Music and the Politics of Negation by James R. Currie (review)

Abstract

and Politics of Negation. By James R. Currie. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. [xxi, 222 p. ISBN 9780253357038 (hardcover), $34.95; (e-book), $28.99.] examples, bibliography, index.In his book, and Politics of Negation, James R. Currie employs following sections: Veils (Mozart, Piano Concerto K. 459, Finale); Dreams (Fugal Counterpoint); Exile (Haydn, String Quartet Op. 33, No. 5); Enchantment (Mo - zart, La clemenza di Tito); and Forgetting (Edward Said). Currie's overarching enterprise has been to elevate from rubble of its political setting. As James Garratt said in his review of book, where he compared it with Music after All (Journal of American Musi cological Society 62, no. 1 [Spring 2009]: 145-204), the version of this argument presented in and Politics of Negation is considerably more nuanced (Music & Letters 94, no. 3 [2013]: 528). Nevertheless, unprimed reader of book may experience a jolt when Currie equates smugness of current musicology with self-congratulatory stance of late capitalism-a state that he rightly opines is unwarranted with current situation of world, postcollapse of Eastern European communisms and, principally, post-fall of Berlin Wall: catastrophic political instability, global financial crisis, coldly indifferent markets unmasked, fragility of democracy, and failure of Leftin Britain.By Currie's account, new or musicology's transhistoricalness causes it, ironically, to enact psychoanalytic condition of projectional disavowal, through replicating the dynamics of very object that it nearly always rejects in order to validate itself (p. x). This leads to a of exclusion-of music and (p. x). In what can be seen as an updated application of Fredric Jameson's insights in Postmodernism, or, Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post- Contemporary Interventions [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991]), Currie specifically situates new musicology's identity politics as a reflection of heinousness of this phase in our political history. Currie leads us through analyses founded on typical new musicology paradigms-while yet managing, simultaneously, to champion revivification of aesthetic autonomy- all of which arrive at some point of negation, so that negation of egregious political situations can occur through music. I would have welcomed more teasing-out of charge that new musicology has a general sense of political well-being (p. x). Nor was I explicitly shown this structural replicating. One might ask whether aligning new musicology with its dominant political context just because both came into being at same time is not in itself an act of historicizing!In his analysis of works from classical era, Currie's argument is that straying from established forms equates with political activism-an example of which is analogy that concerto form embodies dynamic of individual versus society, which Currie explores through Finale of Mozart's Piano Concerto in F major, K.459, and which provides a parallel for our contemporary situation. Currie addresses Wye J. Allanbrook's postmodern (A Millennial Mozart? Mozart Society of America Newsletter 3, no. 2 [Summer 1999]: 2-4) at length here. This trope might well smack of a restaging of Susan McClary's and others' approaches-and indeed, Currie informs us that his own approach is not an argu ment against those who have inspired him (Berthold Hoeckner, Michael Spitzer, Daniel Chua, Lydia Goehr and Martin Scherzinger [p. xv]). These are all authors who would be described as new musicologists or, in U.K., as part of British critical musicology approach. (It is refreshing to this reader that there are only two references, judiciously selected, to Gilles Deleuze.) But Currie then proceeds to refute his own slant here by uncovering its innate instability. …