Material Gains: Assessing Susan McClary

Abstract

Really? I asked the editors. You really want me to review Susan McClary right after she reviewed me in these very pages? You’re willing to risk the sort of spectacle in which, say, Joseph Kerman and Charles Rosen hand the palm back and forth in The New York Review of Each Other's Books? Don’t you know that is how one loses one's clout? Oh yes, we’ll risk it, they replied, and I am glad. What Susan handed me was not exactly a palm, although there were fronds amid the brambles. And as the editors evidently expected, what I am about to hand back will not exactly be a palm either, although I do intend it as a token of admiration. It is no secret that Susan and I are old acquaintances—old friends, even—united in what I trust are resilient bonds of affection. Those bonds have never constrained our free exchange of often critical opinion; and as long as she has made hers public in a decidedly mixed review of my Oxford History of Western Music, I am happy to follow suit now that she has been honoured by Ashgate with a collection of reissued essays called Reading Music1—one in a series, Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology, that also includes volumes devoted to the writings of Lawrence Kramer, Gary Tomlinson, Simon Frith, and Nicholas Cook—and also with a Festschrift called Musicological Identities (2008),2 assembled and edited by Raymond Knapp, her UCLA colleague, and her former pupils Steven Baur and Jacqueline Warwick. This pair of tributes invites a comprehensive stocktaking of McClary's achievement and impact.