Abstract

In his extensive efforts to counter what he referred to as “the universalizing discourses of Europe and the United States,” Edward Said recognized the need for and explored the possibilities of a “different kind of reading and interpretation” (Culture 50). In that exploration, he noted that “our interpretive change of perspective allows us to challenge the sovereign and unchallenged authority of the allegedly detached Western observer” (51). As is suggested in this statement and in his designating Culture and Imperialism as “a kind geographical inquiry into historical experience,” much of Said's work employs the language of the visible realm to counter “the universalizing discourses of Europe and the United States.” Implicit in his argument for a change of interpretive perspectives is his recognition that a thorough critique of universalizing discourses requires a supplement to or something beyond the perspectives available through the language of the visible. The change of perspective Said described in Culture and Imperialism, for example, and discussed elsewhere entailed a shift from a visual to an audible perspective when he turned to music in general but especially counterpoint for an interpretive model.The change advocated by Said has significant affinities with a robust undercurrent in the history of philosophy/theory in which there have been challenges to the dominance of sight (as, for example, in Said's reference to “the sovereign and unchallenged authority of the allegedly detached Western observer”) over sound as key to understanding. Jean-Luc Nancy, to whose work I will return, is among current writers offering such a challenge. In Listening he asks, “Why and how is it that something of perceived meaning has privileged a model, a support, or a referent in visual presence rather than in acoustic penetration?” (2–3) A version of that question became important to Said's cultural criticism as well as to the earlier innovative undertakings of two artists/cultural critics, some of whose work I will examine in this essay: composer and music theorist Charles Seeger and painter and filmmaker Hans Richter.When Said began his pioneering work on counterpoint in music as providing models for critical thinking and reading beyond the realms of music, he made clear his desire that the tools and discipline developed in such thinking and reading practices should by no means be confined to the study of aesthetic productions out of their contexts in the political/social world, but should be considered contrapuntally as acting in and on that political/social environment. Said encouraged the reading and rereading of “cultural archives” “contrapuntally,” by which he meant in part exercising a disciplined “awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (Culture 51). Called for in this description is the requirement of serious attention to the politics of times and spaces. However, the attention required is necessarily split, divided among multiple forces operating sometimes in opposition to, sometimes in juxtaposition to, sometimes in consort with each other.A virtue of counterpoint as a potential model for critical thinking is, as Said fully recognized, the fact that in its requiring divided attention to multiple forces it is suited to attempts to address ubiquitous complexities encountered in the cultural archives and day-to-day politics in multiple areas of the globe. While acknowledging that it is in many ways an unenviable life, it is the life of the exile that Said proposes as a model for a significant type of contrapuntal awareness. Exiles, Said argues, may not occupy an ideal political and social location, but they do maintain a privileged perspective that can illustrate ways in which we might better account for the experience of the Other within our own worldview and critically scrutinize prevailing orthodoxies that promote divisions between the dominant culture and the Other. In “Reflections on Exile,” Said writes, “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home: exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal” (Reflections 186). Said emphasizes that such contrapuntal awareness is complex, intellectually, emotionally, and politically.Said's work on the divided perspective of the exile and on divisions between dominant cultures and the various marginalized or excluded Others stands in the company of work done by several writers, including Hannah Arendt on the refugee, Giorgio Agamben on the denizen and homo sacer, and Judith Butler on the fact that “not everyone counts as a subject” (Frames 31). All these writers have been aware of the dangerous inadequacies of traditional models that too simply project the possibility of an eventual harmonic resolution in which one or another concept of “human rights” will ease if not erase divisions between dominant cultures and their subjected Others. These writers are among those who have demonstrated the pressing necessity of recognizing that there are many differences not harmoniously resolvable that must be understood and addressed as perpetually dissonant political realities of the future.Such recognition requires a persistent movement or motion of attention in which what Said refers to as the “plurality of vision” compares one way of life or one state of being to another. An emphasis on movement or motion of attention is in keeping with a basic theme in Culture and Imperialism: presenting a “challenge [to] the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been at the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism.” Said observes that “throughout the exchange between Europeans and their ‘others’ … the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident” (Culture xxv). Variations on this theme run throughout Said's work.When such plurality of vision entertains, as Said suggests the model of the exile does, nonreductive or nonhomogenizing ways of perceiving juxtapositions of difference, it may encourage a type of discourse made up of potentially constructive dissonances. Such discourse might resemble that developed by what Butler refers to as political “coalitions” consisting of “animated fields of differences” (Frames 147). Several years ago, Said worked to stake out new ground with his exploration of music, especially counterpoint, as a resource offering models for kinds of perception necessary for productive critical awareness of forces in juxtaposition to each other at the same time. I propose to further that work in this article and will do so in part by examining Seeger's and Richter's explorations and applications of counterpoint as a model for attempting to reintroduce movement or motion into that which has seemingly become static.The most widely known concept of counterpoint in Western music is “tonal or harmonic” counterpoint, dominant from about 1600 to 1900, but still very present. Said, Daniel Barenboim, Susan McClary, and Jacques Attali are among those who have written about the fact that the long tradition of tonal or harmonic counterpoint has served to reinforce political and social desires for order and security. Barenboim, for example, in the conversations with Said collected in Parallels and Paradoxes talks in terms of a “psychology of tonality” in which a home or tonic is established, followed by exploratory movement beyond the home, with an eventual return to the safety and comfort of home. McClary observes that in such a pattern, a return to home is “guaranteed in advance.” Such a guarantee can appear to provide assurance that one need not question whether or not order will ultimately prevail. As one among many models for considering events in the political and social world, the tonal or harmonic pattern lends itself to the possibility of reductive, homogenizing treatment of political and social complexities inviting exercises of faith that all will finally be well resolved.McClary says of the hierarchically organized pattern of tonality that “a more perfect analog to the emerging Enlightenment ideals—reason, purposeful advancement, the compatibility of social order and inner feelings, the possibility of self-generation—would be difficult to imagine” (Conventional 68). Fundamental to the parallel McClary finds between tonality and some Enlightenment ideals of social order is a hierarchy in which there is a central governing force around which all elements are organized. In an endnote attached to a discussion of “how eighteenth-century tonality works to produce a particular construction of the self,” (70-71) she refers readers to Foucault's Discipline and Punish “for more on the politically motivated encroachment of reason over behavior during this period.” The reference underscores the fact that both tonality and Enlightenment political and social aims depended on ideals of order, discipline, and harmony.In referring to this parallel that McClary and others discuss, I call attention to one aspect little noticed in discussions of tonality: the role of vision in a panoptically ordered social grouping as analogous to the central governing force of the tonic in music of the tonal tradition. Foucault's discussions of the “overseer” in the panopticon are precursors to concerns such as those of Nancy about the dominance of sight over sound as a model for the formation of knowledge. In this article's examinations of Seeger's and Richter's embracing of counterpoint as intellectual model while providing their own departures from tonal counterpoint, I will show that in their experiments with introducing elements of audible perception, into visual perception, they were entertaining versions of a question asked later by Nancy: “Under what conditions … can one talk about a visual sound?” (Listening 3) In so doing, they were—via thought about relationships between their arts and their political/social contexts—addressing some problems of concern to several philosophers and theorists exploring the intellectual benefits of sound-based ways of forming knowledge.In his brief appeals to “atonality” and “atonal counterpoint” in Culture and Imperialism and in his comment on atonality in Parallels and Paradoxes, Said touched on some of the soporific effects of tonal counterpoint as a model for critical analysis of political and social situations. However, at other times, as in his discussion of counterpoint on page 51 of Culture and Imperialism, he seems to embrace without hesitation tonal or harmonic counterpoint as a model for critical thinking beyond the realm of music.1In the course of this examination of the roles of counterpoint in the work of Seeger and Richter, I will argue that a long-established manner of thinking and talking about perception or awareness of counterpoint—a manner subscribed to by Said and accepted by multiple reference sources such as The Harvard Dictionary of Music—has unfortunately limited some productive possibilities for counterpoint's serving as a nonreductive or nonhomogenizing model for critical thinking about events in the political and social world at large.A more expansive view of counterpoint as providing models for critical thinking—more expansive than Said's discussions afford—not only will allow recovery of some mostly overlooked significant thought about counterpoint in music as offering general intellectual models but also will provide new insight into ways in which two artists—one primarily concerned with music and the other intent upon painting and filmmaking—addressed in and through their arts multiple political/social and cultural upheavals in the West occurring in and after World War I. Like Said, both Seeger and Richter explored connections between their arts and the political/social conditions those arts inhabited.As I have indicated, I will give attention to one area in which the inquiries of Seeger and Richter bore resemblances to some innovative thought in a strain of mostly Continental philosophy/theory. What is sometimes referred to as a preoccupation with visual perspective or an ocular dominance in the history of Western thought generated serious interest especially after the work of Heidegger—in ways of knowing available in the realm of the audible. Quite apart from the efforts in Continental philosophy and in theory, but contemporaneously with some of those efforts, Seeger and Richter challenged assumptions about a privileged position of sight over sound and questioned typical conceptions about the separation of those realms. Of concern to both Seeger and Richter was the problem of how forms of motion or movement inherent in the perception of sound might be translatable into visual perception. In exercising that concern, they were exploring some issues pertinent to anyone interested in intellectual models that stress the importance of perception of the audible.Further I will discuss some of the efforts of Seeger and Richter to challenge conventional thought about forms of harmony, order, and security as often displayed in the arts and in politics of their time. I will argue that their explorations can even now contribute to an awareness of ways in which manners of perceiving juxtapositions of difference might be brought into a potentially constructive discourse of dissonance.Acts of splitting attention and coming to terms with difference are fundamental to the perception of several phenomena in music, including counterpoint and modulation. The Harvard Dictionary of Music defines counterpoint as “the combination of two or more melodic lines; the linear consideration of melodic lines sounding together; the technical principles governing such consideration … [and] a feature of music in which combinations of two or more simultaneously sounding pitches are regularly employed.” In addition to stressing the fact that perception of an “at-the-same-timeness” is required for the processing of counterpoint, the Harvard Dictionary makes clear that complex forms of movement or motion are integral to counterpoint and the processing of it. The entry continues, “The essence of contrapuntal perception is that horizontal motion of one part may be perceived and differentiated from the simultaneous horizontal motion of another, at the same time.” Thus contrapuntal perception is dynamic, entailing acts of processing separate forces in motion on distinct paths at the same time.In addition to counterpoint, as I have said, there are many other aspects of and events in music in which there is movement or motion requiring a splitting of attention, each of which, like counterpoint, potentially offers insight into acts of critical awareness. Processing modulation in musical compositions is one example in which a kind of division of perception similar to that required in the processing of counterpoint takes place, and I believe modulation can, in addition to counterpoint, provide a model for critical thinking beyond the realm of music. In the entry on “modulation,” the Harvard Dictionary discusses “the ear's remarkable ability to retain, as a function of musical memory, the primacy of an established key to which the music may return even after the most varied and lengthy journeys through distant keys.” Clearly, this “remarkable ability” for tracking complex motion, an ability that requires keeping a point of reference in memory while other competing points of reference are introduced is—especially during extended periods of time—associated with a capacity for sustained splitting of attention paralleling that required in coming to terms with counterpoint. The journey of modulation in the prelude to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde presents one well-known demand on the listener's sustained splitting of attention.A requirement of sustained splitting of attention associated with modulation was emphatically cultivated in Western music during the later part of the nineteenth century with an expanded reliance on modulation. The Harvard Dictionary's entry on modulation contains the following: “In the 19th century, continuous chromatic modulation over a very long period of musical time, with an apparent main key occurring but seldom, is a distinguishing characteristic of several composers, especially Wagner in his mature operas, and Liszt, Franck, and Bruckner in their orchestral works. The later intensification of this practice, in the late works of Mahler and the early works of Schoenberg, was one of the factors that led to the breakdown of functional tonality altogether [see Atonality].” In a case such as the prelude to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, we can say that the parameters allowing a memorable relationship between the home and other keys encountered are severely tested, as is any sense of traditional tonal order dependent on such a memorable relationship. Thus, developments in the history of counterpoint and modulation display patterns in which there is movement from reliance on order emanating from a center to disruptions (atonal counterpoint, dissonant counterpoint, extreme forms of modulation) of that order. Many of those developments require complex forms of awareness.In another discussion of the potential for formal characteristics of music's serving as models for critical thinking, Said refers to Vico's thought about patterns of repetition in history as Said relates them to “musical techniques of repetition, in particular those of the cantus firmus or of the chaconne or, to cite the most developed classical instance, Bach's Goldberg Variations.” He adds, “By these devices a ground motif anchors the ornamental variations taking place above it.” No less in these instances than in counterpoint and modulation, there is a splitting of attention between elements fundamental to the structure of counterpoint, modulation, or the techniques related to cantus firmus. However, a comment Said makes about the latter example—a comment also generally applicable to counterpoint and modulation—I find to be particularly instructive to this discussion. In thinking of both tonal counterpoint and modulation as consisting of patterns in which a home or anchor position is established with multiple movements away from the home and returns to it, we can also entertain the parallel idea of anchor theme and variation. Said observes that “there is in these musical forms [cantus firmus, etc.] a tension between the contrariety or eccentricity of the variation and the constancy and asserted rationality of the cantus firmus” (World 114). Versions of that often-contrarian tension requiring splitting of attention appear in counterpoint as well as modulation, and versions of that tension are essential to Seeger's and Richter's borrowings from counterpoint.By drawing on these musical examples in his discussion of Vico's thought, Said underscores another relationship that is basic to the concerns of Seeger and Richter. In the comments on Vico, Said is pointing out parallels between patterns of repetition in language/thought and music. To link patterns of language/thought and patterns in music in the context of the explication of Vico's work is to foreground relationships between versions of tropology and patterns in music. While I will not in this discussion pursue details of one or another version of tropological analysis, I will emphasize the fact that, like Said, Seeger and Richter recognized that patterns in music—in their cases especially multiple patterns of counterpoint—were rich resources for developing models for critical thinking beyond the realms of music.Among the many other instances in music in which there is a splitting of attention in movement between elements of considerable difference are a pianist's playing while sight-reading the treble and bass clef “at the same time,” a performer's playing or singing sight-reading transposition from one key to another “at the same time,” and so on. Questions about the extent, degree, or type of difference are important because they introduce the possibility that the greater the degree of difference the greater the likelihood an awareness of and coming to terms with the difference will be realized only within an expanded sense of “at the same time.”As I consider some significant experimental thought in the work of Seeger and Richter about aspects of music as models for thought outside the realms of music, I will especially notice their inquiries into sonorous contrapuntal perception and the at-the-same-timeness of such perception. Both Richter and Seeger focused a great deal of their attention on counterpoint, which they conceived of in fundamentally similar as well as very different ways. A common concern for both was the belief that a version of counterpoint could serve as model for resistance to some prevailing characteristics of the artistic and political/social status quo Seeger and Richter were intent on countering. Thus their work took significant part in political/social and artistic upheavals during and after World War I and served with the efforts of many others as multiply reacting to the chaos of what seemed to be a new world.I will refer to three versions of counterpoint, all of which require an at-the-same-time processing of separate forces in motion: traditional tonal or harmonic counterpoint, atonal counterpoint, and dissonant counterpoint. As noted earlier, in the tonal tradition (dominant from roughly 1600 to 1900, but still very much a part of Western culture) counterpoint depends upon the establishment, departure from, and eventual return to a “tonal center,” and Said, Attali, and McClary are among several writers who have discussed the historic role of tonal counterpoint in sustaining conservative political/social conditions. Although Seeger and Richter clearly recognized that tonal counterpoint was a prime representative of the status quo they were intent on resisting, they initially approached tonal counterpoint with quite different attitudes about whether it should be resisted or turned to the service of resistance. Seeger proposed and developed a radical alternative to tonal counterpoint, while Richter initially embraced it in the belief that it could be made to engage in work against the status quo of which it was a part. The ultimate similarity—among the differences—in their views of how counterpoint might be used as model for reformative thinking is that both searched versions of it for tools of resistance.In contrast to music embodying tonal counterpoint, compositions employing atonal counterpoint are marked by an abandonment of a tonal center. About atonality often associated with the work of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, among others, The Oxford Dictionary of Music observes, “Atonality is usually applied where there is no tonal center…. The twelve notes of the octave function independently, unrelated to a key centre.” Dissonant counterpoint, the radical alternative proposed and explored by Seeger, departs from both tonal and atonal counterpoint by maintaining a home or center but dissonating the characteristics of the home or center the tradition of tonality primarily considered to be harmonious, the home or center abandoned by atonality.About his development of an alternative to traditional harmonic counterpoint, Seeger says, “The essential departure was the establishment of dissonance rather than consonance as the rule…. By definition the procedure was on the whole one of negation and contrariness” (qtd. in Nicholls, American 90). In short, Seeger was less intent on an abandonment of some traditional expectations than he was on a radical reversal of those expectations. A fundamental view of “tradition and habit” to be found in much of Seeger's work is that “habit can be changed—even reversed” (Studies II 94). This view is no less basic to the connections between their work in music (in Seeger's case) and painting and film (in Richter's case) and the political world to which much of their work offered resistance.In its treatment of dissonance in the entry on counterpoint, The Harvard Dictionary of Music quotes the following from Walter Piston's textbook on counterpoint: “The essential quality of dissonance is its sense of movement and not, as is sometimes erroneously assumed, its degree of unpleasantness to the ear.” I stress the point that attention to movement in dissonance is related to what I referred to earlier as attention to or awareness of movement in the perception of juxtapositions of difference. Such a recognition of the significance of movement in dissonance is, as we will see, a reason for Seeger's stressing the importance of both rhythmic as well as melodic dissonance in his theory of dissonant counterpoint. Further, the recognition provides insight into the fact that while Richter used the language of harmonic counterpoint to articulate some of his innovative resistances to the status quo, his various experiments with incorporating a sense of movement into his paintings and drawings, including in some of his “gestural” Dada work, were indicators of his attempts at dissonating the status quo.Issues of “simultaneity” and concepts of “at the same time” in typical discussions of perception of counterpoint were of particular concern to Said in his explorations of counterpoint in music as a general intellectual/critical model. Much of Said's work on counterpoint aimed at establishing it as a tool to be used to put both similar and dissimilar entities together in conversation, to create new, alternative perspectives and identity positions. In fact, for Said the concept of counterpoint in music and the idea of conversation are joined in the notion of contrapuntal conversation in which there is an emphasis on attention to dynamic movement from position to position.By way of stressing the importance of what Said refers to as simultaneous awareness of or attention to juxtaposed points or positions, I refer, again, to the passage in Culture and Imperialism in which Said describes a version of contrapuntal critical reading in the following terms: “As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (51). However, there is an important distinction between “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions” (in the passage from “Reflections” cited earlier) and “simultaneous awareness” (in the passage from Culture) if one means by the latter phrase—as I take Said to mean—a processing or coming to terms with or comprehension of the interplay of simultaneous dimensions. I suggest that an awareness of what are sometimes the complexities of interplay between simultaneous dimensions may not be reducible to “simultaneous awareness” (simultaneous in the sense of existing exactly coincidentally) and may require what I will refer to as “contemporaneous awareness” (contemporaneous in the sense of existing in the same time period). The distinction will be important in this article.For the purposes of the following discussion, I note that in the comments on simultaneous awareness in the passages just cited, Said appropriately indicates that the points (“simultaneously” perceived) between which awareness moves are sufficiently distinct in whatever ways and to whatever extent that they must be considered different from each other. However, I believe that in Said's discussions of simultaneous awareness, as well as in some other discussions of simultaneity such as that in the Harvard Dictionary there is insufficient attention to questions about how extensive those differences are and how the extent of difference might affect the complexity and the timing of the awareness. Such questions need further attention in dealing with the subject of how and why counterpoint and some other phenomena in music can provide productive models for critical thinking beyond the realms of music.Daniel Levitin's discussions of “auditory grouping” in This Is Your Brain on Music are pertinent to a distinction between simultaneity and contemporaneity. Referring to a trumpet and an oboe playing the same note at the same time, he observes that we as listeners do not focus on the differences in the timbre of the sound produced by the instruments; instead, our perception operates on the principle that “sounds that begin together—at the same instant in time—are perceived as going together, in the grouping sense.” Further, the “principle of simultaneous onsets can be thought of more generally as a principle of temporal positioning…. Time is a factor in auditory grouping” (80). I note here that the concepts of sound “grouping” and “temporal positioning” have both a temporal and a spatial dimension. In this example, because the sounds are “spaced” so close together in time, the splitting of attention between the trumpet and the oboe is minimized to the point of demanding no, or very minimal, critical reflection on the listener's part.Many other musical phenomena requiring splitting of attention sustained over time pose a much more complex situation as, for example, in modulation, which I mentioned earlier. Referring to the key changes that can take place during modulation in a piece of music, Levitin says that “by definition, the key is generally something that holds for a relatively long period of time during the course of the song, typically on the order of minutes” (Brain 72). In other words, in the overall movement of the tonal characteristics of the song, the sounds that are the modulatory points of reference may be “spaced” at various, sometimes “long” distances fr

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