Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject by Michael L. Klein

Abstract

Music and Crises of Modern Subject. By Michael L. Klein. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. [xii, 191 p. ISBN 9780253017208 (cloth), $40; ISBN 9780253017222 (e-book), $39.99] Musical examples, works cited, index. Michael L. Klein's latest book, Music and Crises of Modern Subject, discards traditional avenues of music theory and instead penetrates musical subjects primarily through writings of psychoanalyst Jacques (1901-1981). Following twentieth-century French philosophy, which is not new musicology, is an un common path for subjects of music theory and analysis in early twenty-first century. Although monograph contains fewer than 200 pages, all six chapters include innumerable nuggets of mind-altering, and often sobering, musings that challenge previous interpretations of musical works (and texts) ranging from Franz Schubert and Frederic Chopin Witold I.utoskuvski and Kaija Saariaho. Klein's intimate and piercing writing (a la Slavoj Zizek) elucidates Lacan's layers of subjectivity by repeatedly emphasizing central terms, using literature and recent films as intertextual examples, and placing interrogative subheadings within each chapter. In short, and in form of a chiasmus (just one of many), Klein tries to clarify what Lacan's model of subjectivity means for our approaches music, and what music means for our approaches Lacan (p-2). In first chapter (Music and Symptom), Klein introduces Lacan's symptom and three orders of subjectivity--the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real--through early discourse of music theory and hermeneutics. An article by Edward T. that presents two contrasting modes of interpretation--structural and expressive--in context of Moment musical no. 6 in A[flat] Major provides Klein's starting point (see Cone, Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Hermeneutics, 19th Century Music 5, no. 3 [Spring 1982]: 233-41). Near beginning of his Moment musical, Schubert writes an odd in relative minor that features an unresolved E[natural] in top voice, an E[natural] that calls a promissory note, a pitch or chord that withholds its voice-leading obligations until a later passage (p. 10; original italics). To transform this observation into expressive meaning, Klein remarks that Cone whispers words syphilis, desolation, and dread at end of his study (p. 7; italics in original). Klein views Cone's initial approach as unnecessary, however: Structural analysis as first step toward hermeneutics is a hopeless methodology because it only reinforces idea that meaning works like an equation in which a structural detail here is equivalent an extra-musical meaning there (p. 11). The latter attitude becomes a theme throughout book. Following Lacan, who believes the task of analysis involves making symptom speak, rendering it in language, Klein considers strange and unsettling passages in Moment musical [as] symptoms demanding interpretation (p. 17). In final parts of chapter, Klein confronts Johannes Brahms's beautiful Clarinet Sonata in F Minor, op. 120, no. 1, with Lacan's three orders of subjectivity. In second chapter (The Acoustic Mirror as Formative of Auditory Pleasure and Fantasy: Chopin's Berceuse, Brahms's Romanze, and Saariaho's 'Parfume de l'instant'), Klein borrows phrase acoustic from critical theorist Kaja Silverman describe musical passages by Chopin, Brahms, and Saariaho that reflect period just before Lacan's mirror stage of human development (p. 40). Chopin's Berceuse, op. 57, projects stability and comfort: The simple rocking of tonic and dominant harmonies for nearly entirety of piece makes it easy forget that we are hearing a series of variations: we relive of maternal swaying (p. 44). Klein writes of an enduring nostalgic fantasy that persists following our entrance into culture through language (i. …