Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form.(Review)

Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form. By Susan McClary. (Ernest Bloch Lectures.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. [xiv, 205 p. ISBN 0-520-22106-0. $24.95.]

Susan McClary's new book undertakes to demonstrate a very sensible and important truth of history: that the artistic conventions of a culture or period embody "the premises of an age, the cultural arrangements that enable communication, coexistence, and self-awareness" (p. 6). She observes that conventions have suffered from a certain disrespect in music historiography, a consequence of nineteenth-century romanticism and early-twentieth-century modernism. Possibly she exaggerates this in order to sharpen her rhetorical vantage point, but her readers will surely agree that recent critical writing on music has naturally gravitated to the individual composer and idiosyncrasies of particular compositions -- therefore to the nineteenth century.

McClary has a valid point, for hermeneutic criticism naturally has sought out the music that best justifies hermeneutic treatment. As Rose Rosengard Subotnik has argued, the mindset that guided the development of criticism beginning around the start of the nineteenth century also manifests itself in the music of that time (Subotnik, "Evidence of a Critical World View in Mozart's Last Three Symphonies," in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates [New York: W. W. Norton, 1984], 29--43). So it should really come as no surprise that interpretation has occupied itself with individual works and their departures from convention.

McClary, commendably, sets out to counterbalance this individualist thrust by offering a cultural interpretation of musical conventions. She chooses as her foci the conventions of eighteenth-century tonality and the twelve-bar blues. The former, she notes, enacts "a specific kind of social world that allows equally for collaboration and individuality--an arrangement that permits both to exist, to work together toward progress, reason, consensus, freedom of expression, and long-range goals" (p. 81). The latter embodies "certain models of social interaction characteristic of African cultures" and has the cultural function--here McClary follows Henry Louis Gates--of "signifyin(g)," which "ensures the continuity of community, at the same time that it celebrates the imagination and skill of each particular performer" (p. 36).

In later chapters, McClary presents her perspectives on the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. Her claim that German romanticism, resisting convention, "split itself off irrevocably from community in accordance with Romantic notions of individualistic expression" (p. 111) draws upon Norbert Elias's distinction between the French Enlightenment ideal of civilisation and the German romantic ideal of personal Kultur. She also emphasizes that this same assignment of high value to the internal and personal led to the dominance of so-called absolute music and the focus on "purely musical" analysis in scholarly writing until recently. Anticonventionalism, which ratchets up with each generation, logically leads to modernism by the early twentieth century. The redemption (my term, not hers) that she finds in postmodernism then arises from the diversity of approaches and the incorporation of various conventions into "exuberant creativity" (p. 167), in which musicians perform "some active negotiation with the cult ural past for the sake of the here and now" (p. 168).

Concluding, MeClary makes two commendable arguments. First, she stresses that ideas of the "purely musical" and of "aesthetic autonomy," though real components of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history of music, amount to no more than that--historically conditioned, period-specific concepts. The nineteenth century's glorification of heroic individualism and the concept of musical autonomy remain the exceptions in music history, not the rule. Second, she argues that postmodern thinking and musics should challenge us to cast aside the linear, narrative plots we might contrive for any unified view of history in favor of wider views that bring into our frame of vision more musics and richer, more complex pictures than older ways of thinking have allowed.

We can easily agree with McClary on all of this. We might even wonder whether the old historical master scenarios have not, in fact, already become so outdated that McClary merely tilts at ghosts. Serious musicological criticism today does not deny that the musical conventions of an age do social work and reveal cultural premises, nor do any serious histories now claim some sort of single, teleological vector for Western music. So it may be that the core of this book is not especially controversial or even new. Nevertheless, MeClary lays out her case with a conviction that inherently justifies reading it.