Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. (Book Reviews: Diverse Topics).(Book Review)

Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. By Lawrence Kramer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. [ix, 335 p. ISBN 0-520-22824-3. $55. (hbk.); ISBN 0-520-23272-0. $22.50 (pbk.).] Compact disc, music examples, index.

In Musical Meaning, Lawrence Kramer continues the trajectory of his contention (in Music as Cultural Practice [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990] and Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]) that music's meaning exceeds the self-limiting concept of music's aesthetic autonomy. Kramer proposes to extend his critique of this historically constructed concept by examining the interplay of social contingency and the projection of autonomy, which he claims comprises the "higher-order" context and condition of intelligibility for most modern Western music. This higher-order context defines the "a priori ambiguity" (p. 2) that historically grounds music's meaning. By refraining questions of music's meaning within this higher-order context, Kramer ascribes semantic contents to music without, he contends, dismissing the historical, ideological, and functional importance of its autonomy. By identifying the contingencies of socially constructed meanings as the primary term, he reverses the inclination to value music s self-sufficiency in order to stress music's engagement with the world.

The critical history Kramer sketches in Musical Meaning tracks the way interplay of contingency and autonomy relate to the construction of musical, and social, subjectivities. Using music as a critical tool, he investigates the "intimate dynamics of culture and society, and the dynamics of intimacy in culture and society" (p. 6) across two centuries. Topics range from the "birth of sex at the piano" in Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata to John Coltrane's musical "debricolage" in his adaptation of George Gershwin's "Summertime" to Kramer's deconstruction of the cult of originality in his own Revenants (a compact disc is included). The book also includes essays on the virtuosity of Liszt's public performance, the "bisexuality" of Schumann's role as composer in his Carnaval, the Marx Brothers' comedic A Night at the Opera, and the sociomusical drama of infusions of African American jazz and blues. Through these essays, Kramer illustrates a critical history of musical meanings, which contextualizes the historical an d ideological features of music's semantic dimension.

The interpretive framework Kramer adopts identifies music's excesses with postmodernist constructions of subjectivity. By transvaluing music's projected autonomy, he identifies these excesses with music a immediacy, and with the irrationality of every experience of the unconditional's contingency. For Kramer, the sense of self "is poised between a unique and absolute self-presence and a contingent social constructedness" (p. 3). Correspondingly, music's a priori ambiguity articulates one of the core conditions of subjectivity. Kramer's postmodernist formulation of a musical subjectivity whose specific content elicits its excess draws on Jacques Derrida's notion of differance, "the continuous distinction and deferral of the same from itself" (p. 263). For Kramer, because music "forms the remainder of every experience it engages, music may act as a cultural trope for the self, the subject as self-moved agency that remains when all of its attributes and experiences have been subtracted" (p. 4). This musical rema inder accordingly signifies the supplement that exceeds the semantic content that produces it. As the sign of a pure excess, the musical remainder consequently signifies the site of pleasure and desire beyond the confines of an ideal autonomy valued for its metaphysical transcendence.

Kramer's concept of music as the "art of collapsing distances" (p. 3) singles Out the musical remainder as the leitmotiv of his musical hermeneutics. Where instrumental music's emancipation from language supposedly alienated it from meaning, his hermeneutics contextualizes music in order to propose potential or virtual meanings through ascriptive interpretations of musical processes and devices. By reversing the supposition that music's meaning inheres in formal processes, Kramer's hermeneutics exploits the idea that "meaning resides in the context alone, [so that] ...