Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

Volume 8 Number 1, April 2007

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David Schwartz.  Listening awry:  music and alterity in German culture.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2006.  216 p.  ISBN 0-8166-4950-0 (paperback).

 

Reviewed by

 

Brad Eden

University of California, Santa Barbara

 

 

This book is the second by this author on the fascinating intersections of music, culture, and psychoanalysis.  His first book Listening subjects:  music, psychoanalysis, culture examined popular and classical musical texts from a musical-historical, musical-theoretical, and post-Lacanian perspectives.  While the author felt that this first book was successful in its chapter discussions, overall he felt that there was little unity among the various topics.  Thus, in this second book, the author focuses on Freud and Lacan as primary sources, kind of follows historical modernism from the late eighteenth century to the present, and theorizes a section of German culture at the same time.  Surrounding all of this is the author’s personal experiences growing up in Germany, both as a German and as a German Jew. 

 

The concept of “listening awry” is explained in the preface.  It involves a number of interesting perspectives:  seeing music from both an objective and a cultural background; challenging the assumption of a set relationship between text and context; looking at music and genre from both private and public issues; examining both aesthetic and historical approaches; focusing on many musical examples in one chapter and very few in the next; discussing popular music in one chapter and then “high” classical music in the next.  These are just a few of the juxtapositions the author brings to bear as he guides comments and opinions throughout the book.  Other topics include the Jew, the look/gaze binary, the other/Other binary, and trauma.

 

Chapter 1 examines the orchestra in the eighteenth century, and the fact that there were two conductors, a Kapellmeister and a concertmaster, and how the concept of the masterwork first appeared with Handel’s Messiah.  Chapter 2 looks at the world of the German art song, focusing on the writings of Christian Friedrich Michaelis and the songs of Franz Schubert.  The third chapter discusses the history of the discourse of the hysteric in the nineteenth century as it moves towards the study of psychoanalysis, while looking at Anton Webern’s opus 6, no. 4.  The idea that German music was flipped from the political left to the political right in national socialist Germany is the topic of Chapter 4, using a single volume of songs published in 1934 as an example.  Two versions of the Parsifal legend, the opera by Richard Wagner and the 1982 film by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, are examined in Chapter 5.

 

Overall, the author provides some very interesting conclusions and discussion points throughout the book.  He challenges and provides commentary on issues and topics not normally researched in contemporary musicology and music theory, examining cultural, psychological, ethnic, and musical values along the way.  A very thought-provoking and interesting study.