Analysis as Ethics: Experiments with Music Loving
Luong, Vivian
2019
Abstract
In response to critiques of music theory following Joseph Kerman’s “How We Got Into Analysis and How to Get Out,” theorists often hail the virtues of analysis to defend our position in music studies. In addition to enriching musical experience and our sense of self, analysis matters because it involves a concern with caring for and understanding music on its own terms. My dissertation expands on the ethical potential implied in this last argument for analysis. Drawing on feminist music theory, I propose that we can locate this potential in the very relationships that animate analysis: music loving. Taking seriously this pervasive yet under-theorized concept, I consider how we might rethink music loving to better articulate the ethics of our work. In chapter one, I explore how music theorists frame the purpose of analysis in the stories we tell about our discipline. These narratives, I argue, locate an analytical ethics in the separation of music from context, which I liken to Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism—strategies of hope that cause harm rather than good. This dissertation then offers other stories that reconsider how analysis can make better subjects and worlds. Chapter two draws together the two central frameworks of this project—feminist music theory and new materialisms. In particular, I focus on Suzanne G. Cusick and Marion A. Guck’s writings on our embodied relationships with music, in which music acts on us and generates pleasure that motivates our scholarship. These writings present a way into a new materialist ethics that acknowledges the dynamic flow of agency across human and nonhuman bodies, such as musical works. Chapter three expands the concept of love to theorize this version of ethics. First, I demonstrate how a particular image of love as an interaction between only two bodies—the theorist and the music—remains at the core of our understanding of analysis and its purpose. Then, in order to more adequately answer feminist music theory’s call for diverse accounts of music, I propose another version of love. I draw on Deleuze and Guattari as well as new materialist expansions of their work to redefine love as a relationship among assemblages—heterogeneous networks of bodies, forces, and things. In the context of music theory, this kind of analytical loving would involve analysts, recordings, scores, theoretical apparatuses, and many other things. Through grappling with this idiosyncratic understanding of love, I suggest that theorists could experiment with the production of new disciplinary practices and ethics. Chapter four offers analytical writing from this philosophical orientation. I draw on affect theory and anthropology to demonstrate how affective autoethnography serves as a valuable method. In a series of autoethnographic vignettes about making a Schenkerian analysis of J. S. Bach’s Prelude in B-flat Minor, BWV 891, I perform the ethos of experimental music loving, evoking jolts of joyous potential and paranoid scholarly habits that strike during analysis. Chapter five concludes by situating this loving ethics of analysis alongside recent perspectives on the effects of music scholarship. Referencing musicology’s reparative turn toward questions of ethics, love, and care, I argue that music theory’s analysis-oriented ethics offers special insight in these conversations. From this site of commonality, we can collaborate on new stories about the value and sustainability of music studies.Subjects
Music analysis Ethics Feminist music theory Queer music theory New materialisms Autoethnography
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