The Politics of Reception

The Politics of Reception: Tailoring the Present as Fulfilment of a Desired Past
Author(s): Leo Treitler

Source: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 116, No. 2 (1991), pp. 280-298
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
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The Politics of Reception: Tailoring the
Present as Fulfilment of a Desired Past
LEO TREITLER
THE discourse of history can appear as a medium of proud self-

portraiture, as the ritual of a culture in narcissistic self-contemplation,
glorying in its uniqueness and superiority and in its descent from revered
ancestors. This thought catches history as a kind of myth and opens
history to anthropological, as well as to historiographical, description.
I come to this perspective by way of my reading in the modern recep-
tion history of medieval Latin ecclesiastical chant, in which I am struck
by the attitudes, needs and ambitions by which that history has been con-
ditioned, and by the feverish ideological pitch of much of the literature.
Just as the story that has been fashioned about medieval chant in the
modern literature reads as an allegory about the idea of 'Western
culture', so I mean my story about that process of fashioning to be an
allegory about history and about the cultural self-image that we have
inherited.
From the moment in the modern era when the chant entered a process
of conscious reception and became a subject of history it was positioned at
the headwaters of the mainstream of European music. To demonstrate its
right to that position, historians promptly undertook to display in it just
those qualities that were to count as the condition of value and greatness
in the culture that validated them in this way, and to claim for it a
descent from the music of the culture that was to be a model for Western
culture: Greek antiquity. At the same time the chant, as the oldest known
European musical tradition, validated those qualities as the essential
touchstone for recognizing what was European in music - and, perhaps of
greater importance, what was not non-European. The very prominence
of chant as a historical subject from the early youth of the discipline of
music history in the late eighteenth century is due in large part to its role
in assuring that we have a subject for the discipline at all, that is,
'Western music', and in fashioning our own cultural self-image.
Here is Francois Auguste Gevaert, writing in his book Les origines du
chant liturgique de l'dglise latine (Ghent, 1890):
The chant of the Christian church appeared precisely in an epoch when the
intellectual activity of Greco-Roman society was in decline, and it reached the
high point of its development at the moment when the aesthetic and literary
sense of the West was in a sleep destined to last a long time. ... As for the
musical interest which the old melodies offered to the artist ... that is not a
matter of pure curiosity, as would be the music of exotic people - Chinese or
This essay is dedicated to Lewis Lockwood in honour of his sixtieth birthday. It has benefited from
the work of Hayden White, especially The Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1986).
THE POLITICS OF RECEPTION 281
Hindu - where we encounter bizarre melodies and rhythms, piquant

perhaps but at bottom strange to our manner of feeling. The ecclesiastical
songs ... have passed into our blood and have contributed to form what we
can call our musical temperament (p. 6).
As simply as that Gevaert identifies at once the absolute divide between
what is 'ours' and some (bizarre, strange) Other that will be a central
theme in my story.
The earliest signs of a historical consciousness about chant reach us from
the Carolingian era. The story of chant that we read in eighteenth-
century literature takes as its narrative core reports from the ninth
century about interactions among different chant traditions, and those
reports reveal an entanglement in issues of cultural identity and conflict
from the very beginning.
I begin my account with a report on a short article entitled 'Plainchant'
in the second volume of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique
(Paris, 1768, pp. 95-105). Plainchant, wrote Rousseau, is
a noble relic, very much disfigured, but very precious, of Greek music, which
having passed through the hands of barbarians has not, however, been able to
lose all its primitive beauties. There remains yet enough of it to render it
much preferable, even in its present condition, and for the use to which it is
intended, to those effeminate and theatrical pieces which in some churches
are substituted in its place.'
I wish to underscore a few points. The source for the plainchant that had
come down to Rousseau's time is the music of Greek antiquity. That
should be understood, indeed, as a claim - or, better, an assumption -
about historical origins and continuity, but also as a statement about the
music's qualities and about the idea of Greek antiquity as the source of
artistic standards.
'Barbarism' has a negative connotation, but 'primitive' does not. It
enfolds within its meaning the ideas of closeness to origins, purity, direct-
ness, naturalness (the opposite of affectation and artificiality). Charles
Burney, in his General History of Music (London, 1776), knits some of
these ideas together when he writes of the 'simplicity' of plainchant sing-
ing, which 'precludes levity in the composition and licentiousness in the
performance' (p. 423). (That 'licentiousness' carried then the sense of
sexual wanton that it now does seems likely from the context we are about
to enter. And then, after all, Don Giovanni is identified in the dramatis
personae as 'Giovane Cavaliere estremamente licenzioso'.)
The vocabulary of these early histories is bathed in a feeling of
nostalgia for a golden age undebased by corruption, but an age, we must
remember, about whose music little or nothing was known. But that is
just the point about a golden age. It has meaning only as a transcendent
idea whose main attribute is the unspoilt quality that attracts nostalgia.
To concretize it is already to spoil it. The penumbra of a golden age has
always tended to surround stories about the origins of chant, and con-
tinues to do so.
' All quotations from Rousseau are taken from the English translation by William Waring (London,
1779).
282 LEO TREITLER
The eighteenth
Joachim Wincke
grandeur' for suc
document in whic
Nachahmung der
(Dresden, 1745) -
the meaning of Ro
synonymous with
site of the qualiti
be understood as m
emphatic markin
work of Michelan
(Here is his illust
the fleet-footed
quicken and his m
how Homer descr
soften their work
charm. 'We know
became effeminate.'
The theme of purity and the dread of corruption fills the greater par
of Rousseau's historical sketch about chant:
Ambrosius, archbishop of Milan, is said to have been the inventor of th

plain-chant. . . . Pope Gregory perfected it, and gave it the form which
preserves at present in Rome and the other churches in which the Rom
melody is practiced. The Gallican church allows the Gregorian chant but
part, with much ill-will and almost under duress.
Then he relates a characteristic anecdote that came to be repeated w

ritual regularity:
The pious Charlemagne being returned to celebrate the festival of Easter wit
our apostolic Lord at Rome, there arose, during the feast, a quarrel between
the Frankish and Italian choristers. The Franks pretended to sing better and
more agreeably than the Italians. The latter declaring themselves superior in
the ecclesiastic music . . . accused the Franks of corrupting and disfiguri
the true melody . . . on account of the natural and barbarous roughness
their throats. This dispute being laid before his majesty, the pious monarch
said to his choristers, 'Tell us, which is the purest and most excellent water,
that drawn from the fountain head, or that of the streams which flow at e
tensive distance from it.' All consented in pronouncing that of the fountain
head the most pure, and that of the rivulets so much inferior as the distanc
whence it flowed. 'Have recourse, then,' replied Charlemagne, 'to the fou
tain of St. Gregory, whose music you have undoubtedly corrupted.'
It is a linkage - at the very beginning of the story as our eighteent

century sources know it - between aesthetic value and political purpose.
Sir John Hawkins brings in another element in which the story is see
from the Frankish side (Rousseau's story is based on Roman source
2 The Ideas of Progress and their Impact on Art (New York, 1971), 12-32. All quotations from
Winckelmann are taken from these pages of Gombrich's book, in his translations.
The account given of this matte

Gaul [the famous Notker] is tha
the emperor Charlemagne, twel
were to reform the music of the
that there might be an uniformit
but that these men, jealous of the
to corrupt and diversify the plain
confusion in which it was involved
capable of performing it correctl
Rousseau's neoclassicism did not thrive in the climate of national and
racial sentiment that settled over the nineteenth century. His ide
of chant as a Greek patrimony seems first to have been disputed direct
in a general book of music history published in 1834 (the first of
the genre 'Histories of Western Music') by the amateur music histor
R. G. Kiesewetter, a Viennese nobleman, civil servant and musical
man-about-town (he turns up repeatedly between 1820 and 1826 in
Beethoven's conversation books).4 'It is a preconceived opinion,' he wrote,
'as widely spread as it is deeply rooted, that modern music was modelled
on that of ancient Greece, of which it is in fact merely a continuation.'"
His attack on this notion, however, is of no less an a priori, speculativ
and ideological nature than is Rousseau's assertion itself. We get a hint
of what was at stake from the German title: Geschichte der euro-
pdiisch-abendldndischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik. I emphasize the
clause: our music of today. He wrote:
Modern music flourished only in proportion as it began to separat
withdraw itself from the system laid down and enforced by the Greeks
reached . . . perfection only when it succeeded in completely emancip
itself from the last remnant of the ancient Grecian. . . . That Grecian or
Hebrew melodies should have found their way into the assemblies of Chris-
tians seems altogether incredible. . . . Their natural horror of everything c
nected with the heathens . .. was too great for the admission among them
such melodies as had been common to the pagan temples or theatres; wh
they evinced an equal anxiety also to separate themselves from the Je
(pp. 1-4).
Kiesewetter's disagreement with Rousseau over the question of
Greek origins of European music seems ironic in a way. His argum
against it lays the ground for a nationalist and even racist narrative th
began to be spun out later in the nineteenth century, and especially in
twentieth, but alongside a transformation in European ideas about
character and origins of ancient Greek culture that could have obvi
those very arguments by assuaging the otherness that Kiesewetter cou
not square with his sense of 'our music'. I shall have to return to all th
The old story about quarrels between the Romans and the Franks
been placed in the centre of modern chant scholarship by a discovery t
A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1776), 138.
4 Beethoven: Konversationshefte, ed. Karl-Heinz K6hler and Grita Herre with Giinther Bro
(Berlin, 1968-), i, 372; ii, 319; vi, 175; ix, 204, 216, 291.
5 History of the Modern Music of Western Europe, trans. Robert Muller (London, 1848; re
New York, 1973), 1.
284 LEO TREITLER
seems to fly in th
the belief that the chant tradition that settled over the Western church -
i.e. Gregorian chant - was disseminated from Rome. The discovery is
that the oldest chant books of Roman provenance (from the eleventh and
twelfth centuries) transmit melodies that are consistently different in style
from the Gregorian melodies that are their liturgical counterparts and
that are transmitted in Frankish chant books of the tenth century and
after. The Roman melodies have come generally to be called 'Old
Roman', even though there is no agreement about the theory that they
are descended from an old pre-Gregorian chant tradition of Roman
origin. The oldest books with Gregorian chant known to have been in
Rome were imported from France in the twelfth century. This situation is
trouble for the belief that the Gregorian tradition was founded in Rome
and disseminated from there throughout Europe. The question remains
unresolved, but in the course of the discussion the narrative has been
enhanced with explicit and implicit categories of race, nationality and
gender that had become highly articulated during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries in non-musical humanistic and sociological
fields.6
We must now look at a pair of melodies from the two traditions (see
Example 1) in order to get some direct experience of what has touched off
these stirrings. They are settings of the same text and were sung on the
same ritual occasion: the introit of the Mass on the Fourth Sunday of
Advent. The differences of melodic style that are manifest here are
typical of the two traditions. The Old Roman melody is more drawn out
with melismas, more redundant, more ornate. The outlines of the
Gregorian melody are sharper, more direct. Despite these differences the
two melodies display a similarity of phrasing and of tonal outline that
exemplifies a family resemblance which is common between correspond-
ing chants of the two traditions, sufficiently to send the mind off in
thoughts about one being a descendant of the other, or both being
descendants of a common ancestor. These questions of genealogy have
led to successively broader questions: about the origins of plainchant and
its stylistic history, about the origins and nature of European music,
about the character and sources of European culture.
One of the scholars most directly responsible for that was Bruno
Staiblein (who coined the term 'Old Roman'). His descriptions of Old
Roman and Gregorian chant resonate strongly with the language that we
encounter in the eighteenth-century literature. That is no coincidence; it
is, rather, an instance of the recycling of eighteenth-century classicizing
values as modernist standards - critical neoclassicism, we might call it.7
The Old Roman melodies are described thus (Stiblein's reference is
exactly to the melodies of Example 1): 'endless streams of melody that
6 An overview of the source situation and of the theories that have been advanced to account for
it is given by Helmut Hucke in 'Gregorian and Old Roman Chant', The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians (London, 1980), vii, 693-7.
' Stiblein's remarks are quoted from two sources: Die Gesiinge des altrdmischen Graduale
Vat. lat. 5319, Monumenta monodica medii aevi, 2 (Kassel, 1970), and 'Die Entstehung des
gregorianischen Chorals', Die Musikforschung, 27 (1974), 5-17.
Example 1. The Introit Rorate ca

traditions.
Old Roman
--- --7-- -_---..__ _

Gregorian A
Ro - ra - te cae - li de su - per
Let the heavens precipitate from above
et nu - bes plu - ant ius - turn

and let the clouds rain down the Just One
a pe - ri a - tur ter - ra
Let the earth open
..,
et ger - mi - net sal - va - to - rem
.:
and sprout the Saviour
overflow the boundaries of textual div

voluptuous gown . .. soft, elegant, cha
edges or corners'.8 To Rousseau and W
the description of an art in a decadent
view of the style as 'naive, youthfully
a general Italic, folk-like feeling'.' The
are 'disciplined and ordered, a produ
They are 'clear, sculpted configuratio
are of a 'more perfect quality - perfec
* 'Die Enstehung des gregorianischen Chorals', 11

* Die Gesdnge des altrdmischen Graduale, 38.
0o Ibid.
" Ibid.
286 LEO TREITLER
ninth-century wr
plucks from med
(vigour), potesta
He regards the O
Gregorian tradit
unrestrained col
whence the new
political centres
Through this tran
to a higher, super
thus has two cult
undisciplined Med
efficient and eco
style - the old ce
culture. The belie
reality has not sur
vades the literature.
The most enigmatic of Rousseau's dualities is that of the Gregorian and
Gallican. This is a recurring topic in the modern literature, but there is
little common agreement or understanding about what 'Gallican chant' is
or was. According to the usually judicious New Harvard Dictionary of
Music it was 'the Latin chant of the churches in Gaul before the importa-
tion of Gregorian chant under Pepin and Charlemagne', a process that
Rousseau thought was not very successful. The Harvard Dictionary article
concludes that, on the whole, 'it is difficult to distinguish true Gallican
survivals from local French compositions originating after the suppression
of Gallican chant' (p. 332). This did not, however, restrain Staiblein from
giving quite a detailed characterization of that tradition in an article on
'Gallikanische Liturgie' that was published even before some of the most
likely identifications of such chants were made:'"
In contrast to the classical, unified, concise, sober style of the Roman liturgy,
the Gallican, in its most developed blossoming in the eighth century, displays
trends that are rather to be called Romantic. The bright, colour-happy
richness, a proclivity to fantastic prolixity characterize it, while with the
Roman the leading principles are disciplined formulation and restraint. This
character of the Gallican liturgy brings it close in some respects to the oriental
character.
The virtual identity of the characterization of this duality with that of

the Old Roman-Gregorian is unmistakable, right up to the last two
words, 'oriental character', which I shall take up in a moment. As the im-
plied but counter-intuitive claim of an identity of style between Gaul and
Italic Rome is not based on the comparison of actual melodies or
liturgies, we have to suspect that we are in the presence of an archetype
12 'Die Entstehung des gregorianischen Chorals', 17.

13 Ibid., 14.
14 Ibid.
' Ibid.
16 Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel, 1939-51), iv, cols. 1299-3
for the Other, functioning to define t

oriental as basis for 'our modern Western music', as Kiesewetter had
put it.
Next I turn to the two books that have been most paradigmatic for
chant studies in the twentieth century, one by Peter Wagner, published
in Germany in 1921, 7 the other by Dom Paolo Ferretti, published in Italy
in 1934 and in France in 1938.'8
Wagner characterized the Gregorian melodies as 'models of clear
formal structure and symmetrical organization, the work of aesthetic
deliberation' (p. 398). Ferretti called them 'organic', 'harmonious',
'homogeneous' and 'logical' (pp. vii-viii). Wagner's language was aimed
at a contrast with an older layer of chants whose melodies were
'unregulated and without plan'. The difference is like that between a
'skilfully laid-out flower bed' and a 'luxuriantly proliferating growth'
(p. 403). Those older melodies remind him of the 'unregulated undu-
lation of the melismatics of the Orient', whereas the later ones display
'Latin, Roman traits'. Perhaps that passage was lingering in Staiblein's
mind as he described the Gallican tradition.
The most extravagant-sounding encomium in the whole story is a
passage in Willi Apel's 1958 book surveying Gregorian chant. Con-
cluding an analysis of a group of gradual chants, Apel wrote that 'the
perception of their structural properties greatly enhances their
significance as unified works of art, no less so than in the case of a sonata
by Beethoven'.' The task is to validate Gregorian chants as the source of
European music by displaying in them just those qualities that count as
European, on the authority of Beethoven, who epitomizes them as no one
else (see Figure 1).
This power of Gregorian chant as the earliest embodiment of Western
musical principles under Greek inspiration could then be reflected back
in legitimation of later music. Anton Webern, in his apologia Der Weg
zur neuen Musik, analysed the form of a Gregorian alleluia melody and
exclaimed that it is 'already the full structure of the large symphonic
forms, expressed exactly as in the symphonies of Beethoven'.20 This time
it is the 'new music' that is legitimated by showing it to be in direct line
from that ancient music. The symmetry here catches the game of mirrors
that I mean to suggest with my title.
If there is a single word that can express what is for the modern period
the essential attribute of 'Western music' throughout its assigned history,
that word is 'form', flanked by all its qualifiers (rational, logical, unified.
concise, symmetrical, organic, etc.). Nowhere is that plainer than in the
titles of the two paradigmatic books on chant already cited: Peter
Wagner's Gregorianische Formenlehre and Paolo Ferretti's Estetica
7 Einfiihrung in die gregorianische Melodien, iii, Gregorianische Formenlehre: Eine choralische

Stilkunde (Leipzig, 1921).
" Estetica gregoriana, ossia Trattato delle forme musicali del canto gregoriano (Rome, 1934),
trans. into French as Esthitique grngorien (Tournai, 1938).
9 Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, 1958), 362.
20 Der Weg zur neuen Musik (Vienna, 1960), 23. I am grateful to Professor Anne Schreffler of the
University of Chicago for pointing out this passage to me.
Figure 1. The Musical Hall of Fame. From left to right: Chopin, Handel, Gluck
Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven - the reigning figure (Apollo) in this
nassus - Mendelssohn, Wagner, Meyerbeer, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Bruckn
Reproduced from The Etude, December 1911.
gregoriana.21 Wagner's task, he

Gregorian art through the stu
'form constitutes the essence of
of all the properties and qualitie
Benedetto Croce's summation of
Estetica of 1905: 'The aesthetic f
generation further in the ba
treatise on musical aesthetics, Vom Musikalisch-Schiinen of 1854, where
the language is very similar to Wagner's. In aesthetic analysis, he wrote,
'we ... penetrate to the inner nature of the works and try, from the prin-
ciples of their own structure, to account for the unique efficacy of the im-
pressions we receive from them'.23
But the appeal to form is equivocal. Croce's conception, and Hanslick's
before him, is a conception of inner form that has the sense of 'musical
idea worked out in notes'. Far different, on the other hand, is the mean-
ing we must read in the appropriation of Croce's slogan by generations
of chant scholars. Here form becomes the more pedestrian conception of
the enumeration, arrangement and coherence of parts on such principles
as repetition, variation, development, contrast, return, etc. (A clue is the
plural in Ferretti's title: Treatise on the Musical Forms of Gregorian
Chant.) This conception embodies a value-gradient according to the
principles of closure, symmetry, unity, and the idea that every note is
necessary to the whole and no note is superfluous to it. This is the sense of
form on which the identification of the essential traits of Western music
has rested, the sense that is claimed to be exemplified first in Gregorian
chant. It is form as order - the historical state of equilibrium between the
disorder that precedes (Peter Wagner's 'luxuriantly proliferating growth',
reminding him of the 'unregulated undulation of the melismatics of the
Orient') and the decadence that follows (Rousseau's and Winckelmann's
conception of the 'effeminate'). Form is the hallmark of the work as
monument. ('The composer works slowly and intermittently.., forming
the musical artwork . . . for posterity.')24 Form is what is lacking in the
constructions of the musical Other that are identified in the story I have
been tracing. It is no coincidence that those constructions are products of
the same early nineteenth-century ideological milieu in which this sense
of form came to be explicitly articulated."25
2" That a treatise on musical forms would constitute the extension of the title Estetica gregoriana
is as significant as the fact that a theory of form, as in Wagner's title, would constitute a science of
style. Regarding the influence of these aesthetic issues on the analysis of chant, see my essay '"Cen-
tonate Chant": Ubles Flickwerk or E pluribus unus?',Journal of the American Musicological Society,
28 (1975), 1-23.
22 Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. from the Italian by Douglas
Ainslie (London, 1909), 16.
23 On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution toward the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music,
trans. and ed. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis, 1986), 6.
24 Ibid., 49.
25 I was myself once persuaded of the attractiveness of this way of thinking, and have regrettably
been a contributor to the mythology based on it. My essay 'On the Structure of the Alleluia Melisma:
A Western Tendency in Western Chant', Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed.
Harold Powers (Princeton, 1968), 59-72, conveys in its very title the a priori idea that closure and
unity of melodic structure and coherence of melodic syntax are essentially Western, as opposed to
oriental, features. And the interpretations of melody within the essay I now regard as too restrictive
290 LEO TREITLER
But why would it

deviate from thes
found in the hist
category of the 'o
his book Orienta
introduction, is
a way of coming to terms with the Orient [the Near East] that is based on the
Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only
adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and
oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural con-
testant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other ...
The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image,
idea, personality, experience.
It is 'a surrogate, underground self for the West' (pp. 1-2).
I wish to draw out the implications in this last sentence of a psycho-
logical aspect of the process that is reflected in the history I have been
describing. Through it our culture has refined its sense of identity by
viewing itself in the context of a succession of oppositions with other
cultural entities that are contrasted in essential ways with ours. But what
we regard as the opposite traits of the Other show through as the traits of
a surrogate, underground - we might as well say unconscious - Self. The
Other is, in effect, a projection of the Self, or rather of an unacknowledged
aspect of the Self that is suppressed as unacceptable to that identity that is
the speaker for the Self. Because the duality of Self and Other is created
as a context for the definition of Self, that role must determine the at-
tributes we ascribe to the Other, as much so as the attributes that the
Other has 'in itself. For that reason, and because whatever is declared
'Other' must submit to being made other, it is already born into a rela-
tionship of power - a relationship without reciprocity - as the submissive
and dominated partner. By its very nature, the dualistic epistemology
establishes a political relationship between the knower and the known,
not only the known that is cast off as Other, but also the known that is
claimed for the Self.
This comes at a high price for the Self in the commerce of knowing - a
price, unfortunately, that the Self cannot easily acknowledge. For by virtue
of this distancing, the Self denies itself understanding of the Other. We
think: 'That is something different; it has nothing to do with us.' An
ironic consequence of such dualistic strategies is the disqualification of
the scholar from judgment about what is cast off as 'other'. It guarantees
that the scholarly discourse will be a monologue, or at best the dialogue of
a ventriloquist with his dummy. To put it bluntly, the scholar is set up
from the start to make false judgments, as we can sometimes tell when
about what constitutes unity and coherence, even within the 'Western' tradition. I would rather have
my current understanding of that question represented by the analysis of the Old Roman melody in
my essay 'Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music', Speculum, 56
(1981), 471-91 (pp. 476-80). I offer that analysis, too, as a counterexample to the characterizations
of Old Roman and Gregorian chant that I have cited in the preceding. On its terms the Old Roman
melody shown there is as coherent and unified as any Gregorian melody. It seems we are forever apt
to allow ideology to command analytical methods which then, of course, produce the accounts we
desire.
we make an effort to hear the Other in its own voice. I shall cite a case
later on.
The situation is nuanced by an erotic tension. The Other must be held
within the range of a voyeuristic gaze, one whose effect would be destroyed
by too much familiarity. This is evident in the descriptive language we
have heard about Old Roman chant ('voluptuous gown', 'chain of pearls',
'soft').
The way the dualities of the masculine and the feminine and of the
European and the oriental are treated as interchangeable expressions of
the same categories of critical interpretation and historical narrative is an
insistent clue to a fact of outlook and power. Europe and the Orient are
assigned masculine and feminine character respectively, and in both
cases it is a relationship of the dominant and the dominated. That is a
political reality which was rationalized in theory in the late eighteenth
century in essentialist theories of gender character that were developed
and expressed both as science - Herbert Spencer, for example, asserted in
his Principles of Biology (London, 1867) that 'deficiency in reproductive
power . . . can be reasonably attributed to the overtaxing of [women's]
brains' (pp. 512-13) - and in historical explanation: Hanslick, for example,
explained 'why women . . . have not amounted to much as composers':
The cause of this lies . . . in the plastic aspect of musical composing, which
demands renunciation of subjectivity . . . while women are by nature
preeminently dependent upon feeling . . . it is not feeling which composes
music, but the specifically musical, artistically trained talent.26
At the same time there was a parallel development of essentialist theories
of racial character, described by George Stocking in his book Race,
Culture, and Evolution (New York, 1968). What I have just described as
a political relationship between the knower and the known reflects real
world politics. It could hardly be otherwise.
This linkage between the European-oriental and the male-female
dualities is tightened by the connection of both to yet another deep-lying
dimension of Western thought. Said cites a book entitled Modern Egypt
(New York, 1908) by a certain Lord Cromer:
The European is a close reasoner, a natural logician. . . . The Oriental is irra-
tional ... [his] mind, . . . like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in
symmetry. His reasoning is slipshod. He is singularly deficient in the logical
faculty.27
Figure 2 is a recent political cartoon in which the artist has visualized this
stereotyped idea about the contrast between the Western and the oriental
minds as an icon of the failure of diplomacy in the Persian Gulf. But it is
an idea with a long and distinguished history. In 1801, for example,
Friedrich Hd1derlin wrote that Homer had been 'soulful enough to
appropriate earthy-Western rationality (abendliindische junonische
Niichternheit) for his Apollonian domain'.28
26 On the Musically Beautiful, 46.
27 See Said, Orientalism, 46.
2S Letter to Casimir Bl1endorff, 1801, in Friedrich Hdlderlin: Siimtliche Werke und Briefe (3rd
edn, Munich, 1981), ii, 926. I am grateful to Patrizia Hucke of the Freie Universitlit, Berlin, for call-
ing my attention to this letter.
292 LEO TREITLER
Eugene Ma
Figure 2. Cartoon by Eugene Mihaesco, The New York Times, 11

January 1991. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
The idea of rationality as a uniquely Western trait depends on a view of

a divided human consciousness and cognition that is in itself a part of the
Western heritage that we like to follow back to Plato: it is the idea of an
opposition between reason on one side and passion and desire led by the
senses on the other. This opposition has always been projected onto the
dimension of gender, but the thought network that allowed it to cross
naturally to the constructions of nationalities and race was a creation of
the nineteenth century. That, it seems, required a clarification which
was, in a sense, the other side of the invention of the Orient: the revela-
tion that the culture of Greek antiquity which served as source and model
for European culture was a counter-culture to the Orient. Martin Bernal
has described this in his book Black Athena.29 He writes of
two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as essentially European or

Aryan, the other seeing it as Levantine, on the periphery of the Egyptian a
Semitic cultural area. I call them the 'Aryan' and the 'Ancient' models .
According to the Ancient Model, Greek culture had arisen as the result of c
onization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civiliz
the native inhabitants.
29 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, i, The Fabrication of Ancien
Greece 1785-1985 (New Brunswick, 1987).
But under the paradigm of 'rac

at the end of the eighteenth cen
it became increasingly intolerable
epitome of Europe but also its pur
mixture of native Europeans and
According to
the Aryan Model, which most of u
developed only during the first ha
been an invasion from the north w
'Pre-Hellenic' culture. Greek civilization is seen as the result of the mixture of
the Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and their indigenous subjects (p. 30).
This is the transformation that came too late to head off Kiesewetter's
vigorous rejection of the idea of Greek patrilineage for Western music. It
accomplished what might be expressed by reversing my title: '. .. Th
Tailoring of the Past as Progenitor of a Preferred Idea of the Present
There are clear signs of its adoption as a general notion into music
history, but that did not prompt a restoration of the theory of Gree
origins of chant. This may be because there was no good evidence for it.
But, more to the point, the question was rather superseded by yet anothe
duality that was assigned a higher priority for obvious ideological reasons
as a narrative dimension: the Germanic/Nordic versus the Semitic/
oriental.
We can read about it in a book published nearly 100 years after
Kiesewetter's, Richard Eichenauer's Musik und Rasse (Munich, 1932).
This is a kind of 'History of Western Music', too, but one in which race
provides the main taxonomic and explanatory categories. It belongs in
the company of books published around the same time with such titles as
Kunst und Rasse, Rasse und Stil, Rasse und Seele, Rassenkunde Europas,
Die Rasse in den Geisteswissenschaften, Rassengeschichte des
hellenischen und des riimischen Volkes, Rassenkunde des jiidischen
Volkes.30 The research field was called 'Rassenforschung', heritage of a
Romantic preoccupation with its roots in the late eighteenth century.
Eichenauer's idea about Greek culture was a version of the 'Aryan
theory', which he understood to be the product of recent scholarship:
'Race research has demonstrated that Greek behavioural patterns as a
whole show the picture of a great ascent under Nordic influence followed
by a decline brought about by Entnordung [which he also calls
Semitisierung]' (p. 37). Greek musical style is Apollonian, which in turn is
identified as Nordic.
The history of Gregorian chant, on the other hand, begins in the
Dionysian (i.e. oriental/Semitic) domain, with the Jewish chant of th
Near East. But with the spread of Christianity the chant 'wandered into
the heartland of the Nordic race' where 'the Germanic musical feeling ex
pressed itself ever more strongly' (p. 67). The outcome, then, would have
been a chant tradition with Nordic character, like the Greek, but with n
claim that one had descended from the other.
30 Bibliographical details for these books can be found in Eichenauer, Musik und Rasse.
294 LEO TREITLER
Eichenauer did n
We recall that on
ecclesiastical chan
older,still purely
finds the differen
former] to the clea
Then Eichenauer
by 'Roman'. He q
melodic process w
genius'; and he qu
book Musik des M
chants] rational c
most strongly as
matic style.' In all this Eichenauer sees a 'racial influence. [In the
Gregorian melodies] . . . a "new-Roman", that is Germanic, genius is
speaking. . . . [It is] the Nordic-strict constructive spirit that strives for
the clear working-through of form' (p. 89).
Something like this dialectical epic has an important role in the music-
historical ideology of the more famous Wagner, Richard. It is the conflict
between the Germanic folk myth and Christianity that is described in
Oper und Drama. Christianity uprooted the mythos, robbing it of its
virility and rendering it incapable of procreation. Christianity in effect
emasculated the German myth." A sexual threat to the idea of the
masculine underlies every form of the dread of corruption. This is hinted
at in the theme of the effeminate in the eighteenth century and is explicit
in Wagner's essay.
Wagner's mythic image of conflict was in turn given a specific music-
historical content in the story of a struggle between the melodic modes of
Christian chant and the major-minor tonalities, which were assigned
Germanic character. This version of the story was first presented by Hans
Joachim Moser in a 1914 article, 'The Origins of the Major-Minor Idea
(der Durgedanke) as a Problem in Cultural History'.32
According to Moser the major-minor scales and the church modes
represent a priori such radically different ideas that a development of one
principle out of the other is 'ontologically unthinkable'. As such, he
wrote, they reflect the opposition between the Germanic and the Medi-
terranean peoples. As his authority on this subject he cites The Founda-
tions of the Nineteenth Century, a book by Richard Wagner's son-in-law,
the notorious ideologue Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who came to
occupy a prominent place in the National Socialist Pantheon.33 This book
was unsavoury enough for even Moser to disclaim identification with its
conclusions for 'political, religious and artistic life', while still accepting
its characterization of the racial make-up of the greater European land
mass. He wrote:
3' Richard Wagner's Prose Works, ed. and trans. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1893-9;
New York, 1966), ii, 39-41.
32 Sammelbande der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 15 (1913-14), 270-95.
"3 Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1900).
It will be possible to show that th

modes and folk-like harmonic
between internationalism and nationalism, between communism and in-
dividualism, between 'VTlkerchaos' and 'Germantum'.
(These last two terms require decoding in terms of Chamberlain's

historical ideology: the Mediterranean peoples were always divergent in
character - hence 'V1lkerchaos' - while the Germanic peoples were
united by a common character, 'Germantum'. This high valuation of unity
as a Germanic characteristic - which has been discussed by Erik Erikson
in Childhood and Society (New York, 1963) - transferred easily to the
canon of values for art, and has done so since the Carolingian era, as we
have seen.) The smoke of battle has cleared, but we can still read in the
most up-to-date and apparently non-ideological surveys of Western music
history how under northern influence Gregorian melodies took on a more
triadic character, that is, they became more like melodies in the
major-minor tonalities.34
As a reminder that this theme of the Germanic-Mediterranean polarity
transcends particular musical genres or traditions, we may recall
Hanslick's claim that 'the tyranny of the upper vocal part among the
Italians has one main cause in the mental indolence of those people for
whom the sustained penetration with which the northerner likes to follow
an ingenious work of harmonic contrapuntal activity [is impossible]'.35
I may say that the claim about the increasing triadic character of chant
under northern influence does not stand up at all well under the com-
parative study of actual melodies,36 and that is typical of the sort of
dissonance that is set off when we can manage to hear medieval voices
against the voices that have been imposed on medieval material by im-
perious historians. But I want to report on just one such case, bearing on
the central issue of form in the story I have been telling. In a recent essay
on the concepts of process and structure in the musical thought of the
Middle Ages, the musicologist Fritz Reckow listened for clues in medieval
writing of ideas about anything like what we call 'form'.37 What he heard
was a description of music through a rich vocabulary that portrays the
most finely nuanced and differentiated aspects and modes of movement:
running, striding, rambling, retarding, waiting. The focus is always on
the concretely audible performance. The sense of movement is so self-
evident that it does not seem to require any theoretical exposition or
legitimation. The interest is not in closure but in contrast, not in unity
but in the avoidance of monotony. Repetition is regarded not in the
sense of structural members but of amplification; not for motivic or
thematic unity but for reiteration, recognition of the familiar. Music is
"' 'A Northern influence on plainchant was that the melodic line became modified through the
introduction of more skips, especially by the interval of a third. . . . The tendency of Northern
melody was toward organization by third.' Donald Jay Grout and Claude Palisca, A History of
Western Music (4th edn, New York, 1988), 68.
" On the Musically Beautiful, 64.
36 See Charlotte D. Roederer, 'Can we Identify an Aquitanian Chant Style?', Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 27 (1974), 75-99.
"7 'Prozessus und Structura: Ober Gattungstradition und Formverstlindniss im Mittelalter',
Musiktheorie, 1 (1986), 5-31.
296 LEO TREITLER
described as exper
recognizes a conce
A parallel situatio
where there is a te
grounds of its for
Schuller's book E
York, 1968). Relev
'Beethoven' in the
other.
[Duke] Ellington is
passed by Jelly Ro
metrical than those
fact, when compar
Ellington's form .
(p. 348).
(As early as 1935 P
brought Ellingto
classical of popular
Brahms.)38 In th
'misconception th
music - whether i
these designs - is
The language of
chant. A Louis Ar
model of 'structur
excluded Other can
ing chant. In wha
exotic musical 'cu
Calloway about B
that Chinese mus
and corrupt jazz t
and now there is talk of a neoclassical restoration, an idea that one critic
has called 'wishful thinking, . . . a biased and unsubstantiated claim that
seeks to impose a historicist vision of jazz onto a conflictive and highly
unstable . . . movement'.40
In a 1970 review of the Schuller book Lawrence Gushee commented on
the 'constant tendency for a given performance to be treated as a work
art rather than a sample of a process'.4' In modern jazz studies it seem
that the more the emphasis is on the description of the form of
autonomous works, the less attention is given to the process of makin
and transmission and to the contexts in which these occur. This is a clue
" I am grateful to Prof. Krin Gabbard for this information, and for other helpful suggestions and
information regarding this parallel.
9 Dizzy Gillespie with Al Frazer, To Be or Not . . . to Bop (New York, 1979), 111.
40 Ronald M. Radano, 'Jazz Neoclassicism and the Mask of Consensus', Abstracts of Papers Read
at the Joint Meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, Socie
for Music Theory, November 7 through November 11, 1990, Oakland, California, ed. Bruno Nett
(Urbana, 1990), 47-8.
*' 'Musicology Rhymes with Ideology', Arts in Society, 7/2 (1970), 230-6.
to the interpretation of the preoc

ideological programme, an outcom
For in the unblinking focus on
investigation of form has alway
therefore an evasion of, the in
politics in which music and our
fashioned. It produces as often
what our music has and other mu
of disorder and decadence that has characterized the attitude toward the
Other. But by its very persistence this attitude gives witness to the politi
that maintains it but does not want to be seen.
A brilliant new film by Maurizio Nichetti, Ladri di saponette (released
in the USA under the title Icicle Thief), is about a film within a fil
The inner film, a black-and-white piece of cinema veritit about an
impoverished young couple and their two small children, with clea
reference to de Sica's Bicycle Thief, is a television production bein
watched by a young middle-class couch-potato family of the same size in
their sterile technicolor apartment. Things begin to go haywire during
commercial, when a slim, near-naked super-mod model jumps into
swimming pool and winds up instead drowning in a wooded pond in t
grey world of the inner film, just as the man of the family is bicycling
home from his first day of work after a long period of unemployment.
rescues her, wipes the technicolor off her, and takes her home, and tha
derails the film from its already completed course. In a desperate effort
put it back on track the director enters the world of the inner film. 'Sto
improvising!' he screams at the characters. Bruno, the six-year-old elder
son of the young couple, has become pals with the model, but the direct
sets him straight about what is supposed to happen. The father's bicycle
to be struck by a truck that day on his way home, leaving him inc
pacitated and again out of work. The mother's last resort is to be prostitu
tion, and the children are to go to an orphanage. 'Nothing doing', sa
Bruno. 'You put your children in an orphanage.' In the end the who
family leaves, and the director is left trapped in the television set, his fa
and hands pressed against the screen. He screams to be let out, but t
housewife of the technicolor family switches off the set, choking off h
voice with it.
This offers itself as a metaphor for such histories as I have reviewed
here, prompting these questions: From whose perspective and in whose
interest is the story told? How can we reconcile the needs of historian and
audience for myth with the needs of the characters in the story to act and
speak out of their own situations and in their own voices? If they escape
the confinement and manipulations of their story will we not cheer their
freedom just as we cheer Bruno's? But then there would be no story, only
a script. A story like this could drive one into the extreme solipsism of
deconstruction.
This is one of the dilemmas of historians, which I have neither
discovered nor resolved. In plain language it is a dilemma created by con-
tradictions that do arise between a standard of objectivity which we wish
to attain as a methodological and moral responsibility, and the social
298 LEO TREITLER
demands that sh
dilemma with wh
identity through
result when separ
Just as those dile
around them that
attain the measu
gambling on the
ference that does
tity that does n
consistency; on a
the stark alterna
our objects, in wh
themselves. In th
things said nowa
declaring it a resp
strange in a text
sucked up by the
as a direct respon
began, about the
manner of feelin
Well and good, b
simply as a call fo
imagination. If w
'us and them' syn
for personal, sexu
sharply, recogn
matters of identit
not only from ou
ought to grow ou
tion of texts, but
longer tenable.
Graduate Center, City University of New York
42 'Fremde Texte', Materiali universitari, lettere, 49 (Milan, 1984), 91.

The Politics of Reception

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The Politics of Reception

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The Politics of Reception: Tailoring the Present as Fulfilment of a Desired Past

Author(s): Leo Treitler

THE discourse of history can appear as a medium of proud self-

Hindu - where we encounter bizarre melodies and rhythms, piquant

Ambrosius, archbishop of Milan, is said to have been the inventor of th

Then he relates a characteristic anecdote that came to be repeated w

It is a linkage - at the very beginning of the story as our eighteent

The account given of this matte

Example 1. The Introit Rorate ca

--- --7-- -_---..__ _

et nu - bes plu - ant ius - turn

overflow the boundaries of textual div

* 'Die Enstehung des gregorianischen Chorals', 11

The virtual identity of the characterization of this duality with that of

12 'Die Entstehung des gregorianischen Chorals', 17.

for the Other, functioning to define t

7 Einfiihrung in die gregorianische Melodien, iii, Gregorianische Formenlehre: Eine choralische

gregoriana.21 Wagner's task, he

But why would it

Figure 2. Cartoon by Eugene Mihaesco, The New York Times, 11

The idea of rationality as a uniquely Western trait depends on a view of

two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as essentially European or

But under the paradigm of 'rac

It will be possible to show that th

(These last two terms require decoding in terms of Chamberlain's

to the interpretation of the preoc

Graduate Center, City University of New York

42 'Fremde Texte', Materiali universitari, lettere, 49 (Milan, 1984), 91.

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