Tuesday Colloquium10/08/19
In Search of a Musical Subject: Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann
Musicology
University of Edinburgh
Born in 1981 in Oxford, United Kingdom
Studied Music at the University of Cambridge and King's College London
The concept of subjectivity is one of the most popular in scholarly accounts of music in recent decades; it is also one of the obscurest and most ill-defined. Rarely do the numerous writings that draw upon the idea stop to interrogate what the term means or how it might be supported. This is due less to scholarly indolence, I think, than to the fact that many writers feel they instinctively know what the term means and recognise that it can serve an important, if not indispensable purpose, but find that attempting a better definition gets them caught in a conceptual thicket.
The difficulty arises in part as subjectivity appears not to be a single thing. Neither is it, at least by some accounts, reducible to a group of things. Slightly more securely subjectivity might be argued to be a relation between things. But it is one where its apparent basis - the subject or self - is itself hotly disputed, even denied by some commentators. And then, even after coming to some provisional answer to all of these concerns, how do we even begin to relate this concept to music, which similarly appears to elude verbal confinement? Faced with this state of affairs one might be forgiven for dismissing the whole topic as yet another musicological example of conceptual diffuseness, idle hermeneutics. Yet for all these evident difficulties, still we rely on it implicitly or explicitly to underpin various assertions made about music and its effect on us. We may not be exactly sure what subjectivity is but much of the reception of Western classical music in the last few centuries seems premised upon it.
In this talk I set out some of the issues that I am trying to tackle in the monograph I am currently writing on this topic (title still undecided, though "Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann" is the current frontrunner!). We start with a handful of musical examples from Schumann's music to which subjective qualities may be - and have been - ascribed with varying degrees of plausibility. (It is in fact of particular interest to me how scholars in other disciplines may or may not accept some of these interpretations.) This is used as a springboard for a more detailed account of how we might try to define the term's application to music, following the outlines of my book's opening chapter, somewhat hubristically entitled "Defining Subjectivity". Problematising the topic of musical subjectivity, this explicates the various meanings that have been given to this awkward notion and through increasing clarification proposes a range of potential meanings. Subjectivity here appears to refer to the experience of music as akin to a living being, an animate consciousness, but such that the experience may be of an apparent immediacy that shades it into a privileged first-person perspective - as if somehow viewing it as part of oneself. I go on to look in turn to how subjectivity manifests itself both in music and in history, interrogating the notion of the musical subject through a series of questions that may be summarised as who, how and where, when and why?
Taylor, Benedict (
Berleley, Carlif.,
2017)
Absent subjects and empty centers : Eichendorff's romantic phantasmagoria and Schumann's Liederkreis, Op. 39
Taylor, Benedict (
Abingdon,
2014)
Schubert and the construction of memory : the string quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’)
Tuesday Colloquium10/08/19
In Search of a Musical Subject: Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann