Twentieth-Century Music in the Plural: Pluralism, Difference, and Scholarship

Difference has become one of the most challenging gifts the twentieth century has handed down to the twenty-first. Over the past hundred years, it has worked its way deep into how we think about culture — both as an abstract idea and as something we live every day. Its effects show up across cultural practices such as music, and in how we reflect on and study those practices through a journal like this one.

A short genealogy of Difference could trace back to the early 1900s and Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures on linguistics. Saussure claimed that not just language but all meaning-making systems carve up the world by slicing it into units (phonemes, concepts, words, signs) that mean something only because they differ from one another. In this view, reality becomes a network of mutually defining contrasts. By the mid-twentieth century, structuralism and semiotics had turned these ideas into pillars of literary and cultural theory, showing that even something as everyday as fashion functions as a sign system built on difference. Later, poststructuralism and deconstruction put difference (or différance) back at the center of debates about what meaning is. Those debates then fed into the cultural politics of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity late in the century — all of which, as we know, eventually reshaped musicology too, often contentiously. More recently, far beyond the academy, cultural difference has become urgent in global consciousness, shaped by the violent upheavals of the new century.

Is it too much to invoke this politically charged history as a backdrop for the contents of a scholarly music journal? The connections are there. twentieth-century music could have looked backward with comfortable nostalgia at a high-modernist or avant-garde repertory, neatly closed off by the calendar. Instead, as Christopher Mark and Allan Moore wrote in the journal’s first editorial, it has chosen not to ‘exclude any style/genre/category/use of twentieth-century music’. The hope is that ‘the contiguity of divergent topics in each issue … will stimulate the creation of new perspectives’.

By embracing a policy of non-exclusion and openness to diversity, the journal actively takes difference on board. That commitment is plain in the pages that follow. Alongside studies of canonical modernist composers and their works, there are explorations of film-music poetics and the consumption of world music. (An article on popular music, which would have added even more variety, ended up delayed for this issue because of an already stretched production schedule — but the journal’s commitment to vernacular music as a vital part of the twentieth century remains, and is expected to become a more visible part of its profile in future issues.) The current issue also stands out for the breadth of its methods and approaches. It offers a snapshot — partial and contingent, but revealing — of the heterogeneous landscape of today’s musicology. Among the modes represented are music analysis, aesthetics, hermeneutics, interdisciplinary cultural theory, intra-disciplinary critical musicology, ethnomusicology,

and even what might be called post-critical inquiry. And the authors’ concerns reach beyond musical objects and other aesthetic artifacts into the subjectivities of listening, interpretation, and writing.

Openness to difference goes hand in hand with promoting pluralism. That is why the journal’s title is in the singular but still aims to imply twentieth-century music in the plural — far from the art-music canon that, even recently, the term often exclusively meant in some circles. To the objection that the title should have been the more accurate twentieth-century musics, one could reply that the many musical forms of the period can still be considered parts of a historical phenomenon that, at some level, remains a unity. These are radically different ideas of plurality, and this is no place to settle which is right. Over its lifespan, it is hoped the journal will offer a forum for debating exactly these kinds of historiographic (and, as argued here, political) questions.

This aspiration toward pluralism also reflects a spirit of inclusiveness that has emerged in parts of the West at this particular historical moment — the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. (Taking a non-literal view of its own title, the journal also covers the twenty-first.) But if this aligns with discourses on democracy, we have to wonder: will pursuing pluralism in the academic sphere turn out to be as turbulent as its pursuit in global politics? Oddly enough, the current issue of tcm brings together topics — and authors — from the UK, the US, “old” Europe, and contexts shaped by globalization, creating a map of its own discursive turf. Fortunately, the differences at work here are not on the scale of tensions in international politics. Still, one consequence of the journal’s inclusive policy is that it leaves the door open to the same sorts of polemics that agitate the discipline as a whole.

Take the case of Darmstadt. This postwar institute wielded enormous cultural-critical influence and has frequently stood as a symbol of musical modernism after 1945. For that very reason, Darmstadt “school” composers and aesthetics have been major targets in subsequent waves of postmodern critique — especially inside the so-called “new musicology” — serving as proxies for what is thought to be wrong with modernism as a whole. Within these pages the spiral turns again: a counter-counter-critique calls out some new musicologists for their own perceived lack of self-reflexivity. The charge is that they fail to recognize the representational biases baked into English-language narratives of modernism and so perpetuate them. Wherever individual readers position themselves in this debate, it is a useful reminder that our understanding of twentieth-century music is shaped by our critical and historiographic traditions. This, then, is another kind of difference. Your Darmstadt (or your account of modernism) may differ from mine because of how the stories have been passed down. We ought not to mistake our locally formed knowledge for universal truth. Consider another example — and risk more argument. Might it be enlightening to ask how far the postmodern turn of the new musicology is essentially an American discourse,

distinct from something like critical musicology in the UK or critical theory in Western and Central Europe — its agenda shaped by particular difficulties within the US academy? Looking at the issue that way might adjust how we view the movement without dismantling its contributions. This could, on one side, help shake free a trend that threatens to become its own kind of hegemony. On the other, it might push critics to give the movement’s key figures fair credit — to recognize that challenging the discipline established took considerable integrity and sometimes came at great personal cost in the politics of their own institutions.

All of this reminds us that differences in our musical preferences and epistemological leanings — even those expressed in this journal — are not arbitrary or indefinite, even when chance has brought them together. They represent differences in values, in ideology, shaped by different situations. The music and ways of knowing that I value are not indifferent to me, nor yours to you. But unless we want to settle for a state of non-communicative non-interaction (to twist a phrase from Habermas), we should not be indifferent to each other either. Here universalizing ambitions begin to creep back in, with just as much potential for conflict as for consensus. Because what I find musically worthwhile, I find so precisely because I think it is not merely subjective. The same is true for you, and our projections of those values back into the social world may clash harshly.

With so many musics and ideas in play today, how do we handle the pluralism of our time — including its anxieties and its energy? Schematically — and we must recognize the artificiality of such binary thinking — we can contrast two models. These models, not accidentally, resonate with political theories about cultural difference.

The first is liberal pluralism and its associated idea of value pluralism. According to William A. Galston, a polity based on this model ‘will organize itself around the principle of maximum feasible accommodation of diverse legitimate ways of life, limited only by the minimum requirements of civic unity. This principle expresses (and requires) the practice of tolerance — the conscientious reluctance to act in ways that impede others from living in accordance with their various conceptions of what gives life meaning and worth.’ While Galston does not detail how musical or academic discourse would work under such a principle, one can easily picture how what liberals call “expressive liberty” would function. Each of us is free to practice and value whatever music we choose and, if we like, talk about it under whatever value-system we choose — as long as we do not disturb civic or institutional unity. In such a system, those who follow different aesthetic or intellectual styles may acknowledge each other, dialogue, or even coexist

in disagreement or disapproval, provided that everyone sticks to the minimal agreed-upon rule not to violate or restrict anyone else’s freedom of expression. (In some ways this implies a kind of background neutrality, perhaps latent in Mark and Moore’s picture of a “contiguity of divergent topics.”) Such a blueprint necessarily has no positive epistemological foundation, because theorizing one would itself privilege a particular form of discourse — Reason — and violate the very ground rule of value pluralism. This polity operates on pragmatism. The question is whether this philosophy supplies enough theoretical depth to sustain the fraught epistemological weight a pluralist ethic demands. (Liberal philosophers like Richard Rorty, of course, might dismiss the concern for depth as a metaphysical leftover.)

A different way of handling difference comes from theories of radical democracy, most associated with Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek. Given what has already been said, it is worth noting the different cultural and intellectual lineages of these models. Liberal pluralism is anglophone (or more narrowly, British/North Atlantic), rooted in thinkers from Isaiah Berlin to John Rawls. Radical democracy, on the other hand, leans on continental European traditions. Where liberal pluralism values tolerance, radical democracy runs on antagonism — more precisely, agonism — which uncovers the role of adversarial confrontation within democratic values. Mouffe gives a clear statement in her book The Democratic Paradox, where she writes, ‘One of the keys to the thesis of agonistic pluralism is that, far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order.’ Where liberal pluralists tend to take their premises as a pragmatic given and leave them theoretically underdetermined, radical democrats seem inclined toward theoretical overdetermination. That may be because their ideas stand on an explicitly declared impossibility: the inability to represent society as a totality. As Mouffe puts it, ‘the democratic character of society can only be given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself or himself the representation of the totality and claim to have the “mastery” of the foundation.’ Applied to music, that could mean recognizing that the totality of our many musics can never be integrated into one complete whole. If that is an uncomfortable thought, its proponents nonetheless see it as inseparable from democracy itself.

This is neither the time to declare which model works best nor to rule out the possibility that other models might do better. But it is worth seeing that the struggle with aesthetic and epistemological difference is woven from the same fabric as broader political approaches — the connection is more than metaphorical. Of course, in contrast to international politics, no real bloodshed is likely here (at most, the metaphorical kind), which can make the whole discussion seem like no more than armchair thinking. Yet there is a modest hope: by openly working through ways of handling pluralism and difference within symbolic practices, we may gain insights that are not completely unrelated to wider cultural and political conflicts, both real and not. In that, to be academic could be something far from academic.