… as a carrier from the site of an “unheard” sound.
This is from ‘She Do the Ring* in Different Voices’ (1992) which is a review of the book Unsung Voices by Carolyn Abbate; found in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin (2009):
… New meaning is created when old works are asked new questions that arise out of new intellectual climates and concerns.
… meaning arises — is created — out of a relationship that is forged between subject and object; it is neither “subjective” nor “objective” to the exclusion of the other. Meanings unforeseen by the author (or by anybody else, in the author’s day, in our day, or at any time to come) are thus latent in any text.
… But there is an even larger point at stake, one that might be termed the poietic fallacy: the assumption, already encountered (and countered?), that the meaning of an artwork is wholly an invested meaning, defined and delimited by the process of its manufacture, there to be discovered.
Ultimately Abbate views all of these moves as attempts to quell the “numinous intruder,” to whom she had introduced us (through a parade of operatic characters) in chapter 3, the one who:
“comes in many guises — as despicable outsider, as revolutionary, as ironic voice, as a carrier from the site of an ‘unheard’ sound. Narrating voices within music, like these strangers who haunt the Romantic tradition, create their own dissonant moments, interrupting the spaces surrounding them.”
More than any other writer, as I say, Abbate shows why our postromantic critical and analytical tradition has erected such a fence around “the music itself” to keep that numinous intruder known as “the extramusical” at bay — and why the fence must fail.
[line break added] What we need is less refuge in the antiseptic safety of wholeness and more bold fission expeditions, thus to recapture empathy: “that ‘second hearing,'” Abbate calls it, “which reanimates … a sense for what is uncanny in music.”
My most recent post from Taruskin’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 