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COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Washington
THE PURPOSE OF this article is to examine the treatment of the idea of madness in three of the stage works of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in the light of the writings on madness of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. This association was first made by Ruud Welten in the British journal of contemporary music Tempo, [1] and, while I have reservations about the conclusions that his article comes to, it is from Welten that this article takes its lead in its examination of the topic of madness not solely from the point of view of its representation in music, but also from the point of view of the discourses which surround it. The main substance of the article will consist of discussions of Davies's 1969 music theatre piece, Eight Songs for a Mad King, the work to which Ruud Welten devotes most attention; the other works under consideration are Miss Donnithorne's Maggot (1974) and The Medium (1981). In choosing three works roughly equidistant from each other in temporal terms, the aim is to trace a development in the composer's thinking about madness, which I believe to be revealed in his music.
MADNESS AND POSTMODERNISM
Ruud Welten's stated concern is to "argue that, in spite of all his modernistic aspirations, Sir Peter's work shows a postmodernistic tendency expressed in the regular occurrence of the theme of madness." [2] The argument proceeds in the following way. First, he describes Adorno's uncovery, in the chapter on Stravinsky in The Philosophy of Modern Music, of a musical analogue to the phenomenon of "depersonalization" in psychiatry. [3] Adorno, says Welten, reveals the "destruction of the subject" (a definition of which he gives as "the observing agency") [4] in Stravinsky's shattering of the musical idiom. This disintegration of subjectivity is "a characteristic of post modernism," [5] a postmodernism which consolidates the loss of subjectivity which occurred in Stravinsky's music. The consequences of this loss are described in the following way by Welten:
The subject is no longer a solid unity through which expression can thrive. The subjective truth behind music is shattered, musical traditions merely haunt a disintegrated universe. In music this loss of subjectivity is manifested in the juxtapositions from different musical traditions and in the collapse of univocal expression: the listener no longer feels he is listening to a unity. [6]
The connection between postmodernism and the loss of the subject in the musics of Stravinsky and Maxwell Davies is supported by an appeal to Foucault, whom Welten uses as an example of a "postmodernist" philosopher, although he states this only by implication: the postmodern era is marked by Foucault's declaration of "the death of the subject" (sic) in The Order of Things. It is Foucault's treatment of madness in the Histoire de la Folie (or, at least, Welten's account of it) that allows Welten simultaneously to sustain, and to deny the idea of expression in Eight Songs for a Mad King. In Stravinsky, he says, "the subject is no longer a solid unity through which expression can thrive." [7] He then describes the music as "the expression of madness." This is supported by a number of quotations from Histoire de la Folie, which all appear to be defining madness as "meaning literally: nothing." [8]
I want to describe two possible objections to this line of argument, both of which relate directly to my criticism of the appearance of madness in Eight Songs for a Mad King. The first is that any argument which depends on the idea of madness for its effectiveness risks either becoming implicated in the very silencing of madness by Enlightenment reason which Foucault describes and wishes to avoid, [9] or simply not being accessible to reason at all. Derrida has referred to this attempt by Foucault to write the history of madness without "repeating the aggression of rationalism" as "the maddest aspect" of Foucault's project. In "Cogito and the History of Madness," Derrida doubts whether it is at all possible to write (as Foucault states he wishes to write) the history of the silence imposed on madness by Classical reason, since, as soon as one says anything, one necessarily uses the tools of reason. [10] If, on the other hand, an attempt is made to circumvent the structure of reason, then any conclusion at al l may be reached. An argument based on madness, in these terms, is rather like a calculation based on zero in one of those spurious mathematical equations beloved of schoolchildren.
One can see this Foucauldian process of absorption into the structure of reason, and consequent silencing of madness, at work in both Ruud Welten's article and in Eight Songs itself. In the former, madness is used as an index of the extent to which (in the terms of the article) Maxwell Davies's music exhibits postmodern tendencies; and in the latter, it is used as a pretext for the exploration of "certain extreme regions of experience" through the categorization and exploitation of the vocal techniques of Roy Hart. [11] In neither the article nor the piece is madness allowed to speak for "itself": it simply becomes a term in a reductive argument on the one hand, and a mitigating pretext for seemingly radical vocal techniques on the other. It may be that the ultimate consequences of Foucault's argument are, as Derrida says, contradictory. [12] Even so, it will be noted that the idea of madness, and the mad person himself become strangely removed from the main focus of attention in both the article by Ruud Wel ten, and the composer's own (literally "authorized") reading of Eight Songs for a Mad King.
Foucault's contention is that there is a connection between the way that madness is silenced by reason, and the way that the mad themselves are separated from society, both physically, and by their medicalisation. Perhaps one could make a similar remark about Foucault's project as I made regarding the article by Ruud Welten, in that the implied target of Foucault's criticism is, as indeed he believes all philosophy should be, Enlightenment reason itself. Madness is simply one of the indices by which the effects of reason are measured: the others may be sexuality, criminality, or medicine.
A second, related, objection is that Foucault himself does not accept the distinction made by Ruud Welten between the "modern" and "post modern" eras. Foucault deals overtly with this question in his article "What is Enlightenment?" proposing a definition of modernity as an "attitude" rather than an era:
rather than seeking to distinguish the "modern era" from the "premodern" or the "postmodern," I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of "countermodernity. [13]
This attitude of modernity entails a continuous critique of its own procedures and of its own certainties: in order to avoid a lapse into what might be called "dogmatic rationalism" in which principles such as reason become fetish objects, even these apparently unarguable principles must constantly be examined and reexamined.
if it is dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality. [14]
Let us, then, rather than attempt a division of modern(ist) from postmodern(ist), attempt a more Foucauldian distinction between music which proceeds simply by asserting its own aesthetic basis (a feature of countermodernity in Foucault's definition), and music which engages in a critique of its aesthetic context (a feature of modernity). According to this division, Stravinsky, in his neoclassical pieces, can be seen as engaging in a critique of the assumption inherent in both Romanticism and Expressionism of the idea of a dialectical progression of music history. Similarly, in works such as the Symphony in C, the first movement of which, for example, subverts all the syntactic elements of sonata form, his critique is targeted at traditional notions of structure in music. Ruud Welten makes a good case for reading the music of Petrushka, described by Adorno as embodying the features of schizophrenia, as an imminent critique of a unified subjective expression, just as Steve Sweeney Turner has read Maxwell Davi es's Vesalii Icones as functioning, against the composer's own will as it were, as a critique of the notion of stylistic unity. [15] It is clear from Stravinsky's writings that the composer's expressed desire and the aesthetic functioning of the music were all of a piece. It is less clear that this is so in the case of Maxwell Davies....
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