particularly malleable use of form. The string quartet was still a genre in its infancy and Beethoven exploited the quartet’s lack of identity with a highly flexible use of structure. Compositions vary at will from three to six movements, with a sporadic use of traditional forms. Whilst the original inclusion of the ‘Grosse Fugue’ in Op. 130 and its subsequent exclusion, help to mark out just how far Beethoven was and wasn’t able to experiment with chamber music’s partially established architectonic structures.

On Beethoven’s vocal works, the musicologist Paul Reid writes:

'The songs, works of a predominantly personal, even intimate nature, will never stand unscathed beside the large-scale, public works while they are approached with expectations and preconceptions derived from the popular image of the ‘heroic’ composer, taming the musical elements by sheer force of will.’

These ‘public’ works are, of course, represented by the likes of Fidelio and the Missa Solemnis. Despite the historical dominance of such large-scale works, they (despite their undoubted originality) represent the same sense of weighted tradition that saw parameters set on the autonomy of Beethoven’s symphonic structures. The rest of Beethoven’s vocal oeuvre actually represents works of great tenderness complimented by a real musical ambition. In them, Beethoven works within a myriad of different musical styles; from the sweet, simple strophic settings such as ‘Sehnsucht’, to the influence of Italian opera in the cavatina-cabaletta setting of ‘Seufzer eines ungeliebten/Gegenliebe’ , and also to those through-composed works that foresaw the developments in German art song of the 19th century, such as in ‘Adelaide’ and ‘An die ferne Geliebte’.

Beethoven’s piano sonatas, though, represent a compositional autonomy unsurpassed by any other. These 32 compositions make up his largest single collection of works and their highly variable application of music forms – ironically, many excluding sonata form entirely – and the varied number of movements, illustrate a drastically more experimental approach in the surface structure of Beethoven’s music than the Symphonies, to which McClary chose to focus her gaze. It is this autonomy of structure that is of such profound significance when interpreting representational narratives in the forms of Beethoven’s music.

Of the piano sonatas, quite possibly the most experimental of all is Beethoven’s Op. 54 Sonata in F major and it is a piece that Beethoven regarded with a great deal of affection, as noted by András Schiff in his Beethoven lectures. It is comprised of just two movements, with a total running time of around ten minutes; structurally bizarre by any standard for a classical sonata. The first movement is an intriguing minuet, and the second is a beautiful little perpetuum mobile. But it is this first movement that has incited such a great deal of interest from performers and commentators alike and explicit references have been made for some time about its overt gender implications. Richard Rosenberg famously referred to the movement as ‘La Belle et la Bête’ (Beauty and the Beast), illustrating the extreme nature that gender representation takes on in the movement.

It begins in a ‘tempo d'un menuetto’ in triple time, with what Alfred Brendel describes as ‘a dolce-grazioso theme that is emphatically feminine in nature’.

Fig. 1: Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54, Bars 1-11

This theme is characterized by an economical treatment of both the harmonic and motivic material, which perfectly coincides with the ‘simple’ psychological quality of Jill Halstead’s female gender descriptions of musical gesture. This in turn is complimented by the lightness of the thin texture, the piano dynamic marking and the frequent use of feminine cadences (see bars 4 & 8).

Fig. 2: Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54, Bars 24-26

The second theme, which is introduced at the end of bar 24, is the exact musical antonym of the graceful opening gesture, with its ‘masculine stamping octave triplets’. It is a trio scarred by hemiolas that attempt to cut the music off from its lilting beginnings. It continues to navigate a tonally turbulent course to the beginnings of a rather subdued modulation at bar 59, which then moves towards the return of the original F major theme at bar 70.

The opening theme now takes control of proceedings. Brendel here notes that it ‘has lost a bit of its naïveté’ and that the newly found ‘airs and figurations’ assist in this image of graceful control.

Fig. 3: Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54, Bars 72-75

The masculine theme ‘appears a second time; now it is shorter and does not leave the tonic, something the Beast finds noticeably difficult’. It then fades before being lost again to Beauty in the second recapitulation of the opening theme, after which comes the close of the movement.

Significantly, Brendel then describes how the ‘lovely coda unites the feminine and masculine elements. Beauty’s face appears transformed... Not only has the Beast been tamed, but he has become part of Beauty. There is, however, one last outburst of beastliness, as a result of which the Beast loses his identity. Triplets are resolved into duplets. The movement’s end is feminine.’

Fig. 4: Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54, Bars 173-180

The significance of the final feminine cadence, the tonic recapitulations, the feminine opening theme and the masculine secondary theme, are all bound up in Beethoven’s attempt, in this movement, to turn the entire concept of sonata form on its head: the male is here ‘tamed’ by the female.

It is no coincidence that when Beethoven functions outside the limits of form, the ‘contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture’ are nowhere to be seen within the music. And the Piano Sonata Op. 54’s negative reception (noted by the likes of Charles Rosen) despite its meticulous construction, could well be attributed to the false expectations of this ‘patriarchal culture’; as, conversely, can the Ninth Symphony’s overt popularity.

The Riddle of Form

In a discussion of the French composer Jean Barraqué, the musicologist André Hodeir wrote: ‘In the works of Barraqué, music may well have attained the world of utter strangeness that was partly glimpsed by Beethoven in his last Quartets… by Debussy in La Mer, and by Berg in Wozzeck… a world in which musical form as such remains entirely submerged in the music.’

Here Hodeir is correctly grouping together composers for whom form was utilized for dramatic effect, in a way that it was not for the work of Mozart and Schubert; McClary’s comparative examples. When a compositional model is forced on Beethoven, it is utterly wrong to interpret Beethoven’s psychological narrative. You are there instead interpreting the preceding compositional model's own socio-psychological narrative.

It is only when Beethoven is free to roam structurally that a psychological genesis can truly be traced. As Brendel says of the Sonatas: ‘form itself is also cast in such a way that one can deduce from it the psychological process…Beethoven creates the firmest intellectual basis imaginable, so that the emotions can emerge from it more clearly, distinctly and unequivocally.’

Of course, there are alternative readings for the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 54, notably Anton Kuerti’s illuminating reference to musical parody. But I believe a fundamental tenet of interpretative practice is to allow a multiplicity of readings, as in Paul Ricœur’s concept of aesthetic surplus, and so one understanding of a piece doesn’t necessarily rule out another. In any case, Brendel and Rosenberg’s account can certainly take on slices of humour, even whole chunks of it, so no necessary opposition is in question.

Philosophical Roots

This first mention of the Ricœur's Heideggerian lens, raises the question of philosophical method in musical analysis; which, in the work of Susan McClary, reveals much about the above dilemma regarding Beethoven and his music.

Susan McClary chooses a highly syncretist form of philosophical investigation, with major thinkers and works from diverse traditions interacting freely. Here she identifies philosophical movements ‘as a tool for revealing the existence of "deep structures" beneath the signifying surfaces of musical texts’ , as described by Marcel Cobussen. In McClary’s work Adorno and Foucault, Structuralism and Deconstruction, Modernism and Postmodernism, all engage dynamically. Yet some of this supposed interaction is analytically questionable.

McClary clearly views her work to be in a postmodern deconstructive vein, especially in her attempt to explain and understand formally absolutist concepts and experiences. But her construction of musical meta-narratives and the reading of works from a ‘feminist perspective’, stand at odds with Derrida’s ideals of care and context.

Cobussen writes: ‘In contrast to Derrida, who works from the vocabulary of the text 'itself', McClary departs from a self-discovered system of meaning that she lays over the music as a meta-concept. Derrida's work, on the contrary, is an attack on the abstracting of containable meanings from concrete texts.’

These essentialist hues stem from the influence of Michel Foucault. Of this influence, Peter Martin says that McClary ‘argues, the determinism implicit in Foucault’s formulations must be supplanted by a view of culture as the terrain in which competing versions of reality fight it out’. Here McClary is seeking to avoid the essential Marxist, neo-Nietzschean narrative of Foucault’s works. But to sweep away fundamental tenets of Foucault’s philosophy in order to obtain a workable philosophical framework is, frankly, unlikely to hold up outside the perimeter of contemporary music theory.

Irrelevant of its source, though, it is where McClary directs this strain of essentialism that is so crucial. There is a very real difference between McClary interpreting possible patriarchal representations in musical form, and McClary mapping this same interpretation onto works of the classical canon. I would argue that Adorno’s critical theory can offer a global view when discussing conventions of form and musical taste, as it is this aspect of McClary’s work that holds up well, and yet it does not allow for a critique of individual composers and works to form part of this global view.

Though McClary claimed Adorno's work was the key to ‘getting beyond formalism’, the relation of his critical stance to individual works ‘is decidedly different from those in which music reproduces dominant patriarchal systems of belief’ , as Roger Savage put it in his book Hermeneutics and Music Criticism. Savage adds that this is because of Adorno's 'rigorous insistence that some measure of autonomy was essential for a distancing relation in virtue of which a work was more than a mere extension of social reality by other means’. Such a statement emphasizes the transcendent nature of art and the subsequent multiplicity of readings necessitated by the ‘measure of autonomy’ contained in a musical work’s production.

McClary does include a multiplicity of readings across her body of work, including racial and theological as well as gender narratives, but she maintains a single interpretation for individual works; even when the arresting text of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony reveals other possible readings. It is quite striking that from the starting point of Adorno, whose real interest in Beethoven’s music was founded upon the utter difference it struck to both mimetic reality and to its historiographical musical context, McClary should seek to identify past and present social structures in Beethoven’s music.

Concluding Remarks

The real shame is that in all this paradoxical combination of essentialist deconstruction, some of McClary’s claims become intellectually isolated and can only function from within music itself. This is certainly not a satisfactory end result for a discipline which has occupied the back-waters of intellectual investigation for the past century, nor is it a satisfactory solution for academia as a whole.

Donald Frances Tovey’s account of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 54 began with a battle cry for a rather different mode of analysis and I believe that it serves as a blueprint for proper musicological discourse in relation to individual works:

‘If Beethoven uses an old convention, we must find out how it fits the use he makes of it, instead of imagining that the origin elsewhere explains its presence here. If Beethoven writes in a form and style which cannot be found elsewhere, we must, as Hans Sachs says, find its own rules without worrying because it does not fit ours.’

#Beethoven #NewMusicology #Feminism