Music’s Stubborn Enchantments (and Music Theory’s)

Abstract

In 1917, Max Weber (paraphrasing Schiller) famously proclaimed modernity’s “disenchantment of the world.” Weber was speaking specifically about the waning of belief in the cold light of science, secularism, and rationalized, bureaucratic capitalism, but his dictum has proven remarkably resonant beyond the social science quad. Indeed, disenchantment in various forms arguably pervades the postmodern humanities, as both diagnosis and method: the critical theorist disenchants, unmasks, demystifies. Most music theorists, it need hardly be said, do something quite different. As the SMT celebrates its 40th year, music theory—with its wide-eyed enthusiasms and unapologetic close readings, its loving attention to the sonic and the aesthetic, its frequent aloofness from the social and political—remains a discipline apart, a sort of blissed-out, sylvan glade within the Left-melancholic academy.Depending on one’s intellectual commitments this may be cause for celebration or withering critique. But before we exult or condemn, we should try, once again, to understandwhy, as music theorists, many of us are so prone to enchantment (despite frequent admonishments from our academic neighbors), and what this might mean for our discipline’s future, its place in the academic ecology, and its ethical commitments. This paper considers these questions in connection with the song “Poor Places” by the band Wilco, using it as a case study to stage a fictive encounter between (unabashedly enchanted) music analysis and more critically wary perspectives. I end with broader ethical considerations about enchantment’s potential to effect social change, drawing on the work of political theorist Jane Bennett.