Here is an extract from an article in 'The Opera Quarterly' journal last year by Yale professor Gary Tomlinson:
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In a 2011 article in the New Yorker magazine, apropos of a new Metropolitan Opera production of the Ring, critic Alex Ross drew attention to a ten-measure passage from act 2 of Die Walküre. The passage, or “microlude,” as Ross calls it, occurs at the end of Fricka's fateful dispute with Wotan as she, having won the day, moves backstage and encounters the entering Brünnhilde (ex. 1). The passage captivates Ross, and in his essay, unusually musically specific for the New Yorker, he works smartly to illuminate it. He seeks out singers to comment on Fricka's role, musicologists to weigh in on Wagner's views of women, sex, and marriage, and, above all, conductors to comment on the meaning of the passage. For James Levine and Justin Brown, the microlude sums up Fricka's ambivalent victory, which effectively ends her relation with Wotan and her role in the Ring; for Simone Young and Simon Rattle, it quite literally overlays her outrage on top of Wotan's sorrow in its harmonic and rhythmic dichotomies; for Christoph von Dohnányi, it is the turning point in the Ring's critique of the will to power and domination.
All or none of these interpretations might seem right, but it is not their content that concerns me; instead I am interested that they consist of content alone. They are descriptions of the object that the microlude-as-sign represents. Ross's essay is a steadfast quest for the imitative; it is an exercise in Lacoue-Labarthe's mimetology. In this it swims in the mainstream of Wagnerist discourse. Ross and his experts all strive to say what the passage is about, and this focus on aboutness draws the microlude toward the realm of the leitmotivic—despite the fact, which Ross notes, that it bears no notable recurring motives. It is as if all signification in Wagner—even all signification in music—needs to be reduced to something close to either the iconic or the symbolic, the one displaying aboutness through likeness, the other through conventional connection. This obscures the primacy of indexicality in musical signification, of signs not so much representing as standing near to, gesturing at, pointing to, or indeed causing their objects. The fact that musical sounds are so inapt for referentiality of a linguistic or pictorial sort paradoxically draws the mimetic harness tighter around them, driving their interpreters to a referential specificity all the greater for the unrepresentable nature of the affective states indicated. The aboutness of this passage, in other words, is the more pressing an issue—the stakes of specifying it higher—exactly because the music moves outside the conventionalization of reference enabled by the repetition of those other gestures we call leitmotifs.
Focusing on aboutness, however, will always underestimate the dynamism of signification. It will shine a bright light on referential signs—again, symbols and icons—while leaving in the shadows the operations of index and interpretant. Listen closely to Wagner's microlude. It is a calling, more pressing than most, of its hearer to an activation and a participation. These are all the richer because of the resistance of the passage to both conventionalism and iconism—which after all stimulates Ross's and the others' fascination with it, as it allows no easy, referential pigeonholing of the music. Characterizing this calling, however, is not so much a matter of naming a mimesis as it is one of following an organismal instigation. We move in the wrong direction in trying to describe it as an imposing of signs on the listener—in the direction, in fact, of Wagnerist passivity, desubjectivization, and alienation. Instead we need a vocabulary to describe our participation as a process in which we make the music at every moment, fully as much as the singers and players of the orchestra. It cannot be otherwise, given that music is a transmission of information and a signification, and given the poietic, interpretant-driven nature of semiosis.
I hazard a description of the calling at this moment. We recognize, as the microlude begins, the contrast of mobility above and stasis below. We anticipate in the upper parts' rising trajectory an intensification of this agon, and we confirm this intensification, seeking order, in the repeated passing tones, striving to ascend. Building on this quickly established sense of a musical gradient—an instance of Cumming's directedness—we move toward a coalescing psychic formation as the Wagnerian stimulus increases harmonic complexity and dissonance. At the same time we accommodate the resting points won by resolution of passing tone and flat ii chord, first on a pellucid subdominant, then on the tonic. All this manifests the conditions of our psychic mobility and our grasping for signification as much as it reflects the shape of the stimulus. This mobility takes the form of interpretants and the perceiving through them of a bond between the music and other aspects of our environment—in this case, especially the dramatic presentation before us. At this moment and in a special, musical way, we envorganisms locate ourselves in an ecosystem.
Finally, we redirect our psychic resources, at a new beginning marked by a stable V7 chord and the reentry of voice and language. To say this is to affirm that we move on to the formation of new interpretants. As we do so, we encounter a familiar musical gesture—the curse motive, as it is usually labeled. Many have pointed to the fact that such leitmotifs are not simply referential in function; Badiou sums up and perhaps overstates this view by upholding a leitmotif's function in “a non-descriptive internal musical development, with no dramatic or narrative connotations whatsoever. “Internal” to the music, Badiou means; the specter of Beethoven's developmental procedures rises here (and I will come back to it). But the nonnarrative aspect of leitmotifs is not so much a matter of motivic development as it is about something else that is highlighted by Ross's microlude (and to which Badiou perhaps also alludes). The intrusion of the curse music right after this passage shows that the clearest leitmotivism is identical to nonleitmotivism in the arousal of the listener to sign making. Again: there are no nonsemiotic moments in Wagner, only successive instigations to audience action. Interpretants and indices, not referential symbols and icons, are the heart of the matter.
In retrospect, as the outcome of Peircean semiosis, we cannot not come to a weighing of a sign/object bond. Aboutness intrudes in human experiences of the world, inescapably, and the inevitability of this, which probably does not extend far beyond our species, is a general condition of which analyses of musical referentiality usually do not take sufficient account. If I were to name the aboutness gained through the semiosis of Ross's microlude, speaking in the most general terms in an effort to encompass many of the modes of participation it stimulates, I would adduce a calm in the face of insuperable denial, a resignation toward an external resistance to knowing and control that we could call, with a bow to Kristeva, abjection. It is an emotive response, then, of some complex sort that comes close to eluding capture in words. But even a return as general as this one to a concern with aboutness needs to come with a caveat: it is not a matter of a picture imposed—of anything at all depicted—but of a psychic state constructed by the listener in response to a sonorous environment. A musical envorganism, again, is at work.
Perhaps all this describes from a different vantage the “drastic” musicology that Carolyn Abbate forcefully advocated a few years ago but exemplified somewhat more vaguely. Perhaps, also, it begins to illuminate the mysterious phenomenology of charm that Abbate's muse, Vladimir Jankélévitch, also left ill-defined.15 At the very least it underscores the fact that something akin to a drastic music making is the prerogative of the audience as much as of the performers. If this connection is right, it reveals that the evil twin in Abbate's scheme, gnostic or “decoding” musicology, and the drasticism she favors are not opposed modes but instead entries from opposite ends onto the same path. And certainly the Peircean model of audience instigation I have described welcomes Jankélévitch's assertion that music generates meanings in huge numbers and of almost indeterminate breadth.
But even with this reconciliation, Abbate and Jankélévitch do not go far enough. The experience I aim to describe ultimately renders semiotic aboutness all but irrelevant. Music as a characteristic human activity is close to unique in its power to activate this kind of experience. It belabors the mind with indexicality, with the most embodied and palpable, and least referential, kind of sign. It turns the mind in on itself and on its semiotic activism, enabling an a priori to aboutness to emerge with peculiar force, an a priori I equate with interpretant. Though such a semiotic experience is an interim place for much human activity, it is the stopping point for most nonhuman semiosis and thus the human operation that opens out, connecting our experience to informational processes of wide
extrahuman dispersion.
In other words, the intrusion of aboutness (and with it hermeneutics, gnosticism, decoding, etc.) is a characteristic human telos of semiosis; but music forefronts the much broader semiotic labor on which it is founded. Music is a human semiosis that clearly beckons toward the extrahuman. For this reason we might find in musicology fertile ground for a parahumanism conceived as a multispecies expansiveness, opening our humanity out to primate, mammal, and perhaps even broader clades.
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The rest can be read here:
http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/3-4/186.full
Is there anyone who could make a precis of the above? I find it very hard to read for its syntax and style.
Thanks.