Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 2, August 2011
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Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability, New York, Fordham University Press, 2009. 224 pages, ISBN 978-0-8232-3063-1, Hardback price £44.50, Paperback due for release February 2012)
Reviewed by
Newcastle University, UK
In Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability Kiene Brillenburg Wurth has produced a rich and stimulating exploration of ideas of the sublime since Edmund Burke’s celebrated essay of 1756, drawing productively on insights gained through music – which is reflected in the title - but coming over perhaps even more impressively because of the range of its interdisciplinarity, and the intellectual fearlessness with which she pursues the subject. It should be pointed out straight away that for Brillenburg Wurth there is no single thing that is “the sublime” but instead a whole series of inter-related and relayed cultural and philosophical phenomena, a series of “sublimes” that are historically and culturally contingent. The role of music is almost that of a kind of chemical reagent that Brillenburg Wurth uses to precipitate, as it were, these different aspects of the sublime out of the historical cultures that she addresses in the book. Early on she distinguishes between the ‘legitimate’ and the ‘musical’ modes of the sublime. The legitimate sublime “typically enacts a movement from the multiple and divided to the unified: from the heterogenous to the homogenous. It combines feelings of pleasure and pain . . . but this combination has been dominantly represented [in Western philosophy and art criticism] as a dialectical reversal. . . . a negative moment of fright, frustration, or confusion . . . that is relieved and finalized by a positive moment of mental relief or elevation” (p. 2). The musically sublime, as Brillenburg Wurth proposes it, problematizes this tidy dialectic in which momentary pain is overcome, setting up instead “an aesthetics of undecidability and indeterminacy that comes to be intertwined with the so-called empty sign of instrumental music in later eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Great Britain, France, and Germany”.
Disturbing and destabilizing the neat unidirectionality of characteristically Western binaristic thinking is a strong theme in the book. Lyotard, for example, distinguishes the postmodern sublime, in which the rupturing of boundaries is “actualized” in terms of form and content, as a move beyond the Romantic sublime, in which rupture is represented but aesthetic form (perspective, for example, in painting) is retained. However, Brillenburg Wurth convincingly argues that such an apparent dichotomy between the Romantic and the postmodern is not sustainable beyond the kinds of aphoristic binaries that her ambitious project seeks to destabilise. Though part of her argument takes place at the level of what we might conventionally call “philosophy”, she finds in certain musical works of the nineteenth century structures that anticipate – though “premediate” is in fact the more useful term she prefers – such a postmodern sublime deep within the musical culture of the romantic.
If, for Brillenburg Wurth, there is not one single sublime but several, there are nevertheless commonalities between them. An initial division of the Kantian sublime, for example, into the mathematical and the dynamic proliferates into a whole series of characterisations of sublime idea and experience that are nevertheless held together by a central notion of a “wavering”, a radical and inconcludable undecidability – an indeterminacy – that puts the sublime into a position of liminality, not the resolution of pain into pleasure but a suspension of the very terms upon which such a resolution could be predicated. This notion of wavering, of an instability at the heart of the idea of the sublime, is maintained throughout. From this position she explores the possibility that music – and in particular instrumental, classical music – can be understood as offering up something like virtualized models that allow for an uncovering of the sublime as something intricately and extensively woven in the fabric of cultural reality. Rather than taking a conventional art-historical, literary criticism, or musicological line, in which the sublime in the substance of storms, mountain landscapes, or the sea is represented in images, words, or music, she argues that there are whole epistemological tropes associated with the sublime, such as limitlessness and uncontrollability whose outlines are most particularly traceable in music.
It should be said, by way of criticism, that many of Brillenburg Wurth’s insights have quite a pervasive structuralist form, and while often enabling exciting insights this can also lead into blind alleys, particularly when the abstractions of musical material are conflated with experientially arrived at, subjective hermeneutics. In such places the structuralist fit does not always quite come off. That said, this is a constant problem in talking about music, at least any writing that sets out to achieve more than translating scores into technical analytical vocabulary, which constitutes an awful lot of “respectable” musicology of the past hundred and fifty years. Over the past twenty or thirty years the so-called “New Musicology” – whose leading figures include Susan McClary, Laurence Kramer, Richard Leppert, Rose Rosengard Subotnik, and others – has worked against what was an overwhelmingly epiricist and positivist discipline - musicology - to open a space of speculation and of a hermeneutics that includes the subjective. Such subjective hermeneutic work is one of the strengths of Brillenburg Wurth’s writing, but is also potentially its downfall, as it is for all of us who write about music and musical experience. Here, perhaps, she best articulates the problem, though, acts it out, as it were, rather than representing it, just as she suggests music does with respect to the sublime. The radical incommensurability of musical experience and the language we have to account for it shows as strongly as her subtle, insightful, and mostly persuasive arguments just where the issues binding music and the sublime lie.
Drawing on music as she does it is inevitable that the temporal becomes significant in Brillenburg Wurth’s uncovering of the various cultural locations of the sublime, and perhaps the most thought-provoking and stimulating instance of this is in the way she folds Sehnsucht and Freud’s repetition compulsion into her account of the sublime pluralising the sublime’s temporal aspects, bringing “an intrusive yet irretrievable past” into play for which she finds models in aspects of musical structure. Though she cites Lawrence Kramer in her acknowledgements she does not draw on his own writing on musical ‘revenants’ at this point, but interested readers would find stimulating resonances in reading her final chapter alongside Kramer’s essay (see Kramer, Lawrence, “Ghost Stories: Cultural Memory, Mourning, and the Myth of Originality” in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 258-287).
There is a Lacanian edge to some of the writing on Sehnsucht in chapter 2 that draws this quintessentially Romantic yearning into the realms of the sublime, the irresolvability of desire opening onto the sense of limitlessness and intangibility as characteristics of the sublime. This connects with the final chapter’s grappling with Freud to stitch together the psychoanalytical tropes, but also folds the musical into the argument again, the notes of music, for Brillenburg Wurth, “name not what I lack; they name my lack, my endless, unresolved yearning” (p. 56) especially insofar as musical notes constitute “empty signifiers”.
Though she proposes a role for musical works in her text that resonates with Mieke Bal’s idea of the theoretical object, so that musical works do not simply illustrate theory but “redress, invigorate[s], and adjust the theory they are ‘faced’ with in a creative feedback loop” (p. 9), the arguments tend to be more convincing at one stage removed from specific musical instances, for example her discussion in chapter 3 of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche is stronger where it is Wagner’s writing on music that is invoked rather than the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde itself. Again, though, this touches upon an endemic problem in talking about musical material, and the chapter is nevertheless immensely strong in terms of its philosophy and hermeneutics. There are, though, places where the project to confront theory with theoretical objects is extremely effective; for me there is something incredibly valuable in a project that seeks to find ways for music, that has otherwise been reduced to an entertainment effect in our culture, to become productively engaged with the bigger philosophical issues. In bringing Terry Riley’s classic minimalist composition In C into her discussions as “more than easy listening or the hypnotic leisure time familiarly ascribed to it in the critical and popular imagination” she not only recuperates some of the challenge this music offered when it was first produced, but continues to take seriously the idea that music, and musical works, partake of and participate in the broader philosophical, epistemological, and aesthetic concerns of the culture in which they are found.
There are no doubt some musicologists who will be niggled, and I would be lying to say that there are not places in this book where I have been one of them; one can always snipe from a position of disciplinary specialization. But this would be to quite literally misread this book. Such work as this is not valuable because it is necessarily “right” but because the kinds of thinking and the kinds of dialogue it opens up are so much more productive, and so much richer than narrower, more specialized studies that do not ever challenge their own frames of reference. I have experienced a thrilling sense of participating in a dialogue in reading Brillenburg Wurth’s text, whose most distinguishing feature may ultimately be its intellectual courage, a certain fearlessness to pull ideas into constellation with one another, to speculate, and to very much embody the something of the spirit of the 18th and 19th Century epistemological framings that are the main matter of the book, and of the indeterminacy and undecidability – the fluidity and contingency – of music itself that so thoroughly informs the work as a whole. Whatever small-scale reservations I may have about some of the occasional musicological details, the book’s intellectual daring and willingness to excavate hidden connections across cultural forms and practices of the past three hundred years is one of the things that recommends this book to a wide readership, and which represents its most formidable achievement, and makes of it as stimulating and engaging a book as one could wish for.