Does Carolyn Abbate have anything to say to Quakers?
Thoughts on musical performance and other things
This week I took it on myself to do a very belated reading of Carolyn Abbate’s 2004 essay, “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?"1 It was nice to get an item off the bucket list. And I enjoyed reading it. But most importantly, it brought back memories of two distinct stages of my life and reorganized how I thought about them. It also made me think hard about the different audiences that the approximately 40 subscribers to my Substack represent.
Abbate spends about 30 pages arguing that musicologists should pay more attention to music in performance. It takes her 30 pages to make this point because she’s pushing back against long-standing assumptions and practices of musicology and doing the kind of flanking moves that one does when one is engaged in an academic argument. As such, it is very much an “in house” essay, although it was published in Critical Inquiry, which is not primarily a musicological journal. It was here that I found myself thinking a lot about what kind of house musicology is, whom that house shelters, whom it doesn’t shelter, why I like to visit, and why it’s not a good place for me to live.
Her contrast between “gnostic” and “drastic” derives from the thought of Vladimir Jankélévitch, whose book Music and the Ineffable she translated. I can hear religious studies folk2 groaning at the term “gnostic,” which has been suspect since Michael Williams’ Rethinking “Gnosticism”, which argues that the term has been used so broadly as to be functionally meaningless - kind of like what Republicans are doing to “woke” today. But Abbate uses the term clearly enough to represent approaches to music that try to “decode” meanings in the output of composers. This involves a lot of poring over scores and doing oodles of historical research to understand the times in which the composer worked. Abbate notes that this kind of work wrenches our thought processes away from the embodied and ephemeral nature of musical performance. She, following Jankélévitch, calls the kind of thought that emerges in relation to the fleeting moments of live performance “drastic” because “it not only connotes physicality, but also desperation and peril.”3
Turning the essay into a story
Thinking about music through the categories of “gnostic and drastic,” made me look back on my life in a different way. The new story goes: In college, I was seeking a “gnostic” relationship with music, but my search led me to graduate school, where my teachers were on a journey to go in a more “drastic” direction. I entered college as a viola performance major after meeting a viola teacher with whom I worked well at a summer camp. At the time, I was firmly in the closet, so I wanted music to be a disembodied escape to a purely spiritual realm. Here the meaning of “gnostic” is less about finding hidden meanings than a general distrust of the body. I found this kind of escape most effectively in listening to musical recordings, although sometimes thoughts about how technology made the experiences possible disturbed my sense of disembodied bliss. What I valued most about practicing was the way it would train my sense of concentration; I could judge how good a practice session was by how well I was able to concentrate on what I was doing. So, there was a clear connection between practicing the viola and times of meditation or prayer, which called for a similar concentration.
But often, a burning question of “what is the point?” or “what is the meaning?” of the sounds I was learning to make interrupted my concentration during practice sessions. I could learn to make better sounds, and that could be satisfying, but increasingly I found myself bumping up against the frustration of not seeing why better sounds were in and of themselves valuable. Abbate reports an experiment in trying to think “gnostically” and “drastically” during a performance - she didn’t get very far with connecting the sounds she was making to their historical context when thinking “gnostically,” but thinking drastically got her to “doing this really fast is fun.” But that was the kind of thought that I struggled to see the point of. This frustration intensified after I got heavily involved in revolutionary political action. The gap between “making pretty sounds” and “fighting injustice” seemed unbridgeable. So, I searched for a bridge. My first attempt to find the bridge was in the thought of Theodor Adorno, who didn’t get me as far as I wanted. It was when I discovered the writings of Susan McClary that I found the bridge I was looking for, a bridge that let me approach music with an enthusiasm I’d lost while trying to sort out why music even matters.
It’s this bridge between sounds and society that Abbate diagnoses as gnostic in the sense that the sounds become a kind of code for the abstraction “society” that we build out of the confusing field of social relations we constantly participate in. If what music reflects is ideology (and I was excited to find that it did), why not just skip the music and go straight to the ideology? But for me, finding ways to relate music to society was a way of bringing music back into the embodied world, with its material privations and sensual ecstasies. I didn’t have a sense that I was getting away from embodiment by treating music as a code - I was connecting what had been a source of disembodied pleasure to other domains of activity. And it was this desire to connect music to other things that led me to get a graduate degree in musicology.
Abbate’s essay builds on the work of my graduate teachers Suzanne Cusick and Fred Maus and takes the direction they were going to the next logical step. (The essay also finally helped me understand why Maus was not a fan of “hermeneutics” in musical scholarship, something that had me scratching my head from time-to-time back in the day.) So, reading the essay felt like being in a weird loop. I found a way to be excited by music by finding a way to treat it as a code, but that led me to teachers who wanted to think more in relation to performance, which I’d essentially given up on after my senior recital.
Nowhere to hide
One of the things Abbate notes about performance is that it leaves the performer nowhere to hide.4 This insight brought back the memory of playing Anton Webern’s, Concerto for Nine Instruments in college. We played it between two pieces for full orchestra. For some reason, I thought the players of the Webern piece would assemble backstage, and all walk out together. So, I was frantically looking for them until someone told me, “They’re onstage! You need to get up there!” I got to the stage as the conductor was already making his way to the podium and had to rush past him to get my seat. I still get hot thinking about that moment 30-something years later. And my memory of the performance is more about that inauspicious beginning than anything we did as we made sounds.
Mysticism
One of Abbate’s flanking moves is to acknowledge that the way in which her argument pushes us into the spiritual may be “embarrasing” for musicologists. And it was here that I was most aware that talking to musicologists and talking to Quakers are two very different things - and I am again thinking about that task of looking for a bridge between things that feel incompatible.
The most explicit musicological expression of “we’ve moved past mysticism” that I’ve seen is Karol Berger’s Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, which is a triumphant narrative of getting out from under the limitations of religion and into a linear sense of progress. Susan McClary, whom I found so exciting in college, also posits that mysticism, transcendence, and spirituality are simply ways of obfuscating the material and social conditions of music. A few years ago, I grappled with my disagreements on this aspect of her thought.
But if classical music has a history that allows us to posit mysticism as an escape from social responsibility, this is not what Quakerism or other religious histories indicate. I’m thinking of the way Howard Thurman saw his attention to spirituality as an important contribution to the Civil Rights movement. Quakers have a rich history of linking spiritual introspection to social activism. Just last Sunday, out of the silence of worship came many testimonies about homelessness. And these testimonies revealed profound tensions within the meeting about how to respond to it. Spiritual practice did not lead to a papering over of social tensions - it was the context that revealed them. And here is where the question of shelter I discussed earlier takes on a different hue. Whatever benefits a drastic approach to musical performance has in terms of getting us into an embodied world, it’s still an activity that is difficult to connect to the injustices that surround us. I think in particular of attending a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, a musical work that wears its moral demands on its sleeve, and watching the concertgoers ignore the homeless people trying to sell them copies of Streetwise on their way out. If the choice here was between a drastic appreciation of a performance and a gnostic exploration of the moral demands the music makes on us, the drastic won in a way that reminded me of why it frustrated me in my practice room so many years ago.
Carolyn Abbate, “Music - Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring 2004), 505-536.
Note to musicologists: I’ve seen references to “religious scholars” in a few musicological books. Calling a religious studies scholar (or a scholar of religion) a “religious scholar” is like calling a musicologist a musician. Some scholars of religion are themselves religious, some are not. Some even have an explicit agenda of debunking religion.
Abbate, “Music - Drastic or Gnostic,” 510.
Abbate, “Music - Drastic or Gnostic,” 536.