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The Ambiguous Ethics of Music’s Ineffability: A Brief Reflection on the Recent Thought of Michael Gallope and Carolyn Abbate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

MARTIN SCHERZINGER
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Extract

Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience.4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes it as radically open. Framed by and theoretically grounded in the thinking of four twentieth-century philosophers (Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze), the book deftly steers between the Scylla of music’s irreducible sensuous materiality (and its attendant invitation to decipherment) and the Charybdis of its elusive ineffability (and its attendant vanishing act in the face of decipherment). The book begins by reflecting on the fascinations and prohibitions of the harmoniaia in ancient Greek philosophy. Already here, Gallope revises the standard interpretation of these founding texts, demonstrating the ways in which Socrates, Glaucon, Aristotle and others in fact consider music as at once deeply mysterious and also strictly rule-governed. This conception of music’sperplexing precision is shown to be shared in ‘global’ contexts less available to music history, including (for example) the Ikhwan Al-Safa, an eleventh-century priesthood of Islamic scholars. At the same time, Gallope draws attention to the continuity between simplified taxonomies of the ancients and the instrumentalization of their axioms for contemporary engagements with affect, so rampant in the era of emerging neuromedia. Instead of recoiling from music’s indeterminacy (retreating to silence, say, or insisting on music’s unspeakable mystery), Gallope attempts to unpack the critical potential at the heart of auditory experience. On the other hand, he argues, such potential is not harnessed by marking the movements of music’s conceptual nomenclatures alone. Noting that music ‘never speaks like a language, nor is it entirely nonlinguistic’, Gallope seeks to account for the specificity of its ‘vague impact’.5 In other words, while there is a residue of conceptual mediation at work in all sonic encounter, music’s ‘sensory impact’ cannot be subsumed by that residue.

Type
Review Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 145 , Issue 1 , May 2020 , pp. 229 - 250
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope for making their article ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’ available to me before its publication date in the The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Nanette Nielsen, Tomas McAuley and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020). Their work has been a constant inspiration to me. I have also benefited from their comments on an earlier draft of this review. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the gracious suggestions from Sarah Collins and Ian Rumbold, no less than the interlocution with Kofi Agawu, Gabriella Coleman, Alexander Galloway, Benjamin Kafka, Charles Kronengold and Kelli Moore.

References

1 Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind: Thinking (New York and London: Harcourt & Brace, 1971), 87.Google Scholar

2 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51 (p. 241).Google Scholar

3 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, ‘Constituents of a Theory of Media’, New Media Reader, ed. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 2003), 259–76 (p. 264)Google Scholar.

4 Gallope, Michael, Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 10 (emphasis added).

6 Ibid., 150.

7 Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 505–36.

8 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 19.

9 Ibid., 6.

10 Gallope, Michael, ‘Technics, Consciousness, and Musical Objects’, Music and Consciousness, ed. Clarke, Eric and Clarke, David (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–64 Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., 47.

12 Gallope, Michael, ‘Is Improvisation Present?’, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, 2 vols., ed. Lewis, George and Piekut, Benjamin (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar, i, 143–58, and ‘On Close Reading and Sound Recording’ (2016), <https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/close-reading-sound-recording/> (accessed 17 October 2019).

13 Gallope, ‘On Close Reading’, 37.

14 Gallope, ‘Is Improvisation Present?’, 153.

15 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 256.

16 Ibid.

17 Abbate, Carolyn and Gallope, Michael, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Nielsen, Nanette, McAuley, Tomas and Levinson, Jerrold (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020)Google Scholar, draft at <https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/mgallope> (quoted here by permission), 2, 21.

18 Ibid., 2.

19 Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 510, 513.

20 Ibid., 516–17.

21 Ibid., 516.

22 Ibid., 524, 517.

23 Ibid., 516.

24 Ibid., 517.

25 Ibid., 524, 518, 534.

26 Ibid., 536.

27 Ibid.

28 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 26.

29 Langer, Susanne K., Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953)Google Scholar.

30 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 160–4.

31 Martin Scherzinger, ‘On Sonotropism’, Contemporary Music Review, 31/5–6 (2012), 345–51.

32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, Elizabeth (G. E. M.) (New York: Macmillan, 1953)Google Scholar, 109.

33 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 85.

34 Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 517, 522, 532, 535.

35 Ibid., 516 (emphasis original).

36 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 16.

37 Ibid., 18.

38 Ibid., 17, 18.

39 Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 531.

40 Ibid.

41 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 97 Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., 98.

43 Ibid., 115.

44 Ibid., 99.

45 Ibid., 106.

46 Ibid., 114–15.

47 Ibid., 115–16.

48 Ibid., 118.

49 Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 520.

50 Ibid., 520, 521.

51 Ibid., 526 (emphasis original).

52 Ibid., 512, 513, 514, 532.

53 Ibid., 512, 513, 521.

54 Ibid., 509, 529, 532, 533.

55 James Currie, in a well-known essay written a few years later, described music’s beriddling specificity as ‘the blank transformative hole’ into which we fall in the moment of musical encounter. His gravitational metaphor of falling into a transformative gap is relevant here. See Currie, James Robert, ‘Music After All’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 62 (2009), 145–203 (p. 184)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 532.

57 Ibid., 526, 528.

58 Ibid., 531, 532 (emphasis added).

59 Ibid., 510, 513, 527.

60 Ibid., 532 (emphasis added).

61 Ibid., 517.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 8.

65 Ibid., 26.

66 Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 517.

67 Arendt’s cautionary note on speculation reads as follows: ‘The […] trouble is that every speculation carries with it a mental construct in whose systematic order every datum can find its hermeneutic place with an even more stringent consistency than that provided by a successful scientific theory, since, being an exclusively mental construct without need of any real experience, it does not have to deal with exceptions to the rule.’ Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 113.

68 Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, 529.

69 Ibid., 530.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid. (emphasis added).

72 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 248, 257, 252.

73 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 25.

74 Ibid., 18, 19.

75 Ibid., 18.

76 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 250, 248.

77 Ibid., 247.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid., 248.

80 Ibid.

81 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 12; Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 26.

82 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 253.

83 Ibid. (emphasis added).

84 Ibid., 12.

85 Ibid., 253.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid., 250.

88 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 27.

89 Ibid., 7, 8.

90 Ibid., 8.

91 Of interest here is Charles Kronengold’s critique of actor-network theory in the context of music’s ‘microdynamics of aesthetic experience’. See Kronengold, ‘Harpsichords and People at the Limits of Mediation Theory’, Contemporary Music Review, 37/5–6 (2018), 575–605 (p. 575).

92 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 253.

93 See above, n. 78.

94 Perhaps it is not surprising that the anti-hermeneutic actor-networks in the world of Bruno Latour come bundled with an injunction against critique in general. See , Latour’s ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004)Google Scholar, 225–48.

95 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 250.

96 Ibid., 248, 250, 251.

97 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 26.

98 Ibid., 25, 26.

99 Ibid., 26.

100 Ibid.

101 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 252.

102 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 26.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid., 20.

105 Ibid., 8, 20.

106 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 250.

107 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 247.

108 Ibid., 6.

109 Ibid., 251.

110 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 20, 25.

111 Ibid., 20.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid.

114 Ibid.

115 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 14–15.

116 Scherzinger, Martin, ‘Enforced Deterritorialization, or the Trouble with Musical Politics’, Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music, ed. Hulse, Brian and Nesbitt, Nick (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010)Google Scholar, 149–86.

117 For an investigation into the wholesale incorporation of surveillance technologies into the basic economic functioning of capitalism, see Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile, 2019)Google Scholar. For a study in the role played by music streaming services in digital data capture, see Drott, Eric, ‘Music as a Technology of Surveillance’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 12 (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 233–67, and Scherzinger, Martin, ‘Music, Labor, Technologies of Desire’, Music and Affect, ed. Lochhead, Judith and Smith, Steven Decatur (New York: Routledge, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

118 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 248.

119 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 249, 251. See also Kofi Agawu, ‘Tonality as a Colonizing Force’, Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Michael Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 334–55; and Scherzinger, Martin, ‘Anti-Colonial Temperament: The Case of Amadinda ’, Critical Reader on African Music, ed. Avorgbedor, Daniel, Kwasi Dor, George Worlasi and Omojola, Bode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar. From the importation of pianos and accordions to various Indian and African colonies in the nineteenth century to the dissemination of software protocols such as MIDI, which took up residency in most Indian and African music studios in the late twentieth, tonality has enjoyed an afterlife in the post-colonies that exceeds even that of the popular music of industrialized nations from which it emerged. According to Xavier Serra, a software engineer working on music information retrieval in a global framework, the ‘impact of MIDI’ has been the match of ‘colonialism itself’ – reducing pitch sensitivity, quantizing rhythmic figures, simplifying tuning systems and so on (personal communication, 2014).

120 Gallope, Deep Refrains, 253.

121 Ibid., 251.

122 Ibid.

123 Abbate and Gallope, ‘The Ineffable (and Beyond)’, 26.

124 Ibid., 2.

125 See Scherzinger, Martin, ‘Algorithmic Audition: Modeling Musical Perception’, Imagined Forms: Modeling Material Culture, ed. Brueckner, Martin, Isenstadt, Sandy and Wasserman, Sarah (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

126 Alexander Galloway, ‘The Golden Age of Analog (It’s Now)’, lecture given at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Control Societies Speaker Series, 2017–18, <https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/annenberg-video/golden-age-analog-its-now-alexander-galloway> (accessed 17 October 2019).

127 On the ‘semiophobia’ of new materialism, see Boysen, Benjamin, ‘The Embarrassment of Being Human: A Critique of New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology’, Orbis litterarum, 73 (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 225–42 (p. 225).