The ‘strange procedures’ of Schubert's creativity that the publisher detected in 1826, or the critic's mention of ‘bizarre, grotesque things’ in his early songs, quoted in the Introduction and chapter 1, re-emerge through this book as part of the lexicon of gothic necropoetics that captivated the imagination of the time. Strangeness, whether through sonic signifiers or poetic subject matter, weaves its way in and out of the case studies. Pieces that reflect the dreamworlds of ‘Nacht und Träume’, such as the Adagio of the String Quintet, give way to extreme disjuncture characteristic of the grotesque. Funereal music undergoes doubling and distortion, as in the Andante of the Piano Trio in E flat and the C minor Impromptu, discussed in chapter 2. And music that is eerie one moment turns sublime in another, as suggested in relation to the dialectics of pain and pleasure in ‘Bertas Lied in der Nacht’ and ‘Der Unglückliche’, in chapter 3. The recurrence of tropes (musical and poetic) highlights the fluidity of a vocabulary that is doubled, warped, defamiliarized, and left unreconciled across generic and chronological boundaries.

Prominent amid this continuity of gothic tropes are the ways in which their associations, and the contexts in which they appear, change over time. One such example is the octave doubling present in much of the music discussed here, from the opening stanzas of ‘Leichenfantasie’, the first case study of chapter 1, to the return of split lefthand octaves in the opening of the Andantino of the A major Piano Sonata, D 959, the final case study of chapter 4. Their recurrence suggests implicit dialogues across the case studies, with blurred boundaries among the contrasting iterations: the latter example, while devoid of the supernatural associations of the former, carries traces of death through its distant echoes of the earlier songs, and is now tinged with the weight of what has come before. Musical material undergoes change, returning in altered contexts, as highlighted by the fusions of funereal and French overture style, or the ways in which themes are distorted in the C minor Impromptu and the Adagio of the E flat Trio. Funereal imagery, as in the wider range of case studies in chapter 2, is devoid of its connotations in Schubert's graveyard settings, while containing echoes of their soundworlds.

Wittgenstein's verificationism

As described in the previous chapter, Wittgenstein's discussion of aesthetics and ethics in his lectures in May Term 1933 is prefaced and informed by his new account of meaning as use, which, applied to declarative sentences or propositions, leads to verificationism: ‘If you want to know the meaning of a sentence ask for its verification’ (AL 29). For any predicate ‘F’, you have to consider the language-game and see how it is used, that is, how a claim that something is F could be verified. For what characterises the use of a predicate is that its declarative application can be judged true or false, and that such a judgement can be vindicated or rejected on suitable grounds. Hence, the meaning of such a truth-apt predication is determined by the way its truth or falsity can be ascertained. For example, ‘to explain what is meant by “6 yards” we must shew a man how we measure it’ (M 311). Accordingly, the meaning of the proposition ‘The shed is 6 yards long’ is given by its possible methods of verification (or falsification).

It is worth noting that this core idea of verificationism – that to know the meaning of a predicate is to know how it is used, that is, amongst other things, on what grounds its application can be judged true or false – is indeed just an aspect of the view that meaning is use. Wittgenstein espoused it not only in the early 1930s but to the end of his life. What distinguishes his mature view from the scientistic verificationism of the Vienna Circle is that he came to realise that although there must be grounds for judging the application of a predicate as correct or incorrect, there need not always be methods of objective verification. And yet, in order to clarify the meaning of a predicate, it is always useful to ask if and how its application could be verified. In conversation, he explained that by a simile:

Boulez Was Brought Up in Montbrison, a small town near Lyon, where he received his first musical education. There was no public concert life in the town, but he was part of a church choir – he described being in a choir as ‘a very good educational experience’ – and in 1991 he recalled that there were local chamber music groups that rehearsed weekly. While studying a mathematics-based curriculum at secondary school in Lyon, he took private lessons in piano and harmony with Lionel de Pachmann, son of the celebrated pianist Vladimir de Pachmann. These lessons were based on the standard repertoire and classical musical language. Opportunities for Boulez to hear contemporary music while he was at school were very limited; in discussion with François Meïmoun he remembered hearing the violinist Jacques Thibaud playing Szymanowski's Mythes (1915) and being ‘especially struck’ by the first piece, ‘La Fontaine d’Aréthuse’, because ‘its sonic universe cut across that of modern music of the time, when Honegger was the acme of modernity’.

Honegger was the most prominent contemporary composer in France in the early 1940s, and in Lyon, Boulez remembered hearing André Cluytens, then musical director of the Opéra National de Lyon, conduct works by him. Boulez particularly recalled Honegger's La Danse des morts, which seemed to him ‘fabulous, completely different from the [musical] universe with which I was familiar’. La Danse des morts (1938), an oratorio inspired by Holbein's Dance of Death, features a melange of material including French revolutionary songs, the Dies irae plainsong and a preachy text by Paul Claudel which draws on Biblical extracts. Its punchy opening, graphically depicting fire and brimstone with multiple trombones and percussion instruments, is more reminiscent of Varèse than of most of Honegger's work, and its scoring for narrator, soloists, chorus and orchestra shows Honegger and Claudel grappling with a ‘total theatre’ concept, as in their earlier Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (1935).

Only a few years later, Boulez would himself be performing work by Honegger and by Claudel in his role as musical director of the Renaud– Barrault theatre company. Boulez did not experiment with composition until 1942, when he was 17 years old: one of his first surviving attempts was a setting of Baudelaire, Recueillement, which he may not have known at the time had been set by Debussy fifty years earlier.

Introduction

During the 1950s, the United States would begin to promote a unidirectionality of history, geared toward enabling the United States to prevail in the geopolitical confrontation against the Soviet Union. In order to project the geopolitical power of the United States, there was a need to ensure that the countries affected by the confrontation that emerged in the 1950s would be persuaded about the good intentions of the United States, particularly when it came to promoting the economic and social rehabilitation of vast areas of the world. The 1950s saw the beginning of the idea of a “global commonwealth” of nations, initially restricted to the areas of the world that had a cultural affinity with America, aligned with the geostrategic interests of the United States, and willing to accept the political and economic principles projected from Washington.

Exerting Power and Shaping the Future—A Look at America's Role in the 1950s

The United States played a significant role in the world during the 1950s. After World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two superpowers, along with the Soviet Union. The United States played a leading role in establishing and leading the Western alliance, which was a military alliance between North American and European countries that was formed to counter the Soviet Union's influence in Europe. The United States also played a major role in the Korean War, which took place from 1950 to 1953, and in the Vietnam War, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s. During the 1950s, the United States experienced a time of economic prosperity and cultural conformity known as the “American Dream” or the “Affluent Society.” The 1950s also saw the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, as African Americans and other minority groups in the US began to agitate for equal rights and treatment under the law. In addition to its role on the world stage and its domestic developments, the US also played a major role in shaping popular culture during the 1950s. The decade saw the emergence of rock and roll music, and many iconic cultural figures, such as Elvis Presley, emerged during this time.

ON NOVEMBER 20, 1951, while BGS units fought the coffee wars, Adenauer travelled to Paris to sign a draft of the European Defense Community (EDC) Treaty. French Premier René Pleven and the archi-tect of the Schuman Coal and Steel Plan, Jean Monnet, outlined the terms of the new treaty. If ratified, the EDC would have given the Federal Republic its first chance to have armed forces since the end of the war, but only as part of a larger supranational European army. Rearming under a French plan, however, proved unpopular among West Germany's veteran soldiers, who had recently proposed their own plan calling for twenty-five divisions led by German officers. But for Adenauer, establishing a new army in any form was a chance to gain more sovereignty. The day he initialed the draft of the proposed treaty, he confided in his memoirs that: “On this day the Federal Government was beginning to speak with its own authority in association with the Western World.”

These proceedings should have had no immediate effect on border policing. Article 11 of the treaty exempted the police forces of signatory nations from its terms. But now that the rearmament of West Germany appeared inevitable, members of the BGS believed the government would call upon them to staff the new army. Since the majority of its personnel and their leaders had come from the Wehrmacht, it seemed like the logical next step. Some of the men claimed that the government had promised to make them soldiers once the new army was formed. For Interior Minister Robert Lehr and his successor Gerhard Schröder, the creation of German armed forces caused an existential crisis. What did the future hold for the BGS now that West Germany had a new army?

Although members of the BGS assumed they would be instrumental in founding the army, military veterans in Adenauer's proto-defense ministry, the Blank Office (Amt Blank) had other ideas. These veteran offi-cers intended to build an army free of the burdens and traditions of the recent past. Many of those in the Blank Office considered the BGS to be a force of reactionaries that might reject the new beginning they had envisioned.

Wittgenstein speaks not only of ‘grammatical rules’ but also of ‘grammatical statements’ (or propositions) (grammatische Sätze). The difference between the two concepts is one of perspective. Linguistic meaning can be explained by grammatical rules (or, to take Wittgenstein's own qualifications into account, by expressions of grammatical norms). For example, the meaning of the word ‘bachelor’ can be explained by the grammatical rule:

However, when this sentence is not used to teach or to explain but is considered as a statement, Wittgenstein calls it a grammatical statement. After all, we regard it as true that a bachelor is an unmarried man, which makes it more natural to speak of a statement (or proposition) than a rule. It is a statement, but not an empirical statement, not a ‘statement of fact’ (AL 18); it is ‘a statement which no experience will refute’ (AL 16).

In more traditional philosophical terminology, (1) is called an analytic truth or statement. According to the standard definition, analytic statements are true simply in virtue of the meanings of the ingredient words. This definition is naturally suggested by the fact that analytic truths are typically used as linguistic explanations. Instead of

The two sentences have the same use, fulfil the same function in language and hence have the same meaning. A statement of (2) is true because the word ‘cygnet’ does mean a young swan. That is to say, (2) is true in virtue of the meaning of the word ‘cygnet’. But as (2) functions in the same way as the corresponding analytic statement (3), the same can be said about (3). This too can be verified simply by looking up the meaning of the word ‘cygnet’ in a dictionary. Of course, the truth of (2) and (3) is dependent not only on the meaning of the word ‘cygnet’, but also on the meanings of their other words. If, for example, the word ‘young’ meant ‘black’, the statements would be false. So just like (2), (3) is true in virtue of the meaning of the whole sentence.

Lehasa Moloi is one of those organic intellectuals whose ambition from his youth has been to tackle the issues related to what appears to be lagging material, political and social development of the African continent. Committed to the education of the masses that would include for him an investment in consciousness-raising among young college students, Moloi confronts the challenges of miseducation of the African with a revolutionary pedagogy based on African agency. He rescues us from the dead end of a misguided approach to development. While working on his doctorate with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, perhaps the key African decolonial scholar, Moloi began to ask questions that prompted him to consider the historical agency of African people. It was not enough that one identifies and explains the decoloniality of power regarding the vestiges left by colonial oppressions, one had to sift through history to rediscover how Africans had conceived a world of relationships that were authentic and elastic enough to provide stability for thousands of years before the invasions of Europeans and Arabs. c Always ready to honour the academic guidance of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, now the Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Moloi sought to take the route of African centeredness where the fundamental puzzle had to be found in how African people approached their own lived experiences in the context of contemporary challenges. In effect, the issues of epistemic freedom, decolonization and decoloniality in regard to ‘development’ had to be questioned from an Afrocentric perspective. What is it to be developed in African eyes? How must one see the constraints, restraints and complaints of Western authorities, whether from the Americas or Europe, about development in Africa?

Moloi has extended the discourse on ‘development’ in an urgent manner by refocusing theory and practice on African culture itself. To fulfil all societal ambitions of ethics, aesthetics, economics, technology and construction, there must be a collective sense of African agency where citizens are engaged in individual and group responses to external situations based on culture. Thus, Lehasa Moloi takes us beyond the destruction of the false facades of Western thinking or Eastern thinking erected to conceal African capabilities.

ON 23 MARCH 1824, after serving seventeen years as a missionary in China, Robert Morrison returned to England on leave. With him aboard the ship Waterloo were 10,000 fascicles of Chinese books, compris-ing over nine hundred titles. Morrison estimated the value of the works, ‘many of which were obtained with great difficulty, as the Chinese govern-ment make it illegal for the natives to sell their books to foreigners’, and many of which ‘were scarce and expensive’, at ‘upwards of £2,000’. Hoping to alleviate his countrymen's ignorance of a country that was becoming increasingly important to Britain, Morrison planned to donate his collec-tion to Oxford or Cambridge in return for a commitment to establish a professorship in the Chinese language ‘for the instruction of individuals desirous of studying it, for religious, or other purposes’.

Neither Cambridge nor Oxford was interested. Unable to find a taker, Morrison deposited the collection at the London Missionary Society before he returned to China the following year. His collection languished there for more than ten years, until – finally – in 1837, three years after Morrison's death, the newly established University College London grudgingly agreed to establish the professorship in Chinese in return for the collection. The professorship was allowed to lapse after only five years, however; and there is little evidence to suggest that the collection was put to use in any system-atic teaching of Chinese or about China until late in the century.

Here, appropriately, perhaps, in the last chapter to this volume, we seem to have come to the end of the Enlightenment. We are clearly in a very different time and a very different place from late seventeenth- and eight-eenthcentury Europe, when readers (particularly French readers) eagerly snapped up the Jesuits’ latest accounts of China; when Jean Baptiste Boyer could, in 1741, dedicate his Lettres chinoises to Confucius, ‘the greatest man the universe has produced’; and when interest in China (and other ‘Ori-ental’ countries) was strong enough, as described earlier in this volume, to propel the decision, in the early 1780s, to publish Barthélemy d’Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale in an edition for ‘the general public’.

Typically, an explanation of an event cites the causes that made it happen. According to what has been called the ‘standard view’ in the philosophy of action (cf. Sandis 2009, p. 2), intentional human actions are just a subclass of events, and the agent's reasons are the causes of their actions. In the 1930s this widespread causalism was disputed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose alternative view that reason-giving explanations should not be seen as a type of causal explanations held sway in the 1960s. It was defended by Elizabeth Anscombe (1957), Peter Winch (1958), and A.I. Melden (1961) but was then forcefully challenged by Donald Davidson in his influential paper ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ (1963), which by the 1970s had re-established causalism about reasons as the standard view. The standard causalist view, however, has generally been acknowledged to be troubled by a major problem: the problem of deviant causal chains (cf. Moya 1990, pp. 114–28). Davidson himself had confessed not to be able to resolve this problem (1973, p. 79), yet many of his followers remained more optimistic.

A more recent causalist view, propounded, for example, by Carlos Moya (2014, pp. 200–4) and John Hyman (2015, Ch.5), is that the flaw both in Davidson's version of causalism and in the anti-causalism of Wittgenstein and his followers was their commitment to a Humean account of causation as a law-governed relation between events. On Hyman's view, once we accept (i) that one can be immediately aware of causation without having to observe regularities, and (ii) that desires are dispositions, and dispositions can be causal factors too, causalism is safe from Wittgensteinian objections. Moreover, Hyman tries to defuse the problem of deviant causal connections by arguing (i) that it is just a special case of the general difficulty of distinguishing between manifestations of dispositions and mere side effects, and (ii) that it doesn't undermine the causalist construal: for whether its effects are deviant or not, citing a disposition explains them causally in either case (Hyman 2015, p. 116). In this chapter, I shall, after a few preliminary clarifications, re-consider the deviant causal chain problem with those more flexible causalist ideas in mind.

I first encountered Franz Schubert when I was five. An easy, bare-bones piano solo transcription of the song ‘Ständchen’ rested against the music desk of our old Köhler upright piano in the living room. My mother, intent on teaching it to me by rote, played it slowly and only a few notes at a time. I stopped her after many bars of this process and asked why the music was so sad. She paused and answered cryptically: ‘Schubert died of a broken heart.’ Whether she knew the truth of Schubert's tragic end or not, her words hung in the air merged with the sounds that issued forth from that old, out-of-tune upright, and unknowingly she cemented a notion that the music's sadness was connected to something beyond the notes.

My mother's response, even if only poetically true, aligns well with hermeneutic readings that link Schubert's awareness of his own mortality to depictions of death in his music. Not surprisingly, I gravitated towards these narratives as a performer and as a teacher, finding in them satisfying entry points for engaging with Schubert's music.

Joe Davies's seminal book, The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert, turns away from biographical considerations to a cross-disciplinary, multisensory exploration of death and the gothic at the intersection of music, literature, and the visual arts. Davies's breadth of erudition and depth of insight is striking for its balance of analytical/critical commentary that is grounded in musical engagement while still being accessible to a wide audience. In a book for scholars, performers, and readers outside the discipline of music, Davies guides us on a revelatory journey through a lesser-known village in Schubert country and opens new vistas for Schubert analysis, interpretation, and performance.

Public fascination with the gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sets the stage for Schubert's preoccupation with death, the macabre, and the strange. Davies observes that these gothic tropes, appearing as early as Schubert's 1810 Schauerballaden, extend throughout his oeuvre to the later instrumental and piano works of his final years. Through case studies, Davies identifies a non-linear ‘constellation of ideas’ that intermingle, fragment, loop, and metamorphose in sonic estuaries of gothic Romanticism, the sublime, and the grotesque.