Music/ology: A Baradian Account

Abstract

How can we, as musicologists, know the social, material, and dynamic reality of musical performance? This question recurs throughout this dissertation, both as a musicological andas a philosophical problem. In order to gain insight into the breadth of this question, I am led by the problem articulated by the musicologist Carolyn Abbate in her 2004 essay “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?”Abbate’s question closely resembles the epistemological problem posed above and isdirected towards knowing the dynamic reality of musical performance. However, Abbate concludes that the musicologist is unable to capture the dynamic reality of performance in either thought or language, because he/she cannot simultaneously be present at the performance and conceptualise the process of performing and everything that accompanies it. Drawing upon the reaction of Karol Berger on Abbate’s question and on the work of the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch and his emphasis on Bergsonian phenomenology, I deconstruct in chapter 1 Abbate’s question and its elaboration. In chapter 2, I engage with the work of several musicologists who have responded toAbbate’s question. The arguments of Christopher Hasty, Georgina Born, and BenjaminPiekut offer me the opportunity to further explore the separation between knowing andbeing by studying the phenomenological, process-philosophical, sociological, andphilosophy-of-science aspects of current musicological studies investigating musicalperformance. I conclude that, although the aforementioned musicologists theorise thecomplex relationship between knowing and being, they are unable to traverse the drasticgnostic dichotomy.To explore a possible solution to Abbate’s problem, I read her argumentation together with physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad’s metaphysics of anagential real. This metaphysics assumes an ontology of radical immanence,focussing on how matter and meaning are inherently tied together. “Things” and “thoughts”come into being as effects of matter-meaning relations through intra-actions—relatingsthrough and within which all forms of being come into existence in their specificity,including “us.” Agential realism implies a radical epistemological and ontological shifttowards a non-dualistic and performative approach. This permits a non-reductive study ofmusical performance that undermines a representationalist two-world logic, but requires athorough reworking of established scientific ideas of objectivity, subjectivity, and causality.In chapter 4, I elaborate on Barad’s ethical conception of valuing as aninextricable part of intra-actions in a case study on musicality. I propose a notion ofmusicality that emphasises the many musico-material encounters (valuing and touching) inthe course of the musical event as a form of creativity through responsivity. As such,musicality does not present a standard for assessing values, nor does musicality as moralityimply a prescription of “good” or “correct” music. Whilst a complete theory of musicalityexceeds the scope of this dissertation, I demonstrate how my reworking of musicality is aneffect of diffractively reading the insights of Abbate and Barad together. Rather thanunravelling dualisms, this performative, intra-active research practice demonstratesmusic/ology at work, inviting us to study the musico-onto-epistemological dynamics ofmatter-meaning relations that produce specific music and knowledge, and to study howmusic and knowledge are generative of new matter-meaning relations.